See also:
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1 | I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO
Raoul Peck
Many films in 2016 couldn’t help but to relate to our moment — look to David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water, Jeff Nichols’ Loving, Ava DuVernay’s searing 13th, or Scorsese’s Silence for just a few, incredibly diverse examples ranked on this list. These and other compelling movies doubled as prescient social commentary, in some cases deliberately; they could be bold, authoritative, angry, harsh, familiar, or just plain harrowing. Taken together, they felt necessary.
Raoul Peck’s astonishing I Am Not Your Negro sits atop that list — atop 2016 — for several reasons. Most obviously, its very premise results in searing historical imagination: the lyricism of one of our greatest writers, James Baldwin, applied to both our past and the way we continue to live today. It’s a sight to behold as the film’s narration shifts between an unpublished Baldwin text, read marvelously by Samuel L. Jackson, and clips of his most provocative statements on race, class, and identity. But there’s something even more striking about this documentary, as cinema, something that demands widespread attention in times like these. Peck uses Baldwin’s cultural commentary — his horror at watching John Wayne movies as a child, say, or his conflicted opinions regarding the filmography of Sidney Poitier (most notably Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?) — to brutally enmesh culture and entertainment, art and politics, in his (and Baldwin’s) sweeping commentary on the perseverance of American racism. Peck uses images of the pop culture canon to reveal who we are. In addition to its fascinating subject, its remarkable resonance, and its unyielding insights, I Am Not Your Negro offers an utterly vital testament to the lasting power of art.
2 | MOONLIGHT
Barry Jenkins
Moonlight doesn’t come on very strong, initially — but don’t let that fool you. This trembling drama directed by Barry Jenkins progresses with quiet realism, its relaxed but perceptive camera capturing its protagonist’s momentary feelings of confusion, disappointment, and horror as he comes of age in a poor Miami community. The entwined focus on race and sexuality immediately distinguishes the film as valuable, even essential — heartfelt explorations of intersectionality like this one aren’t exactly easy to come by at the movies. But Moonlight goes further. Through their restrained approach, Jenkins and his seamless ensemble create a masterwork of aching humanity and specificity.
3 | TONI ERDMANN
Maren Ade
Alternately poignant, meandering, and shockingly funny, Maren Ade’s wild German comedy Toni Erdmann tells the two-and-a-half-hour story of a father and daughter, struggling but trying — in their own bizarre way — to finally, lastingly connect. It’s a work of awe-inspiring detail, every frame meticulously put-together with much to explore and to study; its two primary characters are lusciously fleshed-out, their nuances and contradictions so realistic they veer toward documentary. Yet, ultimately, this is a film made of moments: Through its unmatched collection of brilliant scenes, Toni Erdmann is one movie you won’t be able to shake.
4 | 20TH CENTURY WOMEN
Mike Mills
Mike Mills’ dreamy late-‘70s mood piece is dedicated to his mother: a lonely beachside divorcee who always keeps her house crowded and her cigarette burning. She’s a dynamic figure, consciously reconstructed as an emblem of the past, who would translate well to the screen in any capable actor’s hands. In Annette Bening’s, however, she’s simply radiant — bursting with spirit, pain, joy, laughter, deafening silence, wistful regret. The film around her — a study of a mother, her son, and three strangers pushing against their boundaries of intimacy — is a marvel of openness, about finding slivers of meaning in other people’s strange stories and flawed lives. It’s memoir suffused with soul, textured with longing.
5 | O.J.: MADE IN AMERICA & 13TH
Ezra Edelman & Ava DuVernay
Two more exceptional documentaries tracing the legacy of race in America. Ava DuVernay, a filmmaker who continues to excel in new modes of storytelling, turned to a centuries-spanning look at incarceration and slavery with 13th. It’s a rigorous and justly pained commentary, told through an impassioned lens. The more leveled O.J.: Made in America blurs the line between film and TV, and at a little under eight hours, it’s difficult to watch in one sitting. But Ezra Edelman’s discipline translates, rather amazingly, into a definitive telling of an American tragedy.
6 | LITTLE MEN
Ira Sachs
I can’t think of an American independent filmmaker telling better stories right now than Ira Sachs. After the sexy Keep the Lights On and the tender Love Is Strange, the director returned to the streets of New York with Little Men, his finest and deepest effort to date. The film’s ostensible focus on a childhood friendship expands thoughtfully, at a perfect clip and with acute emotional intelligence. It ends as a shattering yet rewarding tale of fleeting love in lonely times, as rich a slice-of-life as they come.
7 | THINGS TO COME
Mia Hansen-Love
Mia Hansen-Love’s Things to Come is, first and foremost, a smart character study enlivened by an incredible Isabelle Huppert performance. Yet more impressively, it’s also a bracing exercise in philosophical application. Through a direct engagement with knotty academic theory, the film mines profound and generous truths about the human condition. It’s in touch with — and consumed by — being and living at a level I’ve rarely experienced.
8 | EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!
Richard Linklater
How could Richard Linklater’s first film since the revered Boyhood get so little buzz and still be so good? Everybody Wants Some!! flew under the radar this year, undeservedly placed aside by some as a well-made confection. In reality, it found Linklater getting back into the Dazed & Confused spirit with newfound maturity. Joyously evocative of its time and place — ‘80s college baseball to be exact — Everybody Wants Some uses its characters’ highs and lows to construct an understated paean to the unending process of figuring out that thing called adulthood . It’s a cult-classic in the making.
9 | LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP
Whit Stillman
Worthy literary adaptations are few and far between, but Whit Stillman proved one way to make them really sing: have as much fun as possible. Love and Friendship is, at once, a completely faithful reimagining of Jane Austen, a precise comedy of manners, and a delightfully manic extension of Stillman’s filmography. Kate Beckinsale is a deadpan revelation as Lady Susan, and Tom Bennett might give the funniest performance of the year as the foolish Sir James Martin.
10 | JACKIE
Pablo Larrain
Natalie Portman is both so naked, and so transformed and engineered, as Jackie that she manages to nearly absorb the camera, to occupy the space where biography and self-portrait begin to overlap. You can’t take your eyes off of her. And tellingly, the genius of Pablo Larrain’s movie is how it keys into that confluence: the operatic score enveloping her, the tight close-ups, the occasional surreal sequence that swerves toward nightmare. Jackie, on its face, is an expertly realized take on the tension between fame and identity. But intuitively, it understands the enigmatic nature of performance — both that of its subject and of its portrayer — as its most arresting element.
11 | MANCHESTER BY THE SEA & PATERSON
Kenneth Lonergan & Jim Jarmusch
Two powerful visions rooted in the mundanities of everyday life. Kenneth Lonergan’s melancholy epic Manchester by the Sea, anchored by a devastating script and sprinkled with crucial moments of levity and humor, portrays grief in its agonizing entirety. The film quietly rides the tides of hopelessness and banality that meet unimaginable loss, all before scrupulously confronting the challenge of moving on. In Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, meanwhile, Adam Driver exudes a form of decency that opens up an entire world of possibility. He plays a local bus driver and nonprofessional poet, the kind of hero usually too boring for the movies. Not here: Paterson’s humanistic rendering of poetry translates into a buoyant parable of life’s hidden treasures, waiting in plain sight.
10 Runner-Ups
Elle: No two people will come out of Paul Verhoeven’s twisty, caustic, ethically unmoored social satire the same way. It’s a completely subjective viewing experience, made both palatable and fascinating by the magnetic Isabelle Huppert.
Fences: Sometimes it’s best to let a masterpiece rest. A well-mounted, faithfully executed version of August Wilson’s original play, this Fences showcases two brilliant performers, in Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, at the very top of their game. It’s more than enough.
Hell or High Water: A grimy neo-Western starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster, and Jeff Bridges, Hell or High Water is a taut, well-acted heist thriller with a potent economic message to give it some kick.
Krisha: Trey Edward Shults’ fearless debut reimagines the family gathering as a psychological thriller. It’s both intimidatingly authentic and explosively unpredictable.
La La Land: Damien Chazelle’s graceful ode to the big-screen musical, La La Land is a disarmingly smart throwback. And while the script is a little choppy overall, the ending — an improbable mix of homage, reflection, and innovation — is pure movie magic.
Louder Than Bombs: Joachim Trier’s first English-language feature fragments the domestic drama into a weepy collage, piecing together shards of pain and grief in the creation of an ambitiously cinematic family portrait. Gabriel Byrne, particularly, is tremendous as the weary patriarch.
Loving: With Loving, Jeff Nichols’ uniquely Southern approaches to characterization and atmosphere are extended to the capital-I Important historical drama. The result, fortunately, is as intimate and lived-in an attempt at period film as American movies provide.
Silence: Thirty years in the making, Martin Scorsese’s demandingly inquisitive Silence is more than a little uneven. But the film — in considering the limitations of faith, and interrogating cultural notions of doubt and myth with a stunning audacity — still offers an artistically intensified experience of religious introspection.
Southside With You: It sounds trite: a date movie based on the budding romance of Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson. But Southside with You is, in execution, a gorgeous rendering of romantic connection, offering a deeply affecting meditation on what true love really looks like — bickering and all.
Weiner: It premiered before what was, perhaps, the final devastating act in the strange saga of Anthony Weiner. Nonetheless, Weiner proved to be a farce for the times, a sad but illuminating foray into the dynamics behind a disgraced politician’s attempted (and failed) comeback.