Well, here we are again—another one of these lists. I'm not going to do one of those long preambles. As usual, this post is divided between my favorite movies (emphasis on "favorite," not "best," whatever that means) and other movies I thought were notable, either for good or ill. Also as usually, I admit that I (obviously) haven't seen every 2017 movie, and I resent that the elitist and outdated distribution schedules have kept some of my most-anticipated movies away from Knoxville (more importantly, The Post and Phantom Thread).
I hope y'all enjoy it. Please, disagree with me; share your own picks; discuss. I've said it before—I love discussing this list stuff.
Favorite Movies
1. The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography
It's all about death, when you get right down to it: our lives, our actions, our thoughts—whether or not we're conscious of it, they're all defined by that firm bookend. Warm and easy-going, The B-Side resembles that other Errol Morris masterpiece, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, by allowing a mix of editing and unfettered obsession over a craft (here, Polaroid portraitry) to accumulate into a towering treatise. I haven't seen a ton of people love this movie as much as I did, but more so than anything else I saw this year, The B-Side is profound.
[Read original review here]
2. Good Time
A damning character portrait disguised as a feature-length chase sequence, Good Time is fun until it's devastating. It's the sort of movie where you'll spend most of the runtime with your hand over your agape mouth, your eyes dazzled by the gorgeous nocturnal cinematography, your ears ringing from the assaultive score. If you haven't already seen it, the most viscerally exciting movie of the year is well-worth your time.
[Read original review here]
3. The Shape of Water
In the running for Guillermo del Toro's best English-language film, The Shape of Water is by turns swooningly romantic and gory, baroque and grimy, nostalgic and mythic; it's a blender of all of del Toro's best preoccupations, from classic Hollywood to B-movie trash, and it's great. You'll believe a fish-man can dance.
[Read original review here]
4. A Ghost Story
David Lowrey's hypnotic, unpredictable art film about grief is something of a feature-length remake of the "I got a rock" refrain from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, right down to the sheet ghost. The magic of this movie is that it's also heartbreaking, and not in that gentle Charlie-Brown-style way—it's legitimately staring-into-the-void-style sublimity.
[Read original review here]
5. mother!
If Darren Aronofsky wanted to just make provocative, stylistically adventurous Bible movies for the rest of his career, that would be a-okay with me. Whatever you think of the theology here, the sheer daring of this movie's scope is in a league of its own.
[Read original review here]
6. The Beguiled
Sweatiest movie of the year, bar none. This is supposedly set in Virginia, but this is definitely Louisiana, and rarely has humidity been so palpably captured on film. It's Sofia Coppola's best in quite some time, and it's no accident that it's also a tight, mean little thriller, Coppola's usually dreamy atmospherics morphing into something as sinister and phantasmagoric as it is beautiful.
[Read original review here]
7. A Quiet Passion
An exquisite tribute to Emily Dickinson couched in Terence Davies's usual visual splendor—a particularly good match of subject with director, as Davies's understated formalism complements Dickinson's own poetic style wonderfully.
[Read original review here]
8. Logan
The only superhero movie in this superhero-stuffed year I'd call "great," and while we've had plenty of movies with politics on their minds, this, with its apocalyptic squalor, is one of the few that really captures my fears of where we seem to be heading.
[Read original review here]
9. A Cure for Wellness
Something something good taste something bad script something something. I don't care. This movie looks awesome, and it's the best gothic horror we've gotten at the movies since Crimson Peak. Plus, there's no topping the compositions and lighting of the visuals here.
[Read original review here]
10. Your Name
It has all the gorgeous detail of previous Makoto Shinkai features and, a first for me with his work, a story I really bought into. The final half hour or so of the film is some of the most cosmic, beautiful film imagery, animated or not, of the year.
[Read original review here]
Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting
Best Zeitgeist-Defining Movie: Get Out—This is the 2017 movie, and I don't see many good arguments to the contrary. It's far from my favorite, but Get Out is still really freaking good, hilarious and frightening in equal measure, bolstered by a diverse cinematic tradition alluded to heavily in Jordan Peele's dense and frequently brilliant screenplay. But this is more than a spot-the-allusion film; it's a film that uses movies like Night of the Living Dead and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to genuinely subversive ends, playing off our familiarity with the beats and images of these movies to shock us. Also, it's about race; more specifically, it's about predatory white people. Let's not pretend like that isn't the most 2017 plot in all of cinema.
I hope y'all enjoy it. Please, disagree with me; share your own picks; discuss. I've said it before—I love discussing this list stuff.
Favorite Movies
1. The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography
It's all about death, when you get right down to it: our lives, our actions, our thoughts—whether or not we're conscious of it, they're all defined by that firm bookend. Warm and easy-going, The B-Side resembles that other Errol Morris masterpiece, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, by allowing a mix of editing and unfettered obsession over a craft (here, Polaroid portraitry) to accumulate into a towering treatise. I haven't seen a ton of people love this movie as much as I did, but more so than anything else I saw this year, The B-Side is profound.
[Read original review here]
A damning character portrait disguised as a feature-length chase sequence, Good Time is fun until it's devastating. It's the sort of movie where you'll spend most of the runtime with your hand over your agape mouth, your eyes dazzled by the gorgeous nocturnal cinematography, your ears ringing from the assaultive score. If you haven't already seen it, the most viscerally exciting movie of the year is well-worth your time.
[Read original review here]
In the running for Guillermo del Toro's best English-language film, The Shape of Water is by turns swooningly romantic and gory, baroque and grimy, nostalgic and mythic; it's a blender of all of del Toro's best preoccupations, from classic Hollywood to B-movie trash, and it's great. You'll believe a fish-man can dance.
[Read original review here]
David Lowrey's hypnotic, unpredictable art film about grief is something of a feature-length remake of the "I got a rock" refrain from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, right down to the sheet ghost. The magic of this movie is that it's also heartbreaking, and not in that gentle Charlie-Brown-style way—it's legitimately staring-into-the-void-style sublimity.
[Read original review here]
If Darren Aronofsky wanted to just make provocative, stylistically adventurous Bible movies for the rest of his career, that would be a-okay with me. Whatever you think of the theology here, the sheer daring of this movie's scope is in a league of its own.
[Read original review here]
Sweatiest movie of the year, bar none. This is supposedly set in Virginia, but this is definitely Louisiana, and rarely has humidity been so palpably captured on film. It's Sofia Coppola's best in quite some time, and it's no accident that it's also a tight, mean little thriller, Coppola's usually dreamy atmospherics morphing into something as sinister and phantasmagoric as it is beautiful.
[Read original review here]
An exquisite tribute to Emily Dickinson couched in Terence Davies's usual visual splendor—a particularly good match of subject with director, as Davies's understated formalism complements Dickinson's own poetic style wonderfully.
[Read original review here]
The only superhero movie in this superhero-stuffed year I'd call "great," and while we've had plenty of movies with politics on their minds, this, with its apocalyptic squalor, is one of the few that really captures my fears of where we seem to be heading.
[Read original review here]
Something something good taste something bad script something something. I don't care. This movie looks awesome, and it's the best gothic horror we've gotten at the movies since Crimson Peak. Plus, there's no topping the compositions and lighting of the visuals here.
[Read original review here]
It has all the gorgeous detail of previous Makoto Shinkai features and, a first for me with his work, a story I really bought into. The final half hour or so of the film is some of the most cosmic, beautiful film imagery, animated or not, of the year.
[Read original review here]
Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting
Best Zeitgeist-Defining Movie: Get Out—This is the 2017 movie, and I don't see many good arguments to the contrary. It's far from my favorite, but Get Out is still really freaking good, hilarious and frightening in equal measure, bolstered by a diverse cinematic tradition alluded to heavily in Jordan Peele's dense and frequently brilliant screenplay. But this is more than a spot-the-allusion film; it's a film that uses movies like Night of the Living Dead and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to genuinely subversive ends, playing off our familiarity with the beats and images of these movies to shock us. Also, it's about race; more specifically, it's about predatory white people. Let's not pretend like that isn't the most 2017 plot in all of cinema.
Best Drama: The Salesman—And I mean "drama" in the sense that it resembles a play. Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman isn't play-like in the derogatory way that movie critics usually mean when they compare the two media; rather, I'd just like to call attention to and celebrate that way that, like always, Farhadi brings a tense efficiency to the screenplay that recalls the immediacy of the stage. Farhadi's movies are as tight as drums, and while there are some elements in The Salesman that makes it less tight than, say, The Past, it still makes a mighty sound when struck.
Best Coming of Age: Lady Bird—I haven't had a chance to formally review this one yet (it's likely the final 2017 movie I'm going to see in a theater), but I love me some coming-of-age cinema, and this one is very good. Willing to be honest about the specific ways in which high school students can be various shades of pretentious and careless in a way that recalls last year's masterful The Edge of Seventeen, it's a tremendously well-observed film that, for all its plot shagginess (and there is that, sometimes to its detriment), is so sharp and specific in its characterization of Lady Bird herself that she practically jumps off the screen to shake your hand.
Best Cinematography: Blade Runner 2049—I get the thematic and narrative critiques of this movie, but I won't hear anyone dissing Roger Deakins's astounding, beautiful, lay-me-down-to-rest-because-I-have-seen-the-face-of-God visual work. Some kudos probably goes to the production design, too, without which this probably wouldn't have been so stunning. But come on; it's also Deakins we're talking about here.
Best Cry: Coco—Pixar, y'all. "Remember meeeee..."
Best Action: John Wick: Chapter 2—It's like dudes in suits shooting each other in art galleries in highly choreographed ways. What's not to like about that?
Best "Not Quite the Best Action, but Hey Look! Tarkovsky!": Atomic Blonde—Don't get me wrong: the action in Atomic Blonde is very good. It just isn't John Wick: Chapter 2 good. Still, there's a fight scene in front of a projection of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, so major points to this movie for making a cheap retro allusion that I am physically unable to resist. Take that, Ready Player One.
Best Action (Ape Division): War for the Planet of the Apes—Apes on horses! Apes with guns! Apes breaking out of concentration camps! Apes doing all sorts of things! All our movies should have more apes. (But all kidding aside, this really is a good movie)
Best Animation: The Boss Baby—Am I losing my mind? Pixar has the photorealism, Cartoon Saloon has the serious stylization, Illumination Entertainment has all the really crappy-looking stuff, but it's DreamWorks Animation—frikkin' DREAMWORKS—that's actually doing the animation I like best on an aesthetic level these days. This studio has finally done what I'd considered impossible and made CG animation as flexible and convincingly cartoonish as hand-drawn stuff, and for that, they have my sincere gratitude.
Animated Movie I'm Most Thankful For: The Breadwinner—This movie is flawed in significant ways, but, along with the DreamWorks output this year (?!?), it most pushes English-language animation in directions I wish the whole medium would all go: serious-minded, audience-trusting, culturally diverse, stylistically (not realistically) animated.
Best Opening Sequence: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets—The first five minutes of this movie, set perfectly to David Bowie's "Space Oddity," are the best five minutes (opening or not) of any movie this year. It's a warm throwback to the optimism of sci-fi's 1940s/50s golden era, only flipped to show interplanetary contact to be an intrinsic element of this future utopia, not its greatest threat. Any other year, it wouldn't be a particularly political statement, but with every inter-species handshake, it's impossible not to feel that cooperative multiculturalism is a necessary piece of humanity's future, and also to feel the chasm between that ideal and our contemporary political discourse.
Best Opening Sequence (Non-David-Bowie Division): Baby Driver—Edgar Wright's crime caper never really delivers on the promise of this scene as an action movie intricately choreographed to pop music, but for its opening scene (and honestly, the decidedly more pedestrian second scene), Baby Driver is the perfect realization of this premise. It's wonderful.
Best Use of "Take Me Home, Country Roads": Logan Lucky—This movie's a lot of fun all around, but it's only a great movie in one moment, and that's at a children's beauty pageant, of all reprehensible things. People sing this song; it's moving.
Best Use of the Word "Poop": Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie—There's a lot of poop-centric stuff in this movie. It's great.
Worst Use of a True Story: Same Kind of Different as Me—Pure Flix strikes again! This time, they've skimmed over all the legitimately interesting stuff about the kind of amazing true story that informs the plot and instead left us with the most boring, cookie-cutter inspirational trash ever. Hurray!
Most Misunderstood: The Glass Castle—Critics saw a toothless weepy in a tremendously difficult, thorny film about what it means to feel love for a genuinely abusive person. This is not a movie of easily-arrived-at adages; it's a film that languishes on messy, complicated, intentionally problematic questions and doesn't suggest anything cheap about its film-ending catharsis.
Best Quote: The Big Sick—"This is why I don't want to go online, 'cause it's never good. You go online, they hated Forrest Gump." Terry (a great Ray Romano) gets it.
Best Use of Social Media: Personal Shopper—Briefly, the quiet psychological thrills of Personal Shopper get cranked up to sheer horror-movie levels, and it's all thanks to a clever playing off of what we know about texting and social media engagement.
Best Use of Outer Space: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2—There's a lot about these Marvel movies that's getting stale, but I'll give them this: as long as they are making colorful, goofy, imaginatively designed space-opera visuals (see also: Thor: Ragnarok), I'll probably still watch them.
Best Shower: Alien: Covenant—You'll know it when you see it.
Best Kiss: Alien: Covenant—Again, you'll know it when you see it.
Best "Well, We're Going to Be Making These Movies Until Human Extinction, So We Might As Well Make It Interesting": Star Wars: The Last Jedi—This actually probably belongs again to Alien: Covenant again, but I'm not confident that they'll be making Alien movies for that much longer. Star Wars, though... Star Wars is forever. The Last Jedi is likely the most experimental that we're going to see Star Wars get for a while (though judging by some of the fan outrage, they need to get a lot more so—just rip that band-aide off, Kennedy), and even this isn't too dramatic of a departure (I can't be the only one who wanted Rey to join Kylo like he asked). However, it's by far the most interesting engagement with the series mythology since the prequels, and this is the first time since Lucas was at the helm that the Star Wars universe felt like a living, breathing place full of species and planets we haven't seen before. It's enjoyable.
"Good Try, I Guess" Award: Song to Song—Does Terrence Malick actually know what rock music is, or did he just read the Wikipedia page? QUESTIONS TO PONDER.
Worst Application of Corporate Synergy: Beauty and the Beast—We did not need this movie, and we certainly didn't need it to be as bad as it was. Disney's been pretty good at making questionable (and nakedly money-grubbing) decisions at least blandly enjoyable this decade, but NOPE. Not this one.
Best Slow, Monarchical Death: The Death of Louis XIV—The title says it all, and let me repeat: it is sloooooow. But it's also beautifully costumed, and there's something about the languorous, meticulous way that we watch the Sun King pass from this life that feels so profoundly conscious of the realities of death in a way that reminds me of Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes.
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