Favorite Movies of 2016

I'm running a little behind this year, thanks to a combination of factors that most prominently features my own laziness. So apologies for that. Otherwise, I don't have a lot to say here. Here they are, my favorite movies of 2016, per usual beholden to my usual caveats that 1. "2016" means movies I saw during the calendar year that saw an American theatrical release during the calendar year, and 2. the reliably ludicrous and outdated roll-out model for major releases like La La Land has prevented me from seeing movies I definitely would have otherwise (like La La Land—I'm a little pissed that Knoxville didn't get La La Land soon enough to make this list; can you tell?).

Also, as always, this list was hard to trim down to a neat 10, but either because of an unusual glut of fantastic film in 2016 or just an unusual preciseness in my own watching habits, this year was particularly hard. I could have easily made a top 20 and still dismayed at leaving some on the cutting room floor. But such is the artificially inflicted pain of list-making.

Okay, I'll get on with the list now. Don't forget to tell me your own favorite movies, since this is nowhere near a comprehensive list of good 2016 cinema.

[As with my best 2016 music list, I'm linking to my original reviews for the films, provided I reviewed them. Unlike the music list, I'm writing short blurbs, too. It looked too bare without them.]

Favorite Movies

1. Green Room

It's not like a vicious conflict between urban leftists and rural fascists is in anyway relevant to this year. Nope. Can't see a connection there. Let's say there were a connection, though. This movie might be pretty brilliant, and not just for political posturing; it's the tightest thriller I've seen in years and a phenomenal piece of character drama, to boot. Every death is a blow.

[Read the original review here]

2. The Edge of Seventeen

I can't hype this movie enough. Steinfeld is Oscar-worthy. The characters are miles more human than those in most ostensibly adult-oriented movies. The depiction of adolescent obnoxiousness as an off-shoot of personal tragedy is spot-on. The stakes are perfect. I originally said I should wait for the theatrical high to wear off. Well, it has, and I'll say it still: this is one of the best coming-of-age movies of all time.

[Read original review here]

3. The Nice Guys

Nothing complicated going on here. This movie just makes me laugh very, very hard. Crowe and Gosling make a wonderful odd couple, and Gosling in particular shows a great capacity for physical comedy. It's so funny.

[Read original review here]

4. Kubo and the Two Strings

In a cultural moment that many have come to declare "post-facts," Kubo's message of the ability for story to override reality for both good and evil feels even more incendiary than it would have already. Even better, the animation is breathtaking.

[Read original review here]

5. Lemonade

Yes, I'm counting it as a movie. An awesome movie.

[Read original review here]

6. Moonlight

It's a structural experiment, sure, and a treatise on identity. But in practice, neither of those rather lofty aims end up feeling any loftier than the sand under these characters' feet. The drama of this movie's three vignettes is both profound and grittily tangible.

[Read original review here]

7. Hell or High Water

This movie hits its climax and then just keeps going. Normally, I'd reckon that as a fatal flaw; with a film as whip-smart as this one, though, it's what ends up making it great.

[Read original review here]

8. Eye in the Sky

The only way you'll have a tenser time in a movie this year is if you watch my #1. It's not a "fun" movie, not with its pained ambivalence on drone warfare, but it's a riveting one nonetheless.

[Read original review here]

9. Moana

Moana has a deeper bench of songs than any Disney movie in 20 years, and that's just one of its many pleasures. Really, the whole package is just so sweet.

[Read original review here]

10. Hush

Its "home invasion, but what if she was deaf?" premise should be gimmicky. But the execution is borderline brilliant. My review said that this would be fighting The Witch for the best horror movie of 2016, and, well, look who made the list.

[Read original review]

Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Other Best Horror Movie: The Witch—But seriously, The Witch is great, and I give it major kudos for committing to the Puritan language and nutso creepy ending.

Best Additional Evidence That This Was Just a Fantastic Year for Horror: Lights Out, Don't Breathe, et al—There were so many good horror movies this year, y'all.

Is It a Movie or a Miniseries? I Don't Know or Care Because It's Incredible: O.J.: Made in America—If I were more confident that this searing dissection of American celebrity and racial politics is a proper movie, it would rest easily at the #1 spot on the list. Instead, here it sits, with nothing to show for its excellence except my full-throated recommendation, regardless of the medium it belongs with.

Best Evolution from Old Fuddy-Duddy: Knight of Cups—Terrence Malick isn't exactly in dire need of update, but after the waifish To the Wonder, this high-concept urban-spiritual tale feels fresh and vital.

Best Same Old, Same Old from Old Fuddy Duddy: Café Society—Look, by this point, you know what you're in for with a Woody Allen movie and whether or not you're going to be into that territory. Me, I'm still loving all the incisive iterations of his stable of pet themes when he's able to craft movies as aching and gorgeous as this one.

Best Portrayal of People I Would Never Be Inclined to Give the Time of Day to in Real Life: Everybody Wants Some!!—Spending two hours with a group of athletes jumping from college party to college party as they try to impress ladies with their cleverness in an attempt to get laid sounds like "Michael O'Malley Repellent: The Movie." But lo and behold, we're instead graced with a funny and compassionate two hours that paints some of the most enjoyably idiosyncratic characters of the year. Willoughby for life!

Best Worst Cringe: Weiner—The most compelling tragedy of this riveting, excruciating documentary is not any of the many scandals that Anthony Weiner invites the camera to record but rather the knowledge that all us 2016 viewers bring to the table, which is that even these scandals aren't the last of the Weiner shenanigans!

Best Poignancy via Farting Corpse: Swiss Army Man—It really is poignant. And it really does feature a farting corpse (not even the most ridiculous this corpse does [cue Jurassic Park theme]).

Best Religious Work: Hail, Caesar!—By this time, I hope the characterization of the Coen brothers as nihilistic snarksters has been long put to rest, and if it hasn't, here comes Hail, Caesar! to try to tuck it in once more. A silly, sardonic movie, to be sure, but once that, like Inside Llewyn Davis and A Serious Man and No Country for Old Men and several more before it, is imbued with a sincere and even desperate quest for meaning within the universe.

Second-Best Religious Work: The Innocents—The Innocents is, honestly, a better movie overall than Hail, Caesar! But it's not better at being religious, settling on more humanist pursuits than the more sublimely focused Coens are. But it's still very good, compelling stuff.

Most in Need of Political Clarity: Captain America: Civil War—In theory, this is a movie about ideologies. But it does so little to flesh out the battling ideas of Captain America and Iron Man that it remains a movie about fists. We do get that kickin' airport fight scene, though, so it's not all a loss.

Best Eyeball: The Neon Demon—You'll know it when you see it.

Best Eyeball, Runner Up: The Lobster—You'll know it when you don't see it.

The "I Can't Believe I Haven't Talked About This Movie in This Post Yet" Award: Arrival—So very good. So very exploitative of linguistic theory. And here it is at the bottom of this post.

Best Non-2016 Movie I Saw For the First Time in 2016: Malcolm X—My original review gets at it best, but I haven't been so profoundly shaken by a movie since... well, I guess since I saw Make Way for Tomorrow last year.

Gotta stop sometime, so I might as well stop here. But I do so reluctantly! 10 Cloverfield Lane, Louder Than Bombs, Rogue One, Finding Dory, both Werner Herzog docs, Imperium, The Shallows, Love & Friendship, and like a bazillion other good-to-great movies from 2016 are still left unacknowledged. 2016 was a super solid cinematic year, and I'm sure all y'all out there have your own favorites that lie similarly neglected. So chime in! I'd love to hear from everyone.

Until next time!

Favorite Music of 2016

2016 has been a rough year by most metrics, and 2017 isn't looking to be much better. But one thing we can take comfort in is that, regardless of circumstance, the arts reminded us of beauty and pain and awe with the firm insistence that has characterized them since time immemorial. The arts are the distillation of the human tenacity into objects, be they digital or plastic or vinyl, and 2016 music was in no short supply of striking and unshakeable human objects. Below, you can find catalogued the ones that struck me the most, although even more than usual, culling this list down to just ten was a mighty challenge.

My usual blind spots persist, although they are shrinking: metal has no presence on this list and occupied a pretty narrow band of my total listening habits in 2016, and for such a rich year in hip-hop releases, my listening probably did not give the genre what it deserved. But it is what it is, and what this is is my favorite albums and songs from the year. Enjoy!

[Note: I started weekly reviews this year, so in the interest of not being redundant, if I had reviewed one of these albums this year, I've simply linked to the review page rather than create a new blurb.]

Favorite Albums:

1. David Bowie: Blackstar
We lost so many artists in 2016 that it's frightening to even begin to count them, but losing Bowie really, really stung, all the more so because Bowie's music felt more alive than it had in a decade at least. Blackstar ranks among the late legend's masterpieces, and what—in that blissful weekend that separated the release of this album from the man's death—initially seemed to be one of Bowie's strangest works soon snapped into focus as one of his most openly personal. Scratch that: not just one of his most personal—one of the most personal albums of all time. "You know I'll be free, just like that bluebird," he sings. "Ain't that just like me?" Exactly like David Bowie: brilliant.

2. Esperanza Spalding: Emily's D+Evolution


[Read original review here]

3. Radiohead: A Moon Shaped Pool


[Read original review here]

4. Kendrick Lamar: untitled unmastered


[Read original review here]

5. Beyoncé: Lemonade


[Read original review here]

6. Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith: A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke


[Read original review here]

7. Shearwater: Jet Plane and Oxbow


[Read original review here]

8. Margo Price: Midwest Farmer's Daughter


[Read original review here]

9. Regina Spektor: Remember Us to Life


[Read original review here]

10. Jenny Hval: Blood Bitch


[Read original review here]









Great 2016 Songs Not On These Albums:

Black Mountain: "Mothers of the Sun"—Black Mountain's 2016 album, IV, evokes Black Sabbath all over the place, but this opening track is probably the Sabbathiest, a grimy, relentless march of classic-rock-style heavy metal with a killer riff. It's apologetically nostalgic; it's also apologetically awesome.

Carly Rae Jepsen: "Cry"— "He never wants to strip down to his feelings/He never wants to kiss and close his eyes" is the sort of is-it-cheesy-or-well-observed line that has become Carly Rae's bread and butter. But the real charm here is the crystalline production, which gives the song the rich, faux-'80s sound that's become the 2010s bread and butter.

Car Seat Headrest: "Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales"—The dirty secret of this "songs" section is that a lot of these picks are just chances for me to acknowledge albums that might have made the Top 10 if I had had a chance to spend more time with them. In the case of Car Seat Headrest's Teens of Denial, you've got a batch of literate, prickly-sweet indie rock songs of the variety that we might have heard from Pavement had they kept in the direction they started with on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Although to be precise, this pick, the standout "Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales," sounds a lot more Weezer-y. Which is cool, too. Whatever the case, it's a fantastic song from an album I really need to hear more from.

Chance the Rapper (feat. T-Pain, Kirk Franklin, Eryn Allen Kane, Noname): "Finish Line"—Chance the Rapper spun gold out of the "gospel rap" sound that both he and Kanye touted this year. Of the two, Chance wins the gospel rap crown by a country mile, and this is exhibit A.

Brian Eno: "Fickle Sun (iii) I'm Set Free"—I'm not sure if this Velvet Underground cover makes sense outside of the context of its place as the closer for Brian Eno's solid album from early in 2016. But as a climax to a classically spacey Eno record, it's sublime.

INGA: "Volunteered Slavery"—I don't even know where I found this song. It was some random Bandcamp download. But it's a great little piece of modern jazzy something or other.

Kamaiyah: "I'm On"—A great rags-to-riches brag. Kamaiyah is one of several promising young voices to ascend the hip-hop ladder recently, and I'm all for that. She's a tremendously captivating MC.

Maps Need Reading: "Altar Ego"—Local Knoxville band spot here. Maps Need Reading released their debut album this year, and this 12-minute opus is far and away the best song on it. Recalling bits of Rush and Genesis and Pink Floyd while still establishing its own sonic identity, "Altar Ego" is fantastic justification of Maps Need Reading's central spot in Knoxville's prog scene.

M83: "Solitude"—M83's album Junk was dismissed as kitschy and hollow. I didn't spend enough time with it to know if that's true (and to be honest, I generally don't love M83 stuff to begin with), but "Solitude," with its majestic, cinematic sweep, is breathtaking. 

Noname: "Yesterday"—Noname just makes me smile. There's a joint humility and verve to her delivery that makes her music irresistible to me, and no more so is this true than in the opening track to her excellent 2016 mixtape, Telefone. Not that Chance is going anywhere, but Noname is the perfect inheritor to his throne as the feel-good conscious rapper of his era. Look her up if you haven't already.

PJ Harvey: "The Wheel"—A furious, scorched-earth rocker from one of alt-rock's perennial earth-scorchers. Harvey's foray into international social consciousness was kind of hit-and-miss this year, but this song, focusing on a small, almost inconsequential scene of photos fading in sunlight, is a powerful bit of Kosovo metonymy.

Preoccupations: "Degraded"—The band formerly known as "Viet Cong" lost little in the voyage from one name to the next. "Degraded" delivers the same characteristically aggressive post-punk you've come to expect from the band's debut last year, this time zeroing in a bit more intently on Joy Division as an influence.

Savages: "Evil"—And speaking of aggressive post-punk, get a load of Savages.

Solange: "Cranes in the Sky"—This is another "want to spend more time with the album" pick. Those harmonies! That chorus! It's a beautiful song every bit the equal to (and maybe even surpassing) the music put out by that other Knowles woman this year.

Kanye West: "Saint Pablo"—Even by the scattered logic of contemporary Kanye releases, The Life of Pablo was an especially scattered album, but in the wreckage of what has turned out to be an unfortunately unfortunate 2016 for Ye, we can still pick out the jewels, and "Saint Pablo" is chief among them. In light of what the last few months of the year looked like for Kanye, "This generation's closest thing to Einstein/So don't worry about me, I'm fine" are a pair of lines that have taken on perhaps more meaning than the man himself ever intended, but if anything, West's music only becomes richer through the lens of the conflict between author and audience.

White Stag: "Mothouse"—More Knoxville pride. Of the two Knox prog bands represented here, White Stag is the clear visionary, infusing their 10-minute suites with ambient and black metal textures that place them on the vanguard of what's looking to be an exciting 2017 breakthrough.

Wilco: "We Aren't the World (Safety Girl)"—Modern-day Wilco is a band of two ambitions: the scrappy, noisy rock of 2015's Star Wars and the scrappy, finger-picking rock of 2016's Schmilco. Both versions feel intermittently tossed-off and brilliant, and I honestly prefer the noisier side of the band. But there's still lots to love about the quieter, more acoustic stylings, as evidenced by the sweet sarcasms of "We Aren't the World (Safety Girl)." "Let's pretend we're hundred-dollar bills, like so, and complain every day there's a spider in my soup," Tweedy sings, "Tired of my opinions like everybody else, is that so?" It's some of his best songwriting in recent years, and given how I don't at all agree with the meme of Wilco being in decline, that's saying something.