2016 in Review

2016 was a weird year for film. The general consensus is that it was a bad year for big studio productions, but an equally good year for low-budget films. I agree. In this article I’ll cover some different stuff, including my top 10 list from 2016, the year’s most over/underrated films, and my most anticipated 2017 releases. I link to my reviews in the film titles, for the ones I’ve written about. I describe the premise of most of these films, but there are no spoilers beyond that.

TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2016
I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to do these lists without mentioning what films you missed that year, so here are the 2016 releases I look the most forward to catching up with: Jackie, American Honey, Everybody Wants Some, Kill Zone 2, 20th Century Women and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. Let’s get to it!

10. Hail, Caesar!
Many refer to this wonderful movie as a lesser Coen brother’s film. I get it. Hail, Caesar! certainly isn’t among their very best films. Here’s the thing though. The Coen brothers at their best blow everyone else out of the park. At their second-best, they’re still among the best filmmakers alive. Hail, Caesar! is a hilarious tribute to the golden age of Hollywood. It has numerous spectacular set pieces (my personal favourite is Channing Tatum’s dance sequence), the best ensemble cast of the year, and 2016’s break-out performance (Alden Ehrenreich, obviously).

9. Allied
By far the most underrated film of the year. I can only subscribe Allied’s mediocre reviews to unfair prejudice against Robert Zemeckis and Brad Pitt. I didn’t get around to reviewing Allied, but I found it to be a delightfully gripping and suave thriller, and easily Zemeckis’ best film in twenty years. Pitt and Cotillard are perfectly cast, and through Zemeckis’ eyes they become the slickest on-screen couple of the year.

8. Son of Saul
This Hungarian WWII drama won the Academy Award for best foreign language picture last year, but wasn’t released in most of Europe until 2016. The filmmakers made a bold gamble, and shot an entire film in a narrow 4×3 aspect ratio, while keeping the camera glued to the main character (played by Géza Röhrig). The gamble pays off. Röhrig earns every second of your attention, and the film accomplishes two impossible feats: Offering an original take on an Auschwitz drama, and doing so in a humane way.

7. Don’t Think Twice
I never caught up with writer/director Mike Birbiglia’s debut feature, Sleepwalk With Me, but his sophomore effort is incredible. Don’t Think Twice is a drama/comedy about a New York based improv-group, and its 92 minutes runtime flies by in a blur of laughs and sharp observations that are equally truthful and painful. I haven’t watched most of Keegan-Michael Key’s sketches, but based on his performance here I’m ready for him to make the jump to fulltime actor.

6. The Edge of Seventeen
Remember when Hailee Steinfeld, aged 14, was rightfully nominated for an Oscar for her performance in the Coen brothers’ 2010 western True Grit? I haven’t seen any of her other films in the passing six years, but she’s back with a vengeance in The Edge of Seventeen. Writer/director Kelly Craig had a super-funny script that she was ready to shoot, but in order to improve the script, she first mingled with a bunch of high schoolers for research. She realised she had it all wrong, and rewrote the whole thing. The new script that turned into The Edge of Seventeen gets to so many truths about being a teenager: You think the world revolves around you, the only currency is popularity, and chances are you’re an asshole and the root of your own problems.

5. Elle
When Paul Verhoeven makes blockbusters (Starship Troopers, RoboCop, Basic Instinct) they’re not what you’d expect. It turns out that when he makes a drama about rape, it’s not what you’d expect either. Rape is such a sensitive topic to handle, and and while I think our current culture is too politically correct and oversensitive, I won’t begrudge anyone for being offended by this weird and troubling work of art. Elle is funny, scary, subversive, weird, unpredictable, and utterly unlike anything you’ve ever seen. In a rare year with more interesting female characters than male, it has the best performance by an actress in Isabelle Huppert. Verhoeven tried to make this movie for years in Hollywood, and we can only praise ourselves lucky that nobody there wanted to touch this project.

4. Captain America: Civil War
I love comic book movies. Sure, many of them suck, but that’s true of any genre. Good comic book films are endlessly entertaining, imaginative and filled with wonderful characters, action and melodrama. What Marvel has been doing for the past eight years is utterly unprecedented, and it pays off spectacularly in the best superhero movie since 2012. The conflict in Civil War builds perfectly; your sympathy is torn between its opponents. It manages to introduce two new characters that both are total show-stealers, and this is in a film that has spades of fantastic characters to begin with. Civil War was the movie I watched the most times in 2016. Whenever it ends, I just want to put it on again.

3. La La Land
I enjoyed 2014’s Whiplash, but I wasn’t as hot on it as most people. Damien Chazelle’s new musical, La La Land, however, is a big step forward for the frustratingly talented and young writer/director. La La Land is a musical with relatively few songs, but the film’s DNA is cemented in the musical world. This is clearly the film Chazelle always wanted to make -the result is magical and impossible not to love. La La Land is filled with color, life, love and laughter. Ryan Gosling is great, but Emma Stone is the real showstopper here. None of them are worldclass dancers or singers, but they’re amazing actors, and sufficiently skilled at the song and dance to make this movie work like gangbusters. I have complicated and unresolved feelings toward the film’s ending, but with its breathtaking cinematography, great music, and impeccable choreography, this film stole my heart.

2. Moonlight
I saw this movie a month ago, and when the credits rolled I was sure it was going to be my favourite film of the year. And it easily could have been. I saw my #1 movie less than 24 hours ago, and if I’d made this list a day, or maybe just an hour, later, I might’ve swapped my #1 and #2. I have nothing but praise for Barry Jenkins’ stunning masterpiece, that chronicles the formative years of a black homosexual in Miami. This movie is electrical and poetic. Abstract yet specific. From it’s mesmerizing  opening shot to its moving conclusion, Moonlight is vibrant with emotion.

1. Manchester By the Sea
If La La Land stole my heart, Manchester by the Sea broke it. Kenneth Lonergan’s masterpiece is a powerful meditation on grief, self-forgiveness, and moral luck, but don’t let that fool you: this is also one of the year’s funniest movies. The amount and quality of humor Lonergan creates, while using this to build his characters, is nothing short of miraculous. His character observations are so true to life it’s like he’s operating on another level than everyone else. As mentioned above, I could easily have swapped my #1 and #2 this year. I put this film above Moonlight largely as a symbolic gesture, because film’s like this doesn’t get enough praise. Moonlight and La La Land are stylistic marvels; their genius hits you in the face. Manchester by the Sea is a subtle, humble film, that confidently assumes that nothing beats a brilliant script with brilliant performances. Its lack of pyrotechnics may make it look less impressive, but it shouldn’t. It’s that line of disastrous thinking that lead people to think Inarritu is a good director. I was underwhelmed at the beginning of Manchester by the Sea, but almost like clockwork, my estimation of it rose a notch every ten minutes, until it revealed itself to be an unparalleled stroke of genius by the end.

Honorable mentions
There were two films in particular it pained me to leave off this list: Park Chan-wook’s amazing (if overly erotic) thriller, The Handmaiden, and The Daniels’ moving fart-comedy Swiss Army Man. The other films I loved this year, and would’ve been happy to put on my top 10 if there’d been an available slot, are: Neighbours 2: Sorority Rising, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Arrival, Silence, Kubo and the Two Strings, Lion, and The Jungle Book.  

2016 Disappointment
Here are the 2016 films with the widest gap between my excitement for seeing the film (high) and opinion after leaving the cinema (low). The trailers, cast, and David Ayer’s previous highlights had me convinced Suicide Squad,  if not a great movie, would at least be fun and entertaining. Alas, the movie was an absolute snoozefest of a catastrophe. The return of both Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon gave me high hopes for Jason Bourne, but that film turned out to be the antithesis of all that made the original Bourne-trilogy so appealing. Finally, I was as pumped as anyone for returning to the magical world of Harry Potter, especially with the Goddess herself penning the script, but Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was resoundingly meh.

2016 Movies I Didn’t Get
Some of these movies are bad, but most of them were fine – I’m just confused that everyone else LOVED them. Deadpool (baaaad), The Girl on the Train (bad) Zootopia (fine), Star Trek: Beyond (Fine) Hell or High Water (good, but calm down already). Toni Erdmann (pretty good, but calm waaaay down).

2016 Movies That Didn’t Get Enough Love
Not necessarily masterpieces, but these are films I loved watching, look forward to rewatching, and would heartily recommend – but nobody talked about them. I’ve excluded films from my top 10. The Shallows, Blood Father, Captain Fantastic, 10. Cloverfield Lane. 

Who Would Win What Oscars If the World Was a Fair Place:  
Best film: Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea)
Best Director: Berry Jenkins (Moonlight)
Best Actor: Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea)
Best Actress: Isabelle Huppert (Elle)
Best Supporting Actor: Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Nocturnal Animals)
Best Supporting Actress: Naomie Harris (Moonlight)
Best Original Screenplay: Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea)
Best Adapted Screenplay: Eric Heisserer (Arrival)
Best Animated Feature: Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings)
Best Foreign Language Film: Paul Verhoeven (Elle)
Best Documentary Feature: David Farrier & Dylan Reeve (Tickled)
Best Original Score: Andy Hull & Robert McDowell (Swiss Army Man)
Best Cinematography: James Laxton (Moonlight)

Most Anticipated 2017 Releases
I only considered films that have a 2017 release date, not films that are just scheduled to be released sometime in 2017 (if they haven’t gotten a specific release date yet, chances are the film won’t actually come out this year)*. Also, this list skews toward studio productions, because it’s difficult to know in advance what independent and foreign language films will be worth paying attention to. Most of my favourite films from 2016 weren’t on my radar a year ago.

*But if they DO come out this year, Paul Thomas Anderson and Darren Aronofsky both have very exciting sounding movies on the way.

1. Baby Driver (Because Edgar Wright).
2. Dunkirk (Because Christopher Nolan, but unfortunately a war movie).
3. Star Wars VIII (Because Rian Johnson, but unfortunately a Star Wars movie).
4. The Circle (Because James Ponsoldt + Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, Jon Boyega & Patton Oswalt ++ Danny Elfman composing +++ Matthew Libatique shooting!).
5.Logan Lucky (Because Steven Soderbergh + Adam Driver).
6. John Wick: Chapter 2: (Because John Wick is a perfect action film and there’s not enough Keanu Reeves in my life).
7. Spiderman: Homecoming (Because Spider Man!).
8. Molly’s Game (Because Aaron Sorkin writing. BUT also Sorkin directing – not necessarily bad, but not as surefire a hit as if Fincher or Boyle had directed).
9. The Beguiled (Because Sofia Coppola + Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst & Colin Farrell).
10. The Dark Tower (Because Nikolaj Arcel is one of Denmark’s finest filmmakers, and it’ll be exciting to see what he does with Stephen King’s beloved books and that cast).

 

That’s it! Thanks to everyone who’s been reading an commenting!