Our Favourite Films of 2016

Scout Tafoya

(films I saw last year released this year)

No Home Movie

Aferim!
The Lobster
Cemetery of Splendor
Right Now, Wrong Then
The Treasure
My Golden Days
Mountains May Depart
The Measure of a Man
Don't Blink - Robert Frank


Sean Van Deuren

My Golden Days
Moonlight
Jackie
The Lobster
Manchester by the Sea
Nocturnal Animals
Knight of Cups
Arrival 
Things To Come 
Don't Think Twice


Lucas Mangum

Arrival
Midnight Special 
The Witch
Green Room
The Jungle Book
Anomalisa 
Deadpool
Star Trek Beyond
Train to Busan 
10 Cloverfield Lane


Sophy Romvari

Werewolf 
Manchester by the Sea
Certain Women 
Cameraperson 
A Quiet Passion 
Never Eat Alone 
Nocturama 
Love and Friendship
Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids 
Toni Erdmann/No Home Movie/Paterson

Tucker Johnson

Manchester by the Sea

Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Knight of Cups
The Lobster
Hell or High Water

Arrival
Rogue One
Hello My Name is Doris
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
Kubo & The Two Strings

Mark Lukenbill

20th Century Women

No Home Movie

Elle

Little Sister

Moonlight

Cameraperson

First Girl I Loved

Lace Crater

Certain Women

The Love Witch

unreleased:

Mate-me por favor

Women Who Kill/All This Panic

Murtada

Things To Come
Moonlight
Fire At Sea
La La Land
I Am Not Your Negro
Elle
The Handmaiden
Julieta
Certain Women
American Honey

CM Gardner

Things to Come 
O.J. Made In America 
Manchester By the Sea 
Happy Hour 
Homeland: Iraq Year Zero 
Moonlight 
Little Sister 
Everybody Wants Some!! 
Paterson 1
Kaili Blues 

Best Films Without Distribution: Nocturama and Sieranevada 
Best New To Mes: Portrait of a Young Girl At the End of the 1960s in Brussels (Akerman), High School (Wiseman), The Battle of Chiles Parts I-III (Guzman), Providence (Resnais), Real Life (Brooks), and Tokyo Olympiad (Ichikawa)

Best Rep: Tales of Cinema: The Films of Hong Sang-Soo



Damian Arlyn

Silence
The Little Prince
The Nice Guys
Hacksaw Ridge
Knight of Cups
Arrival
Hell or High Water
Hail, Caesar!
The BFG
The Witch

Manifest Destiny: the Lewis & Clark Musical Adventure

Daniel Khan

Moonlight
Manchester By the Sea
Elle
Things to Come
Cameraperson
Jackie
Certain Women
The Handmaiden
Sunset Song
Knight of Cups
Arrival
Louder Than Bombs
The Fits
Hell or High Water
Midnight Special

Jason Miller

1. Cemetery of Splendor

A film I saw in late 2015 and nothing has eclipsed it since. Maybe 2016's most politically-tinged film, where the spectre of old regimes never dissipates. The danger still chugs forward, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's homeland is torn and processed, and silence is the biggest condemnation of all. 

2. Certain Women 

Kelly Reichardt spins Mailie Meloy's short stories into a fitful, yet still anti-dramatic, trio of pain, suffering and goddamned hard work by grown women. Meloy's collection was named "Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It" and what better name for the story of women who choose not to settle and will do anything they can for a foothold in this world. Reichardt has long been treated as a Realist, with her relaxed performances and natural world-building, but even with those attributes, her frames have become even more organized, even turning the Montana mountains more picturesque than they have ever appeared on film. 

3. Mountains May Depart 

There is maybe no filmmaker working that career is as founded on the idea of national identity as Jia Zhangke, whose entire career has been probes of the recent history of the Chinese working class. Mountains is both familiar territory and new ground for Jia, with its triptych working in the past, present and future. But Mountains is first and foremost a melodrama, starting as a love triangle, turning into a family melodrama and concluding as a coming of age tale. The movie stands as a personal statement of anxiety complicating Jia's sense of national identity. It's speculative future shows a figure who has lost his home, lost his identity and now displaced, looks back across the sea, calling out to a sense of belonging that he's missing. It's 2016's most wistful moment and one of approaching a deeply uncertain future with strength and grace. 

4. Sunset Song

The latest astonishment from likely the great British director to ever live, Terence Davies mixes mixes both 70mm and digital to capture, respectively, the exterior and interior of the life of Chris Guthrie (the stunning Agyness Deyn). Chris is a woman who is ready to take the land outside of her home and make it hers, but forever is trapped by the inevitability of what happens inside the home. Just the beginning in what (with A Quiet Passion), feels like a new, radical and exciting chapter for Davies' already extraordinary career. 

5. Knight of Cups 

Terrence Malick, who forever seemed destined to retire quietly, has only made thornier and more difficult films as he's grown into his elderly years. Forever marveled by modern society, Malick's Hollywood surrogate and the cavalcade of women around him (as well as a hell of a lot of Emmanuel Lubezki camerawork) turn LA into a thousand different worlds, each as boundless and astonishing as the next. Likely the scariest film of the year, with the best Vegas trip in the history of cinema. 

6. Happy Hour

Likely the year's most undefinable film, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's six hour, wild child of a film is an experience of both heightened emotional states and a relatively modest scope. Anchored by four fantastic performances (attuned perfectly to each character's nature and situation), the film explores what feels like every permutation of relationships, work, family and daily life, while also being hyper-aware that it's just barely scratching the surface. Each turn, surprise and inevitability is met with an incredible approach by director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi and DP Yoshio Kitagawa, expanding even just any possible expectation of the experiences one film can hold. 

7. Manchester by the Sea 

A much smaller film than most treat it, Kenneth Lonergan shows that you can't build a new life out of the absence of what once was. A parade of verbal jabs, quiet alignments and small gestures (even down to Lee packing the photos of his children with a towel). 

8. Café Society 

Woody Allen's first dip into digital was 2016's most beautifully composed film (who knew Storaro could still be at the height of his powers 50+ years into his career?). A quietly aching film that is the perfect rejoinder to "time heals all wounds". 

9. Cameraperson 

Easily the year's most inventive, adventurous and formally specific film, Kirsten Johnson's solo directing debut finds the power in what only films can do and relishes in it. Made with equal doses of anguish and pain as with joy and mirth. 

10. No Home Movie 

Chantal Akerman's final film, as rich and harsh as her other documentary about her mother, News From Home. Akerman's formal rigor is met equally with her love of both her mother and life itself. A film about the pain of saying goodbye when we needed it the most. 

Honorable Mentions: Everybody Wants Some!!, Justin Timberlake and the Tennessee Kids, Love and Friendship, Silence, Sully, Julieta, Kaili Blues, Allied, The Alchemist Cookbook 

A few blind-spots I'll catch up with: Paterson, Afternoon, Aquarius, Things to Come, The Other Side, Toni Erdmann

Best older films I saw for the first time in 2016:

A New Leaf, The Clock, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, The Puppetmaster, In a Year with 13 Moons