My Favourite Films of 2017

1. Phantom Thread

by Paul Thomas Anderson

When a new movie is run through a projector, it's a rare and beautiful thing. It's more than just placing an image on a screen, it's throwing a little piece of the entire history of film onto a canvas. Seeing how an artist paints with that history, hearing sounds that have popped in the ears of cineastes for decades. Paul Thomas Anderson, by virtue of being the only director who insists his films be projected on film when they're first released, does us all a favour. He makes us remember everytime we've sat in front a projector watching 35mm film run by a stream of light. That alone would be enough. He also makes masterpieces. And I don't like that word, it's basically meaningless. I just don't know how else to begin. He begins by taking a fistful of early David Lean (Brief Encounter, Passionate Friends, Blythe Spirit) and stitching them together with fabric borrowed from Hitchcock. When we need to understand our heroes’ perspectives, we’ll suddenly find ourselves in a dynamic setting crib from Psycho or Vertigo. The two English directors are his passport to the setting, allowing him to know how tall to stand in cramped drawing rooms, how breakfast is served, how a man sits in a chair and how women know they’re being observed. And from that negative, that feeling of what is and isn’t, Anderson builds from little more than gray houses, white walls, orange halls and cancelled parties, a realm of defeat and unwanted attention, of perpetual annoyance that picks everyone up onto their toes and sets every spine straight. Anderson has made a film about the condition of being an artist that greets outright the hidden contract between every stormy male ‘genius’ and the people who care for them, every muse, wife, and wet nurse. If talent is a kind of degenerative disorder, one that requires quarantining from the rest of the world, then the only way in to their psychosis is through disease. Love must be a fever cabinet, and we must sweat out our perceived alienation from the touch of those who care. Flat on your back hallucinating one’s dead mother, we aren’t tortured geniuses, just tortured, and every prisoner needs a jailer and a doctor if they’re to live out the end of their sentence. Anderson makes no excuses for the perversity of his discovery, thank heaven, and the fetishistic parade the insane lovers lead is a tour of early sound cinema’s casual provocations. The films sounds and feels like the product of some mad fetishist from the '70s, a Losey or a Visconti, but it’s speaking to us in the present. I’ve never been more eager to answer.

2. Twin Peaks: The Return

by David Lynch

David Lynch’s retirement guarantees an altogether safer and less interesting artistic life for people all over the world. Just look at the outline of this 18 hour odyssey: people spent the last two decades waiting for him to fulfill the promise of a thoroughly compromised object he managed to half-sneak by networks and censors. He the 

spends the meantime making the most violent, sexual and a-rhythmic shadowplays any American had ever attempted. So then he returns to the project after a ten year silence spent doing little other than meditate and make music in his garage and what did viewers want? Catchphrases and cute behavior? What did he do? Make a deconstructionist myth about (sexual) evil in the United States, positing the loss of our soul as the minute we uncovered a way to end civilizations and turned it on ourselves simply to measure the potential damage. In a way we did stop advancing when we discovered the bomb. When we first learned how to unleash untold destruction and horror on our enemies, how to make sure they have American flag-hued radiation scars for generations to come, before we gave houses and food to each of our own beleaguered citizens. Who are the harbingers of this unspeakable intangible horror? Vagrants. Forgotten men. Our reckoning. The people abandoned by the state apparatus, naturally they will later haunt the FBI and its army of befuddled shadows, causing them to imagine they could undo the evil they protect. And that’s the show’s MO. Those of us who believe we understand the truth or protect some rosy dream of it will be the ones hurt most by its wooly lashing sting. It breaks free from cages and mutilates the ‘innocent’ and guilty alike because we believe in the state and prop it up, as we do with our religious beliefs and capitalism. We’re the ones keeping all the lies afloat. And the best we can do is ask that our art be identical to all previous work? Lynch posits that we deserve to be trapped in time reliving our greatest failures if all we want is empty nostalgia. After all, what are we pining for? A time before ours, even less enlightened ("gotta light?"), where women and people of colour couldn't walk a city block without certainty of white violence? Our nostalgia is a privilege we didn't earn. What we thought of as a cozier time was a nightmare, and our cute show about a town of oddballs was always about a father raping his daughter. Now we can't pretend. 

3. Lady Bird

by Greta Gerwig

Greta Gerwig has made a film as lovable, heedlessly emotional and improbably fluid and dextrous as she is as a performer, a slightly sunnier but no less honest prequel to her first film Nights and Weekends. She's captured the voice of white teenagers and their mothers as perfectly as I've ever seen it (I've seen these arguments, been in the room as the talking turns to shouting). Arguments and affection measuring as expressions of the horrific anxiety that comes with loving someone who stepped out of you/who made you accidentally in their image, perceived flaws and all. It's a beautifully open work about the carpeted battleground of suburban co-habitation, of worrying about money because it might mean your love changes when tuitions can't be paid. Every new idea is a war of egos, every new development in one life is a reminder of what's missing from the other. This honestly written, empathetically directed tug of war (our hero, a never-better Saoirse Ronan, rebels against her family, the idea that she herself might be overly entitled, both of her chosen boyfriends, even her own name) puts one very specifically between a mother and daughter, but also of anyone who grew up with aspirations bigger than their environment allowed. A tired priest staging Sondheim, a nun who pines for a little rebellion of her own, a Hispanic adoptee chafing against his white family. It's incredibly specific, but its spirit is universal. 

4. The Rider

by Chloé Zhao

It's in this film's half-dozen tableaux of cowboys walking through an acre of dusk-lit wheat and dirt that the movie's singularity becomes overwhelming. You may have seen grainy images of lone western heroes carefully choosing the next step toward oblivion before, but when has the lead-up to these eternal footsteps felt quite so riddled with hard-fought and hard-lost emotional portent. Have we ever known so thoroughly the vituperative whim of fate as reflected through such heartbreakingly simple choices? All around our lead lie little signifiers that his freedom, his love for life, is about to come to a horrific, painful, protracted end. His sister and his best friend offer him clues of a life robbed of one's faculties. His father's weathered face and uneasy existence show the toll of unwanted responsibility. His young friends remind him of the promise he had just a few short years ago. And the horses for which he cares remind him that nothing ever stays free or wild. This film has a preternatural compassionate grace I'm not used to seeing from young filmmakers working in America. Chloé Zhao is about to become one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived. 

5. Zama

by Lucrecia Martel

Returning from nigh a decade in the wilderness Lucrecia Martel's new film shows a man reluctantly surrendering to it. This gorgeous ambling cautionary tale about colonial power is the sort of epic they used to make once every six months before the 80s steered film art on a course against ambience and stillness. Exploration used to look like this back when directors like Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Werner Herzog and Lina Wertmüller were young. Now this seems out of time. All the better for it, obviously, but a joyful anomaly. Aristocratic responsibility is rendered as the worst hangover in history, what happens when the hallucinogens, drink, smoke and pleasure have all turned to pain and curdled the unfamiliar land you no longer wish to haunt. How can you tell from the hellish, quaking, multicolored reality from your worst nightmare, especially when you lose a little more of your glory and position with each passing day? Zama's brilliantly realized loss of agency shows Martel at her most playful and irreverent, the anger of the film's message coyly buried under waves of soft music, body paint, llama staring contests, and one empty promise and building after another. Try to rebuild your civilization where it does not belong and the result will undoubtedly look preposterous and end in murder. Martel, who moved from ice cold (The Headless Woman) to sweltering hot (Zama), is at the peak of her observer's power. This gently psychedelic warm bath of a movie she has drawn for us feels like the height of cinephile luxury. 

6. A Cure for Wellness

by Gore Verbinski

Gore Verbinski himself seems to have taken the cure because he's living his best life. After attempting to educate America's preteens about America's shameful genocidal past via an early cinema rollercoaster ride (and famously not making enough studio money while he was at it), some maniac gave him even more money to talk about what a corrupt superstructure capitalism is. The very reason this gorgeously insane curio cabinet exists, is to explain that the very lunatics who greenlit it are in thrall to cult mentalities and unhinged amorality. The vessel he uses to tell us all this? Tormenting uncharismatic Dane DeHaan for just about three hours, squeezing him like an eel and watch him squirm on the floor gasping for life. The most gorgeous use of digital this year, and proof that there are still a couple of maniacs throwing studio money down the toilet expressly so that kooks like me can watch in orgastic stupefaction as the movie I watch turns from The Devils to Sheitan to Phantom of the Opera and back again. Grimy, sweaty, blue black fantasia. The film I'm most grateful somehow was made in 2017. 

7. Call Me By Your Name

by Luca Guadagnino

A lot of the time I walk around with the opening credits of I Am Love playing in my head. To me, the perfect fusion of architecture, light and music, which likely says as much about me as people who prefer something by the great Eugène Green. Don't get me wrong, I love Green's religious rapture in the face of ancient buildings, but there was something more modern, more perverse and propulsive about the way Luca Guadagnino did it. The film that follows was a fulsome melodrama hidden beneath a cool sheen of music, immutable lighting, set in place by an apparent remix of L'eclisse. As much as I wanted the gorgeous mirrored stage opening of A Bigger Splash to be a representative curtain raiser, the film settled into a too-busy rhythm, not taking the time to luxuriate in lust and the pleasures of eternal artistry. I liked it, but after I Am Love? Nothing short of Call Me By Your Name would suffice as a follow-up. Perhaps his Contempt, the cool sheen now belongs to the hidden emotions buried under the touching, the quick talking, the showing off, the sly movements of Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet as they size each other up. Reversing (inverting?) De Sica's romantic momentum (The Adults Are Watching) among new and old ruins, this sumptuous films reaches for Sufjan Stevens (in lieu of Elliott Smith), Ryuichi Sakamoto, and most perfectly, The Psychedelic Furs to do all the talking for these muted lovers-to-be. The images are manicured like the Gardens of Lucullus, light perfectly deepening every shirtless body and broken statue, hinting at the impossibility of living whole. Chalamet will remember letting go of Hammer for as long as those statues sat at the bottom of the sea. Our emotions have lives beyond us, our love sunk into the stone of villas, playable like the classical music used to seduce and disarm. This film understands the surfaces of art as reflections of our hidden desires, and ably joins the canon of the works referenced through its effortless charm and fearless emotional transparency. 

8. The Young Karl Marx

by Raoul Peck

Vicky Krieps will likely be best remembered for Phantom Thread when surveys of her career are conducted, but she's a fierce, earthy presence and just as lovable and alive as Jenny Marx in Raoul Peck's delicious biopic. She's certainly a match for Stefan Konarske's Engels and August Diehl's Marx, which is handy because their ideological romance is the film's central concern, more than Marx's marriage to Jenny or Engels love for Mary Burns (Hannah Steele). The ricochet of love-as-counterargument to capitalism is a seductive idea given the full weight of historical drama. Peck and his team pull a grammatical fast one, filming, designing and costuming up a storm as if they were making Jane Austen or Tolstoy. And then he serves up the history of communism as if it were a drama about dowries. I know why people didn't like this, they're just wrong. This thing is compulsively enjoyable and rewatchable on the strength of its design and performances, to say nothing of the now-invaluable feeling of watching history being changed for the better. Can't tell you how much that means to me now. These men drank and smoke and puked in the gutter dreaming of a time less goddamn awful. Peck could have made basically anything after his runaway doc smash I Am Not Your Negro and he chose this because this information is still important. 

9. Éternité

by Tran Anh Hung

Tran Anh Hung's Norwegian Wood is one of the most intelligent and exacting looks at an emotional meltdown ever recorded, the way it clouds your periphery and focuses in on nothing but pain. His follow-up spares no ounce of pain, but is in a much more relaxed and resplendent milieu, perhaps as a way to escape the chill of his last film. Éternité, his Tree of Life, is about the way pain and love become unwritten human history. A catalog of loss and coupling, births and funerals, set to a never-still classical score, shows the way we travel through other people's memories as participants and visitors. The way we build memories and express ourselves. The film has no plot, just a series of impressions each more beautiful and important than the last. Films like this frighten people, hence it never being released in the US, the way they treat life cinematically, eliding conflict and making normality its subject. Socialist-humanist art will probably never catch on in such a hateful place, but when it sneaks over here I'm always grateful. When it's this transcendent, I'm over the moon. 

10. Contemporary Color

by Bill & Turner Ross

Speaking of socialist art, David Byrne recreates the kind of flag dancing that was previously a staple of Asian dictatorships and American towns during Jim Crow, and given it to the people! Which people? Well whoever might be tempted by Blood Orange, David Byrne, Nelly Furtado and St. Vincent writing original songs for a one-night-only concert event. As filmed by the Ross brothers, this event was the second coming of the Stop Making Sense tour. Everyone on stage matters, the music combines everyone's efforts in a graceful sonata of fabric, arms and legs. An odyssey of acceptance (filmed on the night the country legalized gay marriage), this film exists to transport performers' smiles to screens across the country, to show everyone what it looks like when Zola Jesus is lost in song, her head thrashing while her flag team takes over for her. That reverie is worth everything. 

11. Behemoth

by Zhao Liang

Industry's malevolent arms stretching over untouched land, naked men laying on the ground like an infant workforce, and the silent calm, claiming it through influence and the ghosts it's left behind. Everything is touched by the oil-slicked designs and mangled limbs of labor, keeping the surface of the earth a deafening roar of productivity to sustain its life. Nothing waits below, no back-up plan after destruction, and nothing waits above, after, when we're on a burnt coffin of a planet. All there is, all we can hope to do, is hold up a mirror and see if the right monsters gaze inside. This is really what you're doing. This is the world you're making. This is your absent face while men work for nothing and die for less. A broken promise of more humanity. 

12. My Happy Family

by Nana Ekvtimishvili & Simon Groß

Though it'd be nice to have a film like Holy Motors every year, that completely rewrites the simplest cinematic equations into some hitherto unseen formula, it's equally flooring and comforting to watch a movie like My Happy Family this far after the birth of cinema, which does little but observe a woman in crisis, and walk away feeling moved and exhilarated. A prime example of what my friend Danny Bowes once termed "Long ass movies with long ass takes in foreign fucking languages," Ekvtimishvili and Groß manufacture the right circumstances in which to press their characters and watch the incredibly expressive faces of their actors as they re-think everything they've ever done. If it's lead them to this crossroads, maybe they've made some huge mistakes. Ia Shugliashvili performs an incredible feat as she both unravels and finds herself, often in the same scene. She has to go through a trial by fire in order to prove to herself she can live without her family, but that also takes a little of her authority away from her in the eyes of her mother and children. The navigation of self worth is always going to be an inexhaustible subject, but when it's done with this much awareness of cultural expectations, as well as a woman's relative power in restrictive societies, or even in the context of a close family, every word and gesture carries atomic power. Which is why seemingly ordinary embarrassments, as when Shugliashvili has to sing for her high school reunion, become titanic tests of oneself. If she can make it to the end of the song without breaking, she can do anything. I'll never not be moved by women who have earned a little piece of mind and respect and are this close to achieving it. 

13. Wormwood

by Errol Morris

An exhaustive, exhausting amount of information melted down into a tincture and dropped into your eyes, Errol Morris' latest might be the crowning achievement of his decades as a documentarian. A thousand cameras and a million words support his investigation of Eric Olson's coming of age through his investigation of his father's death. Olson, who studied collage and spent his life looking into the lie's surrounding his father's 10 storey drop to his demise, provides the wry, sticky voice of interrogation as we watch a splendid cast (Peter Sarsgaard doing what he was born to do as departed Frank Olson) re-enact the central mystery of his childhood. Like a bizarre therapeutic experiment, Morris takes equal delight framing the interviews as he does recreating a paranoid and perpetually sunless 50s, throwing new twists and turns (and a metric ton of disarming, confounding images and sounds) as Olson discovered them throughout his life. The character of the 50s are captured with unrivaled uncanniness, its sci-fi fixations, heroic drinking, buried emotions, and atomic fears lingering in every half-lit room and on the edge of every deranged smile. A film about paranoia that reveals that the paranoid were right to suspect the truth was being hidden, but wrong about what it all meant. Jumped, fell, pushed, dive...the point is Olson hit the ground. Morris knows that no matter how many ways you frame the truth, you'll always wind up there, which makes this hours long experiment an incredible feat, in that it feels like it might not end the way we know it does. The greatest generation a den of vipers, high, cracking up, depressed, lying, murdering, covering up, drunk, deranged and never held accountable. It's Shakespeare without a hero or an ending. 

14. Voyage of Time/Song to Song

by Terrence Malick 

When I watched these films separately I was moved, certainly, but not in the way I was by the epics (Knight of Cups, Tree of Life, The New World) and then it hit me that these films together represent a closing of a chapter in his artistic life. That's why he wanted them released so near to each other. Voyage of Time is his exploration of the beginning of mammalian existence after the big bang in The Tree of Life. Song To Song is his Garden of Eden and after story, what happens when humans walk upright and leave the breast of their creator, destroying each other, themselves, the land in the process of discovering some viable form of existing without god: the creation of art to replace him. Together these films are a perfect displaced understanding of human purpose and life, and an even more perfect look at what Malick values. He has Patti Smith play the film's god proxy, after all. That's about as personal as it gets. The world is a dense thicket of conflicted morality and true north no longer exists, every cut a blink from beyond, transporting us further than we thought possible. 

15. Visages Villages

by Agnès Varda & JR

Looking back at the history of cinema is fraught with unspeakable tragedy. It's difficult to watch Chantal Akerman's movies without becoming overwhelmed with loss. That's how I've felt about Agnès Varda for awhile now. She's still with us, but her last new feature I'd seen was The Beaches of Agnès and while it's unspeakably gorgeous and life-affirming, it's also a tough act to follow. How could Varda make another film this personal, she'd already told her life story through her art? She'd built herself a house of celluloid (literally), and talked us through the death of her truest love. What was there left to do? Well, I suppose she could come up with a joyous B-side about memory and images that could unstick her legacy from the perfect melancholy of Beaches. With photographer/imp JR by her side, Varda tours the French hinterland looking for anyone who needs cheering up, and gives them a hefty dose of her enormous cinematic ambition from her point of view a few feet off the ground. I sat next to her this year to interview her about the film, and though we rambled and she was tired, the experience had no equal. Her small, wrinkled hands, her improbably fierce-yet-soft eyes, her perfectly cropped and dyed hair. I felt like I was visiting Mount Olympus, because how could such a figure, capable of the most colossal work, who changed lives with a simple flexing of her artistic muscles, be right here next to me? I wanted to hug her and thank her for everything she'd done for me, for every feeling her movies had provoked in me, but I might have traumatized her. I settled for shaking her tiny hand and smiling. I hope I was able to communicate half of what I wanted to express in that look as she can in a close-up. I never got around to mentioning that I just about cried watching her sing "Ring My Bell," because there's an all-too-thin line separating journalist from weeping fanboy. She's done enough in her 89 years, including making Visage Villages, a soufflé of joyous interactions, that I can spare her having to validate my response to her work. She made it. As always, that's enough. 

16. Alias Grace

by Mary Harron

Mary Harron and Sarah Polley, possibly the coolest Canadian feminists alive, worked together to bring to life one of Margaret Atwood's slipperiest texts, giving a plum role to the eminently beguiling and Dietrich-resembling Sarah Gadon. What did we do to deserve such a gift? Nothing good, as the film, spread over six chapters, is a bitter indictment of indentured womanhood. The bonnets and aprons are mere exaggeration, there is no time period where its lessons don't apply. Polley's lithe writing and Harron's arch, thorough, and vicious direction (no surprises there) take us into not just the mind of their maybe-murderess but of a gender running the world in secret while their husbands and lovers paint over their contributions. The expected jealousies and fainting couch-surprise when the limits of their experience are reached without warning, Alias Grace shows for a time what it can feel like to fly under the radar of social expectations. What a joy it is to not be like every other woman, and what a terror it is to be at the whims of every man. Flying through memories and subliminal implications at a rate that frequently feels faster than 24 frames per second, the few potential fates for every player as the central crime becomes clearer seem more and more horrific. It was never a matter of guilt or innocence, but whether it's possible to live out one's days in anything like peace when you'll always be a stranger and a problem to the man next to you. For all its effects-driven bluster, provocative pop music, hordes of extras, and paint-thick stylization, last year's enormous adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale can't compete with the spectacle of a man and a woman having a conversation while we in the audience have to guess who has the upper hand. 

17. Coco

by Lee Unkich & Adrian Molina 

Pixar's stock in trade has long been making you cry whether you want to or not. They've been largely successful from day one, but it wasn't until Coco that I had the prescribed reaction when watching the first ten minutes of Up (my vote for their best film other than this), or the Sarah McLachlan interlude in Toy Story 2. And though it may be what the film was built to do, I didn't mind at all how uncontrollably I lost control of myself during the final ten minutes of Coco. My grandmother is 93 and her memory is starting to go, this movie is for me as much as anybody. The movie earns those ten minutes, of course, that's the real achievement. It's about dying twice when everyone alive forgets about you. How parents are explaining this to kids is anyone's guess, but that's just about the most devastating plot I've ever heard. Thank god the film is so vibrant and lush. The colours and set design are a neon dream, redesigning their characters and symbols as alternately poised and stumblebum Mexican melodramatic staples (if this film encourages more people to seek out classic Mexican cinema [you might want to start here], it will have more than done its job). The film is a feast for the eyes and a non-stop delight, and yes, you'll cry like a baby if you're anything like me. 

18. Beach Rats

by Eliza Hittman

As I've told anyone who will listen, Eliza Hittman has decided to become our premiere neo-realist and this is her Accattone (Boardwalkattone?), a deeply sensuous look at burgeoning (and just as quickly stifled) sexual identity among the perpetually repressed. The symbols and places (a busy beach, a father's funeral, a flea-bitten motel) are all right out of the Italian passion play dictionary. Hittman's camera and editorial rhythms recall the way Kevin Shields plays guitar, turning everything into a deep rushing wave into which you're meant to dive. Her acute perception of the location and its denizens is rivaled only by her understanding of young lust and what we'd give to keep our identities a secret during certain periods in our lives. 

19. The Rape of Recy Taylor

by Nancy Buirski

It occurs to me that if anyone ever needed proof that we need strong, thought-provoking and justifiably furious documentaries like The Rape of Recy Taylor, all you need to do is look at the comments under any given review. Take mine, for example. The first comment is about me being hyperbolic about race relations in this country (gonna go ahead and assume the commenter is white, just a crazy hunch), and later I'm told that I've confused real life for The Handmaid's Tale (which this person has ostensibly watched, despite not believing racial/sexual imbalance is an issue worth caring about). Everything about it is perfectly frustrating: belittle and undermine any attempt to look back at this country's hideous racial and sexual history, and swiftly put down the notion that any of that is still a problem. So I'm grateful for this film because it dares to look and speak up, dares to interview still living victims of antique racism (in case there was any doubt it's still running rampant in the goddamn streets), dares to suggest we owe our public an apology for centuries of violent, unspeakable cruelty, dares to even exist. That Buirski's surfaces, like being gently pulled across the polished marble floors of a museum, are getting even more assured and gorgeous only helps her wedge her ideas into our unconscious. This film is a terrifying road trip through a shameful chapter of American history, but we need its like now more than ever. 

20. Marjorie Prime

by Michael Almereyda

Almereyda's always had a penchant for genre. His career begins in earnest with Nadja, a splendidly dream-like vampire movie, and takes many detours through post-punk horror and sci-fi. His latest, the calmly grueling Marjorie Prime, is the best Twilight Zone episode never made by John Brahm or Albert Lewin. The border between life and death is like a diaphanous sheet that could be ripped aside at a moment's notice. Like the endless glasses of consolatory whiskey drunk by the grieving central characters (including Geena Davis and Lois Smith in peak form), life here is rendered as something that could just be refilled as long as there's someone left to pour it. Watching these actors struggle with the hollow figures of departed loved ones would be wrenching if it weren't also so endless fascinating. The perfect b-side to Experimenter. Reality is a facsimile, best to accept it and try to move on, or you'll be stuck in a house of ghosts. 

21. Tour De Pharmacy

by Jake Szymanski

It's easy to say that commitment to the silliest subject matter is what makes parody so effective, but what I'm still laughing about six months after first seeing this is that Szymanski manages to keep a straight face with so many of the funniest actors in the world throwing every ounce of their energy at the wall hoping not to stick. Samberg's boundless goofball energy, taped down during his Brooklyn 99 seasons, is unleashed. John Cena, Orlando Bloom, Daveed Digs, Danny Glover, Jeff Goldblum, Dolph Lundgren and Julia Ormond all clearly relish the chance to play socio and psychopaths, completely free of morality and social grace. Szymanski matches their free-for-all with tightly controlled parodic diction. It's the asides that make it, though, and the sense that everyone involved knows something's off. The blood cell cartoon is the best example of the creators complete dedication to a ten second joke that has nothing whatsoever to do with the main text, and yet is still the funniest part of the film. It's the entire project in a nutshell, in a way: it looks like the genuine article, starts funny and gets hysterical and histrionic in no time at all, before falling right back down to earth so we can get on with the show. The next joke is always the most important thing. 

22. Sleep Has Her House

by Scott Barley

Barley has been hypnotizing the natural world for our benefit in small doses for almost a decade. It sits still like it's stuck in a programmed loop while he gazes at it like a doctor staring at x-rays, inviting us in to draw whatever conclusions we can. It all happens whether we're there or not, in the dead of night, pulsing with life, buzzing and chirping thanks to the animal life hiding in the dark green expanses. His images here seem almost unreal, like he had to have painted them. How could trees, a stream, a horse, a lake seem this alien, this unsettling, this new? I'm happy not to know, to be drawn in and hypnotized like his living compositions. Part of a shared dream of unseen existence, briefly tamed, watched as much by the world as we watch it.

23. Dawson City Frozen Time

by Bill Morrison

A reverie for lost potential, a song for an old town, an incantation for a dying art. Morrison's post-rock histories reach a crowd-pleasing peak with this methodical look at the shaping of this moment, using the history of film as a map. 

24. Mimosas

by Oliver Laxe

The other doom metal pilgrimage released this year (see #35), Oliver Laxe's contemplative death march invents itself and its stylistic grandeur as it progresses. A film like this never seems like it has a clear goal and when it ends, it seems like both intuitive and insane that it's come here. Its natural harrowing course from death to death seems the only rational response to the world when it's over. While it's transpiring? A spell. A mystery. An exorcism. 

25. Slack Bay

by Bruno Dumont

Bruno Dumont developing a sense of humour is one of my favourite phenomena of cinephilia in the 21st century. Watching him become playfully surreal in his new, nearly slapstick passion plays makes his early serious films finally fit into a productive scheme. Dumont going funny wouldn't mean the same thing without his dead prostitutes and magic murderers stalking the halls of his back catalog. This gently transcendent farce revisits his old ecumenical stomping grounds, finally locating a vein of Buñuelian absurdity to compliment his bloodthirsty religious tales. I laughed as often as I was stunned into silence. 

26. I Called Him Morgan

by Kaspar Collin

A snow-covered tale of regret and timing, you can practically see the steam rising from the mouths of its interview subjects, feel the blood pooling under Morgan's cold frame, feel the slush under your feet, the white lights of a classroom or a jazz club blinding you to the inevitable as each detail is spun into silk. A film in response to Morgan's death and his art, a kind of post-bop funeral march, I Called Him Morgan is all the more tragic that this movie will be much of America's first exposure to the mad, slick genius. 

27. The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected)

by Noah Baumbach

Noah Baumbach back in the autobiographical realm that reaps the greatest reward whenever Greta Gerwig isn’t around go make him stop moping. The moping here is, however, exceptional and uses the full force of the history of the movie nebbish to its benefit. Adam Sandler (good again after something like s decade faxing it in. Not even phoning it in), Ben Stiller, and Dustin Hoffman are the sexless scolds running in circles trying to avoid their deaths and their own hatreds. All three men specialize in unlikable pricks and so Baumbach must dig and dig and dig until he finds their humanity, forcing a family reckoning, each member having independent epiphanies between some of the sharpest gags of the 21st century. Everything has to break spectacularly before it can be patched up, and it’s always cathartic watching the seams rip in a Baumbach. The marginalization of women is acceptable only because this is a movie about the very specifically shit things that men do to each other and women. 

28. Let The Sunshine In

by Claire Denis

Claire Denis’ first outright romantic comedy is exactly the languorous treat I was hoping for, a gentle, sleepy trawl through a heavily poisoned dating pool. Confidences and self esteem issues ossify after a certain age and Juliet Binoche, as our perpetually flabbergasted Denis stand-in, gets to see every way it’s possible for men to stay boys.

29. The Untamed

by Amat Escalante

Using Possession as his springboard, Mexico's cinematic Jackson Pollock throws his best work at us in buckets of unearthly images, cineaste affection and affectation, and uncommon, under-represented feeling. Putting the lie to Carlos Reygadas' nonsensical Post Tenebras Lux by making his fantastic stories make linear as well as emotional sense, The Untamed is like a cocoon of a movie, wrapping you and its characters in both metaphor and hideous yet wonderful fantasy. This is the movie The Shape of Water ought to have been, a Beauty and the Beast erotic psychodrama unafraid of what it really is that might draw a lover to another disgusting, inhuman lover. 

30. Good Luck

by Ben Russell

Ben Russell’s small scale epic of the toll of labour (measured in footsteps and faces) tries to find the music hiding under the earth, the impetus for the continued fight for the soul, damaged as surely and steadily as the rock his nameless miner heroes chip away. Almost a Warholian study of the blood and sweat expended for survival, Good Luck will always be a relevant document of work.

31. In The Fade

by Fatih Akin

Manchester by the Sea reacquainted me last year with one of my favorite underexplored ideas in film and literature: the communal experience after tragedy. The way a home becomes a sight of safety from the outside world, but every object reminds one of the departed. Even so the world outside isn’t a place for the fragile. In the Fade is a study in contrasting environments, the treachery of a safe space, the clinical hostility of a courtroom, the broken paradise of a seaside retreat. Nothing means what it used to, no value you once attributed to anyone or anything holds true, nothing of which you were once certain is so. In The Fade shows what it looks like for the grief stricken to invade spaces public, private, personal, foreign, hostile, and friendly. Many were bummed at the ending, but I understand it as more than cheap symmetry. How else are you going to make everyone understand what the pain of letting go does to you. The movie’s heroine (a never better Diane Kruger) wants to send an apolitical message: do not take our purpose. The one we find in the aftermath will not make sense and it will not be pretty.

32. Blade of the Immortal

by Takashi Miike

Another long lens mini-opera of abject destruction from Takashi Miike, Japan’s foremost Rhodes scholar of pain. Hundreds of faceless opponents, maybe one for each film Miike has made, cut down in the throes of fatherly affection, the desire to know that though your life cannot be lived on your own terms any longer, you can still change the lives of others for the better. Miike’s version of a Jerry Schatzberg drama piles on the flamboyant villainy, complicated mythologies and allegiances buy stays true to his central fascination: what can the mind and heart convince the body to endure? Just about anything, it seems. This manifests itself in borderline decadent suffering but that remains a romantic outlook to which I’m always sympathetic.

33. Stronger

by David Gordon Green 

Though I want the biopic (at least as it's being used in America today) to be retired permanently, Stronger ought to serve as a reminder that no form is inherently bad. As if in response to Peter Berg's deeply terrible propaganda vomit Patriot's Day, David Gordon Green recovers neatly from his last ripped-from-the-headlines disaster (let's never speak of it again) and shows the actual human cost of an act of terrorism. This poor bastard (a typically fine Jake Gyllenhaal) didn't even care about the marathon or what it represented to strong Boston. He just showed up to patch up an already busted relationship. His reward was that he gets to spend the rest of his life just as broken, superficially speaking. What the film shows in agonizing detail, is that your legs don't hold a candle to your personality if you can learn to be an adult when the time comes. Tatiana Maslany (marvelous) storms through the movie tossing lessons to every brash Boston child stuck to her life like cold sores. Her newly traumatized boyfriend, his shrewish extended family and squally mother (a revelatory Miranda Richardson); everyone needs a wake-up call. The bomb is just the start of the nightmare. Now you have to live. Green's prankishness doesn't even prove a liability, as the scenes of the childlike amputees going on binges are crucial to understanding Gyllenhaal's psychology. Even more so than Prince Avalanche, this is the film that marries the divergent threads of his filmmaking. 

34. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri 

by Martin McDonagh

I will grant that if you were hoping this movie would have anything intelligent to say about race, your disappointment is justified. It doesn't. It's a film about the privilege afforded the aggrieved white masses in this country. That dying or being close to the dead or having an opinion stronger and more legitimate than the guy next to you means that you deserve to be heard. Francis McDormand's character learns, largely from her son, that being in pain doesn't make you special and it doesn't make you right. No one here has an assumption that goes unchallenged because everyone is a little stupider than they first appear. No cause is righteous in America unless it's for everyone. I'll never forget seeing Bill Cosby go on TV to talk about gun violence in America, his activism directly inspired by his child being shot to death. He spoke out because it affected him, and his activism stopped mattering the minute it became clear that his apparent value of human life didn't extend to his decision to rape dozens of women. You want to be able to do something, say anything, to express yourself some way about impossible turns of events such as this, but what can your actions and words ultimately accomplish? This, I suspect, is what McDonagh is trying to unpack. McDormand and Sam Rockwell's racist sidekick divine the same excruciating lesson from different angles: good intentions don't always beget the right actions and doing the right thing frequently doesn't mean jack shit. Everything they do is to make themselves feel more at ease with the cosmic indifference extended to their respective plights. When that fails, they take to violence because that's easier, quicker and it feels better. That's the America I know. 

35. Pilgrimage

by Brendan Muldowney

When I'm president it'll be a crime to misuse Jon Bernthal, one of the sharpest and most charismatic actors in the world. Just look what Brendan Muldowney did with him robbed of a reason to have him talk. As a monstrous, mute, murdering monk, Bernthal says exactly one word and still handily carries the movie on his hunched shoulders. Richard Armitage's sickly looking knight gives him ample support, but the film would have survived if Bernthal were the only character, tearing through thickets of faceless non-believers looking for absolution. Pilgrimage's foggy Irish tableaux provide the perfect setting for private holy wars and tricksy betrayals. When god is silent, Bernthal grabs a sword and speaks up. 

36. The Beguiled

by Sofia Coppola

Returning to the well of abandoned femininity, from whence sprang her magnificent career, Sofia Coppola finds a passel of misfiring libidos in the feverish heat of the Civil War-ravaged south. Lies keep the sky in place here, that their cause is righteous, that the war will end peacefully, that each woman present wants the best for the tall drink of whiskey convalescing in the parlor, that there might be a way to keep every intention a secret. Coppola presents each woman as a would-be Pietà, hoping that they might cradle the last (good looking) man on earth in their silks and perfect curls, saving all men from harm by wrapping their legs around the one. Beautifully, for once, it's only the man who loses. 

37. Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992

by John Ridley

Ridley's anger got quite the workout this year, between this remarkable feast of talking heads and his dashing miniseries Guerilla, the black answer to Carlos. Here he listens carefully to everyone, rationing rope for the crackers who need it and giving a much needed window to the still-imprisoned black faces who've never recovered from being the nation's stand-in for racially motivated violence. Daryl Gates' name is ensconced forever in the fascist hall-of-fame, but the men who attempted to fight back, to take back a piece of South Central's dignity through an outstretched hand or a closed fist? Life was at least unbiased in its refusal to hand out second chances that day in 1992. They'll hear the sounds and remember the blood on their hands and shoes for as long as they live, as they all make clear through their testimony. Ridley just listens to people who have never been asked to talk, and the heartbreaking mosaic of misunderstanding ought to serve as a potent reminder of what can go wrong when a portion of the population is pitted against another by the police. Bonus: Mark Isham's blistering score giving each word an angular melancholy, forcing them back into us no matter how hard we might want to push them away. 

38. Lady Macbeth

by William Oldroyd

Colonialism rendered as a kind of venereal disease, a creeping feeling of unease as one man after another spends ten minutes in the same room as a woman who has discovered that the only thing men will listen to is sex. If that's not available, neglect. Steely, seething neglect. Florence Pugh, death's eyes in the middle of a round feline countenance, has only to watch and wait as the men around her dig their graves. Her monstrousness only seems apparent when it's too late and she's become the thing she's attempted to unseat. This is how women like Ivanka Trump, Margaret Thatcher, Mary Whitehouse, and Tomi Lahren become powerful. They narrow their gaze and stop treating their peers and equals as human. Though Oldroyd presents this as Shakespeare in the Heath, there's nothing romantic at play here. Just good old fashioned sociopathy, one of cinema's most enduringly delectable subjects. 

39. Operation Avalanche

by Matt Johnson

Matt Johnson's punk satire, like a Dead Milkmen record in super saturated autumnal

16mm, is the perfect back-of-the-class prank. Kubrick, the moon landing, the CIA,

Alan Pakula, and Jackass are drawn in the margins of the 60s, and given the full

confidence and weight of new effects technology. It's all seamless, which makes the

full-throttle chicanery a true wonder, beyond its smart ass script and grinning

performances. These guys all know they're getting away with something that film

school nerds have been dreaming about for decades. They just happened to be the

first guys to do it, and that enthusiasm never once falters, even when the body count

starts to pile up. This film may technically be a 2016 release, but I was so charmed

there was no way I wasn't going to write about it this year. It deserves to be seen

and lapped up.

40. On The Beach Alone At Night

by Hong Sang Soo

Every Hong movie is about the same six things. It's his warped, half-mad innovations and non sequiturs that wrench them from their creator's fetish collection and into their respective birth years. This one I'll remember as the creation of 2017, the year after his affair became public, when we all thought we knew his business. The phantom on the porch, the man we imagine, the unseen director who has scuttled poor Kim Min-Hee's dreams of a happy ending, the tiring search for meaning, closure, a second chapter of a book that's already been written, will stay with me longer than any of Hong's previous plots. This one just means more. These are the consequences of believing yourself above them. This is what loneliness looks like when you'd convinced yourself that that alone wasn't the point of a mistake. We are all, no matter how free, gorgeous and loved, mortal and beholden to public opinion. The phantom of masculinity is free, and he mocks her from every balcony and window. The man will always rebound and the woman has to make new sense of a reality for which she hadn't planned. I've always liked Hong's comedies. This one is bigger than even the best of those. 

41. Loveless

by Andrey Zvyagintsev

Zvyagintsev's compositions always give one the impression that a body is defrosting just off camera. The perpetual thawing ice that is Russia's sociopolitical climate makes a disappearance into death by implication alone. Divorce is a symbolic white elephant, lending weight to every corrupt aspect of life under Putin and shuddering growth behind it. You will repeat the same mistakes, you will not change, you will run in place. And the camera is as calm and all-knowing as the state itself, which is to say, we learn everything we're meant to, and the rest is a fog. Becoming lost, searching the endless abandoned structures just to the south of civilization, every old relative's house waiting to be searched, a mixtape of old failures and new disappointments, all played with the cool abstraction of a Keith Jarrett record. 

42. Endless Poetry

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Looking back The Rainbow Thief wasn't so much the end of Jodorowsky's willingness to work with studios, though it's clearly that, for sure. It's the bridge between his willingness to embrace his own sentimentality, hitherto only glimpsed in his Au Hasard Balthazar-with-an-Elephant (and yes the proper way to shrink this is is Au Hasard Babar) movie Tusk, and even that purposely used long lens and cranes to keep away from the action and away from the wreckage done to objectivity with close-ups. With The Dance of Reality, Jodorowsky kicked the doors down because damnit the story of his childhood needed to be told. He's back with the story of his adolescence, an equally inventive, ribald and problematic look at the occasionally hateful, occasionally wonderful circus troop he called family. 

43. Dark Night 

by Tim Sutton

Responding to unspeakable tragedy with a split structure (it's practically an omnibus feature, given how deliberately Sutton delineates the tone of each character's segments) brings us close to understanding the way normality becomes the stuff of hideous legend just because a gun makes its way into the wrong hands. Many took umbrage at the film's attempts to find...well something in the midst of the randomness of the events it fictionalizes, but I find that this sort of answer is the best one to hope for. Not one that explains away a gunman's motivations or makes heroes out victims simply because they were both in the same space, but rather one that values the minutia of the lives of those affected. White terrorists aren't comic book villains, they're unstable creeps who like figuring out how far into other people's personal space they can crawl. And the victims of gun violence in this country? They're you and me. Just people with ordinary hopes and ordinary lives. That's what I want to see. Some measure of their ordinary lives written in light, made cinematic, not special. There is no right answer to tragedy, because gun violence isn't any longer a tragedy in America. It's ordinary. It happens every day. This film, a shimmering cross between Paranoid Park and Elephant, seeks to take the question mark from the equation of guns in the hands of lunatics. Someone always sees it coming and no one can do anything. It's the American way. 

44. The Other Side of Hope

by Aki Kaurismäki

Aki Kaurismäki’s second film in his trilogy/treatise on immigration is just another of his sly ways of saying how easy it is to be a good person and a part of the community that geography dictates is home. Home here is a rundown little restaurant, a bed, the arms of s friend who will walk you to help and safety, the comforting words of a brother, knowing in your heart you might find peace when you next rest. All Kaurismäki heroes seek a sort of communal welcome; that the place you next lay your head is a symbolic gathering of hands, that you don’t leave a mess in your wake. That the world is a little better now that you’re here. This message is delivered in Kaurismäki’s always-welcome Fassbinderian lowlight and theatrical staging, not a hair (or weary traveler) out of place when the curtain falls. 

45. Whose Streets

by Sabaah Folayan

Ferguson's voice heard finally without the white noise of punditry or toxic assumption clouding sentiment. The reality of the spit-upon activist, the sleepless parents of children hunted by the police, the citizens just trying to go home. Missouri was militarized in the wake of a wrongful death and order, a hollow joke, was meant to be upheld by the same trigger happy mob who put the young man in his grave. The cries from the street are this film's focus, the faces of people who are arrested and shot simply for existing. Folayan's focus is on the people brave enough to use their real names, to stand in public though it could be the last place they do so. An essential testament to the bravery required to get out of bed when you're black in America. 

46. Strong Island

by Yance Ford

Yance Ford uses his own face, unblinking, tired, furious, upset, as a tool of interrogation and confrontation. This is the face of the people robbed of their brothers and sisters, this is the face white cops look at and don't see humanity, the face lawyers tell settlement amounts to right after they hear the news that no one will be held accountable. Ford's scream, a sound I'll never forget as long as I live, is the moment every one needs to see right now. It's a scream that expresses decades of loss, of frustration and sadness and blind, hot fury. The scream is all many people have. The scream will not be enough but we must scream. Yance Ford's face is meant to haunt those who have done him wrong. It haunts us all, whether we've seen it or not. 

47. Good Time

by Joshua & Benny Safdie

The Safdies blinding neon New York is further grafted onto their 70s worshipping craft, a harmony of degenerate impulses, grubby opportunists, and sleek yet grainy delivery. It's in the way their camera cruises the streets of Queens, the way their hero, a rat-eyed Robert Pattinson, our finest young Brit actor, talks his way in and out of ruin, using and leaving everyone he needs at a moment's notice. He's aping the financial geniuses who made the city from the top, trying to use their disgusting beauty to his advantage, to cheat his way out of the gutter. Maybe it's plainly a movie for the moment, but we'll be watching it for decades whenever we need the genuine sting of bad people in danger. 

48. Landline

by Gillian Robespierre

We all need a little more Jenny Slate than we're getting in our diet. Gillian Robespierre has armed her with two performers equal to her almost supernatural charm, the grim and hysterically joyless Abby Quinn, and the perfectly weary yet wired Edie Falco. The three women prove to each other that the perfection they're each chasing doesn't exist, allowing for them to sink to the bathroom floor of acceptance together. Their lives have developed a patina of expectation and disappointment, so they thrash around hoping for something better, or at the very least, a little change. When all is said and done they'd all kill for the normality again because change is painful. Uncommonly insightful and deeply ingratiating romantic comedy of the sort I'm glad we're starting to see more often. 

49. The Square

by Ruben Östlund

Pitch black silliness broken up by visits from the deeply damaged and wanting real world. This mix of Leos Carax and Roy Andersson is built around ingenious set pieces of discomfort and atonal social interactions that almost play like feedback from an amplifier, so thoroughly wrong are they. Elisabeth Moss wins the day with her smile after escaping with a trash can full of questionably coveted male seed. Her roommate, a gorilla, is no help, but what did we expect? 

50. Split

by M. Night Shyamalan

M. Night Shyamalan in shlock brute mode is one of my few remaining guilty pleasures (half-kidding, but he does go out of his way to seem a little dirty and dangerous and disreputable). This lolita-tormenting carnival sideshow is a delicious new low, so to speak, for Philadelphia's favourite Spielberg disciple, but his craft is water tight. Ratcheting tension at a rapid clip while allowing his stupidly gifted cast to show off however they can from the back of his insidiously perfect frames, Shyamalan shows a rigourousness of which I'd never known him capable. Can't wait for chapter 3. 

51. Hello Destroyer

by Kevan Funk

A plunge into the sad afterlife of Canada's violent men shows dead animals, missed appointments and the disfavour of a fickle nation. Drifting with its quiet bruiser from the meager spotlight to the ass end of blue collar living, this film has the receipts for the price of performing for applause, for believing your passion will support you, that your team won't drop you when it's convenient. Dreams become cold apartments and quiet parents. A fantastically realised fall from grace.

52. Norman: The Moderate Rise & Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer

by Joseph Cedar

Richard Gere finally finds himself a role worth disappearing into, a mover and shaker in search of a surrogate family, a career boost and a new fake best friend. Cedar's New York is one I recognize, a cold, fast moving petrie dish of opportunity and quickly dissipated favour. His battery of insider information and puzzled pawns is a fabulous puzzle begging to be solved. 

53. Afterimage

by Andrzej Wajda

Wajda ended his career exactly how he started it: a mosaic of the troubled nation he called home. As Poland falls to tyranny, a one-legged artist pisses at every authority figure who comes within striking distance of the old badger. Surrounded by a disspiriting grayscale world (bursts of colours popping into frame every so often like little gifts to the man who saw a world of it that escaped authorities), Wladyslaw Strzeminski, played by old co-conspirator Boguslaw Linda, rages at the dying of his light. The walls close in on him, his daughter becomes a remote presence in his life, and he realizes he might finally be dying. It's not pretty but it's all true and it's in Wajda's typically furious handwriting, some of the finest the world of film ever knew.  

54. Godless

by Scott Frank

Scott Frank took a page out of collaborator James Mangold's book and wrote himself a nice big oater, replete with bloodfeuds, gun-toting lesbians, hidden mistresses, one-armed cutthroats, blind sheriffs, and a man who could shoot the head off a snake. All that overripe symbolism wouldn't be worth half a goddamn without a climax, and this film has an 80 minute finale to beat the band, a breathlessly deranged gunfight the likes of which Westerns don't seem to get around to anymore. Like a salted and cured mix of Open Range, 3:10 To Yuma and Tom Robbins. 

55. Guerilla

by John Ridley

London in the 60s explodes like a powder keg and Ridley indulges in his inner John Boorman. Or rather if Boorman had gone back to London after Point Blank and tackled the country's growing racial unease, he might have made Guerilla, an enormously compelling look at the disparate factions of dissatisfied leftists and malcontents who attempted to violently assert their dignity. A racist police force digs in their heels and Ridley pours on as much gasoline as possible. The editing alone should make this essential viewing. 

56. Ex-Libris: The New York Public Library

by Frederick Wiseman

Wiseman hones in on the democratization of all information, the way we access it, the work that goes into making it available, and the sorts of people who seek it. Dipping in and out of Richard Dawkins and Elvis Costello giving free talks to hungry audiences while also showing the guts of the book return system and the petty complaints at help desks accidentally explains why this was a film Wiseman needed to wait until the advent of twitter to make. 

57. Princess Cyd

by Stephen Cone

Cone's latest chapter in the much needed maturation of American film's making sense of our differing theological beliefs, wrapped like a cigarette in a delicate lesbian romance meant as a mirror to an older woman's growing dissatisfaction with her loneliness. No one gets to judge anyone, but without the crashing of different lives, how can we see what we might become? Cone's sunny Chicago suburbs are a welcoming place of recovery and discovery. 

58. Thelma

by Joachim Trier

Icy nordic Firestarter by the pre-eminent creator of cinematic novellas. Love and lust are deliberately mixed up with the recklessness of religion and telekinesis. One terrible power or another will challenge what you know about your body and your journey. Some of Trier's most arrestingly dark images to date help us wedge ourselves in a brain only just understanding its own strength. 

59. Jungle

by Greg McLean

McLean's penchant for survivalist narratives is to put to a more globalist, historically sensitive use. Though the film wants for Wolf Creek's focus and charming nastiness, McLean can still make a patch of inhospitable land sing like Maria Callas. This film adds little gestures and symbols to his roster of indelible flourishes. A fist on a table, thrown down in anger, shows 50 years of life as a Jewish man in the 20th century. McLean makes large points by staying small, making this the inverse of Wolf Creek 2. A gorgeously haunting look at how we make life easier because we can't hack the normal stuff. What you might call 'just livin''. His heroes are never satisfied with that, and they all pay. The catch this time is we know that if Radcliffe's starving traveler lives, real change might come of it. 

60. Before We Vanish

by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's riff on Starman is as contemplative and subtle as you'd expect, a delightfully deadpan joy, unafraid to travel to violent excesses and teenager-friendly heart-rending beats.

61. Wasteland 1: Ardent Verdant 

by Jodie Mack

A terrifically exciting collage of the rift between where we come from and where we're going. Mack's homemade philosophical animations mix the wit of Hollis Frampton and the verve and technique of Brakhage, turning the incomprehensible into the personal and gleefully perverse. 

62. 120 BPM

by Robin Campillo

Campillo puts a little more of himself in every movie he makes, even going so far as to recall a shot from his excellently elegiac zombie movie Les Revenants, a sobering reminder of the untold millions of dead yet to fall to AIDS, this film's primary villain after pharmaceutical companies and activist in-fighting. A community gets individualized attention from the director, who sees their youthful exuberance as both necessary and a crutch. Younger people don't have a wealth of experience, but they're unafraid of expressing themselves heedlessly, whether through coating themselves in fake blood, using their own ashes as a weapon, or the administration of a deathbed handjob. This film is loaded with perfectly lovely externalizations of anger, all sensitively rendered by Campillo, who's old enough to know how important they are. 

63. The Labyrinth

by Bram Ruiter

A wriggling dislocation exercise, dancing with our perception, allowing us to detach and enjoy its tempo and delicate colours. Ruiter finds a grace in the land, in removing it from traditional context, in rendering it lightly unreal and acutely effecting. Ten minutes to watch it, months to enjoy its lingering effects. 

64. See You Yesterday

by Stefon Bristol

There is not enough black sci-fi. There's no way around that, it's a sad, sobering fact. This incredible, loaded little miracle ought to mobilize more creators, because it says so much through its spectacle. 

65. Alien: Covenant

by Ridley Scott

Ridley Scott, one of my first auteurs, writes himself a homoerotic cave myth, using twins to extrapolate his own uneasy feelings about his creative nature. This movie centers on the destruction of perfectly paired soul mates meant to restart civilization after we've broken our planet. It's only the nazi robot who sees that our belief in that lie, that there is such a thing as a soulmate, is what makes us so easy to study, take advantage of, and destroy. Faith is a powerful tool for conquering worlds and traveling across galaxies, but it can't stand up to unhinged creativity and a lack of scruples. This Gustave Doré-inspired slasher sleepover is exactly the sort of anomaly I want my artists to produce at a regular clip. Wholly satisfying as an autobiographical exploration. 

66. The Salesman

by Asghar Farhadi

This may be the closest Farhadi comes to making an outright genre film, and I accept that. The deliberately imperfect meta-construct of the story is at once a red herring and an imperative jumpstart to understanding Iranian art. The more the film looks like it's handing you answers, the less they make sense, and the more compelling everything becomes. 

67. The Assignment

by Walter Hill

Walter Hill finally made a film to solve the riddle that is Michelle Rodriguez. He made a cracking two-hander and gifted us that as well but if this was nothing but Rodriguez identity crisis, this would still be one of the most important action movies made during my lifetime. 

68. Top of the Lake: China Girl

by Jane Campion & Ariel Kleiman

If nothing else its depiction of toxic, self-pitying maleness ought to have a special place in culture for being so accurate. Campion's crafted her most despicable monster yet in the child-preying pimp Alexander (David Dencik), who thinks he's figured out the capitalist world and by exploiting women he's beaten the system. Gives me hives just thinking about it. It recovers (it must, he's truly disgusting) whenever it focuses on the plethora of rich female characters meant as his opposition. They argue with each other and step on each other's toes but they're so richly drawn it hardly matters. This, for instance, is maybe my favourite Nicole Kidman performance, and if she doesn't always wear her hair like this she's missing a trick. Elisabeth Moss, portraying one of her finest creations, is like a piece of broken glass, jagged, fragile and sharp, all too aware what a horrid world she's inherited. 

69. Berlin Syndrome

by Cate Shortland

After Lore Shortland fast forwards to the present to show another woman imperiled by a purity-obsessed German man's master plan. The film is up front about the casual impossibility of surviving sexual slavery, showing without drawing undo emphasis to the issue, that women are a thousand percent stronger than they're given credit for by most narratives. To simply live under these conditions is unthinkable, but she does it. Shortland's engrossing montage and razor-fine compositions of life in a bourgeoise prison do so much silent heavy lifting that it's possible in moments to  forget the big picture, because each scene is so independently enrapturing and gross.

70. Ismael's Ghosts

by Arnaud Desplechin

Desplechin's most baroque fantasia yet tackles the miracles and hardships of filmmaking by being about everything but the act of directing.  

71. T2: Transpotting

by Danny Boyle

Boyle and the boys' homecoming is a technicolor kaleidoscope, as full of verve and nervous energy as ever. The digital images enhance our understanding of the way these coke-snorting children age, by letting us see every pore up close, every scarred nose and shrunken, sunken eye. The film is full of good performances and guided by an appropriately sad sense of need, but to me the meat of the movie is Jonny Lee Miller, who has improved the most of everyone in the cast, waging his own private war against his urges and self-image. It's a lightning bolt of a performance, receding hairline and cracking voice putting the lie to his bluster and strength at every turn. 

72. Lucky

by John Carroll Lynch

There were giants in the earth in those days.

73. Paint It Black

by Amber Tamblyn

It would take something very special indeed to compete with a star turn from an electrifying Alia Shawkat, her voice finally allowed to be as low as it is, her eyes caked in shadow, unafraid finally to look like herself and be the spectacular animal she's been building to since her days as a child actress. Turns out that special thing is Janet McTeer going full Joan Crawford. These two dynamos going toe to toe is the cinematic event of the year, like Pacific Rim in an empty mansion. Amber Tamblyn's psychodrama ought to have been rolled out to every theatre in the country, because while it's unafraid of the perversity of their clash, of the puke-and-piss stained road to recovery, it's equally willing to find redemptive grace notes that don't sell the exercise short. An angry little miracle wrapped in a vintage gown. 

74. Star Wars: The Last Jedi

by Rian Johnson

Rian Johnson's Fail-Safe, with a little Ken Russell, Byron Haskin, Kurosawa and Magic Schoolbus thrown in for good measure. Its message (listen to women, for the love of god), is probably the best possible use for a big hunk of space peplum like this. 

75. Gunpowder

by J. Blakeson

J Blakeson begins his return to mercenary British thrillers by going full Mark of the Devil, and then building a never-yielding white knuckle thriller out of Taliban-style religious fervor. It's the missing ingredient from V For Vendetta: these people were fucking crazy. Blakeson knows it, but still does a fine job concocting a swashbuckling conspiracy thriller out of their lunacy. 

76. It

by Andrés Muschietti

Productive nostalgia, essentially remaking The Breakfast Club with actual stakes and believable teenagers. We didn't need another It, we have It Follows, but this little coming of age movie is impressively drawn indeed. 

77. All The Money In The World

by Ridley Scott

To return to the idea of the tragic safe space, Ridley Scott, who seems concerned only with big picture and big texture matters, somehow made an incredibly convincing version of his own traumatic healing zone. The dusty and dusk-lit Italian apartment of the bereaved Getty’s waiting to hear news of their kidnapped son was one of my favourite environments in a movie this year. Michelle Williams faded aristocratic manner trading exhausted terms with a ferocious, oily Romain Duris should have been the whole movie, but the film around these two tour de force performances is satisfying nevertheless. Christopher Plummer’s purposeful grotesquery meshes nicely with the lavish reconstruction of the purgatorial Italy where crime and punishment alike are planned and executed. The scene turns from Fellini to Costa-Gavras as glamour and money prove the curse they always were, the force that turned Getty into his own Dorian Gray portrait, and all that remains is the hope for human connection when all that money vanishes.

78. The Big Sick

by Michael Showalter

Any movie imperils itself by ditching Zoe Kazan at the first act break, so it's a goddamn good thing Holly Hunter was waiting in the wings to replace her. Another of this year's films about groups of people attempting to grieve in private, this one could have done with a little more focus and a lot less movie stand-up, but Apatow would never have allowed it. The core of the movie is the four person vortex of insecurity surrounding a medical emergency. Career woes just don't add up to much when a life hangs in the balance. Regardless the film stays utterly charming throughout, mostly because of Hunter's efficacy and Ray Romano's hangdog bluntness, a fine mix of components. 

79. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold

by Griffin Dunne

I aspire to Joan Didion's acerbic incisiveness every time I touch a keyboard. It was a true joy to watch her nephew pay tribute to her and her long shadow. 

80. Logan

by James Mangold 

A bloody father daughter field trip, equal parts Shane and Spawn, the only film I've ever seen that attempts to impart to the father figure the actual pain of childbirth. Naturally he fucking dies on the other side because he can't handle it. That's empathy. The only really good Xmen movie, though I liked Mangold's other one. 

81. Get Out

by Jordan Peele

Afropunk haunted house slavery poem. The one movie everyone had to see in 2017. How do you top that?

82. Logan Lucky

by Steven Soderbergh

Like the John Denver song at its center, this film is a gentle drive down a familiar country road. Splendidly low stakes heisting and a contest for silliest accent. 

83. Wind River

by Taylor Sheridan

Shockingly sympathetic work from Sheridan, who usually can't be bothered with sentimentality. Graham Greene, who's been one of my favourite actors since I was kid, carries the investigation while Olsen watches. Gil Birmingham seems to know he's outmatched by his wife's grief and so tries to go through his own pain alone, knowing full well he's only putting on a show. Jeremy Renner is the best he's been since The Hurt Locker, stoic and wounded. That the film goes where it goes and is built around something so ubiquitous it could seem like a cheap attention grab and still winds up in such a believably touching note of disarray is no mean feat. I thought Sheridan couldn't surprise me anymore. I was wrong. 

84. Patton Oswalt: Annihilation

by Bobcat Goldthwait

A stand-up at both the depths of a personal terror (one we all face in some way or another) and the height of his expressive power lets us all in on the horrifying truth of just getting out of bed every morning to face the little girl for which he's responsible. Standing up has never seemed so courageous. Goldthwait's patient stare allows Oswalt's words to bloom before us, his face gently opening and allowing us to understand his pain. 

85. The Wall

by Doug Liman

Something Ed Cahn or Joseph H. Lewis might have done, a gabby tale of the virtue of knowing when you're licked, something Americans never seem to know how to do. 

86. Horace Tapscott Musical Griot

by Barbara McCullough

As twisty and enriching as one of his compositions, this stream of consciousness look at an old soul, who was himself a window into the history of Jazz in America and into the communal lives of black musicians. An essential document and a fabulously told series of stories.  

87. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

by Angela Robinson

Subverts biopic problems and subject matter exhaustion through refreshing intimacy and brusque communication. No one ever lies for long in this movie, and the truth usually hurts, so when the central trio aren't going to town on each other in some of the most amazingly artificial yet stunningly warm and welcome love scenes of the year, they're smoking and swearing at each other. The film's use of bondage as a powerful tool of self-investigation is genuinely touching, don't ask me how Robinson pulled that off. All that and period costumes. What's a matter, scared of having fun? 

88. Nathan For You: Finding Frances

by Nathan Fielder

A disturbing close-up of the suture separating reality from fiction, a nail-biting dance with exploitation. 

89. Girls Trip

by Malcolm D. Lee

Tiffany Haddish's call for prayer belongs in a much tawdrier exploitation film, but it does wind up working for this sumptuous banquet of shamelessness, sisterhood and unabashed glamour. This film is what it looks like when a bunch of people are on exactly the same page about a movie's making and its intended impact. Like an inverse F. Gary Gray morality play, this movie doesn't need to shy away from self-aggrandizement because it is only too aware how fabulously talented and gorgeous its leads are. This movie is a big gross hug from a close friend who's seen you piss yourself and still picks up the phone when you call. 

90. Okja

by Bong Joon-Ho

Playing with well-worn tropes doesn't dilute Bong Joon-Ho's directorial potency any. This wild ass road movie goes for the jugular early and often, completely unafraid of alienating and shocking its audience. By turns completely horrifying and unspeakably adorable, this movie wants to give the next generation their own Babe, but makes sure they earn it first. 

91. American Fable

by Anne Hamilton

Peyton Kennedy's first bonafide star turn, holding her own against Richard Schiff, among others, without breaking a sweat. This delirious little tale of backcountry betrayal cracks along on the strength of its nightmare images and Kennedy's brilliant talent for underplaying, for being normal even as it's plain she is anything but. America could use a few more films like this, simple and cunning, stacked with great undervalued performers. 

92. Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo

by Olivier Ducastel & Jacques Martineau

The film earns dozens of karma points for its frank sexuality and copious male nudity but doesn't wind up needing them because its life-or-death, Varda-quoting second and third acts have a desperate edge softened occasionally by the two men's transparent need to be needed. Though the stakes climb impossibly high (two people finding each other is no laughing matter), the film's clip is always breezy, making this work a real tightrope act for the leads, who go from no-holds-barred sex to clinging to each other for support and love in under 60 minutes. Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised it works, but it does. 

93. Kojo

by Michael Fequiere

Pure joy is an eleven year old unpacking and assembling a drum kit and taking an audience of adults to school. 

94. The Event

by Sergei Loznitsa

"Swan Lake," like a benediction for a country's grappling with its ugly history. We have been wrong, but we have produced beautiful things. Surely we can pull ourselves out of this mess once more. The stern black and white images don't bear out hope, only a continuity of effort. 

95. Pumpkin Movie/It's Him

by Sophy Romvari

Romvari's tales of missing men and the stain/shadows they leave behind are some of the most reliably thought-provoking in Canadian film. This incidental double feature show the good and the bad sides of masculine influence, as rendered/remembered by women stuck with their legacies. Unlike Nine Behind's absent director, their influence is felt much more keenly by a grieving sister, and a pair of perpetually stalked and bothered young women. Female friendship is both consolation and armor, a way around the problem of needing men, or at the very least, being constantly battered by their existence, present or invisible. Her heroes reach for definitive hope but find only half-hearted gestures, a knowing defeated tone for describing them. The perfect surfaces she conjures for both films help the sorrow go down easier. 

96. The Daughter

by Simon Stone

Australia, it turns out, is the perfect place to stage Ibsen. Unemphatically presented (the truth stings enough without the director hammering it home), this tapestry of pain is impossible not to become wrapped up in, if only because each character is so believably damaged. 

97. The Great Wall

by Zhang Yimou

Zhang Yimou's attempt at both olympic pageantry and euro-pudding romantic drama ought to be the incomprehensible laff-riot most critics want you to think it is, but the director of Hero didn't get hit on the head and forget how to make movies over night. This movie is capital F-Fun and every off-kilter element, from Damon's accent to the silly CGI dragons, is just another tent in the carnival. The stained glass sequence is some of the finest work the veteran director has ever done. 

98. First They Killed My Father

by Angelina Jolie

Jolie, back in humanitarian crisis mode, glides across a country's shame all to locate the indefatigable humanity of its smallest combatants. Anthony Dod Mantle scaled back his arsenal of lighting effects to keep from over-aestheticizing the horror of life as a child soldier. The land never loses its natural sheen, and our young hero never forgets that though making war is human, it's not necessary. 

99. Annabelle: Creation

by David Sandberg

The cast is perhaps overqualified, but most welcome, for this surprisingly effective haunted house ride. Little girls struggle with feeling unwanted just as a demon discovers their vulnerability. Expertly acted and sharply directed. 

100. The Commune

by Thomas Vinterberg

Thomas Vinterberg does his best Lukas Moodysson impression and naturally unearths a few more honestly ugly truths. This film's interpersonal dramas might be a touch generic but the looks on its female characters faces as they understand that they're not in the 21st century in which the film is made, that for all their liberal views and belief in equality, the men around them still make the world and they must exist in response to male will and whims. The film doesn't foist modern thought onto period life, for which we can be grateful. It shows women pining for a more enlightened time, so completely that they'll try to bring it about through the social equivalent of emergency surgery but the times have a way of stopping progress like a virus. 

Best Old Movies of 2017

The Confession
Wormwood Star
The Jungle Book (1994)
The Memory of Justice
The Witches of Eastwick
Bless Their Little Hearts
Heartburn
Get Rhythm
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
You Can Count On Me
Goon
Idaho Transfer
The Cherry Orchard (1999)
Tales From The Crypt: The Man Who Was Death
The Moderns
Johnny Handsome
Street of No Return
Smokey And The Bandit
Surf Nazis Must Die
Invasion U.S.A. (1985)
Curses
Black Robe
Pescados
The Pledge
Sloth
Muta
New Argiropolis
Golden Eighties
The Craft
The Runestone
The Legend of Zorro
The Mask of Zorro
Fire In The Sky
Needful Things
Lost Souls
Middle of Nowhere
Jawbreaker
Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
Wilmington 10 — USA 10,000
Code of Silence
China Gate
The Final Terror
Erin Brockovich
To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar
Another 48 Hours
Daughters of the Dust
12 Angry Men (1997)
U.S. Go Home
Chocolat
Newtown
The Perfect Kiss
Gidget Goes To Hell
The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
Sign 'o the Times
Lions Love
Rules Don't Apply
The Great Waldo Pepper
Lorenzo's Oil
L'Arriere-Saison
One Hour Photo
Eagle's Wing
Lord of Illusions
Easy A
Survival Quest
Belly
Mystery Street

The B-Side

Fear The Walking Dead always had an edge over The Walking Dead. While its sister series started spinning its wheels in its third season and hasn't yet found an organic way to make an endless stream of zombies and dystopian communities interesting, Fear The Walking Dead has been savvier from the start. The series has a more intense style that was allowed to ebb and flow depending on who was directing each episode. Fear used its muscular cinematography, rich color palette and a dark, moody score by Paul Haslinger to heighten each character’s psychological isolation from each other. The writing is stronger, with less of the plot motivated by idiocy or meanness on the part of the heroes, and the way the actors play off each other would be compelling in any setting or genre. Most importantly, the zombies aren't always the threat they are in The Walking Dead; it's tough to remain afraid of something if it's constantly on screen and there's a reason the word "fear" is in the title.

There was also the simplicity, quickly forgotten in The Walking Dead, that murdering monsters that look like people has a profound effect on even the hardest person. Nick (Frank Dillane) in particular, who never had the firmest grip on reality or his own sanity to begin with, began to buckle whenever presented with too many corpses of innocent people. Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie) lost it completely, as any young man attracted to violence but ultimately afraid of it might. Daniel (Rubén Blades), the former torturer, began to have flashbacks to the mayhem he caused and suddenly every bit of violence in his life began to coalesce, like white blood cells attacking the lies he uses to live with himself. His monologue about his time on a death squad to a kidnapped marine made the most of Blades' natural gravitas as a performer, but also hinted that he'd always be a little more equipped to handle the horror around everyone, but the show quickly put the lie to his resolve. That Fear never forgets that we're all human is one of the many reasons it's been worth sticking with. When Travis (Cliff Curtis) and Madison (Kim Dickens) have conversations about their children, it isn't just about their response to zombies, it actually draws on their previous life at home. They have pasts as well as presents, and this whole zombie thing is just one stressful piece of the puzzle. 

Its sense of place was another point in its favor: While The Walking Dead's version of the American South got monotonous immediately, the LA chapter in the opening season often flirted with the kind of buzzing atmospherics that marks the Michael Mann-derived work of Nic Winding Refn, It Follows, or Hyena. Its version of LA as pre-haunted flirted with uniqueness, even if it never quite got there. That it tried was admirable. Its vision of Mexico, particularly when in the hands of a master like Gerardo Naranjo, who I'm guessing had a thing or two to say about the bleached colour palette of his episode. Mexico felt like something approaching the real thing, not a fake version of a zombie wasteland. The landscape was nuanced.

Now in its third season, Fear The Walking Dead must decide what direction to take the story and what kind of place it wants to inhabit. The Walking Dead illustrated that, without a definitive ending in sight, a series like this can too quickly become Dynasty with a body count. The series proves the richness of its craft almost immediately by separating the cast and making them fight for survival, a not uncommon occurrence on The Walking Dead. The difference is in the execution. When we rejoin Travis and Madison, her children, Nick and Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey), and Nick's girlfriend, Luciana (Danay Garcia), they’ve been kidnapped by a paramilitary group. Their ingenuity and brutality in one-upping their captor, Troy (Daniel Sharman), is gripping and grotesque, Madison jamming a spoon in Troy's eye and threatening to pop it out being the grim highlight. The dynamics between the characters changes by the end of the episode, which makes their struggle little more than a detour, but it hardly matters when the execution is this exciting: The gorgeous shallow-focus cinematography, frenetic editing, and endearingly exhausted performances make each of the show's tangents reason enough for Fear The Walking Dead to exist even if they hint that the series has no long-term storytelling ambitions. Things just happen, but that can be a virtue.

The best example of this purposeful aimlessness might be when the relentlessly cagey Strand (Colman Domingo), who's been conning his way out of danger since the first season, pretends to be a doctor to curry favor with desperate locals in the seaside hotel where much of season 2 transpired. This backfires almost immediately when a man asks him to deliver a baby at knifepoint. Domingo's facial expression when he realizes he's going to have learn natal care in a hurry is a hilarious moment of humanity, one of a few the series allows itself. The funniest moment the show has yet produced occurs when Madison and her children land at a survivalist’s compound and discover an infomercial created by folksy Jeremiah Otto (Dayton Callie) that's so crooked and clever it would have worked equally well as a pre-credits scene on Breaking Bad. Madison and her brood surviving in Otto's ‘ranch’ is exactly the kind of go-nowhere arc that's proved so lethally boring on The Walking Dead season after season. Fear the Walking Dead has the filmmaking chops, comic energy, and trust in its performers to make the shapelessness seem like a good idea, even if it’s what got The Walking Dead in dramatic trouble.


The cast is shaken up a little in the third season, but the mix of intelligence, exhaustion and reluctant compassion still animates the central players. Callie, always a welcome screen presence, caused by the departure of a crucial cast member in the opening seconds of the second. He’s a good foil for the steely Dickens, one of the most effortlessly human performers on TV. Dillane still supplies entertaining unpredictability as former junkie Nick, and in Sharman's Troy he has a foil worthy of his showy, chaotic theatrics.

But the greatest choice the series makes is in teasing the return of the great Rubén Blades, who so lit up the first season and a half of Fear The Walking Dead. Blades is one of the finest and most underrated screen performers, and the opportunity to watch him wend his way through another season is a tantalizing prospect. It's elements like his gracefully spooky performance that made the series such a thrilling watch. The writers and directors of this b-side show have a good thing going, and don’t look to be running out of steam anytime soon.

Coming up next

It was my 17th birthday, I was happy as I could have been. I was dating a girl who I'd spent a year pining for from afar and there was a whole big controversy because her boyfriend was the nicest guy in school and I'd kind of stolen her from him, but that's not what happened that's just how it looked. It took us months to get that back in order and for people to stop giving us sideways glances. For my birthday my parents, sisters, and grandparents took me to a sushi restaurant, which I'd planned because I knew my girlfriend would be there with some friends that night and I wanted to be able to look across the restaurant and smile at her and have her smile at me without interrupting her evening. I got a lot of super spiff gifts including a laptop an english teacher insisted I get because she didn't want to spend the entirety of my senior year in high school reading my handwriting. That was about as happy as I got back then. 

I ordered what I always did at this joint, an eel and scallop roll (I ate fish by the pound back then) and smiled at my girlfriend and she smiled back, my younger sister and I were making each other laugh doing impressions of Colin Meloy from The Decemberists, and then there was a shooting pain in my throat. I coughed and sputtered and excused myself. Five minutes later the pain, excruciating, was still present. My dad drove me to the hospital, luckily only about ten minutes away. They admitted me put in a private room, traded my shirt for a gown so naturally the fat kid who wore a shirt to the beach was feeling really in his element. Then the really bad news came. They'd be putting an I.V. in so they could then feed muscle relaxers into my blood so I'd be calm enough for an X-Ray of my throat. There was reason to believe an eel bone was still stuck in there. I didn't get it and was furious and scared but I said yes and braced myself. I have a bad history with needles, have always hated them. I have one of those uncanny, impossible memories of myself as a child in a doctor's office getting a series of injections, crying and screaming "Not the shot!" The impossible thing is I can see myself in the office, as if I was standing in the doorway watching my childhood self, scrunched up red face and everything. Everytime a doctor mentions an injection or the drawing of blood I see that little boy's face and my stomach sinks to my feet. I've gotten slightly better since this night, but that may just be because it was undeniably the low point in my relationship to hospitals. I have a story about dentistry I'll have to tell you some other time. 

They put the needle in my arm, that familiar, foreign sting, and the nurse says "Whoops." Always what you want to hear. Needle comes out, and then back in. Blood has shot out of the hole and onto the perfect white bandage around the area that they'd prepared. I hear myself lying and saying I'm ok but I'm transfixed by the needle. Can't stop staring. I put my hoodie over the arm so I have to stop looking at it. A minute later I'm walking down the hall, clutching my I.V., wheeling dumbly alongside me. They take the first X-Ray, I don't remember much about it, then I ask to use the restroom. I remember walking to the little bathroom behind the heavy door, I remember looking down at the toilet, and then I remember waking up believing I'd been kidnapped. I'm in a warehouse, I can hear the voices of my captors, they'll be back any second, I'm in Colombia…or Mexico… then it hits me. I'm on the floor of the bathroom, my head wedged between the wall and the heavy door. If someone had opened it, they'd have crushed my head. The I.V. is next to me on the floor and somehow the bag hasn't ripped, the needle hasn't come out. I stand up and slowly walk back to the X-Ray room. "I passed out." "Why didn't you say something?" The technician snapped at me. I didn't have an answer for that one. 

I shakily walk back to the hospital room and wait for the results, the pain in my throat is still bad but it's taken a backseat to the feeling of disappointment that comes when you're a kid and your birthday is ruined, the pain in my arm, the embarrassment from having passed out, and my general disorientation (and my later frustration when it appeared as though the bone was long gone, it was just the pain that was still stuck in my throat). I need something, anything to take my mind off how catastrophically this evening turned out. I grab the little remote next to me and turn the volume up and whatever's on the TV. It turns out to be an interview on TCM with Robert Osborne and Anthony Quinn. Everything about it was calming. Osborne's melodious, slightly reedy voice with its pockets of brandy-aged lows, his practiced highs and lows, from years as a consummate professional in front of a camera. He was gentleness incarnate. Quinn, a rascal and a survivor laughing, smiling, forthcoming, two old pros who'd lived and breathed the subject matter at hand. The room they sat in, the one any TCM fan from that era grew to view as their second living room, the one they always wished they could visit, with its amber lighting, its soft greens and browns hiding discreetly in the set design, nothing too loud or upsetting. That was the experience of watching Robert Osborne, everything manicured to set you at ease. He was like Fred Rogers or Bob Ross, he was here to teach us, to help us and guide us through a mountain of information, a lot of ugly. He'd soften the blows, the deaths and tragedies, the careers shortened by alcoholism and studio politics with a sympathetic shrug and a little raise of the eyebrows. Robert Osborne taught me about life's disappointing tide in the most avuncular, sage way anyone could hope for. Sure, our heroes die (this week is an especially sombre testament to that disheartening truth), but if we're lucky, someone as charismatic and passionate as Osborne will make sure their legacies never vanish. 

Osborne was going to be an actor before he wound up on my TV throughout my adolescence. He was good friends with people like Robert Wagner, Jill St. John and Jane Powell and he always kept that million dollar smile they taught actors of that generation. He leapt from job to job when performing didn't pan out, writing books and working as a columnist for The Hollywood Reporter - they knew he knew all about classic hollywood. He was the rare survivor who didn't have scars from his stint surrounded by the most glamorous people alive. He started hosting on TV in 1984 but he wouldn't cement himself as an icon until the creation of TCM in 1994. Osborne was the only man for the job. He had the knowledge, he had the enthusiasm and he had the softest possible presence. Even when they put him in the room with cantankerous Robert Mitchum, then on his death bed, he never lost the smile even though Mitchum dodged everything Osborne threw at him. He was all of us, wanting to reach into the screen Sherlock Jr. style, and pull out that gorgeously complicated history and share it with us. 

I watched him every day. Video stores came and went in my hometown but TCM was forever. It was film school before film school. Osborne's hosting segments were the perfect introduction to any topic. Bite-sized, good-humoured, and always that smile, that voice. He was another grandfather. I'd watch, in perfect serenity, as he shared great conversations with co-hosts like Molly Haskell, herself a regal ambassador to cinema history. I loved watching him try to give outré offerings like Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! during his guest programmer sessions. He'd have generous but exacting talks with a murderer's row of guests like Lauren Bacall, Peter O'Toole, Ann Miller, James Garner, Liza Minelli Rod Steiger, and, as I learned on the worst night of my 17th year, Anthony Quinn. Osborne didn't just give us information and context on classic movies. He kept the past alive, let us know that history itself could be beautiful, as wonderful and comforting as it was to enter that soundstage every night with him. He worked like a dog, even when he was ill, which unfortunately was most of his last decade as a broadcaster. 

In college I came home for holidays and summers and would mainline all the TCM I'd missed while I was away, keeping hours of programming on my poor mother's DVR. Osborne standing in his suit on that lovely, golden-hued soundstage, was as much a part of being home as being in my own house. In 2008 I noticed his voice shaking, he'd trip over his words and some of the longer names, and those deep pockets his voice used to occasionally dip into would last longer. He was sick, I could hear it. That's how well his viewers knew him. I worried. Used to hold my breath during the longer passages of his intros because I was concerned he wouldn't make it through to the end. I cringed when he slipped up because...basically I wanted him to live forever, to be the old pro I grew up with, who I'd been watching since at least 6th grade. I was heartened every time he'd return from his month-long absences. The old man still had a good fight left in him. During his 80th birthday celebration, which was shown on TCM, he looked so happy to be able to stand in the spotlight and just say 'thank you' to everyone watching. We'd put him up there and he never forgot it. As each new guest came out to wish him well, his smile grew larger and larger. It was tough not to get emotional watching him so happy up there, being feted in the manner of his introduction to his favourite films noir and musicals. 

The truth is even now that he's gone Osborne's always going to be with me and everyone else who loved the films he loved and gave to us. His voice will drift through the silences in My Man Godfrey, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, Dodsworth, Indiscreet, Bringing Up Baby and The Big Clock, reminding us that art is enough. It is purpose enough. It is beautiful enough. Life can be awfully cruel, but people like Robert Osborne wanted it to be a little more lovely. He wanted to give us art so that we might better understand life. He'll never be forgotten by kids raised on classic movies. He was like family. 

The 2016 Monsieur Oscars

Favourite Fiction Film of 2016

1. Certain Women
2. The Lost City of Z
3. Silence
4. Knight of Cups
5. Manchester by the Sea
6. Crosscurrent
7. Little Sister
8. Neruda
9. Sunset Song
10. 72 Hours: A Brooklyn Love Story?
11. Malgré la nuit
12. The Fits
13. Nocturama
14. Elle
15. Sieranevada

Favourite Nonfiction Film

1. Til Madness Do Us Part
2. Kate Plays Christine
3. Cameraperson
4. I Am Not Your Negro
5. O.J. Made In America
6. Tower
7. Homosapiens
8. Fire At Sea
9. I Had Nowhere To Go
10. Journey Through French Cinema
11. The B-Side
12. The Settlers
13. Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids
14. Peter And The Farm
15. One More Time With Feeling

Favourite Performance by a Director

1. James Gray - Lost City of Z
2. Kelly Reichardt - Certain Woman
3. Andrzej Żuławski - Cosmos
4. Terrence Malick - Knight of Cups / Voyage of Time
5. Bertrand Bonello - Nocturama
6. Jaume Collett-Serra - The Shallows
7. Noah Buschel - The Phenom
8. Joel & Ethan Coen - Hail, Caesar!
9. Robert Greene - Kate Plays Christine
10. Pablo Larrain - Jackie/Neruda/The Club
11. Kiyoshi Kurosawa - Creepy/Daguerrotype 
12. Sophia Takal - Always Shine
13. Aleksandr Sokoruv - Francofonia
14. Wang Bing - 'Til Madness Do Us Part
15. Zachary Treitz - Men Go To Battle

Achievement in Cinematography

1. Mark Lee Ping Bin - Crosscurrent
2. Kirsten Johnson - Cameraperson
3. Emmanuel Lubezki - Knight of Cups
4. Michael McDonough - Sunset Song 
5. Darius Khondji - The Lost City of Z
6. Roger Deakins - Hail, Caesar!
7. Dion Beebe - 13 Hours
8. Flavio Martínez Labiano - The Shallows
9. Vittorio Storaro - Cafe Society
10. Dante Spinotti - I Saw The Light
11. David Gallego - Embrace of the Serpent
12. Julie Kirkwood - I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House
13. Matthew Irving - Outlaws and Angels
14. Adam Stone - Loving
15. Florian Hoffmeister - A Quiet Passion

Favourite Original Screenplay

1. Neruda
2. Louder Than Bombs
3. Hail, Caesar!
4. Sieranevada
5. Things To Come
6. Paterson
7. Embrace of the Serpent
8. The Alchemist Cookbook
9. Everybody Wants Some!!
10. Son of Joseph

Favourite Adapted Screenplay

1. Cosmos
2. The Lost City of Z
3. Silence
4. Love & Friendship
5. Frankenstein
6. High-Rise
7. The Club
8. I Am Not Your Negro
9. Elle
10. Tower

Favourite Lead Performance by an Actress

1. Lily Gladstone - Certain Women
2. Ruth Negga - Loving
3. Addison Timlin - Little Sister
4. Annette Bening - 20th Century Women
5. Viola Davis - Fences
6. Hailee Steinfeld - Edge of Seventeen
7. Isabelle Huppert - Elle/Things To Come
8. Ruth Wilson - I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House
9. Kate Lyn Shiel - Kate Plays Christine
10. Emma Suárez & Adriana Ugarte - Julieta
11. Sarah Bolger - Emelie
12. Royalty Hightower - The Fits
13. Narges Rashidi - Under The Shadow
14. Tae-ri Kim - The Handmaiden
15. Malin Buska - The Girl King
16. Sally Field - Hello, My Name is Doris
17. Anya Taylor-Joy - The Witch
18. Kate Beckinsale - Love & Friendship
19. Blake Lively - The Shallows
20. Kate Dickie - Couple in a Hole

Favourite Lead Performance by an Actor

1. Anton Yelchin - Green Room
2. Andrew Garfield - Silence
3. Joel Edgerton - Jane Got A Gun
4. Gabriel Byrne - Louder Than Bombs
5. Song Kang-Ho - Age of Shadows/The Throne
6. Jonathan Genet - Cosmos
7. Paul Higgins - Couple in a Hole
8. Liam Cunningham - Childhood of a Leader
9. Pat Healy - Carnage Park
10. Ralph Fiennes - A Bigger Splash
11. Igor Tsyshkevych & Ian Bailey - "Nobody Speak"
12. Nicholas Hoult - Equals
13. Melvin Mogoli - 72 Hours: A Brooklyn Love Story?
14. Denzel Washington - Fences
15. Michael Shannon - Midnight Special
16. Josh Brolin - Hail, Caesar! 
17. Justin Timerlake - Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids
18. Jean-Pierre Léaud - The Death of Louis XIV
19. Tom Hanks - Sully
20. Do-won Kwak - The Wailing

Favourite Supporting Performance by an Actress

1. Janelle Monae - Moonlight / Hidden Figures
2. Michelle Williams - Certain Women/Manchester by the Sea
3. Laura Dern - Certain Women
4. Jennifer Ehle - A Quiet Passion
5. Isabelle Fuhrman - Cell
6. Tyne Daly - Hello, My Name is Doris
7. Eva Green & Ella Purnell - Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children
8. Kate Dickie - The Witch
9. Rachel Korine - Men Go To Battle
10. Paula Prentiss - I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House
11. Golshifteh Farahani - Paterson
12. Hayley Squires - I, Daniel Blake
13. Isabelle Huppert - Louder Than Bombs
14. Taissa Farmiga - In a Valley of Violence
15. Gretchen Mol - Manchester By The Sea
16. Victoria Guerra & Sabine Azéma - Cosmos
17. Ally Sheedy - Little Sister
18. Andrea-Rachel Parker - 72 Hours: A Brooklyn Love Story?
19. Cate Blanchett - Knight of Cups
20. Katherine Waterston - Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them

Favourite Supporting Performance by an Actor

1. Richard Brake - 31
2. Joel Edgerton - Midnight Special
3. Tom Bennett - Love & Friendship
4. Brian Dennehy - Knight of Cups
5. Mahershala Ali - Moonlight
6. Channing Tatum - Hail Caesar!
7. Robert Pattinson - Queen of the Desert / Childhood of a Leader / Lost City of Z
8. Casey Affleck - The Finest Hours
9. Shin'ya Tsukamoto - Silence
10. Keith Carradine - A Quiet Passion
11. Sam Neill - Hunt for the Wilderpeople
12. John Goodman - 10 Cloverfield Lane
13. Tony Todd - Frankenstein
14. Michael Shannon - Nocturnal Animals / Loving
15. Chris Hemsworth - Ghostbusters
16. Christopher Matthew Cook - Dog Eat Dog
17. Pat Healy - Henry Gamble's Birthday Party
18. Scott Haze - The Sound And The Fury
19. Mathieu Amalric - Son of Joseph
20. Eric Andre - Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

Favourite Feature Debut Film

1. 72 Hours: A Brooklyn Love Story?
2. Men Go To Battle
3. The Witch
4. Kubo & The Two Strings
5. Under The Shadow
6. Eyes of My Mother
7. The Blackcoat's Daughter
8. How To Tell You're a Douchebag
9. The Laundryman
10. Outlaws and Angels

Achievement in Art Direction

1. Under Electric Clouds
2. Julieta
3. Neruda
4. Silence
5. Sunset Song
6. A Quiet Passion
7. Francofonia
8. The Lost City of Z
9. Crosscurrent
10. The Throne
11. Childhood of a Leader
12. Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children
13. Finding Dory
14. The Little Prince
15. Moonlight

Favourite Original Score

1. Childhood of a Leader
2. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
3. Daguerrotype
4. Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil
5. The Tag Along
6. Midnight Special
7. Jackie
8. I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House
9. Outlaws and Angels
10. Couple in a Hole

Achievement in Editing

1. Knight of Cups
2. The Shallows
3. Voyage of Time
4. Louder Than Bombs
5. Cameraperson
6. Neruda
7. Love & Friendship
8. Men Go To Battle
9. The Sound And The Fury
10. The Finest Hours
11. The Tag-Along
12. Crosscurrent
13. Age of Shadows
14. Cosmos
15. The Wailing

Achievement in Costume Design

1. The Girl King
2. Gods of Egypt
3. High-Rise
4. Childhood of a Leader
5. Sunset Song
6. The Witch
7. Love & Friendship
8. Jackie
9. Hail Caesar!
10. Sunset Song
11. Rogue One
12. Neruda
13. A Quiet Passion
14. Silence
15. Everybody Wants Some!!

Achievement in Production Design

1. The Witch
2. Star Trek Beyond
3. Queen of the Desert
4. The Sound and the Fury
5. Sunset Song
6. Jackie
7. Rogue One
8. Childhood of a Leader
9. A Quiet Passion
10. Three

Achievement in Sound Design

1. The Tag-Along
2. Louder Than Bombs
3. Crosscurrent
4. Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil
5. The Shallows
6. The Finest Hours
7. Men Go To Battle
8. The Witch
9. The Fits
10. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
11. The Shallows
12. Hell or High Water
13. Jackie
14. Shelley
15. I Had Nowhere To Go
16. The Wailing
17. Midnight Special
18. Knight of Cups
19. Cosmos
20. Outlaws and Angels