Top 10 Week: Films of 2016

#10: A Bigger Splash
It's hard to know what to make of Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash at first glance. It's a film where many of the important events take place off screen, that seems determined to look just off to the side of the story rather than directly at it. The film is as shrouded in mystery as the characters are exposed (this may very well be the "nakedest" mainstream movie of 2016). It's only when it gets to the end that you begin to see it for what it really is, which is a story about how the wealthy and privileged can run roughshod over everything around them while the vulnerable and the disadvantaged are treated like the real dangers to society. An opaque film to be sure, A Bigger Splash is the kind of work that grows on you with subsequent viewings.

Top 10 Week: Performances by Women in 2016

#10: Judy Davis, The Dressmaker
A character known as "Mad Molly" sort of demands to be played in a scenery chewing way, and that's exactly what Judy Davis does in The Dressmaker, but in a skilled fashion that not a lot of actors can pull off. Few can go "big" while still being sincere and grounding the character in some emotional truth, but Davis does it with her portrayal of a woman who was basically driven crazy, robbed of everything that mattered, outcast and treated like the town joke, left to languish in filth. The turnaround she makes during the course of the film is subtle, built incrementally scene by scene by Davis as her character redeems herself and helps give her daughter the power to give their hometown exactly what it deserves.

Top 10 Week: Performances by Men in 2016

#10: Jack Reynor, Sing Street
As the older brother who knows everything worth knowing but who has descended into a rut he can't extricate himself from, Jack Reynor steals the show in Sing Street. Gifted with a great monologue towards the end, Reynor rises to the occasion and provides the film with fire and vitality, so much so that the spiritual victory of the finale, which sees the protagonist and his love interest ride off into the sunset, feels like it belongs more to Reynor's character than to anyone else.

Top 10 Week: Scenes of 2016

#10: I'm Back, You Bastards, The Dressmaker
Like an anti-hero in a classic western, but dressed like a femme fatale in a classic noir, Kate Winslet's character in The Dressmaker steps back into her dusty hometown, sets down her suitcase, lights a cigarette, and makes the above pronouncement. Though the film then takes a bit of a detour, making it appear as if it's going to be something else, it eventually comes back to the acid promise of these opening moments in a fashion as grand and flamboyant as everything else in the film.

Top 10 Week: Posters of 2016

#10: Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
A clever play on the picture timeline of human evolution for a documentary about the impact of technology on humans and how it's changing the ways that we interact with each other.

Top 10 Week: The Runners Up

Bearing in mind that I haven't seen the following films, which may (but may not) have altered the rankings: Certain Women, Toni Erdmann, 20th Century Women, Hidden Figures, Elle, Silence; I'm kicking off my Top 10 Week with the runners up who just missed making my lists of the best Films, Performances, and Scenes of 2016.

Scenes of 2016
The Escape, The Handmaiden
Technically two scenes, but most scenes in The Handmaiden are technically two scenes due to its split perspective. In the first part of the film, the escape is viewed from above, watching as the two women enter and exit a series of buildings via their sliding rice doors. In the second part, the film is on the ground with the women and allows them a moment of pause as one considers the consequences of failure before soldiering on and following through. The exhilaration on her face as she takes those steps into freedom is one of the film's highlights.

Review: La La Land (2016)

* * * 1/2
Director: Damien Chazelle
Starring: Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling

Sometimes all that matters is how a movie makes you feel. At a time of year when just about everything at the cineplex, and some of the things outside of the cineplex, is just so heavy, a movie like La La Land, so light, so breezy, so determined to win your affection, is sometimes exactly what you need. By no means a film without flaws, it's nevertheless an utter charmer that put a smile on my face more times than I could count and left me feeling better about this crazy world of ours than any other film I've seen in months. From an opening which hearkens back to Hollywood's past by promising a picture in CinemaScope before moving into a lively opening number set during a traffic jam, to a finale which lovingly references An American in Paris, Funny Face, and Singin' in the Rain, with a seemingly endless list of things in between that manage to be adorable for their worship of old Hollywood rather than annoyingly precious, La La Land is a film that's in it to win you over and does so fairly easily.

Review: Jackie (2016)

* * * *
Director: Pablo Larrain
Starring: Natalie Portman

History isn't what happened, it's how what happened is remembered. That's why a phrase like "history is written by the victors" exists, because the legacy of an event is not a passive thing that simply occurs naturally, but something that is actively created and shaped for a specific purpose. Of course there are multiple versions of the legacy of John F. Kennedy, including the legacy of conspiracy created by his assassination, and the legacy of ambition tied to tragedy that hangs over the Kennedy family in popular imagination, but Jackie is specifically about the romantic legacy of Camelot, that enduring image of the Kennedy administration as being bathed in a golden, glamorous glow, as fragile and fleeting as it was beautiful. Jackie is about the creation of that idea, first given voice in an interview of Jackie Kennedy for Life magazine, and it's a raw, brutally intimate portrait of personal grief played out on a national stage. It's also a great movie that centers on what may prove to be the defining performance of Natalie Portman's career.

Review: The Handmaiden (2016)

* * * 1/2
Director: Park Chan-wook
Starring: Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo, Cho Jin-woong

Lurid. Nasty. Darkly funny. Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden is a lot of things, but it's certainly never boring. A somewhat faithful, but also somewhat loose, adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel Fingersmith, The Handmaiden is an elaborate contraption of a movie that transports the original narrative from Victorian England to the 1930s in Japanese occupied Korea and stuns with its sumptuous costuming and production design, gorgeous (and playful) cinematography, its merciless violence, frank eroticism, and its ability to deftly navigate the turns and multiple turnabouts of its story. The Handmaiden is a savage beauty of a film and it's probably just as well that South Korea didn't make it their submission for the Best Foreign Language Film race at the Oscars since the Academy tends towards the conservative and films this twisted and explicit only rarely get nominated (and pretty much never win).

Review: Arrival (2016)

* * * 1/2
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner

"We need to talk to each other." At a time when society seems more divided than ever, when not only do the left hand and the right hand not seem to know what each other is doing, but can't even seem to fathom that they belong to the same body, this may be the most relevant line of film dialogue in 2016. A great human drama couched in a science fiction thriller, Arrival is both a fantastic entertainment and the kind of introspective piece of work that keeps you thinking about it for days afterwards. To my mind this is the best of director Denis Villeneuve's English-language films, the closest thing he's made to a masterpiece since his trio of great French-language films Maelstrom, Polytechnique, and Incendies. Anchored by a wonderful performance by Amy Adams, Arrival is one of the season's must-see films.

Review: Moonlight (2016)

* * * *
Director: Barry Jenkins
Starring: Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, Trevante Rhodes

The protagonist of Moonlight exists in a space of silence. Told at one point that only he can decide who he's going to be, he faces the additional challenge of having to navigate the fraught terrain of identity without the assistance of a language with which to define it. He can only understand it in the negative: what he shouldn't be, what it's unacceptable to be, what it's dangerous to be. So he remains silent most of the time, searching for a space in which he can belong or for a way to belong in the space he's currently in, a desert of outward expression. Directed by Barry Jenkins, and adapted by him from Tarell Alvin McCraney's play "In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue," the film is a vision of restraint, and somehow the more restrained it is, the more compelling it is - right up until the end, that is, when the floodgates finally open and the film achieves a breathtaking level of catharsis. Moonlight is a film that's going to come up a lot in the coming weeks as the year-end awards and nominations are given out, and it deserves every bit of the adulation it's about to get.

Review: 13th (2016)

* * * *
Director: Ava DuVernay

Words matter, which is part of the reason why the last several months have been so infuriating, as so many people with political power and media platforms have refused to call a spade a spade as a man who has built his campaign around racist policies and has explicitly encouraged racially charged violence at his rallies, and implicitly encouraged it at poling stations, runs for President. In an effort to avoid the accusation of "liberal bias," the media has helped cultivate the idea that the two major candidates are equally legitimate as candidates, even though one is basically just a politician - someone that you might agree with or might not, but who at least seems to understand and accept the limitations of power in a democracy - and the other is an insane megalomaniac who wants to curtail the freedom of the press, imprison his political rivals, outlaw a religion he doesn't like, and literally enclose his country inside a wall. Up until a week ago, when the tipping point was apparently reached, finally allowing all bets to be off, even the media outlets calling out the Republican nominee had largely avoided coming right out and calling this what it is, preferring to use terms like "dog whistle" rather than simply say he's racist. Well, he's racist. He's racist in a way that would have given Strom Thurmond pause, and that dude was fucking racist. In this bizarro world of pulling punches, Ava DuVernay's 13th is a breath of fresh air for saying exactly what it thinks. Bracing, thought provoking, and urgent, 13th isn't just one of the most important films of the year, it's one of the best.

Review: Hell or High Water (2016)

* * * 1/2
Director: David Mackenzie
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster

"We rob banks." Amazing how a movie set during the Great Depression and one set during the present day can paint such similar pictures of an area economically sucked dry and abandoned and a whole population of people who, for generations, have been stuck in a cycle of poverty because the system is rigged to ensure that they always get the worst of it when corporate greed grinds everything to a halt. It's enough to make you sympathize with and fall on the side of the bank robbers, except that Hell or High Water's grizzled, mustachioed lawman is played by Jeff Bridges, putting its bank robbing brothers at a disadvantage compared to Bonnie and Clyde. A hard edged crime movie that grabs you right from its beautifully executed opening shot and doesn't let go until the closing credits, Hell or High Water is one of the year's great thrill rides.

Review: Weiner (2016)

* * * *
Director: Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg

Some documentaries require a bit of luck to achieve their potential for greatness. This was true of 2012's The Queen of Versailles, in which filmmaker Lauren Greenfield had the good fortune to already be filming David and Jackie Siegel to tell a different story when the housing market collapsed, turning their tale from a lifestyles of the rich and the famous type hagiography into an epic tragedy about greed and needless excess, and it's true of Weiner, Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg's film about disgraced politician Anthony Weiner. Conceived as a comeback story about a man putting his mistakes behind him and rescuing his legacy from the gutter, it instead plays witness to that man throwing his second chance away. Both documentaries were lucky to be in the right place at the right time with a camera, but they aren't great because they were lucky. They're great because their filmmakers know how to use what fortune has dropped into their laps to tell stories that are deeply compelling and fascinating.

Review: The Lobster (2016)

* * * *
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz

Having seen Yorgos Lanthimos' Oscar nominated 2009 film Dogtooth, and having a general idea of what this film is about, I was prepared for The Lobster to be weird. I don't think anything could really have prepared me for how sublimely bonkers it actually is. I'm not sure anything I could say about it could properly express just how bizarre and funny it is. Allow me to say this: the premise, in which the characters live in a world that demands that all adults be romantically paired and where anyone who finds themselves single must find a new partner within 45 days or be surgically transformed into an animal, turns out to be the most normal thing about it.

Review: A Bigger Splash (2016)

* * * 1/2
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, Matthias Schoenaerts, Dakota Johnson

"You can't or you won't?" The main character in A Bigger Splash can't speak; she's on doctor's orders to rest her vocal chords lest she destroy her voice and her career as a rock star. That question, when put to her, at first seems merely cheeky, an attempt by the youngest member of the group that surrounds her to be provocative, a superficial feint at insight. Once the film reaches its conclusion, you realize in hindsight that that line actually said it all. What is the root of the tensions between the four principal characters if not the struggle between "can't" and "won't"? These are people accustomed to getting everything they want, so it must come as a shock to the system to have to choose between things they want, to say "no" even though they might want to say "yes," and to realize that how much power is contained in that denial. From the director of the great I Am Love, and based loosely on Jacques Deray's La Piscine, A Bigger Splash is a sumptuous, sordid psychological drama about four people exiled together in paradise and all the things they can't (or won't) do.