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justintimereviews · 7 years

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Top 10 Films of 2016

10. Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater)

With Linklater behind the camera I was not surprised when Everybody Wants Some!! demonstrated just as much comedy, nostalgia, and Texan Buddhism and its spiritual predecessor, Dazed and Confused. Tracing the exploits of a 1980’s college baseball team during the first few days on campus, the film delights in a carefree place and time where youth is finally unsupervised and everything is possible: sex, drugs, sports glory, the future. Importantly, Linklater is careful not to endorse all of his characters’ behavior or philosophies, but rather at times point out their vulnerabilities and masculine mini-crises (in some ways this could make for an intriguing companion film to my pick at #4). While Everybody Wants Some!! was one of the funniest, biggest-hearted movies of the year, the tagline on the movie poster lets us in on Linklater’s true aim: “Here for a good time. Not a long time,” as if to slyly spell out the thing that these manchildren—like all of us—really want so much more of.

9. La La Land (Damien Chazelle)

It may not feel like the right moment, politically, to indulge in a whimsical Hollywood musical about beautiful Hollywood people. But at face value La La Land is well-scored, well-acted, funny, and more introspective than its “follow your dreams” conceit implies. I like watching Chazelle examine the trade-off between ambition and joy, both in Whiplash and his latest film about conflicted artists. In the former, Miles Teller’s obsessive jazz drummer got served what I’d consider far from a happy ending (his father’s appalled face in the final scene is the perfect audience proxy). On the other hand, Teller’s character did manage to achieve his dream, which was always the point. With La La Land, Chazelle’s screenplay and Justin Hurwitz’s composition take another bite at the apple: is your dream really worth achieving if you have to do it alone?

8. Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan)

With one of the year’s strongest scripts and two sublime performances from Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams, Lonergan’s meditation on guilt and grief lived up to its Sundance hype. Without any voiceover and a dearth of bells and whistles, Manchester felt like watching a stageplay in that it left its ensemble no room for error. The actors’ faces and a deftly employed flashback mechanism did most of the legwork, telling a familiar story but on its own heartbreakingly beautiful terms. Most surprising was the film’s humor, particularly from newcomer Lucas Hedges’ poignant and complex portrayal of a grieving teenager.

7. Arrival (Denis Villeneuve)

Fresh off the heels of directing 2015’s best thriller, Villeneuve gives us 2016’s best sci-fi with Arrival. More than almost any director working today Villeneuve understands how to use tension in his films, and the deliberate pace of Eric Heisserer’s script plays right into the auteur’s wheelhouse. Villeneuve—as he did with Prisoners and Sicario—uses genre and high-concept storytelling to examine something basic and constitutional about humanity. In this case, he offers up interstellar linguistics and inky tentacle monsters to teach us about the meaning of life. Arrival also boasts the year’s most breathtaking shot, compliments of the uber-talented DP, Bradford Young:

6. Jackie (Pablo Larrain)

Typically biopics are not as artistically provocative as Larrain’s Jackie: it’s a dark, often unsettling portrait of the inscrutable first lady as she tries to do the impossible. On top of consoling her children and managing her own grief, Natalie Portman’s Jackie charges herself with planning her famous husband’s funeral, preserving his (and her own) place in history, and coming to terms with what life will be like once she’s no longer insulated by her beloved Camelot myth. Frequent voiceover and fragments of disparate, interstitial conversations that reveal Jackie’s inner monologue cause the film to play like a dream, not unlike if Terrence Malick were storyboarding. Strangely, I didn’t know if I even liked the film up until the last 30 minutes, but once it was done I was convinced Larrain and Portman’s collaboration was a work of art.

5. Little Men (Ira Sachs)

I’m fascinated with how the things that happen to us as children influence who we become as adults. Your current career, relationship, hobbies, and emotional disposition could all be the result of some discrete event in your past, say a best friend moving away, or a role model’s fall from grace. Ira Sachs’ Little Men explores this phenomenon through the tale of Jake and Tony (Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri, both tortuously charismatic), two childhood friends brought together and torn apart by circumstances out of their control. Their frustration and confusion with the complications of their parents’ lives is so familiar it hurts. But in Sachs’ bittersweet ending he reminds us of what’s important about these formational—if short-lived—friendships: that they left their mark on us, and we on them.

4. 20th Century Women (Mike Mills)

I did not know much about late 1970s America going into this film, let alone the role that punk rock, feminism, and Jimmy Carter played in shaping the American identity. It’s just a period of history I never paid much attention to. I’m somewhat happy this was the case because I really enjoyed learning about it through Mike Mills’ story. Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, and Elle Fanning play three women of three distinct generations in 1979 Santa Barbara. Bening, a single mother, enlists the two younger women to help raise her adolescent son during a time when men—and the country at large—were undergoing an infamous crisis of confidence. Like Linklater’s film, 20th Century Women is a time capsule flecked with the cultural particulars of a specific, often overlooked era. In spite of this and its excellent soundtrack, what stays with me most is one of Bening’s lines about her son, delivered to Gerwig’s much younger character: “You get to see him out in the world as a person, I never will.” It broke my heart.

3. Krisha (Trey Edward Shults)

If “family holiday horror” is a genre, Krisha is its Citizen Kane. Hypnotizing camera technique and an unnerving score immerse us in an estranged matriarch’s attempt at reconciliation with the family she abandoned many years before. This film made me very uncomfortable. And seeing it has forever changed how I will look at substance abuse—and Thanksgiving turkey—for the better. The only thing more shocking than the experience of watching Krisha is how the film was made. Shults—in his feature film debut—shot entirely at his parents’ Texas home over the course of 9 days, filled the cast almost exclusively with family members (including his aunt in the titular role), and worked on a paltry budget of about $100,000. I’m excited to see what he can do with 10x that.

2. O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman)

The near eight-hour saga does much more than chronicle the rise and fall of the football star turned actor turned tragic figure: it draws a direct through line connecting the highly publicized Trial of the Century (and the myriad emotions on display following the controversial verdict) to key social events in Los Angeles during the decades prior such as the Watts riots, Latasha Harlins killing, and Rodney King beating. Edelman tantalizes you early on with O.J. as an American mythic hero. His was a Horatio Alger success story for the 20th century, having made it out of the San Francisco housing projects to become a Heisman Trophy winner, NFL rushing leader, precedent-setting corporate spokesman, and beloved TV and film personality. Most importantly, he transcended race, such that Simpson himself liked to explain “I’m not black, I’m O.J.” So when he was accused of murdering Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, suddenly the entire country looked to his trial as a referendum on American race relations and social justice. It is an ambitious and towering film, intimate enough to engage yet comprehensive enough to say something profound about American society. For maximum effect try to watch it all in one sitting.

1. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)

Moonlight is the most affecting, emotional film I’ve seen in the last 5 years. Jenkins and the three actors that play Chiron accomplish something so rarely done on screen: they create a fully formed identity of a person. With concentrated dialogue, purposeful imagery, and—most of all—the actors’ eyes, Moonlight is a cinematic allegory of self-actualization and personal discovery that one can’t help but relate to. But Chiron’s story is anything but universal. The film paints an ultra-specific portrait of a young man from Miami that I for one have almost nothing in common with. Moonlight’s achievement, then, is the way it embraces Chiron’s uniqueness while at the same time tapping into universal truths about humanity, sexuality, and identity; by the end of the film we know this other person named Chiron. How Jenkins does this is something I’m still trying to figure out. There’s very little dialogue, no grand set pieces; it’s a soft, whisper of a film. And yet the last 10 minutes broke me down. There were lots of great movies in 2016, but Moonlight is essential.

What else I liked in no particular order: The Lobster, Hell or High Water, Fences, Silence, Eye in the Sky, American Honey, Captain Fantastic, Nocturnal Animals, Florence Foster Jenkins, Sing Street, The Nice Guys, Hidden Figures, Swiss Army Man, Café Society, Knight of Cups, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, Kubo and the Two Strings, Midnight Special, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, The Witch

What I haven’t seen (yet): Paterson, Elle, Lion, I Daniel Blake, Loving, A Bigger Splash, Toni Erdmann, Miss Sloane, Your Name, The Fits

Some further reading on these films I really enjoyed:

Last Taboo: Why Pop Culture Just Can't Deal With Black Male Sexuality, by Wesley Morris

High Tide: Kenneth Lonergan on Manchester by the Sea, Filmmaker Magazine

The State That I Am In: Pablo Larrain Interview, Film Comment

How SXSW Winner Trey Edward Shults Shot "Krisha" With His Family in 9 Days, No Film School

The Year's Most Captivating Performances, by Wesley Morris and A.O. Scott

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