Best of 2017, Part 1: Top 20

Last year I made a resolution--a promise to myself, really--to try and make more time in my life for movies. The sneaky thing about grad school is this: even if you're there because it's what you love, or it's the only way to get the life you want, and even if you love every mind-bludgeoning moment of it--even if all these things are true, the other things you love tend to get put on hold. You find yourself saying (all too often) that you'll pursue your hobbies tomorrow, or the next day; if only you weren't so tired today! So many aspects of your life fade by subtle degrees: small things at first, then larger, more frequent, until that thing you loved--the reason you went to school to begin with--has become the thing you have to feed, the book-shaped pet monster chained to your ankle. And you may still love it, but eventually its tendency to assert itself into the furthest-flung corners of your life can become tiresome.

So the kind of promise that involves investing your time and energy into pulling something out of that monster is...complicated. This time last year (approximately--I'm writing these awfully late this year), I was lamenting the fact that I'd only made time for 50 movies. Both the years before that (aka my other grad school years) saw me clocking 60-ish movies. Which inspired me to make my first New Years resolution in a decade: this year, I was going to make time for movies. And going into this year knowing full well that it would be a period of upheaval, one of those breathless caesuras after which Nothing Would Ever be the Same, etc.: suffice to say I was daunted. My silly January resolution seemed like a the kind of dream you find in someone else's garbage.

All of this is a very long and melodramatic wind-up to the reveal that this year I saw 74 movies. It's still not quite where I was when I was younger (I was so hoping to hit 80 this year, but events conspired in the past weeks to put that goal just outside my reach), but it's a far cry better than what I've done for a while. I pulled movies out of my monster, dammit. And honestly, I'm not really sure how it happened. I was travelling for the first four months of the year, and didn't see hardly anything. The next four months I spent totally destitute, which kept me from the theater. And the last months I spent moving to a different state, starting a PhD, getting sick, and generally getting buried in the kinds of things people tend to get buried under. But it happened, and I'm grateful for that. I'm afraid to jinx the coming year by making another resolution, so I'll leave it at this: I'm glad I made the time to go to the movies in the past 12 months, and I hope I'll remember how glad I am for the next 12 as well.

And what a year to see so much! Maybe I'm just feeling overly sentimental (he says, as if he's not a constant quivering ball of weepy reveries), but this felt like something of a banner year. I can't wait for you to get a glimpse at what's in the top 10. The top three, in particular, feel as though any one of them could have been the best of this or any year--and I'm honestly still not sure what will take the top position.

If you're new (and who knows? Maybe my loyal-ish eastern European fan base will share this link to their friends in Samoa and I can become the #1 twice-annual movie blogger in the South Pacific), here's how the format works: I'll rattle off my top 20 (an indulgent number, but this is the 12th year running of top 20, so dealwithit). In interest of brevity (and also in interest of brevity's rough-and-tumble cousin, oh-my-god-I-have-so-much-to-do-why-am-I-spending-three-hours-writing-this...ity), I'll try to keep my gushing about each movie to two sentences. Let's see how far I get before kicking brevity's teeth in! I am dentist's worst nightmare. After that, there's a deviation from the norm: usually I follow the list with my Zen Awards, which allow for a bit of fun with silly categories. And I just...don't have that in me right now. Maybe I'll come back to it--but time is short, and I'm very tired, so for now I have to forgo trying to make you laugh with the strangest category I can pull out of my head. Apologies! For what it's worth, I've still come up with a list for the best scenes of the year, as well as the worst movies, for those of you who have plenty of time/a really deep masochistic streak.

In interest of transparency, here's a list of what I've seen this year. If something you love didn't make my list, check to see if I actually saw it first--and if I did, tell me why your movie should have made the list! As always, I'm woefully lacking foreign films and documentaries. Normally this is where I'd say that we don't get those kinds of movies in the middle of the country, but my new home is shockingly not terrible at getting the littler movies. So this year, it's on me: apologies to things like Thelma, The Square, A Fantastic Woman, On Body and Soul, Columbus, and others--you did open here, I just managed to miss you. (Although maybe consider not all opening at the same time during finals week. You get a little bit of the blame here, movies.)

And a special 'I'm so sorry' shout-out to Princess Cyd from Stephen Cone, who is one of my absolute favorite indie filmmakers (both The Wise Kids and Henry Gamble's Birthday Party got written up in my best-of lists in their respective years), and is streaming on Amazon. But somehow I just haven't managed to sit down and watch it. So go watch it, even if it's not on this list--I'm sure it would have been, if I'd seen it before press time.

47 Meters Down, 50 Shades Darker, Alien: Covenant, All the Money in the World, All These Sleepless Nights, Atomic Blonde, Baby Driver, Beach Rats, Beauty and the Beast, The Beguiled, The Big Sick, Blade Runner 2049, Born in China, The Boss Baby, BPM (120 Beats per Minute), Call Me by Your Name, Casting JonBenet, Coco, Darkest Hour, Detroit, The Disaster Artist, Downsizing, Dunkirk, The Florida Project, Get Out, A Ghost Story, Gifted, Girls Trip, God's Own Country, Good Time, The Greatest Showman, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Handsome Devil, I, Tonya, Ingrid Goes West, It, It Comes at Night, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Kong: Skull Island, Lady Bird, Lady Macbeth, Last Men in Aleppo, The LEGO Batman Movie, Logan, Logan Lucky, The Lost City of Z, The Lure, Molly's Game, Mother! Mudbound, Murder on the Orient Express, Nocturama,, Okja, One of Us, The Ornithologist, Personal Shopper, Phantom Thread, The Post, Raw, The Shape of Water, Shock Wave, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Split, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Stronger, Thor: Ragnarok, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, War for the Planet of the Apes, Wind River, Wonder Woman, Wonderstruck, The Work, The Wound, The Zookeeper's Wife


If I haven't lost you yet (and if I haven't, you probably need to do some soul-searching of your own re: how you spend your free time), let's jump into it! It's already after 9.00 and I have to be up at 6.00 tomorrow, so I'll try to crack these out as swiftly and pithily as possible.


Honorable Mentions: though they didn't make the top 20, I'm thankful for the see-saw tragicomedy of I, Tonya, the grimy, shame-soaked lust of Beach Rats, and the dazzling ingenuity and bonkers spirit of Okja.

20. God's Own Country (dir. Francis Lee)
Though it's tempting to file this one away as a more upbeat and British Brokeback Mountain, Lee's peon to gruff ranchers, sheep entrails, and the immigrants who love them is a vital and impassioned exercise in silence. Muddy hookups, romantic candlelit dinners in a highland cabin, puffy sweaters, and unsimulated sheep birth--what more are you looking for in your indie queer romance?
(available to rent on Amazon)

19. Wonder Woman (dir. Patty Jenkins)
Most importantly, Wonder Woman gets that for superheros (and their movies) to be great, they first need to be good. Wonder Woman radiates kindness and hope, even in its darkest (and clunkily CG-ed) moments, harnessing the iconographic shorthand that lets these characters keep popping 70-plus years after their inception.
(not available to stream yet)

18. The Big Sick (dir. Michael Showalter)
Hoisting the flag of that most reliable of genre punching bags--the inspirational rom-com--is no easy task, but The Big Sick cuts through the cynicism by being unrelentingly sweet and honest. Doesn't hurt that it earns its share of belly laughs along the way: who among us didn't giggle at that 9/11 joke?
(on Amazon Prime)

17. Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve)
Points have to be given here on raw ambition alone: Villeneuve set out to craft a sprawling sci-fi thriller, a brooding think-piece on the pitfalls of the 'chosen one' narrative, and a piano wire character study of love on the cold, dark fringes. The fact that the movie succeeds at all is somewhat astounding; that it manages to succeed on all of these fronts (and others besides) is nothing short of miraculous.
(rentable on Amazon)

16. Logan (dir. James Mangold)
The superhero movie we need, and perhaps the one we deserve as well: Logan is a brutal, chaotic slog through the decades-long consequences of being placed on a pedestal. By harnessing the Western genre to his own devices, Mangold crawls under the skin of a cultural touchstone (the not-so-indefatigable Wolverine) and lets him look death in the eye--creating a stripped-down, cold-eyed anti-superhero movie for the ages.
(on HBO Go)

15. Personal Shopper (dir. Olivier Assayas)
I've no idea how to sell you on this one--a small-voiced ghostless ghost story in which Kristen Stewart does her best to get the abyss to stare back--but if you can stomach its muted, languorous charms, you'll be rewarded with a singularly thorny exploration of the permeable spaces between life and death. Not for everyone--but if you're feeling patient and melancholy, seek this one out.
(no streaming, sadly)

14. The Lost City of Z (dir. James Gray)
I'll admit that this movie's logline isn't the most compelling--Charlie Hunnam and Robert Pattinson get lost in the jungle!--but Gray's aching, lyrical ode to shades of madness, gentle, wild, or otherwise, presents on of the most hypnotic and transporting experiences of the year. What's more, he coaxes a bevy of fantastic performances from unexpected sources--who knew that Charlie Hunnam could act?
(on Amazon Prime)

13. Raw (dir. Julia Ducournau)
If you've ever wondered how French vegetarian veterinarians might react upon discovering they have an insatiable taste for human flesh (and who hasn't wondered that, at least once), have I got news for you--this sneaky little horror movie from across the pond gives you a blood-splattered front seat to a cackling cannibal cadre just trying to sneak a few meals between classes. Raw is the most tactile movie of the year--all delicate masticating, red splashes on white jackets, and the oh-so-relatable sound of accidentally eating your sister's finger while she's trying to give you a Brazilian wax.
(on Netflix, also rentable on Amazon)

12. The Florida Project (dir. Sean Baker)
A steady-eyed, candy-striped study of life on the margins, Baker's Project takes a potentially exhausting trope--life through the lens of wide-eyed childhood innocence--and infuses it with a dogged honesty that never talks down to its characters, fighting for scraps of dignity thrown to them from an unfathomably distant table. Using the same handheld, non-professional actor approach that the director brought to Tangerine, The Florida Project manages to seem fundamentally grounded, despite its 6-year old protagonist who can't help but seeing her world as what she wants it to be, rather than what it's becoming.
(rentable on Amazon)

11. The Work (dir. Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous)
A documentary exercise in minimalism--here there are no facts, no talking heads, no reenactments, no moralizing or opinions of any kind. McLeary and Aldous just stick their camera into the middle of a three-day therapy session inside a prison, and the results are astounding: a painful, profound humanity full of joys and deep wounds, quietly rebuking the audience for the thoughts they might have had when the prisoners walked through the door.
(rentable on Amazon)

Hey look! We've made it to the top 10 and I haven't even broken my two-sentence rule yet! Granted, I've had to brutalize your time, decency, and the English language itself to do so, but I'm not even gonna apologize. And again, what a top 10 it is! You need to go find every single one of these movies.

10. BPM (120 Beats per Minute) (dir. Robin Campillo)
A dramatized version of How to Survive a Plague--or better yet, the movie that Dallas Buyers Club *should* have been--BPM shines a spotlight on the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s by thrusting the viewer into the thick of the ACT Up movement in Paris, in which committees of ravaged and ravaging men and women fought on the front lines to have their deaths taken seriously. This film is a deeply moving mosaic of the nitty-gritty of social change, the kinds of unapologetic sacrifices communities make to buy their place at the table.
(rentable on Amazon)

9. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
What even is this movie--one of the more disturbing and subtle horror film of the year, the most underrated comedy, or an exercise in brutal absurdity? It's all three at once, seesawing, wild-eyed, between Stepfordian suburban antics, existential body horror, and extreme violence. The premise--a teenager whose father died on the operating table returns to exact revenge on the surgeon by forcing him to choose which one of his family to kill--hardly allows for either comedy or sci-fi trappings, but Lanthimos juggles each disparate ball with the same alien eye he brought to Dogtooth and The Lobster.
(rentable on Amazon)

(Take that, brevity! You thought you could hide, but I found you and now I'm going to make you pay.)

8. Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele)
One of the best debut films in the past decade, a by-turns gleeful and pained mirror held up to a neo-liberal world all too pleased with its own tolerances. The sunken place is real, and Peele makes sure the audience knows what role they've played in creating and maintaining it. The metaphor is on point, sure, but would the movie have reached the heights it has if it weren't also firing on every other level? Get Out is a successful comedy, a successful horror movie, a successful drama, a successful satire, and a successful call to arms, populated by one of the best ensembles of the year and architected with an assured hand by Peele.
(streaming on HBO Go)

7. Nocturama (dir. Bertrand Bonello)
I don't know that I have the words to do this movie justice, and honestly am not sure that you should read anything about it at all before watching it: French teenagers are part of a terrorism plot. Things happen. Go watch this and report back. What an intricate curio of rage this movie is: placeless protagonists in a shop-window Paris, drifting from port to explosive port. Nocturama is punctuated by surreal, unsettling, gorgeous images: a golden face on fire, a dragged-out teen lip-syncing down the stairs, sterile mall environments shaping a world unseen. All of this stapled together by a writhing, aggressive editing that casually undermines what we think we know about how movies should run. This is a breathtaking and confrontational piece of cinema--seek it out!
(on Netflix)

6. mother! (dir. Darren Aronofsky)
I get it--this is either a love-it-or-hate-it scenario. mother! is claustrophobic, chaotic, brutal, and subtle as a bag of hammers. But what can I say--how could I not vibe to something as giddily, mind-bogglingly off-the-rails as Aronofsky's latest ode to intimate violence and Biblical morals gone wrong? Anchored by an unfairly dogpiled Jennifer Lawrence (who, sidebar, rocks the best movie hair since The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), mother! wound its way through all the various cracks in my psyche and ripped them apart with a smile on its face. The final 20 minutes--that eye-popping and unbelievable crescendo of sudden violence--is unlike anything else at the movies this year. Is mother! a re-telling of the Bible, a parable about exploiting the environment, an examination of the artistic process, a story about how people justify staying in abusive relationships to themselves, or a relateable movie about just wanting to brace your sink, but Ed Harris just won't leave you alone? It's all of these things, and more: a breathless whirlwind of a movie designed to make you grasp for your pearls.

5. Casting JonBenet (dir. Kitty Green)
What a strange, curious and beautiful soul this movie has: a documentary-experiment in which actors are cast to play the Ramsey family in a movie that will never exist. The resulting film, in which a group of local actors share their own versions of JonBenet's murder while pretending to be the people involved, is unlike any I've ever seen, and you should go watch it immediately. The cumulative weight the film piles on--the crime, the lives it changed, the dark undercurrents eddying out into the community--are crushing in their sincerity and irreversibility. The final shot, in which every actor simultaneously acts their own piece of the story as the camera pulls out and around to reveal the entire sound stage, completely knocked me off my feet. A documentary to change how you think about what documentaries can achieve, and how they can do it.
(on Netflix)

4. Lady Macbeth (dir. William Oldroyd)
A savagely precise knock-out punch of movie, and criminally underseen: Lady Macbeth adopts a 19th century Russian novella and births it, fully formed, red-eyed and screaming, into present day, flooding the source material with tensions of race, gender, voyeurism, and the hath-no-fury scorn of a woman trapped in a system not meant for her. Transplanted to Victorian England, the story details the misadventures (a soft word for a rough situation if ever there was one) of a young wife in an arranged marriage whose reach far outreaches the grasp that the role of submissive wife demands. What emerges is an ice-cold character study of a life lived, despite the cost: Lady Macbeth is stuffed to the gills with bitterness weeping down the ladder for centuries, finally emerging in a few moments of wanton, chaotic agency. Hard to believe that this is Oldroyd's first movie--if this is his starting point, I can't wait to see where he goes from here.
(rentable on Amazon)

3. Phantom Thread (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
A thread (heh) that I keep returning to in this post is some kind of loss of words (despite the already prodigiously indulgent word count)--how do I describe movies that, by their nature, buck attempts at description? Like most PTA movies, Phantom Thread is just that kind of stallion of a movie--a writhing, furiously happy palette of purple and beige and malignant glares over breakfast. How can I sell you on this, other by telling you it's fantastic? Firstly: the trailers make it seem as if this is another slog of a movie about a suffering genius and the supportive woman who sees him through--and this couldn't be any further from the truth. What we get instead is an unexpectedly hilarious, grimly melodramatic tete-a-tete in which an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, and both decide to settle down with each other and argue over how to serve asparagus. It's a gorgeous, Sirkian romp through the pitfalls of love that finds the well of lies we tell ourselves in order to cohabit spaces, and it drinks deeply. And all of this against a gloriously heightened backdrop--those costumes! That wailing and sappy Johnny Greenwood score!--made to feel like walking through someone else's taffeta fantasies.

2. Lady Bird (dir. Greta Gerwig)
Has there been any movie recently--or ever, in fact--that is so openly empathetic, that has so much time for every character, that grants everyone it sees a perspective and a future? And does so in 90 minutes? What Gerwig accomplishes here is nothing short of miraculous--a quick-paced, uproarious, moving, and above all relateable movie about learning how to occupy a world in which everyone you meet is another person. I cannot get so many of this film's small moments out of my head, little perfections stacked on top of each other to create a monument to the way people brush up against each other as fingerprints: how casually cruel Lady Bird is to her friend, who meekly says 'this is probably the only chance I'll ever get at that' when Lady Bird complains that *she's* not the one who gets time to flirt with hunky Danny, or the conversation with the preppy friend in the pool, who sees herself sending her daughters to catholic school, or the look on Lady Bird's mother's face when Danny says that she lives on the wrong side of the tracks (ohmygod you guys Laurie Metcalf), or the way Tracy Letts straightens his son's tie when he finds out they're both interviewing for the same job. More than anything, this movie is human: an ethereal and multi-facted morass of lives, all regarded with the same kind eye. Is there anything we need more than that in an era defined by joyfully creating categories of otherness? Don't get me wrong: this is my #2 pick of the year, but it's top 5 of the decade material. Lady Bird is absolute perfection--it's one of the most vital experiences of the year in this (or any other) medium.
(rentable on Amazon)

1. Call Me by Your Name (dir. Luca Guadagnino)
The first time I remember encountering anything that I could identify as gay was at Disneyland. Two men holding hands asked my Dad to take a picture of them together, and he obliged. Afterward, he made sure to point out what they were--make sure we knew--and my mother asked, not without disgust, how they could hold hands in this place that was meant for families.
Maybe three years later, some tremulous impulse me led me to look up 'homosexuality' in the dictionary of my middle school library. I remember standing there, staring at the page, realizing that what I read was talking about me. Putting the book back as quickly as I could, in case someone saw. Trying not to cry. Deciding to push that page of the dictionary out of my mind. And out of mind was how my relationship with myself would be characterized for years. I remember seeing a poster for Brokeback Mountain in 2005--two men holding each other--and looking at it with surprise, shock, disgust: look at those two men holding each other, I thought, like that is something you can just do. I did not meet an out queer person until college, and even then, I approached them with something like suspicion. How can they do that in public. Where there are families.
But when someone could push through all that; when someone could cut through all the hatred I held in my head, all the little cuts like glass and the ramparts I had in place to keep the world from ever, ever seeing what I carried inside me; when someone, however briefly, could make me feel as if I could be touched without dissolving into molecules--. I don't know that any straight person can ever completely experience the way that this is like holding electricity in the palm of your hand. The way your world multiplies and stretches exponentially, the sound of it like a hurricane, something primordial and ancient and inevitable, swelling inside of you until it feels as though your soul is going to spill out like light through your mouth. The first time in my apartment: he was in the shower, and I was making us breakfast (omelettes), and I started crying and couldn't stop. Just because of--this. How normal and domestic. Here was a boy I cared about, who seemed to care about me, and we had been together and the world had not turned inside out, the curtains hadn't been rent in two--I was simply there, making an omelette for a boy in the shower. And I hate to think it, but I don't know if I will ever be able to recapture that exact kind of thankful, bewildered joy--the sublime sense of being, for the first time ever--and being with another person who could be like me. The way entire planets moved because of the little mole on his cheek. I was young, and knew nothing, but I knew that suddenly I contained in myself a cosmos, and so did he, and we could see it inside each other when we opened our mouths.
I write all this because this is what Call Me by Your Name feels like to me--it cannons me back into the moment of realizing that it is possible for me to exist as a person, and that there are other people on this Earth who might exist in just that same way. That sense of discovery, shame and heartbreak and joy and terror all roiling into me at once. And I'm grateful to it for that--for spending two hours visualizing all the things I never had the courage to say. For extracting the cosmos from my mouth and letting me look at it for what it is.
(on iTunes and in theaters)


Well that got heavy. Alright, let's all take a collective deep breath, go eat a few of our feelings, and then get back into it.

Best Scenes of the Year

10. Welcome Back-Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Generally I haven't responded to the Guardians series like everyone else seem to, but I can't deny that the opening sequence of the latest one, in which a dancing baby Groot pulls focus (literally) from the massive action scene happening behind him is just the right, subversive note to get the ball rolling.
(You can kind of piece the scene together by watching this first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjPe9gcXtT4 and then this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeL1cg_-eqY&t=5s

9. Mall chase-Okja
What a bonkers, visually inventive movie this is--imagine the world we'd live in if every movie had even a tenth of the style and pep that Bong Joon-Ho brings to his anti-meat-industry romp (am I regretting not having this in the top 20? Maybe a little). Nowhere is that style more evident than in the film's breathless mid-film centerpiece, in which the titular super-pig flees through an underground mall and is subsequently rescued by the Animal Liberation Front, unleashing commercial chaos for everyone involved.
(This is just the very end of the scene, but it's on Netflix, so go watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh23BrGOk18)

8. Hedwig's Dance-Split
Shyamalan may be an overly confident hack most of the time, but credit where credit is due--he can *really* string together some compelling moments every now and again. Split was a definite return to form after two-ish decades of garbage, and the movie's shaggy weirdness and James McAvoy's and Anna Taylor-Joy's performance coalesce into one perfect moment of surreal horror-comedy, as one of the villain's personalities (the one convinced it's a 9 year old kid) dances for the girl he's kidnapped. It's arrestingly staged (those angular planes! The linear motion!) and ferociously performed--scary and surreal and strangely silly, all at once.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnFMS11g4fM

7. Don't Tell My Mom-Lady Bird
It feels reductive and wrong to reduce this perfect movie about women to one scene in which the lead character comforts a boy, but here we are. Maybe part of what makes this scene so moving for me is that it's one of the first times we see Lady Bird pushing her own problems out of the way for someone else's--when former boyfriend Danny loses it over how to come out to his parents, she glimpses, however briefly, a world larger and more alien than her own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdqP0xZunao

6. Love and other Holograms-Blade Runner 2049
This one earns its place for sheer fascination alone. As Joi--a sentient housekeeping/love/servant? program--maps herself onto the body of a prostitute so she can finally try to touch replicant K, I couldn't turn away. The eye-popping just-this-side-of-the-uncanny-valley, the music, the almost-but-not-quite fingers brushing through space: it's just mesmerizing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su6TrKgGNFk

5. Meet Pennywise, the Dancing Clown-It
Though maybe a little over-hyped for what it (heh) is, It was nevertheless a rare studio horror movie that succeeded both as a chamber piece about childhood under assault and a source of dead-under-the-skin jolts. And right from the get-go, It shows that it's not planning on pulling its gruesome punches. A lot of the credit here has to be given to Skarsgard, whose Pennywise is never scarier--or more charismatic--than when he's convincing a little boy to come play in the sewer. The way his voice changes at the end--"Bill's going to kill you" still manages to freak me out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAWVC71nzyA

4. No Man's Land-Wonder Woman
I'm a sucker for big moments that lean on their own iconography, and this moment from Wonder Woman--in which our titular ass-kicker proves why the phrase 'no man's land' is correct and not--has that in spades. I'm still not sold on how comfortable the movie is with having its anti-violence characters casually killing Germans (I think they mixed up WWI and WWII?), but I can't deny the raw cinematic joy this scene possesses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlwHKphUU_Y

3. Mr. Perlman's Monologue-Call Me by Your Name
What can I write about this scene that hasn't already been said? A beautiful monologue, perfectly written and performed, the kind of support and open-mindedness that everyone dreams about getting from their parents, couched in its own examination of love, loss, and the things we give away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3T6kdwYDdo

2. The Sunken Place-Get Out
What Daniel Kaluuya accomplishes with his eyes alone would get this scene on the list, but all the elements swirling around his performance--that scraping teacup, Catherine Keener's tiny smile, the immediately iconic Sunken Place itself--illustrate in one fell swoop what makes Get Out an all-timer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBwVWrBk_uo

1. The Peach Scene-Call Me by Your Name
The film's most infamous scene, but I don't have it here for that reason ('hey, let's all watch Timotheé Chalamet have sex with fruit!'); it's here for what comes after--when Oliver sees what Elio has done, makes light of it, goes to eat the peach and--. Things for which there aren't words: the joy of finally acting on your desires and the shame of now being one of those people, the shame of doing the thing that you've been told will send you straight to hell, and the fire of finding someone who will be in that moment with you, who, when you hate yourself for wanting what you want, can stand next to you and love you for wanting exactly that. Points to Timotheé Chalamet for getting across all of that complexity in the space of a few moments, one strangled sob, followed by 'I don't want you to go.'
(This clip has the author of the book talking over it, but it's the only version on YouTube, so:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BOgQlS9Uto)


Note: I normally try not to do ending scenes here, cuz spoilers, but know that the last seven minutes of Casting JonBenet and the last shot of Call Me by Your Name are also ones for the history books.


Aaaaaaand now:

The Worst Movies of the Year

I know, I know, maybe it sends the wrong message to end all this on a negative note, but you know what? There's a joy to recognizing that some things are garbage, to gleefully calling them out for all their glorious garbosity. Sometimes it's cathartic to share a little rage among friends. And hoo boy do I have some things to share with all of you.

5. Kong: Skull Island
Overblown, tone-deaf, bizarrely exoticizing in its attempts to refute the original's legacy of racism. Kong is two hours of sound and bloody fury, signifying that this whole 'every tentpole is a franchise waiting to die' movement needs to stop.

4. Alien: Covenant
Is it fair to rank any movie so low that has Michael Fassbender doing a gay penny whistle duet with his own copy? Maybe not, but man did I hate the experience of watching this joyless and dead-eyed movie. Everything that made the original movies special has been carefully sifted out and replaced with casual brutality and the very kind of corporate soullessness that keeps making problems for the people in these movies. Movies like this make me root for the xenomorph to get all of us in the end.

3. The Boss Baby
I honestly can't be sure that I didn't hallucinate this in a horrific fever dream. Baby violence! Fart jokes! Alec Baldwin as a baby in a suit! The fact that 'Boss Baby' is a character's ACTUAL NAME. What even is this candy-colored hate crime? How do we live in a world where it's ok to make this movie happen to children?

2. Downsizing
If Alexander Payne set out to make a two-and-a-half-hour illustration about what the road to hell is paved with (spoiler alert: it's whatever drugs he took while writing this movie!), then he succeeded. What a waste of a potentially interesting plot, and what a mind-bogglingly ill-fated last-minute genre turn. Hey, did you know this movie is about the apocalypse? Cuz I sure didn't, and I don't think the people who made the trailers (...or the movie, for that matter) did either. Extra points (nega points?) for having the most ill-advised romance sub-plot I've maybe ever seen in a movie. I will never get this time back.

1. Beauty and the Beast
I am honestly not sure I can write about this movie without breaking my keyboard. You know what we don't need? How about a soulless, ham-handed and inept Kidz Bop version of a classic that has nothing but dollar signs in its eyes? Ok, now that we've got that, what if we add a messy CG-eyesore of a design that had me wanting to rinse my eyes with lye? Oh wow, we've got that too? Ooh, what about some half-hearted 'musical' performances that make Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone look like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? Wow, we've got that too? (Seriously, this movie made me hate Dan Stevens. DAN STEVENS, DAN goddamn "No, I'm going to kill you!" STEVENS. I didn't know that was possible. And kudos to Emma Watson for not sinking into drug-fueled misery after Hermione, but I don't know, maybe rethink some of your choices here) (to be fair, Luke Evans as Gaston was surprisingly good) (Kevin Kline can die in a fire though). And have we talked about that script yet? That scene where they compare their taste in Shakespeare ('Romeo and Juliet? Poppycock! Smart people like Hamlet!') is the kind of dialogue that only someone with 'who wuz William Shakspeers' in their search history could write. Oh and hey, if that weren't enough, I haven't even mentioned the ridiculous Le Fou gay baiting, that plays like 90s-era homophobic comedy, but this time I'm supposed to kiss Bill Condon's perfectly bleached ass for deigning to let Josh Gad flop around like a Liberace cos-player?
This movie is the worst. What a stupid, stupid movie. This movie alone proves that we as a species have nowhere left to go and have earned every bit of the nuclear hellfire that will eventually consume us all. And you know what? This movie's so bad that it's probably going to find a way to survive the nuclear apocalypse, just so that someone thousands of years from now can re-watch it and steer what's left of humanity back into extinction as atonement for their horrendous sins.


So there we have it! I'll try to do all my other lists--acting, directing, screenplays, crafts--within the next couple days, but we'll see how that goes! I'd love to finally get some closure for 2017 as a cinematic year, and would love even more if I could manage to do that before the Oscars (...which are on Sunday).

In the meantime--what'd I get wrong? Right? Let me know!