Nathanael Hood’s Top Ten Film’s of 2016
11. American Honey
For the record, I don’t actually think that Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, a road trip movie about a runaway teenager who joins a roving magazine sales crew, is the eleventh best film of 2016. To be perfectly honest, I still haven’t made up my mind if I like the film, let alone whether or not I think it’s “good.” But I had to put the film up here because I’ve spent more time thinking about it than every other movie of 2016 combined. American Honey consumed my mind in a way few films ever had. For that reason, I feel compelled to include it on my Best of the Year list.
Earlier this year I wrote on American Honey within the larger context of Arnold’s work. You can find that article here:
10. The Nice Guys
In terms of sheer, unbridled fun and entertainment, no other film in 2016 was quite as satisfying as Shane Black’s The Nice Guys. It’s dark, violent, pulpy joy from start to finish. From the very first few scenes it’s obvious that this was the film Black had prepared his whole life to make, re-purposing the buddy cop formula he perfected in his Lethal Weapon screenplays as well as the neo-noir stylings of his directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005). If you removed the comedy from it—of course, why would you want to?—the film could work as a compelling detective story in its own right. Plus, it’s always fun to see Russell Crowe taking the piss out of his tough guy image.
9. Kubo and the Two Strings
Studio Laika’s Kubo and the Two Strings, a fantasy film set in ancient Japan following a young boy who can control paper with his enchanted shamisen, plays like a classic Hollywood serial operating with the same mythopoetic narrative logic as Star Wars: a grand quest through mysterious lands, a dizzying array of villains, a host of lovable sidekicks, and a fully realized fictional universe dense with beauty and magic. I’ve heard some people refer to it as the best unofficial adaptation of the Legend of Zelda video games ever made. There may be something to this claim—especially one sequence where Kubo gets rescued from an underwater eyeball creature that seems ripped out of a N64 game—but at its core, the film is a portrait of grief and loss as seen through the eyes (or eye) of a child. Though some of the plot developments are predictable, it doesn’t cheat any of its emotions. I wish more Western animated movies did likewise.
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8. TIE: Arrival/Rogue One
In a year of so many big budget blockbuster disasters, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival and Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One: A Star Wars Story were reminders that at least some people in Hollywood still know how to make large-scale sci-fi extravaganzas. Arrival, a cerebral film about first contact, may be the first blockbuster to ever revolve around the heady topic of linguistics. But even if Villeneuve’s non-linear narrative acrobatics throw viewers off, the film can still be appreciated as a devastating yet hopeful tale about empathy and cooperation. On the other hand, Rogue One might be the most satisfying Star Wars movie since Return of the Jedi (1983)—if only because, unlike The Force Awakens (2015), it was bold enough to attempt its own identity and not just ape the best bits from A New Hope (1977) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980). After an admittedly rocky first act, the film buckles in for some of the best thrills and action seen on the big screen in quite some time. Arrival and Rogue One both prove that experimentation and innovation need not be anathema to Hollywood spectacle films.
7. Swiss Army Man
Ever wonder what a Charlie Kaufman film would be like if he had an actual sense of humor? Outrageous and unpredictable, Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s Swiss Army Man plays like a lucid absinthe phantasm, using the simple premise of a man trapped on a deserted island with a dead body to examine existential queries the likes of which would make Terrence Malick green with envy. I spent the entire film with my jaw on the floor, incapable of believing what I was seeing. How could two directors who had never made a feature-length film before be this smart, this clever, this audacious? I saw so many half-baked, self-conceited art films this year by filmmakers who thought they were making grandiose statements about life, the universe, and everything by being as obtuse, esoteric, and transgressive as possible. Who could have imagined they would all be blown out of the water by a film where Daniel Radcliffe plays a talking corpse with an erect penis that doubles as a compass whose postmortem farts were powerful and plentiful enough for Paul Dano to ride him like a jet-ski to civilization?
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6. Hell or High Water
We critics really need to start paying more attention to Taylor Sheridan. If his back-to-back screenplays for Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015) and David Mackenzie’s neo-Western Hell or High Water are any indications, he might be well on his way to becoming the single most significant screenwriter in America since Paul Schrader. Hell or High Water is a gloomy, heavy film that sits upon your brain for weeks after you see it. Set in the poverty-stricken parts of rural America that Hollywood likes to ignore, it’s more than just a magnificent cops-and-robbers thriller: it repurposes the tenants of the Western genre for a new millennium. The West has been won, but for what cost? If civilization was the salvation of the early settlers, then crime is the salvation of their great-grand-children, the detritus of the Great Recession. There’s more than a little Old Testament in Hell or High Water: forgiveness can only come by way of a bullet. Also: a role hasn’t been more tailor-made for Jeff Bridges since The Big Lebowski (1998); it’s his post-Dude apotheosis.
“Part of what makes Jackie so extraordinary is that it is a movie about America that could never have been made by Americans: Larraín, a native Chilean, intuitively understood that every four years, the American people elect their new king and queen. And few American queens captivated the world as much as Jackie, a woman equal parts at ease with being a homemaker, a fashion icon, a diplomat, a mother, and an icy enigma. Recreating her famous interview with Theodore H. White of Life magazine at her home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts shortly after her husband’s assassination, Jackie is both a devastating portrait of grief and loss as well as a curious meditation on the need for myths. Must America have royalty? And if it does, to what extent should that same royalty protect its own legacy?”
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“To say it’s Loach’s best film in years, if not decades, is not understatement. Here is a film with the outraged fire of youth curated with the skill of a master craftsman.”
3. Shin Godzilla
“So imagine my surprise to discover that Shin Godzilla is not only thoroughly coherent, but quite possibly the best Godzilla film since the first one in 1954. Shin Godzilla nails the proper spectacle, tone, and emotions one would expect from a film where a monster named after God arises from the depths and wreaks havoc on a unsuspecting humanity.”
2. 13th
I usually don’t put documentaries on my year end Best Of lists; I have a separate list devoted solely to them. (Otherwise I’m sure David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s Tickled and Keith Maitland’s Tower would have already shown up by now.) But something about Ava DuVernay’s 13th felt special. A breath-taking, harrowing examination of the US criminal justice system and how it used a loophole in the 13th Amendment to justify over a century of mass incarceration, the film is as necessary as it is prescient. When I first saw it premiere back in September at the New York Film Festival, the extended sequences featuring snippets of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign speeches juxtaposed against footage of the Civil Rights Movement were terrifying enough. But now they seem like a grim confirmation of a continuing reinforcement of white supremacy against America’s minorities. And yet DuVernay chose to end her film on images and scenes of hope. 13th is more than just a superb documentary, it’s downright essential viewing for the dark years ahead, both as a tool to inform the masses and a sermon promising something greater than we can possibly imagine. But only if we stay alert and vigilant.
1. Paterson
Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson may not be the most entertaining film of 2016. It might not be the smartest or the cleverest or the funniest. But it was the one film I kept returning to in my mind as this miserable year dragged on. Why do I love Paterson? Because it’s the anti-2016. Gentle, calm, and peaceful, Jarmusch’s simple tale about a week in the life of a Paterson, New Jersey bus driver also named Paterson (Adam Driver) was like a glimpse into a world that could and should be. It’s a world curiously absent of dread of malice, a world where all the paupers are poets and, perhaps as importantly, all the poets are paupers. It’s a world of respectful cultural fluidity; a world where Iranian housewives dream of country music and Japanese businessmen dream of William Carlos Williams. And through it all there’s an unspoken sadness just beneath the surface; a sadness which propels its characters to love and support each other in good times and bad. Paterson is everything American cinema should aspire to be—creative and earnest, hopeful yet realistic, with just a touch of magic thrown in. And even more than that, Paterson is everything America as a country should aspire to be, too.
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