Gary Shannon’s Top 10 Films of 2016
(Haven’t Seen Yet: 20th Century Woman, Aquarius, Julieta, The Red Turtle, Silence, Toni Erdmann, Your Name)
(Honorable Mentions: The Age of Shadows, The Boy and the Beast, Certain Women, Don’t Breathe, The Edge of Seventeen, Kubo and the Two Strings, The Little Prince, Love & Friendship, Loving, Midnight Special, The Nice Guys, The Neon Demon, Paterson, Storks, Sunset Song, Train to Busan, The Wailing, Zootopia)
Special Mention: La La Land
Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling dance like Fred Astaire in a rare pastiche of classical Hollywood cinema that vilifies millennial optimism. Chazelle doesn’t imitate or serve the musical format of his precursors Donen, Kelly, Minnelli or Walters, but encapsulates it in a breezy and magical romance of postmodern anxiety.
10. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
A hilarious (and touching) contemporary investigation of emotional asceticism. For me, no film this year satirizes, more delicately and hilariously, the modern lunacy of law and order, class and race, media and privatism, and simply people trying coming to terms with the craziness of the world around them.
Advertisement
9. Moonlight
Intoxicating visual flourishes festoon this depiction of inner city romance and sexuality, imagined as a cultural mosaic in Liberty City, Miami. Moonlight is not something to be contemplated but absorbed, the film immerses us into feeling and thought the way it enraptures us into its neon-lit euphoria.
8. Hell or Highwater
A thrilling modern Deep South folk tale about bank-robbers in a declining American culture so anarchic and chaotic that one man’s notion of evil can easily dilute into another’s notion of good. Hell or Highwater is the most accurate portrayal of the corruption festering at the heart of Western values, and a piercingly sympathetic examination of the modern dustbowl calling itself the American working-class.
Advertisement
7. Knight of Cups
Most film critics have labelled Terence Malick as self-indulgent and obscure, but to me it’s only self-indulgent in the way most filmmakers try (and fail) to be more intimate, and obscure in that, unlike most films, Knight of Cups boldly attempts to feel its material instead of blandly attempting to format his ideas into something more digestible or emotionally condescending.
6. Elle
Verhoeven’s films have almost mostly just been appreciated as middlebrow cash-ins (if not loathed as artistic blunders), regarded as little more than conversational faux pas even though they’ve become favorited pop culture keepsakes of modern satire. Elle is his most approved artistic statement to date, not so much an indictment but a ravishing (and darkly humorous) inspection on the mysteries of human desire.
Advertisement
5. The Witch
Bearing a creepy, folkloric charm above its darker, more sinister subtext of Puritan despotism, The Witch displaces the catharsis of the horror genre for a more cerebral experience. His invocation of history (the Salem witch trials) contextualize this lurid family drama against the backdrop of a period in American history where the paranoid dangers of witchcraft and the occult were supplanted by the real dangers of mass hysteria and religious extremism.
4. Manchester by the Sea
Manchester by the Sea is neither conventional, predictable or ordinary, it’s both unexpectedly funny and devastating in moments that don’t seem to call for it, but we still laugh and wince readily at them because they feel so real and like the majority of us Lonergan’s characters don’t questions life’s serendipitous rewards or unforeseen punishments.
3. Green Room
Tyro-auteur Jeremy Saulnier channels the staticky pandemonium of contemporary America’s downturned politics and pits them in a gladiatorial show-down, brandishing its central conflict proudly: Punks Versus Neo-Nazis! Its brand of nihilism seems almost too ne plus ultra in this Trumpian climate of a severed American identity, but Saulnier’s composition of violence is near-perfect, and his humanity (when not de-fleshed) punctures deeply into his material.
2. Our Little Sister
Our Little Sister, a vibrant, poignant and touching film about 4 people bonding upon the death of their estranged father, proves yet again (in a career spanning nearly 30 years) Kore-eda’s capacity to invoke culture and heritage all while transcending them with his omnipresent, universal graces and a flavour of hypnotic, fairy-tale whimsy.
1. The Handmaiden
The Handmaiden is Park Chan-wook’s sumptuous opus of feminine reclamation but, more than that, it’s a tapestry of cinematic tradition and rule-breaking, never gauging his excesses or limits. For all its virtues The Handmaiden is a film almost beyond description, the performances cinematography, production design, and sound conjugate, the result is an absolutely stunning, irreversible catharsis of sight and sound, an indelible feast for the senses and the mind.
What films made your list?
Advertisement
