As with any movie year, it is impossible to identify a single, overarching theme that unites the best films of 2017. In this year of immense political change, there were some films that resonated eerily with contemporary anxieties (Get Out), others that quite deliberately sought to evoke them (Steven Spielberg’s The Post), and many more still that offered an escape, happy or not. At the multiplex, escapism ruled the day; the year’s top ten grossers included the usual assortment of franchise tentpoles and superhero films, some (Wonder Woman) more worthy than others (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2). At the arthouse, the outlook was bleaker: both in the chilly subject matter so frequently on screen and the disappointing quality of much of the work itself. Celebrated auteurs like Terrence Malick and Michael Haneke were running on fumes with their latest films, and the big winner at Cannes, Ruben Ostlund’s The Square, was an empty exercise in sneering satire.
For all that, there was much to celebrate in 2017. And if there is indeed one nebulous quality common to all my favorites, it was a willingness to bridge sensibilities, scramble genres, or confound expectations. The Florida Project brought an unexpected warmth and joy to a story that might have called out for pure despair. With Faces Places, Agnès Varda showed that the French New Wave is still alive and kicking, in a charming, cheerful odyssey across France that doubles as a meditation on art and aging. Darren Aronofsky implausibly brought the surreal fever dream that is Mother! to mainstream audiences, while Christopher Nolan and Edgar Wright stamped their idiosyncratic personal visions onto major blockbusters. And no film mixed genres more effectively or stirred more debate than my number-one pick—a wholly unanticipated and welcome February surprise.
10. Mother!
Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, a cinematic curio that polarized critics, appalled audiences, and spectacularly flopped at the box office, already has the makings of a cult classic. It might be the strangest big studio release of the year: a set-bound psychological thriller, shot largely with handheld cameras in uncomfortably intimate close-ups, that places Hollywood’s current It Girl (Jennifer Lawrence) in a violent, often darkly funny Biblical and ecological allegory. Javier Bardem is the alternately forgiving and wrathful patriarch, Lawrence his long-suffering wife, and a strong supporting cast led by Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer embody the wretched masses of humanity.
Aronofsky is nothing if not ambitious: his film aims to make familiar religious parables strange by placing them in a radically different context, while folding an additional environmental allegory on top. He seems to be inspired by the open-ended metaphorical conceits of Luis Buñuel’s films—think The Exterminating Angel, about a group of dinner guests who inexplicably cannot leave the table—and in its best moments, Mother! captures some of Buñuel’s surreal, anarchic spirit. The movie is not entirely consistent, and the final scene tilts from the clever to the juvenile and irreverent. But the movie is a technical marvel throughout, admirably audacious in both concept and execution, and worthy of inclusion on those merits alone.
9. Baby Driver
It is rare enough these days to find an action blockbuster not derived from an existing franchise; rarer still to find one as purely entertaining and masterfully constructed as Baby Driver. That is not to say that Edgar Wright’s film is wholly original: ever the pastiche artist, Wright lovingly lifts material from movies like Heat and The Driver in this tale of a teenage getaway driver (Ansel Elgort) reluctantly enlisted by an Atlanta mob boss (Kevin Spacey) to run heist jobs with a ragtag group of ex-cons. The movie distinguishes itself through its unconventional mixing of genres, with moments of high comedy juxtaposed with shockingly non-cartoonish violence, and above all in its technique. The opening chase scene is already a classic: a wordless exercise in carefully calibrated tension, with every swerve, skid, and windshield wipe perfectly synced with the retro soundtrack.
8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
The latest film from Martin McDonagh—he of In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths fame—is another mordant, violent, witty black comedy, although this one arguably tips the scales fully toward drama. The premise is certainly no laughing matter: Frances McDormand stars as the angry mother of a rape and murder victim, who puts up three billboards on a lonely stretch of road castigating the local sheriff (Woody Harrelson) for failing to find her killer. When the movie begins, it seems set to be a righteous saga of revenge, but McDonagh keeps complicating it with unexpected nuance. McDormand’s character is no paragon of virtue, Harrelson’s sheriff is a good man beset by a fatal cancer diagnosis, and even his racist brute of an assistant (Sam Rockwell) earns a redemptive character arc. It is a tribute to McDonagh’s gifts as a screenwriter that he can both keep the audience guessing and paint his morality play in so many shades of grey.
The movie occasionally suffers from McDonagh’s writerly faults, too: he is sometimes too enamored of his own voice, putting verbose screeds in the mouths of characters ill suited for them. (An early scene with McDormand and the local priest is especially egregious.) And the movie’s brutal violence is dispensed so casually, even flippantly, that it sometimes verges on the grotesque. But in the end, all the bloodletting does serve a purpose. Far from being a Tarantinoesque revenge fantasy, Three Billboards ultimately argues for ending the cycle of violence to achieve a more lasting civic peace—though it leaves open the question of whether its characters will have the courage to do so.
7. The Lost City of Z
When people complain that “they don’t make them like they used to,” they are probably thinking about a movie like The Lost City of Z: an old-fashioned and intelligent adventure on a grand canvas, made with flesh-and-blood characters and carrying real dramatic weight. A shame, then, that this excellent historical drama, about a British explorer’s search for a fanciful lost city in the Amazon, barely made a blip when it came out this spring.
The movie, based on a 2009 nonfiction bestseller, is the brainchild of writer-director James Gray, a critical darling whose work often recalls the best of 1970s New Hollywood. His latest plays like a cross between David Lean and Werner Herzog, offering both the straightforward thrills of a jungle adventure and the weightier merits of an art film about obsession and delusion. The central figure is Percy Fawcett (a surprisingly good Charlie Hunnam), a British officer whose fervent belief in a lost Amazonian city earns him the mockery of his colleagues and send him on repeated expeditions to prove them wrong. The film takes Fawcett’s quests seriously—he is a heroic figure, not just a foolhardy dreamer—but it also chronicles the toll of his obsession on his family, and on his own sense of judgment. The movie is a stately and somber thing, patient in its pacing but accumulating gravitas as Fawcett makes trip after trip into the heart of darkness. The film’s final passages have a foreboding, lyrical sense of unreality—and the very last shot is one of the most haunting of the year.
6. Lady Bird
The most critically acclaimed film of the year is far from the most ambitious. Much of Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut, covers well-trodden thematic territory: adolescent angst, teenage rebellion, sexual awakenings, and the perennial teenage fear of becoming one’s parents. But Gerwig’s film is a cut above the usual. Movies like this live or die on the details, and Lady Bird gets just about every one right.
Saoirse Ronan plays the titular Lady Bird, née Christine, a spunky and sometimes insufferable senior at a Catholic girls’ school in Sacramento, eager to flee her lower middle class upbringing and overbearing mother (Laurie Metcalf) for the cosmopolitan paradise of New York. The movie hits many of the usual beats for a coming-of-age dramedy—there is stress about college applications, a teenage romance or two, and a climactic scene at senior prom—but it does so with unusual sensitivity, wit, and a wise awareness of the ways that parents and children project their deepest hopes and fears onto each other. Though Lady Bird is the protagonist, the movie is really about her awakening to a world beyond her narrow wants and needs, her growing understanding of—and gratitude for—the friends and family she is at first so eager to leave behind.
In a movie filled with grace notes, two scenes stand out in particular. One is the moment when Sister Sarah Joan (Lois Smith), a nun at Christine’s school who was once the object of her mockery, offers her a gentle, generous life lesson on love and attention. The second comes on a car ride to prom, when Lady Bird embraces a decidedly unhip Dave Matthews song over the objections of the hipster poseurs around her. It’s the turning point of the movie, when Lady Bird learns to embrace her roots, no matter how middle-class or middlebrow they may be. Lady Bird embraces them, too, and it soars.
5. A Quiet Passion
Emily Dickinson’s life story is not one that lends itself naturally to biopic treatment. A semi-recluse whose poetry languished in obscurity during her own lifetime, Dickinson rarely strayed from the company of her close family and the comforts of their Amherst home. Seen from the outside, her life was almost entirely devoid of incident—which only makes Terrence Davies’s A Quiet Passion all the more remarkable an achievement.
Starring a commanding Cynthia Nixon in the lead role, A Quiet Passion offers a complex and contradictory portrait of its subject. The film’s early stretches are full of the zippy, witty dialogue one would expect from a literary period piece, establishing Emily as the kind of free-thinking heroine one might find in an Austen novel, while sketching her friendship with her sister Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle) and their neighbor Vryling (Catherine Bailey). But A Quiet Passion really distinguishes itself during its second, more somber half. As Dickinson withdraws ever more into herself, pushing away her sister and her suitors alike, she becomes a compelling, paradoxical figure: a woman who is steadfast in her convictions but insecure in her own image, free from society’s expectations but curiously repressed, able to see the world more clearly than those around her but unable to participate fully in its life. The movie is a stately study in how pride and independence can curdle into contempt. The young Emily who begins the film in an intellectual rebellion against her family’s Puritan mores ends trapped in an emotional prison of her own making, with poetry her only outlet.
The film is also an apt meeting of subject and artist. Davies, like Dickinson, is an uncompromising master who has gone under-recognized in his own day, and something of an aloof ascetic as well (he has spoken frankly about his struggles as a celibate gay Catholic, and is frequently attracted to emotional loners as subjects). He is also a filmmaker with the rare ability to convey inner emotional states through cinematic language. Two scenes stand out in particular: one, a haunting dreamlike interlude with an overhead perspective of a mystery man ascending to Emily’s chamber; the other, a languid pan across a candle-lit living room, where Emily’s friends and family are gathered in concert as she peers in solitude from the doorway.
4. Dunkirk
For all his critical and commercial success, Christopher Nolan has often been haunted by three familiar complaints: that his films are cold and clinical, with only the most perfunctory expressions of human emotion; that his plots are unnecessarily convoluted, enamored of intricate puzzle box structures; and that his action sequences are incoherent and uninspired. Dunkirk answer Nolan’s detractors on all three counts, while staying true to the qualities that endeared him to viewers in the first place.
On the face of it, Dunkirk offers Nolan his most straightforward plot yet: a recreation of the Allied troops’ pivotal evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk in late May 1940. In a typical Nolan move, however, the director divides the film into three separate threads, depicting the evacuation by air, sea, and land and cutting between the three even though each is occurring over a different time frame. At first, this decision may seem a confusing contrivance, but it pays off: Nolan’s intercutting heightens the intensity of each section and provides one especially jarring moment of dislocation, which instantly causes the viewer to see one character’s actions in a new light.
It is true that Dunkirk’s characters are more chess pieces than fully developed human beings, but that is beside the point: there is no need for elaborate backstory in a film that is fundamentally about the primitive, urgent human need to survive. Nonetheless, the movie is a textbook example of how to develop character through action rather than dialogue. And there is one moment in particular, on the civilian ship captained by Mark Rylance’s character—when an adolescent makes a grown-up decision to lie so as to spare a soldier pain—that counts as one of the most touching human gestures in Nolan’s filmography.
Most importantly, when it comes to action Dunkirk is by far Nolan’s most satisfying film, displaying a more confident command of craft than his memorable but sometimes sloppy Batman movies. Whatever else one may say about it, Dunkirk is quite simply a first-rate war movie: one that often matches the visceral impact of Saving Private Ryan but with only a fraction of the blood and guts.
3. Faces Places
A portrait of the artist as an old lady, Faces Places finds octogenarian filmmaker Agnès Varda, who first cut her teeth at the height of the French New Wave, crisscrossing the country with JR, a 30-something street artist. Together, the unlikely duo take their artistic talents on the road, creating a kind of traveling ethnography of contemporary France as they create larger-than-life portraits of the ordinary citizens they encounter.
Like much of Varda’s work, Faces Places is characterized by an airy, casual tone that disguises its quite serious concerns: aging, the transience of memory, and the shifting paradigms of working-class life chief among them. The film is both a rewarding exercise in artistic collaboration and a tribute to the individual artist at its core. If this is indeed Varda’s last film, it will be a fitting swan song. (See my full review here).
2. The Florida Project
“Celebrate good times, come on!” blares the music over the opening credits of Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. This may seem a strange choice for a film about childhood poverty, single motherhood, and family breakdown in the Sunshine State, but it is a fitting initiation into a film that refuses to treat any of these subjects in a predictable way.
The Florida Project is set at the Magic Castle, one in a cluster of cheap motels on the outskirts of Disney World; it follows the day-to-day life of the impoverished families who make this land of strip malls and swamps their home. There is an obvious juxtaposition at the heart of the film—the fantasy paradise of Disney World existing side-by-side with the hardscrabble poverty next door—but Baker complicates it at every turn. The movie’s color palette is consistently sunny and vibrant, and its episodic early stretches suggest how the simple joys of childhood can be accessed no matter one’s upbringing. Baker brings a playful, childlike perspective to the scenes of the kids exploring their world, and he elicits an endearing and natural performance from the six year-old Brooklynn Prince.
Yet The Florida Project is not some starry-eyed ode to childhood innocence; it offers an unsparing (and often unpleasant) look at the broken social fabric in which its characters live. The movie is full of irresponsible adults making poor decisions and children who act out in obnoxious and destructive ways, seemingly doomed to repeat the cycle. What makes this all tolerable is the warm humanism that animates the entire film, embodied most visibly in the kind-hearted, over-worked but endlessly patient motel manager played by Willem Dafoe (cast against type in one of the best performances of his career). Squint just a little at the character, and you can see a surrogate for the director himself: a man who may be infuriated and exasperated by his subjects, but who extends them his love and empathy all the same.
1. Get Out
The year’s best film and biggest surprise came early: rolling into theaters in February with little advance notice and leaving a trail of hype in its wake, Get Out instantly generated the kind of water-cooler debate that vanishingly few American studio releases can command. What was this film, anyway: a cringe comedy about racial anxieties, dressed up in the trappings of a horror film? A bizarre mashup of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The culminating satire of the Obama era, or just one man’s deeply personal waking nightmare?
In truth, Get Out is all of the above; above all, it is the brainchild of writer-director Jordan Peele, one half of the sketch comedy duo Key & Peele. The movie’s basic premise could be pitched as a comedy skit: a wealthy young white woman (Allison Williams) brings her black boyfriend (Daniel Kaluuya) home for the weekend to meet her parents, whose eager profession of progressive shibboleths (“I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could!”) masks a sordid sci-fi scheme to exploit, and effectively enslave, African Americans through mind control. In lesser hands, the movie could have been a one-note send-up of liberal hypocrisy, or a strained allegory of the sins of white America. Peele avoids both traps, filling out a sketchy scenario with imaginative visual conceits while deftly mixing tones, styles, and genres into one hard-to-categorize but impossibly entertaining package.
Get Out works in the best traditions of both horror and comedy, code-switching naturally between the two while drawing out both genres’ potential for subversive social commentary. The movie wears its cinematic influences on its sleeve—think George Romero, The Stepford Wives, and Kubrick’s The Shining for starters—but it is far more than the sum of its cinematic callbacks. Peele’s film is rife with inspired and resonant images of its own, from the nightmarish void of the Sunken Place to the midnight sprint of a possessed groundskeeper. Yet for all these otherworldly touches, Get Out is at its most unsettling when it is grounded in familiar social reality. The arresting opening visually echoes the death of Trayvon Martin, for instance, and much of the film’s disquieting dread comes from its characters’ subtle diversions from expected social behaviors. Peele has a sharp ear for the ways in which members of different races and classes relate to each other, and his script cleverly subverts those social expectations to chilling (and often funny) effect. In one already famous scene, for instance, he derives immense tension from the linguistic distinction between “tattle-tale” and “snitch.”
Many a forgotten Oscar hopeful has strived for relevance by trying to make a statement about race; most have retreated to the comforting conventions of Great Man biopics or historical parables. Get Out, by contrast, feels vitally of the moment. Much like Spike Lee’s seminal Do the Right Thing, Peele’s debut is a surefooted entertainment that asks uneasy questions about race in America without providing easy answers, a film that implicates the audience but does not insult it. The laughs catch in your throat, the scares cause jolts of recognition—and the whole film lingers in your mind long after it is over.