Best of 2017

2017 was a fantastic year for movies. Narrowing and rearranging my favorite movies of the year was a nearly impossible task. I can honestly say that the top dozen (or more) could have legitimately contended for the top spot, though the one that ended up there was firmly entrenched from the first time I saw it. So, humbly, I offer the top 17 of '17.

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17. It Comes at Night (Trey Edwards Shults)
If Krisha, the great debut from Trey Edward Shults (#7 on my 2016 list), was a horror movie couched in the veneer of a family drama, then his latest might have simply flipped that approach. It Comes at Night looks and feels like a typical horror movie, but it's more concerned with the dynamics within and between two families than it is with whatever actually comes at night.

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16. Faces Places (Agnès Varda and J.R.)

It must certainly be the case that Agnès Varda--French New Wave pioneer and patron saint of all things good in the world--and photographer J.R. were 2017's cinematic odd couple. The story seems quaint: Varda and J.R. take larger-than-life sized photographs of villagers and plaster them on the sides of building walls. But as the travelogue continues, the cumulative effect reveals something deeper and it's not an accident that the film steers toward the retrospective, both melancholic (her failed reunion with fellow New Waver, Jean-Luc Godard) and exalted (her and J.R.'s recreation of that famous Louvre scene in JLG's Band of Outsiders).

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15. Baby Driver (Edgar Wright)

There was sadness in some circles when Edgar Wright left the production of Ant Man due to creative differences. With few exceptions, though, I would rather see directors I like not tie up their time and creative energy working on franchise installments and instead work on projects that express their own visions. So while his Ant Man may have been a solid entry into the MCU, Baby Driver shows Wright in his element, editing and choreographing all his action to his soundtrack. Like his previous work, the movie is musical without necessarily being a musical. He should probably go ahead and just make a musical.

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14. Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Every year there is a movie that I feel would place higher had I more time to consider it. It was the movie I screened the latest among the entries here and I only got a chance to see it once. Most of PTA's work gets richer with multiple viewings and this is no exception. But what's there at first blush is a craft as meticulous as his Reynolds Woodcock, the fashion designer at the center of this story, whose world is sent akimbo after wooing a pretty young waitress. Daniel Day-Lewis is... well, Daniel Day-Lewis and a great (and perhaps last) performance is to be expected. But, like her character, Vicky Krieps matches him blow-for-blow, and the result is a delicious unraveling of her sparring partner. It's crazy and at times hilarious, thoroughly unbefitting the apparent stuffiness of its subject matter.

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13. Get Out (Jordan Peele)

Independent of its place in everyone's year-end rankings or of the amount of gold and bronze statues it wins, Get Out might be the movie that ends up defining the year 2017 in movies. It has been at the forefront of the movie conversation since its release very early in the year. It's easy to see why, as it cleverly distills the larger anxiety about race in this country (particularly that of the past few years) into the specific story of a black man about to meet the family of his white girlfriend. Both funny and unnerving, it also may mark the presence of a new auteur, Jordan Peele, whose previous TV work, while brilliant in its own right, didn't necessarily foreshadow this sophisticated a work.

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12. Good Time (Josh and Benny Safdie)
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Robert Pattinson continues to move further and further away from his teen idol image with one of the best performances of the year as Connie Nikas, who after a bank robbery gone awry, tries to save his mentally disabled brother after being caught by the police.With laser focus, Connie manages both to get closer and further away from his goals, smooth talking his way in and out of trouble, while simultaneously escalating each situation to the highest of stakes. We're at the point now where we live in a world where two-thirds of the Twilight triangle turned out to actually be great actors.

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11. Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes)
Haynes has made a career out of recreating 20th century Americana. In this way, Wonderstruck may be the most Todd Haynes movie he's ever made, as it tells two parallel stories set in and eventually converging in old New York City, one in 1927 and the other in 1977. The period detail here is striking and it's as good as anything Haynes has done in evoking its historical setting. The stories converge through the connection of two children looking for absent or distant parents and as we move into the top 10, that kind of spectral presence seems to guide many of the movies: sometimes in merely a figurative sense, but also, as we'll eventually see, a more literal one.

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10. Okja (Bong Joon-ho)

Part cautionary ecological tale, part prison break, part Spielbergian creature fable, few filmmakers can make a movie that varies wildly in tone as Okja does work, yet somehow Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho manages to do so. I can see this not working for a lot of people and, frankly, I could take or leave some of the broader performances. But at the center is the moving tale of a girl and her best friend, and the lengths she will go to keep them from being apart.

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9. Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison)

In 1978, over 500 silent film reels were discovered underground in Dawson City, Canada, existing as part of the Yukon permafrost since their thoroughly unceremonious burial in 1929. The great found-footage documentarian Bill Morrison assembles these treasures to not only tell the story of Dawson City, but the history of early cinema as well. And like the city itself, which at once flourished during a gold rush, but has oftentimes seen time pass it by, these images show a resilience that resists its own inherently ephemeral quality.

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8. Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan)
I'll admit that after the first viewing, while admiring much of the visual execution, the complicated narrative structure--certainly a Nolan hallmark--left me a little cold. But it was not so after a rewatch, as its unbalanced triptych of gradually intersecting storylines ratchets up the tension of the rescue and evacuation. It is perhaps Nolan's most elegant integration of his narrative proclivities with the story he's telling.

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7. Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas)
The most thrilling sequence for me in all of 2017 is nothing more than a series of texts sent between Kristen Stewart and an unknown source during a train ride. Much of this ghost story has that same eerie elusiveness, as Assayas keeps moving things just out of arms reach, both from Maureen (Stewart, in her second brilliant collaboration with the director) and his audience.

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6. The Florida Project (Sean Baker)

A movie about the dirt poor, semi-homeless population that lives in the shadow of Disney World seems like it should reek of poverty porn. But Baker, as he did with his previous Tangerine, manages to overflow his movie with life and color. He's aided and abetted by his two non-professional leads, Brooklynn Prince as the precocious Moonee, six-year old daughter to Bria Vinaite's Halley, a single mother who's barely keeping things together. And Willem Dafoe, in one of his most charming performances, is the manager of the candy-colored motel, The Magic Castle, where he has to be both the warm-hearted granddad and stern school principle. I live very close to Disney World, to the point that the second time I watched this movie was at the theater on Disney property where I watch most movies and often drive past many of the locations shown here. It's a sobering reminder of the things that surround us everyday yet we constantly ignore.

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5. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig)

Though Gerwig's solo directing debut isn't strictly autobiographical, it certainly plays as memoir. And while each moment endured by her heroine is tenderly observed, they are cut together with such pace as if they were a flood of memories, taking the length of time your senior year feels like only after having left it. One scene of heartbreak jumps immediately to a scene of triumph and back and forth. Remarkably, none of it feels like melodrama. Gerwig (and one of the best ensembles of the year) manages to make the feelings as raw and grounded as the performances she herself built throughout her acting career. To misquote a bit of dialogue, I just wanted this to be the best version of this movie it could be. And it was.

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4. Columbus (Kogonada)
The feature debut from respected video essayist Kogonada proves that his eye for creating his own images is as strong as his eye is for curating those of the filmmakers he examines. His tale of two people torn between familial obligation and personal ambition has the pacing and tone of the best Ozu. Yet while his aesthetic owes a great deal to that titan of 20th century cinema, his thematic concerns are firmly of the present. That dichotomy is mirrored by its setting--Columbus, Indiana--a place so quiet and seemingly middle-of-nowhere that somehow also became a locus of modern architecture. Haley Lu Richardson graduates from the supporting roles she's mainly played in the past to play a young woman who can't decide if doing something greater is needed or even wanted. John Cho, in one of the rare leading roles for an Asian American man, is pulled in the opposite direction: forced to come "home," when all he's ever cared about is staying away.

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3. A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies)
"Live as a woman for a week... You will find it neither congenial nor trivial." The single best perfomance in 2017 was Cynthia Nixon's portrayal of Emily Dickinson. Though her life seemed to become more and more insular as she aged, neither the movie nor Nixon regards her reclusiveness with pity so much as curiosity, as her writing provides the solace that eludes her in life. In fact as the title suggests, her solitude does not necessarily mean detachment, and it belies a fiery wit that challenges all who come across her.

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2. The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola)

Even though Coppola's latest has a more straightforward plot than anything she's done since probably her debut, The Beguiled possesses all the hallmarks of her work: the languid pace and mood, the muted pastels, the exploration of characters who have reached the crossroads on their privileged ennui. Other writers have discussed, both positively and negatively, about Coppola's elision of a black character in the original story set at the end of the Civil War and of her consistent focus on a white-only version of womanhood, so, for here anyway, I'll leave it to those better thinkers. But I will say that the movie doesn't fail to acknowledge the complicity these women and girls share in their predicament and the way that it leads them inexorably to their collective fates.

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1. A Ghost Story (David Lowery)
In a year of great movies, the one that has refused to leave me is the story of a ghost that, ironically, refuses to leave the spot he once called home. That the hand of fate is cruel enough to keep him in that purgatory upon his death is painful enough, but gets worse once the living continue to live, making him but a (mostly) passive observer.

From the fragility of the images in Faces Places and Dawson City: Frozen Time to the aspirational permanence of the art created and admired in Phantom Thread and Columbus; from Kristen Stewart waiting to hear from her dead brother in Personal Shopper to the ghost of Casey Affleck waiting to be released from his cosmic prison in A Ghost Story, the best movies of 2017, no matter where or when they were set, seemed to feel the weight and urgency of the present, a collective plea to understand the blip of time we have as humans on this Earth and to figure out what the hell we want to do with it.

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And just for fun, since it was such a great year, 17 honorable mentions:

18. Thelma (Joachim Trier)

19. Gook (Justin Chon)

Directed and starring another Twilight alum. Go figure.

20. Raw (Julia Ducournau)

The best of several 2017 cannibal movies. Go figure.

21. Your Name. (Makoto Shinkai)

22. The Post (Steven Spielberg)

23. Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino)

24. All These Sleepless Nights (Michal Marczak)

25. War for the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves)

26. Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson)

Remember when I said I don't like my young auteurs being co-opted by franchises? This is the exception.

27. After the Storm (Hirokazu Koreeda)

28. Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman)

29. The Lost City of Z (James Gray)

30. Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler)

31. The Unknown Girl (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

32. Princess Cyd (Stephen Cone)

33. The Ornithologist (João Pedro Rodrigues)

34. Pitch Perfect 3 (Trish Sie)

They say it's the last one, and I have many thoughts on how and why the series could keep going. But I'll spare you.