I love top ten lists, but sometimes I struggle with them. Sometimes films don’t align themselves as well or as comfortably as I’d like. There were many great films that I liked. Many were sad, funny, illuminating, challenging. I’ve found myself more easily provoked this year than normal, hoping to find comfort in the movie theater where I couldn’t find it in the national news. So this year, instead of a Top Ten, I’m writing about my fifteen favorites, a non-ranked, alphabetically listed group of films that I adored. I’ll confess, this year I did not do well with watching documentaries (none showcased here). I managed to miss BPM (Beats Per Minute) AND didn’t get a chance to see The Post before the list was composed. Maybe most calamitous to some is that I didn’t overwhelmingly love Get Out. But there were plenty of things that I did like a lot, and that’s these fifteen films here. In my first full year writing at Decent Maybe, these were the ones that stuck with me the most.
The Big Sick
Directed by Michael Showalter
Original Review
Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon’s love story is both perfect for a movie and yet unlike any romantic comedy seen in years. The Big Sick starts like When Harry Met Sally… but evolves into something much more interesting. Nanjiani plays himself and Zoe Kazan plays Emily, a young woman who dates Kumail, then breaks up with him and then ends up in a coma with Kumail waiting desperately for her to wake up. The fact that The Big Sick avoids any and all melodrama or maudlin dramatics is a testament to its strong script (by Nanjiani and Gordon), which earns its sentimentality and especially earns its laughs. It also owes a lot to a great cast which also includes Holly Hunter, Ray Romano, Zenobia Shroff and Anupam Kher.
Call Me By Your Name
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
Original Review
Equipped with a script from none other than James Ivory and based on a best-selling novel by André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name is a stunning, patient love story about a young boy (played by Timothée Chalamet) who meets a man (played by Armie Hammer) who stirs in him feelings and emotions he’s never encountered before. Director Luca Guadagnino is a director who worships sex in all images, not even fruit are safe from his camera’s lustful eye. Collaborating with Ivory, Guadagnino is making his least carnal film, but the overflowing nature of passion still bursts through in the images and the performances. Chalamet’s powerful, heartbreaking turn as a smart, talented boy undone by his romantic urges is the movie’s guiding light, but a pitch-perfect supporting turn from Michael Stuhlbarg also brings the house down.
Dunkirk
Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan
Original Review
Intricate editing structures aside, Dunkirk is the most straightforward movie Christopher Nolan has made since his debut, Following. Its bare-bones narrative – following several participants in the failed Allied battle of Dunkirk – gives the audience a sense of war not seen in many films. The movie strips away the usual glorification of World War II carnage, and instead cherishes what actual soldiers value most: survival. Cut with feverish tension and shot on an expansive 70MM format, Dunkirk is the year’s most impressive filmmaking achievement, a technical wonder that still manages a narrative that’s captivating and true. Its simplification of wartime perseverance is deceptive, it’s actually a purveyor of complex human emotions.
The Florida Project
Directed by Sean Baker
Original Review
In his first film since the 2015 masterpiece Tangerine, Sean Baker tones it down with The Florida Project, an equally masterful look at an unconventional family living in Kissimmee, Florida. Baker’s view of poverty, family and empathy is unlike any American filmmaker working today, and The Florida Project is the culmination of his work. Led by six-year-old actress Brooklyn Kimberly Prince and including the brilliant Willem Defoe in one of his greatest performances, the film imagines childhood perfectly, particularly the blinders that kids can have in the face of a crippling reality. Losing Jonathan Demme this year was a tragedy for cinema, in his absence, Sean Baker seems poised to take the title of Best American Humanist Director.
Free Fire
Directed by Ben Wheatley
Original Review
Ben Wheatley’s 90-minute bottle episode of a film takes the best of Scorsese, Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, and condenses it into one shootout inside an empty Boston warehouse. A packed cast including Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy, Sharlto Copley and Armie Hammer (amongst others) plays a variety of shady characters violently trying to survive a night in which a high-stakes arms deal goes completely wrong. The film’s script (written by Wheatley and his writing partner/wife Amy Jump) is a rolling display of quips and curse words, crafting what is actually one of the year’s smartest comedies wrapped in one of the most shockingly violent films of the year. For the first time, I felt Wheatley found a desired middle ground for his taste of ultraviolence, and boy did he pick the right film to put it in.
Girls Trip
Directed by Malcolm D. Lee
Original Review
This ensemble comedy earns a hard R rating and boasts the strong cast of Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith and Tiffany Haddish. The film’s foul language and explicit content certainly thrills, but I was not expecting just how much heart this movie was going to pull off. Its laughs are shocking and plentiful, and its incessant need to please pays off in lots of ways, including a surprise dance-off, a horrifyingly public bathroom accident and a certain sex act with a cantaloupe that literally cannot be explained without witnessing it. Haddish’s breakout performance has gained well-deserved raves, but all four actresses perform perfectly in this hilarious film.
Graduation
Directed by Cristian Mingiu
Original Review
This working class drama about a father who will stop at nothing to get his daughter into Cambridge University rumbles with suffocating tension. Adrian Titieni plays a doctor living in modern-day Romania whose daughter’s shot at a scholarship is jeopardized when she’s attacked the day before her exam. Cristian Mingiu’s latest film is a slow burn thriller about the lengths a parent will go to protect their children. With stark, powerful cinematography, Mingiu never allows the audience to get comfortable, never allows you to be sure that the protagonist’s actions are entirely for the best. Titieni might be giving the performance of the year, while Mingiu paints a picture of Romania that seems none too inviting.
I Am Not Your Negro
Directed by Raoul Peck
Original Review
If America allowed itself a reckoning of its horrid record of racial injustice, I Am Not Your Negro would be an essential place to start pondering. The film focuses on the legendary author and civil rights spokesman James Baldwin, in all ways a brilliant writer and mind, a tectonic force in American literature and society. Director Raoul Peck uses parts of his final, unpublished manuscript (read with a sharp brilliance by Samuel L. Jackson) to draw a direct line straight through American history, displaying centuries of racial hatred and persecution. Showing how black men and women have often been the first sacrificed in the name of racial harmony. It’s hard to go wrong with Baldwin’s text, but Peck’s film is so vibrantly relevant and so beautifully told, it is essential viewing.
Lady Bird
Directed by Greta Gerwig
Original Review
Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird is a phenomenally-assembled collection of moments from a girl’s senior year of high school. That girl, the titular “Lady Bird” McPherson, is played by Saoirse Ronan. Like Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name, Ronan plays a teenager with such astonishing clarity, such bare vulnerability. Gerwig’s note-perfect script and Ronan’s performance end up telling the well-worn high school story we’ve all seen before, but the two do it in such a unique, poignant way. Throw in the year’s best ensemble, which includes Tracy Letts, Lois Smith, Chalamet himself, Beanie Feldstein, Lucas Hedges and an especially great Laurie Metcalf as Lady Bird’s worn-thin mother, and you have the year’s most delightful cinematic experience.
The Lost City of Z
Directed by James Gray
Original Review
James Gray’s classical epic about Percy Fawcett, a man who dedicated his life to finding a lost civilization in South America, is end-to-end cinematic beauty. With cinematographer Darius Khondji, Gray crafts a gorgeous tapestry of colors in light, whether he is in the dangerous depths of the Amazon or the ornate estates of rural England. Fawcett is played by Charlie Hunnam; his quixotic quest lasts most of his adult life, and manages to consume his time and the life of his family. Gray’s tale of obsession is a truly intoxicating cinematic journey, equipped with thrills, laughs, beauty and blood. Sienna Miller, Angus Macfadyen, and Robert Pattinson give strong supporting work as well, but Gray and his wondrous eye are the true star of this picture.
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
Written and Directed by Noah Baumbach
Original Review
Baumbach’s ensemble family dramedy is maddeningly good, packed with his usual array miscalculated judgment and overall poor behavior. Adam Sandler, Elizabeth Marvel and Ben Stiller play siblings irreparably damaged by a clinically narcissistic patriarch played by Dustin Hoffman. The film makes countless meaningful insights about the frustrating nature of family and the small choices we make that often have much larger consequences. The ensemble (which also includes Rebecca Miller, Emma Thompson and Grace Van Patten) are all mannered and idiosyncratic, perfectly distilling Baumbach’s flair for offbeat comedy. His best since The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach manages to make a smart, sad comedy without over-complicating with his usual rage.
Our Souls at Night
Directed by Ritesh Batra
(no original review)
Getting Robert Redford and Jane Fonda back together seems like a good idea, but it also feels too easy. Our Souls at Night simply shouldn’t have been this good. The two play longtime neighbors who’ve mostly been strangers to one another before beginning a relationship that starts off as platonic but grows into something real, true and even surprising. Director Ritesh Batra crafts a calm, patient film, almost strictly for the display of its two stars, while the script (by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, based on a novel by Kent Haruf) weaves a tale of tale of heartbreak and redemption. This simple but tantalizing movie shows us the glory of old Hollywood in a new Hollywood light, and proves that Redford and Fonda still have something to bring to the big screen.
Phantom Thread
Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Original Review
American master Paul Thomas Anderson crafts this strange, beautiful ode to love and fashion with the help of legendary actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Alongside newcomer Vicky Krieps and veteran Lesley Manville, Day-Lewis completes a brilliant, forceful acting trifecta within the year’s most intoxicating film. A smart, funny script which hides a sinister, occasionally absurd underbelly, Anderson proves once again how unique a voice he is in cinema. Equipped with exquisite clothing (from costume designer Mark Bridges) and backed by the year’s best original score (by Johnny Greenwood), Phantom Thread enchants, humors and seduces the audience into a wonderful state while always making sure that you never get too comfortable.
The Salesman
Directed by Asghar Farhadi
Original Review
This Best Foreign Language Oscar winner reached American theaters in January, just in time for Trump’s executive travel ban which would exclude director Asghar Farhadi from attending the very ceremony in which he won his second Academy Award. The story was as newsworthy as The Salesman is phenomenal. Like his 2012 film, A Separation, Farhadi finds deep suspense in the everyday trials of our lives. In this, an actor and his wife must deal with the fallout after she is attacked. The attack has consequences, both within their lives and with others. The actions and reactions create a ripple effect of pain and anguish, in a way that once again proves that Farhadi is amongst our age’s greatest dramatists.
The Square
Directed by Ruben Ostlünd
Original Review
Ruben Ostlünd’s follow-up to Force Majeure was no disappointment. Apparent again was the ferocious, unyielding eye for satire, and this time the victim is the modern art world. Claes Bang plays the curator of a famous Swedish museum, surrounded by privilege and completely insulated from the lower classes that reach up toward him. The Square is a funny, unsparing look at a man unwilling to truly understand his surroundings. When he tries to breach his class status, his usually calm, affluent lifestyle gets threatened by those he’s spent his entire life pretending were invisible. Elisabeth Moss plays an American journalist ready to puncture the curator’s well-sealed bubble, while Terry Notary plays an ape man, a prized exhibition in the museum. They all come together to paint an exciting, occasionally absurd portrait of the intellectual class.
Honorable Mention: Personal Shopper, A Fantastic Woman, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Battles of the Sexes, Coco, Stronger