It was a strange year for movies, just as it was a strange (to put it mildly) year for the U.S. What looked, at times, to be a year somehow lacking, without a breakaway phenomenon—like Moonlight or La La Land last year—gradually revealed itself to be chock-full of smaller, varied pleasures. And there was no post-Labor Day crowding of prestige films, either; winter, spring, and summer releases all made it onto this list.
Despite all our justified despair, 2017 was in fact pretty fruitful, at least in terms of cinema. So fruitful, alas, that some wonderful, deserving films had to be left out of this post‚ like The Shape of Water, a very close No. 11; or the excellent animated feature Your Name; or the wistful World War II drama Their Finest. But the 10 chosen below do, I think, fairly represent my absolute favorites, films that soothed, startled, moved, and illuminated during dark and difficult times.
10. Beatriz at Dinner
Director Miguel Arteta and writer Mike White’s latest collaboration premiered at Sundance in the shell-shocked first days after the presidential inauguration, giving the film an eerie timeliness. As a biting and ultimately devastating plaint about an economic system grown sociopathically rapacious with greed, it’s almost too much to bear. And yet, it’s also cathartically bruising to watch the film’s title character hurl her disgust at a Trumpian billionaire when they wind up, through a mundane twist of fate, at the same nightmarish dinner party. As played by Salma Hayek, zen-calm massage therapist Beatriz is a vessel of collective outrage while also maintaining her individuality, a keenly wrought sense of self. Hayek’s is an earthy, aching performance—one of the best of the year—that’s complemented well by John Lithgow as the opposition, and Connie Britton and Chloë Sevigny as other witless guests. White’s script is a boldly downbeat descent, given poetic body by Arteta’s watchful, gentle filmmaking. A caveat: Beatriz at Dinner does not aim to comfort. There may be some relief in seeing Beatriz go to bat for us, but, as the film argues, we all still may go down swinging in the end, toppling into the abyss. Either way, it’s good to see someone try. The film’s most piercingly telling, damning observation is that it’s the lone woman of color in the room, struggling against an implacable enemy, who’s the only one doing the trying.
9. A Ghost Story
Anyone who’s ever lain awake at night, contemplating mortality—so, I’d think pretty much everyone—should find something validating in David Lowery’s experimental wonder of a film. Intimate and expansive, A Ghost Story follows, well, a ghost—white sheet with eye holes cut out and all—as it lingers in its former home, new owners coming and going, time relentlessly passing. There’s something terrifying about Lowery’s vision, how (with the help of Daniel Hart’s enveloping soundtrack) it captures the vast, howling churn of the universe swallowing up and forgetting one lonely soul, like it will someday do to us. It’s heavy, existentially bleak stuff. Yet as he also showed in his wonderful Disney family film Pete’s Dragon, Lowery has a generosity of spirit that rescues A Ghost Story from being an outright bummer. Instead, the film is insisting and clarifying, a hand held out in support, in mutual fear and awe and confusion. I’ve never seen a movie quite like it, and I don’t know that I will again before all this is over and I’ve moved on to wherever it is we go next. Sigh.
8. Princess Cyd
As kind a movie as there was this year, writer-director Stephen Cone’s tiny, deeply felt character study is modest, thoughtful, and decent. It’s a story of family connection and self-realization that’s never cloying or preachy, which is hard to do. Yet Cone, quietly asserting himself as a major talent, more than pulls it off, with the immeasurable help of his two lead actresses: Jessie Pinnick and the remarkable Rebecca Spence. Pinnick plays the title character, a teenage girl with a tragic past who travels to Chicago to spend a few summer weeks with her aunt, a celebrated novelist and academic with an active religious life, played with abounding grace and intelligence by Spence. (Where the heck has she been hiding? Someone give her the Carrie Coon treatment—if she wants it.) Princess Cyd is a fluid, contemplative look at exchange, at two people learning things from one another, as Cyd and her aunt negotiate a relationship around differences of age, ideology, and experience. How heartening to see big topics—like faith, like sexuality—discussed in such warm, considerate terms by two such gifted actresses. Princess Cyd is also a soft-spoken coming-out film, a loving and subtle tribute to Chicago, and, in one sequence that should be corny but somehow isn’t, an earnest appreciation of good literature. The kind that can—like this little jewel of a movie—transport, uplift, and humbly inspire.
7. Personal Shopper
When I first saw Personal Shopper at Cannes in 2016, it was an intensely personal experience. The loss referenced in Olivier Assayas’s mysterious movie seemed almost directly related to something that happened in my own life. Re-watching it this year (upon its release in the U.S.), I was more captivated by the sharp, nervy sophistication of its oddball filmmaking. Using its centered and committed lead actress, Kristen Stewart, as its chief investigator, Personal Shopper examines the potential for horror—both banal and gothic—lurking in everyday technology, in the ways we use it to both connect and detach. That inquest yields fascinating, frightening results, a portrait of a world in which there is little difference between the virtual and the supernatural. It’s hard to pin down just what the film is definitively trying to say, or indeed even what really happens in its plot. But it has a shivery resonance nonetheless; it’s a bracingly peculiar horror movie shrouding an understated grief drama. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Coy, cool, and knowing, Personal Shopper is another arresting collaboration between Assayas and Stewart. I can’t wait to see what they do next.
6. Phantom Thread
In the last five years, lauded writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson kinda lost me. He made a pair of chilly and off-putting films in his Joaquin Phoenix period, studies of ropey, rumpled maleness that were too aloof and mannered for my taste. Thankfully, Anderson has returned to his There Will Be Blood muse Daniel Day-Lewis (in supposedly his last film role) and given us Phantom Thread, a gorgeous and strange period romance that is, quite surprisingly, also Anderson’s funniest film to date. An even more welcome surprise is how the film’s women are given their due, with Luxembourg actress Vicky Krieps proving a more than capable sparring partner for Day-Lewis’s bratty 1950s dress designer, and the great Lesley Manville commanding her scenes as his imperious, but not unkind, sister. It’s hard to figure out where Phantom Thread is going as it unravels, but once it gets there, the film suddenly reveals itself as something rather touching, even sweet—not adjectives I ever thought I’d use to describe an Anderson film. Phantom Thread is, in the end, a perverse sort of romantic comedy, a wicked tribute to the compromises and lovable madnesses of couplehood, all staged with elegant restraint by Anderson and given lift by Jonny Greenwood’s lush and alluring score. It’s finely tailored stuff, and Anderson is careful not to stitch too tight. He gives the film ample room to breathe, to be loose and witty and weird. The delightful Phantom Thread caught me totally, happily off-guard—as all the best love affairs do.
5. Get Out
A horror-comedy for the ages that is also palpably in touch with its graver aspects, its anger and sadness, Jordan Peele’s striking debut has a sureness of purpose and argument that is awfully refreshing in an age of repugnant, “very fine people on both sides” equivocating. A grim and despondent satire of black experience in supposedly benevolent white spaces, Get Out tells truths and wryly exposes injustices without any sort of accommodating gesture toward its white characters—nor to the white people in the audience. It’s a steadfastly principled film, both furious and sardonic, while still being a gripping entertainment. The film’s cast—led by an expertly alarmed Daniel Kaluuya—relishes in Peele’s pointed writing, creating a vivid mood of dread and unease peppered with mordant wit. Yet all of Get Out’s clever polish doesn’t drown out its dire undertones, doesn’t forget the very real, very serious circumstances—both national and local, systemic and personal—that inspired this inventive film. Hopefully its success means more studio movies like it will be made in the future, ones addressing American ills not with glossy pandering or placating, but with assured, forceful, clear-eyed honesty. And, of course, made by the right people. Get Out would be a more than worthy first shot in that long-overdue revolution.
4. The Lost City of Z
All it took for New York-loyal filmmaker James Gray to craft his true masterpiece was going back in time a hundred years and trekking into the Amazon jungle. That arduous travel paid off, as his breathtaking film—an adventure, a tragedy of colonial vanity, a metaphysical meditation on pride and belief—is easily among the most richly realized films of the year. Charlie Hunnam, as dogged and doomed British explorer Percy Fawcett, has never been better, revealing an entirely new dimension of his abilities. The others in his company—Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Sienna Miller (finally getting something to do)—are equally as emboldened by their cause. The Lost City of Z, adapted from David Grann’s nonfiction book, is handsomely mounted—cinematographer Darius Khondji, working with Gray’s chosen 35mm film, conjures up majesty, danger, desolation with vibrant artistry. But this is not some fussily dressed-up biopic with no real idea at its heart. This film is evocative and tender and heartbreaking, with a final shot to beat all final shots. It whispers with deeper, less obvious meaning. In its closing stretches, the film has the dreamy huff of the transcendent, of the otherworldly. But, of course, The Lost City of Z is really about our world, both discoverable and elusive. Which makes what the film manages to show us seem all the more magnificent.
3. Call Me by Your Name
Haven’t we gushed about this one enough already? Luca Guadagnino’s blissfully languid, luxurious adaptation of André Aciman’s novel (the script is by James Ivory) marvelously invokes the blush and swoon of first love. And it gives cinematic shape to the intoxicating, elemental pull of adolescent lust in its perhaps most feverish bloom, vexing and thrilling and consuming in its intensity. As the film wanders through a Northern Italian summer full of good food and idle hours, Call Me by Your Name deftly illustrates the interiority of those heady teen years, when our minds raced in a thousand private directions, when we were just beginning to manage how we existed in the world—our weakness, our power—in relation to other people, especially those we desired or wished to be. As Elio, the precocious 17-year-old whose relationship with an older male grad student is the main thrust (so to speak) of the film, Timothée Chalamet near effortlessly communicates all that gangly energy, that impatience for life to somehow be clarified in all its bursting possibility. Armie Hammer makes for a disarmingly likable fantasy object, while Michael Stuhlbarg, playing bearded dad, delicately brings the house down with an 11 o’clock monologue that crystallizes the film’s melancholy assessment, its suggestion that we appreciate the bends and tears of living in the world as much as the giddy joys. Call Me by Your Name is a rare preening beauty—the film knows you want it—that is nonetheless compassionate, humane, and inviting. Oh, to be its version of young again. Or, really, for the first time.
2. Faces Places
In terrible 2017, with its grinding balkanization and routine assaults on discourse and intellect, what a blessing to have a movie that not only celebrates art and community, but creates it. This rambling road documentary, directed by venerable 89-year-old French filmmaker Agnès Varda and hip young street artist JR, follows the unlikely pair as they travel around France putting up quick, temporary installations and talking with various French people about life and art. As she looks back on her career, Varda grapples with the specter of death and her prickly relationship with Jean-Luc Godard. It’s all very French and very winning, a generous and good-hearted movie that packs a surprising emotional punch. How often do we get films like this, pleasant and accessible and yet so philosophical, so ruminative? Faces Places feels entirely special in that way, like a really thoughtful gift from two curious beings deeply engaged with the world. Varda and JR are reliably wise and charming guides through their journey of French reflection. I’m so grateful they invited us along.
1. B.P.M. (Beats Per Minute)
The first nine films on this list all addressed or enlightened or even relieved some of the despair I felt throughout this horrible year. But no film in 2017 roused me, shook me, or gave me a sense of ragged hope amidst the ruins like B.P.M., Robin Campillo’s stunning and vivacious account of young AIDS activists in early 1990s Paris. In the film, we see long and discursive conversations at ACT UP meetings, as these people—many of them dying—passionately debate strategy, messaging, diplomacy. There’s infighting and betrayal and cattiness. But these noble kids are, as they bicker and negotiate, inching a cause ever forward, determined and galvanized and righteous. That’d be plenty good movie fodder on its own.
But Campillo also pours heaps of messy life into his film. Dancing and celebration frequently bump up against grief and frustration in B.P.M.’s glorious, sensual riot. The film primarily focuses on two young activists and lovers, played by Arnaud Valois and the brash, terrific Nahuel Pérez Biscayart. As one half of the couple slowly succumbs to his illness, Campillo does not bathe him in angelic light, beatifying the humanity right out of him. Instead Campillo unflinchingly zooms in, showing the bitter indignities and all. He stages a death scene like I’ve never seen before, one so startlingly effective and naturalistic you have to remind yourself it isn’t real. Perhaps most rewardingly, B.P.M. doesn’t shy away from sex, like many films about disease and dying tend to—particularly ones concerning gay men with AIDS. Instead, B.P.M. displays sex in all its roiling and tactile complexity: fun, fraught, freeing, transgressive, dangerous, loving. And finally, as an act of protest. Who would have guessed that perhaps the most moving scene of 2017 would involve a hand job in a Paris hospital room? Yet, there it is, proudly existing like the rest of this triumphant and wrenching film: brave, defiant, and beautiful.
