My Top-10 Films of 2016

2016 has been strange and surprising for all of us, and that’s also reflected in the films that came out last year. Many of the most anticipated blockbusters either underperformed or failed on arrival (“Assassins Creed,” “Independence Day: Resurgence,” “Alice: Through the Looking Glass”), while the R-rated superhero farce “Deadpool” and a Winona Ryder starring, eight-episode Netflix miniseries about Dungeons and Dragons and parallel universes captured America’s imagination.

My favorite movies of the year seem to fill the cracks between Hollywood’s biggest wins and biggest losses, mostly showcasing talented filmmakers that remind us that the most standard genre paradigms still hold true if realized with filmic discipline and a passion for the subject matter.

10 – Tickled – New Zealand documentarian David Farrier falls down the rabbit hole of online competitive tickle-torture, and what started as an assignment to highlight a wacky sub-culture, descends into a lurid story about power, control, money, and online extortion. Doing for the internet what “Psycho” did for showers, this documentary takes wild and unexpected left turns and reveals itself to be one of the most tense and uncomfortable movie watching experiences of 2016.

09 – The Lobster – Colin Ferrell plays a lonely man who checks himself into an isolated single’s retreat to find a life-partner. Once there, he agrees with the management that if he’s unable to find a suitable mate he will forced to live his next life as a lobster. Yorgos Lanthimos' surrealist dark comedy gleefully queers the heterosexual experience and satirizes the arbitrary nature of human social constructs.

08 – The Neon Demon – It took me a few days to untangle the movie's meaning and discern the intentional camp of Nicholas Winding Refn’s fashion-industry horror story. Like a modern and perverse take on the Little Red Riding hood fairy-tale, refracted through the prism of expressive, euro-styled exploitation thrillers and sleazy camp-classics such as “Valley of the Dolls” and “Showgirls,” “The Neon Demon” never lets you comfortably judge the movie based on its genre expectations.

07 – Hell or High Water – It’s been a while since we’ve had a really great, down-and-dirty cops and robbers flick. “Hell or High Water”—2016’s top grossing indie release—is the type of thinking-man’s man-movie that we didn’t know we were craving. Chris Pine and Ben Foster play West-Texas bank-robbing brothers who’re out to steal from the same institution’s that took their fathers land after the Great Recession. Jeff Bridges plays the cowboy detective hot on their trail. Think “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” meets “Thelma & Louise.”

06 – Midnight Special – Jeff Nichols shows off his love for Spielberg’s sci-fi dramas like “E.T.” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” with a paranoid fantasy about a young boy with special abilities who’s running from the government,
 while trying to communicate with beings from another world. The film’s brooding tone and eerie, atmospheric imagery is emotionally grounded by terrific performances from Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Adam Driver and child actor Jaeden Lieberher.

05 – La La Land – Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling sing and dance their way through Damien Chazelle’s archetypal boy-meets-girl musical, which uses the gloss of the Hollywood tradition to argue for the uncertainty of cinema’s future.

04 – Don’t Breathe – Horror movies can talk about today’s issues with insightful allegory, or they follow the footsteps of Hitchcock’s methods of audience manipulation and take us on a jolting thrill-ride. Fede Alvarez’s “Don’t Breathe” chooses the latter and gracefully treads the water of the home-invasion thriller with suspenseful and well-crafted set-pieces.

03 – 13^th – Ava DuVernay’s Netflix documentary deconstructs the legal language of the 13^th amendment which ended slavery only to pave the path for America’s prison-industrial complex. Racial divisions have been written into our very constitution and DuVernay carefully traces every civil-rights set-back to the passing of the 13^th, showing us that our own justice system has replaced the plantation owners of yesteryear.

02 – Moonlight – What separated this film from the other character-driven, austere drama’s that sweep awards season, is its experimental and lyrical cinematic language. Barry Jenkins tells the story of a young black teen who grows up in poverty while he learns to repress his own sexual confusion, reminding us that ‘It Gets Better’ doesn’t always apply to every social situation. Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Mahershala Ali all turn in fragile and deeply effecting performances as a boy who is forced to hide his emotional truth to survive his day-to day existence.

01 – The Witch – Robert Eggers’ folktale about a settler family in the 1600s who’re oppressed by a darkness from within their New England backwoods property sunk its teeth into me as early as February of last year and it still hasn’t let go. The craft and detail that went into this modest production serves to highlight the film’s allegorical concerns about faith, sin, doubt, evil, and perception. Everything from the performances by the mostly-unknown cast, the dark and striking cinematography and the thoroughly bleak presentation of the subject matter left me without a single thing to fault to find in this thoughtful and transcendent art-house horror. 

Honorable Mentions:
Star Trek Beyond, Arrival, Eddie the Eagle, Everybody Wants Some, The Nice Guys, Kubo and the Two Strings, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2017

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about  out year-end lists.

The Witch review

Robert Eggers debut horror film “The Witch” is one of those rare tour de force first features that spotlights a true talent to look out for.  This black metal folk tale is a near-perfect study in tone and immersive tension, with a keen sense of setting and period that boasts a handful of completely credible performances. It not only uses the macabre to sell its aesthetics as a horror film but it embraces a true sense of darkness and slithering evil that will stay in your consciousness long after the initial shock of its deranged third act.

Even more astonishing, “The Witch” has finally broken the hex that dictates that movies starring actors from “Game of Thrones” must suck (“Pompeii,” “The Other Woman,” “Terminator: Genisys”). Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie play the mother and father of a 1630 puritan family who decide to leave their New England pilgrim community to settle their own property in the middle of a nearby gloomy forest. There they hope to build a purer relationship with God, away from the noise of regular society. Their eldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) has begun to question the logic of her parents, their son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) is coming to terms with his difficult puberty, their two young twins may or may not be talking to evil spirits through the family's farm goats and their unbaptized newborn has just gone missing. After the kidnapping, the family begins to find themselves crushed with religious guilt, exposing each member’s personal struggles with sin. Soon internal battles with lust, pride and dishonesty manifests themselves into real or perceived oppressions from the dark forces lurking within the shrouded forest.

What makes this film more narratively enriching than your average cabin in the woods shocker is that the screenplay, laced with biblical, old-English dialogue, is just as committed to the drama and the interior lives of the characters as it is with hitting all the intended genre beats as a thriller. The performances by the mostly-unknown cast are realistic and heartbreaking, especially by lead actress Taylor-Joy whose emotional and symbolic arc within the film is both complex and challenging. Rather than lacing the plot with empty boo-scares and gotchya moments, every character is tormented by their own guilt and their own fears, with the titular Witch preying on the family’s vulnerabilities in ways that are visually creative and truly horrific.  

The sets look lived in and the grim 1600's period imagery is never played for theatrical camp. Because of the intense attention to the film's cosmetic details, Eggers portrayal of pagan magic is strangely believable within the context of this satanic melodrama. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke uses single-source lighting-schemes with metaphoric intent, etching the characters and subjects out of the natural darkness, while never defaulting to flat desaturation or an overuse of digital color-correction.

Some might search for a contemporary message within the story and when talking about dangerous accusations of witchcraft, feminism rises to the surface, and if you’re looking for it, that’s certainly in there. But the picture’s more prevalent theme is of man’s relationship with sin and the unhealthy consequences of repression. 

Given the character’s conflicts with their own faith alongside the high-contrast imagery that's obscured by spindly tree-branches, Swedish art-house auteur Ingmar Bergman would have been proud of this film's relative mainstream success.

“The Witch” was released wide and is being sold as a casual winter horror programmer but unlike the seemingly generic title, this movie is anything but a lazy and predictable experience. The pace is deliberately slow and not unlike Kubrick’s “The Shining,” its taught sense of dread moves closer to you as each sequence pulls the cord a little tighter. There’s certainly entertainment to be had in all its artful spookiness, but this is not really a popcorn film. Rather, this is a masterful study in atmosphere, history and religious philosophy that deserves as much discussion as it deserves your gasps and nightmares.

Grade: A+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2016

Listen to more discussion about "The VVitch" on this week's Jabber and the Drone Podcast.