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.

Don't Breathe review

“Don’t Breathe” is exactly the kick in the neck that extreme horror needs right now. Fede Alvarez’s new thriller cleverly plays with expectations and tropes within the home-invader genre but it never loses sight of its own momentum, creating a vivid cinematic world of its own within a deliberately designed, claustrophobic setting.  The movie makes a lot of allusions to classic shockers of the past, such as Wes Craven’s “Last House on the Left” and Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs,” as well as scene elements and direct imagery from “Silence of the Lambs,” and “Cujo.” Conceptually, this film is basically a reverse version of the 1967 Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin thriller “Wait Until Dark.” But even as those obvious sign posts are visible for the cinefiles in the audience “Don’t Breathe” slams around with enough of its own moves and creative WTF moments to justify its many obvious appropriations.

The story’s set-up is pretty simple; three up-to-no-good, Detroit 20-somethings stake out the home of a blind ex-military man (Stephen Lang) who’s sitting on 300,000 dollars of settlement money after losing his only daughter in a car accident. Rocky (Jane Levy), Alex (Dylan Minnette) and their gun-toting gangster-wannabe frenemy Money (Daniel Zovatto) all hope to use this small fortune to give up their criminal lives and move out west to California, where they can escape their family problems and the general angst of Midwestern, industrial poverty.  Of course, once they break into the house of their mark things don’t go as they had planned.  As it turns out, the blind veteran and his vicious Rottweiler are much more prepared for the occasion than our delinquent protagonists had originally anticipated.

Those with a weak stomach and mild psychological constitution should be warned that this movie serves a pretty strong cup of coffee. Alvarez knows how to wait the appropriate time to strike and he patiently earns his gore, but when the rubber hits the road he doesn’t hold back when it comes to his depictions of blunt violence and seat-squirming shock sequences. In fact, half of the picture’s strength comes from its build up and anticipation towards these moments. This director also never forgets how to structure a scene and uses his wandering camera to layout the architecture of each set-piece so the audience can get a true sense of where everyone is and how hard or easy it should be for them to escape. The best cat and mouse films know that good chase scenes are most effective when they fully incorporate their setting, and in that sense, Lang’s creaky, three-level home becomes another character in the film.

As the movie’s introduces its principle players the dialogue can be stiff and some of the characterizations are at times too broad and archetypal but the actors usually are able pick up the screenplay’s slack in those departments. Things get significantly better once we get into the meat of the break-in. Alvarez revels in the mechanics of his suspense and the cinematic elements of horror as pop entertainment. He loves to pull the strings tight on his scenes and loves to pull the rug out from under the audience, and though the film’s use of sound is especially important here—given that the antagonist is blind—the movie never defaults to the overuse of cheap, quiet-quiet-loud jack in the box scares.

After a summer of misfiring popcorn fare, “Don’t Breathe” is the perfect mean-spirited antidote to start the fall season. It’s unpretentious and unencumbered, and more importantly, it understands the appeal of the genre it’s playing in and knows how to confidently execute it with practical style and craftsmanship.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal-Sep/2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Don't Breathe."