10. The Lobster (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
A wonderfully odd movie, this, of the sort that runs on
its own screwy set of rules in such a matter-of-fact way that it all seems
perfectly reasonable when you’re watching it.
Taking place in a weird future/alternate-present Britain where finding a
romantic partner is a legal requirement, Colin Farrell's nebbish sadsack
David, whose wife has just left him, is taken to a hotel that acts as a
matchmaking arena. Fail to find a
partner in forty-five days, and you’re turned into an animal (hence the title:
David’s choice of animal should he be transformed is a lobster). You can extend your time to find a match by
capturing loners – people without partners who live hidden in the woods
surrounding the hotel.
The bizarre
set-up is presented in a deadpan, understated style that would win plaudits
from Beckett or Pinter. It’s all very
restrained and grey, which makes the shocking moments (and there are a few)
wring some black laughs out of you. In
presenting romance as a legal obligation rather than a worthwhile pursuit, it
neatly satirises societal norms – until David finds himself among the loners,
who prove just as stubborn and nasty as the couples, and a genuine love story
starts to emerge. There’s nothing else
really like it.
9. Hail, Caesar! (dirs. Ethan & Joel Coen)
Hail, Caesar! is a bit of a mishmash of a film, feeling
like various sketches sewn together (not always that well) into a roughly coherent
final product. It’s a testament to those sketches
that it’s still an absolute delight.
Josh Brolin is real-life character Eddie Mannix, a fixer in ‘50s
Hollywood, running around defusing fires.
There’s a famous actress/swimmer (Scarlett Johansson), who’s secretly
pregnant. There’s a veteran English
director (Ralph Fiennes) who’s been pushed into casting a cowboy actor (Alden
Ehrenreich) in his new period piece and isn’t happy about it. There’s a pair of twin sister gossip
columnists (both Tilda Swinton) on the hunt for juicy titbits. And there’s a dimwit matinee idol (George
Clooney) who’s been kidnapped by Communists.
It’s a whirlwind
of incident, simultaneously parodying and glorifying old-school Hollywood. And the starry cast (as well as the above, you’ve
got Channing Tatum, Frances McDormand, Jonah Hill, Christopher Lambert and a
blink-and-you’ll-miss-him Dolph Lundgren lurking in there) are clearly having a
ball trying to outsteal the movie from each other (Hill gets close with his two
scenes, but in the end Ehrenreich walks off with it – you can see how he got
the job of playing the young Han Solo).
There are sight gags, there’s whipcrack dialogue, there’s a genuinely
delightful song-and-dance number. It may
not hang together that well, but it’s easily one of the most enjoyable films of
the year.
8. Deadpool (dir. Tim Miller)
2016 was very possibly the year we hit Peak
Superhero. There were fine efforts from
Marvel’s corner with Doctor Strange and Captain America: Civil War, but the
middling-at-best reception for Warner’s DC movies and a general feeling of
“yep, seen this” makes me wonder if that great long list of upcoming DC and
Marvel movies will actually all get made.
Happily, the first of the year’s two X-Men movies (see? Excessive superheroics) proved that a) when
the genre is tackled with thought and love, it’s still a delight and b) the
endless push for that 12A sweet spot may well be part of the issue.
The unloosening
of the restrictions caused by the 15 certificate is an important place to
start. While the capacity for extra gore
and naughty words could have given the film a tiresome, sniggering adolescent
feel, it instead makes the action scenes that much more visceral and the script
that much wittier and inventive. And,
surprisingly, the jokey sex montage is one of the best examples of a healthy,
happy sexual relationship I can remember seeing from a Hollywood movie in years.
Who knew? The fact that Deadpool
is, famously, a fictional character who knows he’s a fictional character helps
here too, allowing him Ryan Reynolds to poke fun at the X-Men films’
increasingly tortured timeline, Marvel films’ love of superfluous cameos and
Reynolds’ own, not always successful, history of superhero films. (Admittedly some of the humour is heavily
dependent on surprise value – the scene where Deadpool attempts to beat up
Colossus and only ends up hurting himself had me curled up with laughter in the
cinema but only raised a wry grin when re-watching at home.)
But what’s
important is you could strip away the viscera, the f-bombs and the
self-awareness and it’d still be a good movie.
Starting off with a fully powered-up, costume-wearing Deadpool and then
splicing the origin story into discrete chunks through the first half of the
movie is such a self-evidently excellent bit of structure you wonder why all
superhero movies don’t do it. The
characters are well-rounded enough to make you properly interested and invested
in them, and it’s genuinely refreshing to see a comic book movie where the
climax isn’t The Fate Of The World As We Know It. Now, about that sequel...Ron Perlman for
Cable, y/y?
7. When Marnie Was There (dir. Hiromasa Yonebayashi)
A bit of Studio Ghibli history here, the first movie
they’ve released where neither Hayao Miyazaki nor Isao Takahata had anything to
do with the production process. (Beyond
Miyazaki introducing the source novel to director Yonebayashi, that is.) And possibly a second bit, as the studio’s
got no movies lined up for the foreseeable future so this may prove to be the
company’s final feature-length offering.
And should that be the case, they’ve gone out not on one of their
highest points, but certainly a respectable finale.
Yonebayashi’s
second movie as director is also his second to take a British children’s
classic as its source and relocate it to present-day Japan, following 2010’s
decent updating of The Borrowers into
Arrietty. It’s the sort of plot that’s very mid-20th
century children’s literature – an introverted girl goes to stay with distant relatives
in the country for her health and makes a mysterious friend. In this case the girl is an asthmatic
aspiring artist named Anna and the mysterious friend is the titular Marnie, who
lives in a grand old house across the marsh and may or may not be a ghost.
The plot is
filled with twists and turns, and peopled by believable characters – Anna’s
almost violently insular nature means she’s not the most likeable lead at
first, and that works well, making you feel sympathy for her constant
self-sabotage and recognising her abrupt mood swings as the growing pains of
adolescence even as her rude, aggressive behaviour irritates you. Marnie, meanwhile, hides enough quiet sadness
behind her floaty pixie dream girl persona to keep your attention.
Arrietty was arguably Ghibli’s prettiest
movie (no mean feat), but its status has just about been superseded here. Marnie
is simply gorgeous to look at, thanks to the efforts of animation director
Masashi Ando (more from him later in this list). It’s enough to make you
despair if Ghibli never produce another movie – but fear not, for I’ve just
discovered that a bunch of ex-Ghibli staffers have set up a new studio, Studio
Ponoc, and their first movie is a Yonebayashi-directed effort based on a British children’s novel. The dream
lives on!
6. Steve Jobs (dir. Danny Boyle)
Nope, no idea what this movie’s about. Good, though.
Aaron Sorkin’s script may be characteristically a bit pleased with
itself, but it’s still superbly written, with its distinctive three-act,
three-product structure working well.
Michael Fassbender’s excellent, although Kate Winslet walks off with the
movie even if her accent is odd at best.
5. The Nice Guys (dir. Shane Black)
Veteran screenwriter Black’s third movie as director is
so much of a throwback it comes around again and feels fresh and new. In a franchise-led, effects-saturated
marketplace, this ‘70s-set buddy-comedy action-thriller is a delightful change
of pace.
Ryan Gosling is
not-especially-effective private eye Holland March, hired by a woman who claims
to have seen her niece, a porn star killed in a car crash, alive and well after
the crash. He crosses paths with Russell
Crowe’s enforcer for hire Jackson Healy (you’re not allowed to have a proper
first name in this movie), who’s been hired to get March off the scent by
Amelia, an associate of the possibly-not-dead porn star. When Amelia vanishes and a pair of suspicious
thugs turn up looking for her, March and Healy reluctantly team up to find her
first.
The film would
make a very nice double-bill with Inherent Vice, seen lurking on my list last year, what with both flicks’ 70s’ period
trappings and slightly incompetent protagonists. Black coaxes great performances out of Crowe
and Gosling – the latter, especially, is a revelation. I’d only ever seen him in brooding serious
roles like Drive and The Place Beyond the Pines, so his comic
timing and willingness to squeal in fear like a small girl are a delight. The scene where Crowe catches him on the
toilet and he attempts to cover his crotch, keep the stall door open and keep a
gun trained on Crowe simultaneously is probably the best bit of physical comedy
I saw in the cinema this year.
Or, The Last of Us:
The Movie. Glib, and possibly unfair
(the source novel was published exactly a year after Naughty Dog’s game
launched so it’s entirely possible that a lot of the similarities are
coincidence), but surely the same thought was in everyone’s mind. Fungal zombies? Check.
Young girl? Check. Delicate balance of horror and philosophical
reflection on humankind’s place in the wider natural world? Check.
Regardless, it’s a fantastic
movie.
Set in a
post-apocalyptic Britain that has been reduced to rubble by a fungus-spread
zombification disease, it focuses on Melanie (Sennia Nanua), who, along with
her classmates, is kept under lock and key both inside and outside her
underground school. The reason? She’s part of a second generation of humans
that have bonded symbiotically with the fungus, and the remnants of the
military and scientific community are studying her and her peers to investigate
the possibility of a cure. When the base
is breached and overrun, a handful of scientists and soldiers escape, including
Melanie’s teacher Miss Justineau (Gemma Arterton), who insists on bringing her
star pupil on the trek to another base near London.
While all the
standard zombie tropes are present and correct (and, since these are not the
classical zombies, sometimes spiced up with new rules or variations of
behaviour), this is a more melancholic, thoughtful offering than your average
face-chewer. The best zombie movies all
use their shufflers as a metaphor for something (Dawn of the Dead = consumerism, Shaun
of the Dead = the soul-killing dangers of getting caught in an ennui-filled
suburban life, 28 Days Later... =
mindless anger, etc) and here it’s the inevitability of every generation
eventually killing off and replacing their predecessors, and said predecessors
not always going quietly. The result
gives it a philosophical bent and by the end you’re kind of on the zombies’ side:
don’t they have a right to fungus-based life, after all?
Having said
that, it does also have the year’s best action sequence, an astonishing seemingly-one-take
effort covering the base’s breach from Melanie’s perspective as she runs from
her underground prison out into the light and into a whirling maelstrom of
chaos, zombies, soldiers and vehicles all hurtling around her in such a way to
make you genuinely concerned for the actors’ safety.
3. Your Name (dir. Makoto Shinkai)
Here’s a lovely surprise.
Shinkai is the sort of name known to anime freaks and hardcore tedious
cineastes, but I never thought I’d get to see one of his films on the big
screen a few miles from my home town.
But then Your Name proceeded
to give the Japanese box office a damn good thrashing (at the time of writing
it’s Japan’s fourth-biggest box office draw of all time and the second most
successful anime ever) and wouldn’t
you know it, a British release followed.
One of the
reasons I was so delighted to snag a cinema viewing is Shinkai’s known for an
almost comical level of beauty in his films.
Every frame is utterly stunning and demands to be seen on the biggest
screen you can find. The film’s two main
settings – Tokyo and the fictional country town of Itomori – both highlight the
artistry on show, as shepherded by supervising animator Masashi Ando (told you
he’d pop up again).
These settings
are inhabited by Taki, a schoolboy and aspiring architect living an exhausting,
high-paced life in Tokyo, and Mitsuha, a bored and frustrated girl feeling
she’s rotting away in the backwater of Itomori.
On random days, they find themselves waking up in each other’s
bodies. As you do. As they attempt to navigate very different
lives, while leaving notes on each other’s phones, they form a sort of
disassociated, irritable friendship. So
far, so ‘80s teen comedy. But then the
plot suddenly swerves off in a direction that I won’t spoil, but it genuinely
made me gasp and cover my mouth with my hands, like I was a bad GIF.
My only previous
knowledge of Shinkai came from his slow, thoughtful, bittersweet romances 5 Centimetres per Second and The Garden of Words, so the boisterous,
bright, poppy energy of Your Name was
a bit of a surprise (although there’s a sequence near the end that heavily
recalls the final moments of 5
Centimetres, and in a neat touch that I missed until I read it on the Internet
later, one of Garden of Words’
protagonists makes a cameo as Taki’s teacher).
The delightful soundtrack from Japanese band Radwimps (best worst name
or worst best name?) helps as well, and the film’s got enough chutzpah to throw
out its endless scenery porn at one point and present a key scene in delicate
pastels and chalks. It’s actually maybe
a little long – a brilliantly daft thing to be saying about a Shinkai film,
given that getting over an hour’s runtime out of him is a bit of a triumph –
but it’s so utterly enjoyable that you can see why it’s smashing all those
records in its home country. There’s
talk of it being a dark horse for next year’s Best Animated Picture at the
Oscars. Here’s hoping.
2. Spotlight (dir. Tom McCarthy)
A world away from Your
Name’s gorgeously animated fantasy, Spotlight
is a resolutely low-key film about a real-life horrific cover-up and the dedicated
journalists wrenching the truth to light.
Set in early
2000s Boston, it follows the titular Spotlight team of the Boston Globe, who specialise in lengthy, well-researched
investigations. In 2001, they start
digging into a priest convicted of paedophilia who was shuffled around the
Massachusetts area repeatedly rather than dismissed, and to their unfolding
astonishment realise that said priest is one of many and the Catholic Church
essentially has a system in place to get child abusers off the hook.
It’s one of
those movies that just screams Oscar bait, but it’s so resolutely excellent
that it doesn’t matter (and yes, it won Oscars). The time period is something of an accidental
blessing: because these events happened just before the Internet achieved its
current ubiquity, it means the film’s essentially a paean to old-fashioned
journalistic legwork and a spiritual successor to All the President’s Men.
Piles of paper swamp characters’ desks; a genuinely nail-biting sequence
follows Mark Ruffalo’s attempt to photocopy some key evidence before the office
with the photocopier closes for the night.
The film never tries to be clever or fancy because it’s just not
needed. Sometimes all you need is good
actors playing a good script straight.
Having said that, there’s nowt wrong with baroque
violence and grandiloquent speechifying if you can make it entertaining. (Side note: Word’s spellcheck is fine with
“speechifying” but draws the line at “nowt”.)
And the master of making those two things very entertaining indeed is
Tarantino, back here with an impishly button-pushing could-be-a-sequel to Django Unchained.
Kurt Russell is
the efficient but reasonably decent bounty hunter John Ruth (and I’ve just now
realised his name is probably a play on “ruthless”), transporting fugitive
Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh, stealing the movie and loving it) via
stagecoach to the town of Red Rock, where she’ll be hanged. They pick up another bounty hunter (Samuel L.
Jackson) and a man claiming to be Red Rock’s new sheriff (Walton Goggins) en
route before a vicious blizzard forces them to stop off at Minnie’s Haberdashery,
a stagecoach lodge. They’re joined there
by four more travellers of varying degrees of suspiciousness, setting the stage
for bloodletting.
Famously, this
was Tarantino’s attempt to revive old-fashioned “roadshow” showings seen in the
‘50s and ‘60s, using the rarely-used 70mm ultra-widescreen format and including
a 15-minute interval. I saw it with the
interval, and I suspect it helped – as well as giving a break, it came in a
narratively interesting moment, so the audience could discuss possible theories
about what had just happened and where it was going next.
The film’s
aggressively controversial in its examination of America’s fraught racial
history (side note 2: given his love of onscreen violence, what if Tarantino
were to examine his country’s unsettling obsession with guns next?), with its
setting just after the close of the American Civil War allowing the script to
prod a subject seemingly more ubiquitous than ever. But above and beyond that, it’s a shamelessly
entertaining, over-the-top mystery-cum-thriller Western that relishes
elaborate, well-crafted dialogue, has a wicked vein of pitch-black humour and
is visually sumptuous – the intense, heightened whiteout the characters
occasionally venture into feels a hell of a lot colder and more atmospheric
than The Revenant’s greyer, more
realistic milieu. I got the film on
Blu-ray for my birthday and I’m actually a little worried about watching it,
for fear that the masterful cinema experience won’t translate well to the small
screen. Here’s hoping it does – this was
the second film I saw in 2016 and it’s never quite been toppled off my “best of
the year” mental list. It’s quite good,
you know.
SPECIAL BONUS AWARDS ROUND!
Best Facial Hair
I don’t know if Kurt Russell filmed The Hateful Eight or Bone Tomahawk first, but I know his magnificent walrus moustache should have
kept him doing nothing but excellent Westerns for the rest of his life. Sadly, he seems to have shaved it off. Bah.
Best Eyebrows
O-Ei, the titular Miss Hokusai, has a truly stupendous pair of forehead-warmers. Imagine the hairy baby she’d have with Kurt.
Best Mental Hijacking of a Pop Song
I’ll never be able to hear “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”
again without thinking of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s beautiful, quietly sorrowful
rendition of it in Anomalisa. Even if she’s technically singing the Sarah
McLachlan cover version.
Best Robot
Rogue One’s
K-2SO, obviously. Blunt? Sarcastic?
Beats up a Stormtrooper by using a second Stormtrooper as a bludgeoning
instrument? Good work, K2.
Best Shameless Way of Getting Me into the Cinema
Rogue One
again. I wasn’t that bothered about it,
then they started releasing the cast list.
Felicity Jones, interested. Mads
Mikkelsen, getting there. Alan Tudyk, smart
move. Donnie Yen as a blind monk beating
up the Empire with a staff? Why yes, you
may have my money.
Best Frenchman
The moustachioed guy glimpsed on the landing calling for
the police when Idris Elba’s beating up mook no. 6 in Bastille Day (or The Take,
as it’s been understandably renamed)?
Clearly the best part of the year.
‘Cos it’s my dad. (He says Elba’s
a very nice man.)
Most Infuriatingly Distracting Incidental Detail
The 1977-set The
Nice Guys has the famous photo of Paul Simonon smashing his bass that
formed the basis of the London Calling
cover on a character’s wall. At the time
I thought to myself “the album’s 1979, but the photo was obviously earlier – is
that reasonable?” It bugged me for the
rest of the film and I looked it up afterwards.
The photo was taken in 1979. For
a film that revels in its period setting, it’s highly irritating.
Most Sinister Goat
Well, if you allowed TV as well, this would be a proper
race, with Gravity Falls’ Gompers a
strong contender (the show’s finale aired in 2016, it counts). But as it is, in film the devilish silhouette
of The Witch’s Black Phillip falls
over all.
Most Inexplicable Horse
How the hell did that horse get to the rooftop garden in High-Rise?
Best Marketing
Toss-up between Deadpool
and Suicide Squad. Deadpool’s
press stuff was probably stronger overall thanks to sterling work from Ryan
Reynolds and the skull-emoji/poop-emoji/L poster, but Suicide Squad’s brilliant trailers made a fairly average film look
like the best thing ever, which is surely the point of marketing.
Best Inevitable Bit of Soundtrack
Did Eddie the Eagle
use Van Halen’s “Jump” at one point?
Yes, Eddie the Eagle used Van
Halen’s “Jump” at one point. It just
wouldn’t have been right otherwise.
Best Accessorising
Doctor Strange
romps home with this one. The sentient
cape the titular doc obtains would’ve won the prize as it was, but any film
that gives Chiwetel Ejiofor a pair of shoes that are almost literally the
Pegasus Boots from The Legend of Zelda:
Link’s Awakening must be acknowledged.
Best Scene-Stealer
There was a lot of great scene-stealing this year, as I’ve
mentioned in several of the films above.
But the undisputed winner was Tom Bennett in Love & Friendship. His
character of Sir James Martin, a goodnatured idiot who comes off like a dimmer
version of Prince George from Blackadder,
is promising enough to start with, but Bennett throws everything into his
scenes. From being delighted by his
first encounter with peas to getting confused as to how many Commandments there
are, he’s the funniest thing in any movie this year.
Pay Attention, This is How You Do Special Effects
Star Trek Beyond
should be the manual for how to do effects in cinema. As much onscreen stuff as possible, with some
truly magnificent prosthetic work on the aliens, and CGI spared for impossible
geometry and stuff you just couldn’t reasonably do practically. That’s how it’s done.
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