2016/2017 Movie List

I've been doing these movie lists for more than a decade now, and my days of watching 80-90 movies in a year are over.  Getting older and a growing family took care of that.  Between the theaters and home I was still able to watch about 50 movies this year, which I suppose isn't too bad.  I watched more clunkers this year than usual, and there were quite a few movies that were just so-so, but my top 10 is filled with some really great films.  Enjoy the list, and let me know what movies you loved this year!

2016/2017 Movie List

44. Anomolisa With the movie at the bottom of the list each year, I always feel like I am partially at fault.  If it is so bad, why not just stop watching?  The thing is, the writer of this movie, Charlie Kaufman, used to be one of my favorites.  He wrote Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, all interesting, creative movies.  Maybe that’s why I didn’t give up when I realized that this was an all-dialogue movie starring life-like puppets.  The puppet thing was stupid (Why use puppets for a movie that is just people having conversations in a hotel room?) but it was the story itself that I really disliked.  The main character is a horribly depressing middle aged man trying to have an affair on a business trip because he’s going through a mid-life crisis.  It’s pretty hard to make an entertaining movie out of that plot, even if you have a puppet sex scene (yes, really).  I have only myself to blame.

43. Deadpool On last year’s movie list I was writing about Marvel’s superhero movies, and vowed that I wouldn’t see Deadpool.  But it was on HBO continually for about a month, and enough people told me they loved it that I gave in.  And of course I hated it, in part because it violated two rules that usually steer me away from this type of movie: First, I usually don’t like super violent movies, and Deadpool is certainly over-the-top-violent, and second, if lots of high school boys tell you a movie is awesome, it usually is not. At least I didn’t watch Suicide Squad.

42. Pop Star Never Stop Stopping Again, sometimes I look at the bottom of my lists and wonder why I sat through the whole movie?  This movie is by Andy Samberg and the guys in Lonely Island that made all the SNL digital shorts that were pretty funny, so I guess that’s why I even watched it. Samberg plays a former boy-band member who goes solo and releases a series of terrible albums and thinks about getting back together with his band.  It looked bad in the previews, but someone told me it was surprisingly funny so I watched it.  It wasn’t.

41. The Hateful Eight I can’t really say much about this movie because I stopped watching after about 45 minutes.  Sometimes I enjoy Quentin Tarrantino movies in spite of the absurd level of violence.  I’ve even enjoyed some of his more recent movies like Django Unchained and Inglorius Basterds, but not this one.  I stopped watching because it seemed like one of the Tarrantino movies where he thinks he’s being really clever with the dialogue but it is just annoying, and I also got tired of seeing the only female character get repeatedly punched in the face.  Maybe it got better after the first 45 minutes, but at least this time I was smart enough to just stop watching.

40. Hail, Caesar! I don’t know of any other filmmakers besides the Coen brothers for whom I have a wider range of opinions about their movies.  True Grit, O Brother Where Art Thou, No Country for Old Men, Fargo, and Raising Arizona are all legitimately great movies, and The Big Lebowski is an all-time top 25 movie for me.  But sprinkled in their filmography are movies like The Ladykillers and A Serious Man that I couldn’t stand, and unfortunately Hail, Ceasar! falls into the latter category for me.  It seemed so promising - George Clooney plays Baird Whitlock, a bumbling lead actor in 1950’s Hollywood, who gets kidnapped by communist screenwriters. Sadly the promising story gave way to a dull movie.  It felt like less than the some of its parts, and it was just boring.

39. Jason Bourne If you have ever asked yourself  “Do we need another Jason Bourne movie?”  this movie provides a definitive answer: No.  I cannot say how this movie is different from the other Bourne movies in any way, because they have re-hashed the same plot and same action/fight style for about the last 3.  I don’t even remember which movie is which at this point.  I do know that the last one didn’t even have Jason Bourne in it, which didn’t seem like a great idea.  I didn’t even make it to the end of this one.  It’s the rare sequel like the Hangover 2 or the Matrix 3  that is so bad it makes you question if the original was even that great in the first place.  

38. Toni Erdman This was nominated for Best Foreign Language film, which usually means that a movie is interesting.  It is a German movie about a buttoned-up executive that spends all her time working or thinking about work, and her dad, who thinks that life is one big practical joke.  He decides that he’s going to spend more time with his daughter and help her loosen up by doing things like showing up in costume at her work or at the restaurant she’s eating at. I really wanted to like this movie, but it just was so slow I couldn’t even make it all the way to the end.

37. The Girl on the Train  This movie is trash, but at least it is the kind of trash that is kind of fun to watch.  Emily Blount plays an alcoholic, divorced woman that rides the train to and from work, and fantasizes about the life of a woman she sees along the route.  Things get complicated when the woman goes missing.  It’s mildly entertaining to watch the twists and turns unfold for the 120 minute running time, but unless the book is far better than the movie, I can’t fathom why the book has been on the bestseller list so long.

36. Bad Moms Bad Moms has the distinction of being the lowest ranked movie I saw in the theater this year.  Mila Kunis leads a group of moms that decides they are done trying to be perfect - making every meal, driving to every practice, going to every school meeting, helping with every project, etc.  Instead they decide to party and skip out on some of their motherly duties.  I’m sure the concept resonated with a large majority of the people that went to see it, but it is only a little funny, and doesn’t have anything all that interesting to say.  The best and funniest part of the whole movie is during the end credits when the actresses and their moms are interviewed about their relationships growing up. It’s not a ringing endorsement when the end credits are the best part.

35. Dr. Strange Despite some nice visuals and good actors, something about this movie was a little off.  I really like Benedict Cumberbatch as an actor, but he didn’t feel right in this movie, and his acting wasn’t good.  Also, Tilda Swinton plays an Asian woman, which seems a bit odd when they could have cast, oh, I don’t know, maybe an actual Asian woman in the role and it would’ve been much better.  In the origin part of the story Cumberbatch is supposed to be an arrogant surgeon that think he is invincible before becoming severely injured in a car accident.  However the storytelling is so heavy-handed at times that if Cumberbatch had shouted out “Look at me!  I am so arrogant and proud, nothing can stop me!” it might’ve seemed like a breath of subtlety.  I actually liked the second half much better, and I liked how the movie ended, but there were too  many flaws to really like it.

34. The Accountant In The Accountant, Ben Affleck plays an autistic accountant assassin.  No, really.  It’s actually better than it sounds (which isn’t saying that much), but it at least it gave Affleck a good excuse for his wooden acting.

33. Captain Fantastic Viggio Mortenson was nominated for best actor for his portrayal of a widowed father raising his family in an unconventional manner in a remote forest cabin.  Things come to a head when the family gets in their camper and drives to the in-laws to attend their mother’s funeral.  The in-laws are concerned about how their grandchildren are being raised, and conflict arises between the free-spirited father and the wealthy, conservative grandparents.  Of course the viewer is meant to root for the independent and wild nature of Mortenson’s brood, but no matter how good the acting is, I kind of hated his character and couldn’t really get into the movie.

32. The Masterminds  There’s nothing really great or really bad about this movie.  Zach Gallifinakis plays a bumpkin armored truck driver who falls in love with a woman (Kristen Wiig) that convinces him to rob his company.  It is based on a true story, which is pretty remarkable when you hear the whole story, but as a movie it just isn’t funny enough or interesting enough to be anything memorable.

31. Paper Towns In Paper Towns, a high school senior has a memorable night when the much more popular girl next door, who he has had a crush on for years, knocks on his bedroom window and convinces him to join her for a night of playing revenge pranks on those that have offended her.  And then the next day she disappears, only for him to realize that she has left a series of clues to her whereabouts.  He spends the rest of the movie trying to solve the clues to figure out where she is.  It’s a fun, if not particularly memorable high school movie.   

30. Star Trek Beyond I really enjoyed the first two Star Trek reboots.  The casting for the new crew of the Enterprise seems perfect to me, and each of the first two had fun stories that were told in a pretty spectacular fashion.  This felt like a sequel.  It wasn’t bad - the cast is still solid, and there are some good action scenes, but as a whole something was missing that made the first two reboots such a pleasure.  

29. Passengers Passengers is a sci-fi movie set aboard a spaceship transporting thousands of passengers to a homestead colony more than 100 years ago.  The ship is on auto-pilot, and the passengers are in hibernation until something goes wrong, and a couple of them wake up.  Thankfully for us, the two that wake up are Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, who are not too hard on the eyes.  The movie got generally poor reviews, but I actually enjoyed it, in no small part because I enjoy the two leads.  It’s not the type of movie that sticks in your head longer than 15 minutes after you stop watching, but pleasant enough while it’s playing.

28. The Magnificent Seven The original Magnificent Seven (which is itself a re-make of The Seven Samurai) is a classic western, and I own a copy of it on DVD.  Earlier in the year my son and I watched hired hands Yul Brenner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn and friends defend a poor Mexican village against Eli Wallach and his fellow bandits.  It’s one of my favorites.  This version isn’t as good of course, but it was still fun.  This time around Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, and Ethan Hawke lead the gang defending the village.  It was a remake that didn’t need to be made, but I’m a sucker for westerns, and this was good enough to be worth watching.

27. 13 Hours This is a pretty intense recounting of the 2012 attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi.  It mostly avoids the politics surrounding who was responsible for what happened, instead focusing on the CIA operatives that risked their lives to defend the embassy.  I suppose with any movie “based on true events” it’s pretty hard to know how accurate it is, but it certainly looked harrowing.  In his work with Secret Service, my brother met one of the guys that is portrayed in the movie, a Special Agent that nearly died trying to protect the American ambassador.  After watching 13 Hours, I can’t imagine how traumatic it would be to witness this stuff in real life.

26. Tomorrowland In the theaters, this movie was seen as a flop.  With George Clooney, a big budget, and a lot of publicity, it was supposed to make a lot of money, and not many people saw it.  For me, this was a classic case of being pleasantly surprised by a movie I went into with low expectations. Maybe the main reason I enjoyed it as much as I did is that our whole family snuggled in under blankets on one of the many snow days we had this winter and watched the movie together.  The fact that all five of my kids, from 16 to 5, enjoyed the movie, made it a fun afternoon.  

25. Office Christmas Party Although it is far from original (basically it’s The Hangover set at an office Christmas party), there was enough here to keep me entertained.  Jason Bateman and Olivia Munn play office workers trying to save their company by throwing a massive Christmas party in order to impress an important client (Courtney B. Vance).  The party gets more and more out of control, and while it doesn’t come close to the heights of The Hangover, there are enough funny people (TJ Miller, Kate McKinnon) doing funny things to make it amusing.

24. Green Room Green Room was the most intense movie I watched this year, and it’s not for the faint of heart.  Anton Yelchin (who sadly died earlier this year) plays the leader of the punk band The Ain’t Rights, who end up taking a gig at a neo-nazi club in the woods of Oregon.  They open the show with a cover of the song  “Nazi Punks F’ Off”, which as you might imagine doesn’t go very well.  But it’s after the concert that the movie heats up, when the band witnesses a murder backstage.  The rest of the movie is tense, violent, and brutal as Patrick Stewart plays the leader of the skinhead group that faces off against the band to keep them from leaving.  This is director Jeremy Saulnier’s second movie, and his first film, Blue Ruin, was a top 10 movie for me a couple years ago.  It will be interesting to see if he keeps making these violent, intense, thrillers, or if he goes in a different direction for his next movie, but either way he will be an interesting director to watch in coming years.  

23. Zootopia I’m going to park this just outside my top 20 because it’s a kid’s movie, but it was actually pretty good.  It won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and it has a little more to chew on than the average kids movie.  When a crime wave hits the town of Zootopia, a female rabbit (the first bunny on the police force) tries to solve the crime.  Even though Zootopia is made up of all kinds of animals, the predators are the ones that get blamed for the crime.  It touches on the topics of profiling and stereotypes with more complexity than you might expect from a cartoon movie, and the kids and adults in our family all enjoyed it.

22. Demolition I’ve gone from thinking Jake Gyllenhall was an overrated pretty boy actor to being interested in almost any movie he’s in just because he’s in it.  He’s been in some really interesting movies, and he plays crazy better than anyone - convincingly enough to make you think that he’s maybe got a few screws loose in real life.  In Demolition he plays an investment banker dealing with losing his wife in a car accident.  In the aftermath he starts literally and figuratively tearing

apart his old life.  It’s not perfect, but like Gyllenhall, it’s pretty fascinating to watch.

21. Everybody Wants Some After the first 30-45 minutes I was about ready to stop watching this movie.  Richard Linklater is a terrific director, and his last movie, Boyhood, was an all-time great movie achievement.  But the first half of this movie about the start of the year for a college baseball team is essentially just a bunch of jocks trying to figure out how they can drink and get laid, and I didn’t enjoy it at all.  But about halfway through, the characters start to show a little more depth, and it becomes more of a Linklater film.  By the end I thoroughly enjoyed it.  It’s nothing close to Linklater’s best work, but it’s a reminder that even his second-tier work is still enjoyable (and that he should have won Best Picture and Best Director for Boyhood).

20. The Lobster This is one heck of a weird, unique movie.  Colin Farrell plays a single man in a world where people are required to be coupled.  He is sent to a resort where he is given a month to find someone, or else be turned into an animal of his choosing (a lobster).  It is such a strange concept, but it is done well, and there is a great supporting cast, led by John C. Reilly, Rachel Weisz, and others.  Everything about it is odd, but I really loved about ¾ of the movie.  I was disappointed by the ending, but in a movie this weird, I suppose you should expect that it’s going to have a strange ending.  This is the type of movie people either love or hate, and even though it’s flawed, I really enjoyed its uniqueness.

 

19. Midnight Special The opening scene of Midnight Special is one of the best scenes in any movie this year, and it made me think that I was going to be watching another great movie by Jeff Nichols (Mud, Take Shelter).  And I did enjoy the movie, but the rest of it didn’t quite live up to that tense opener.  Michael Shannon and Joel Edgerton are great as men on the run from the FBI and a religious cult.  We find out why as the movie unfolds.  There are a few aspects to the second half of the movie that didn’t quite work for me (too hard to explain without giving things away), but overall it was almost a great movie, and it’s well worth watching, especially if you enjoyed Nichols earlier films.

18. Sing Street John Carney is an Irish director that has made three movies (Once, Begin Again, and Sing Street) about making music.  Once was a revelation.  It starred Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (who are both actual musicians, not actors) as street musicians that find each other and make beautiful music together.  Sing Street is about making music, but in a very different way.  The main character here is a high school boy sent to a city school when his parents get divorced, and decides to form a band to impress a girl (is there any other reason to form a band?)  It’s set in the 80’s, so the band is influenced by Duran Duran and other New Wave music, but pretty quickly they start making their own music and videos.  With all of Carney’s movies the music is good, and it is a huge part of what makes them enjoyable.  If I had any complaint it would actually be that the music is too good - I am certain that no high school band ever was able to write this many songs that sound this good right off the bat without making a bunch of music that was really crappy first.  It’s a minor complaint, because while it might not be realistic, the movie is just a lot of fun.  It has a ton of heart, and it’s hard not to root for the band to make it.

17. Ghostbusters Lots of people panned this movie before it ever came out.  Some people were unhappy that Ghostbusters was being re-made.  Some didn’t like the idea of it being made with a female cast.  Nonsense.  It’s a lot of fun.  I’m as big a fan as there is of the original Ghostbusters.  It is literally my favorite comedy ever made and I’ve probably seen it at least 20 times.  This one hits a lot of the same notes, but the best thing about it is it has a terrific cast and lets them be funny.  Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, Spy) is my current favorite comedy director,  Kate McKinnon, Kirsten Wiig, and Melissa McCarthy are some of the funniest actors alive, and they all have some great moments.  No, it’s not the original, but it doesn’t try to be, and it’s a lot of fun.  Great cameos too.

16. Captain America: Civil War Every summer you can count on a handful of superhero movies, most of them sequels.  This summer you can catch Wonder Woman, Spiderman, Wolverine, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Lego Batman on the big screen.  Most of them make a lot of money, have fun action, and don’t have a whole lot to say.  I’ve always enjoyed the Avengers movies more than most superhero movies, and even though Civil War is part of the Captain America franchise, it is really a full Avengers movie.  The last few Avengers movies have dealt with the themes of privacy vs. security, and how far we will go to protect our freedom.  They’ve maybe mined all they can from those themes, but this is a worthy chapter in the bigger story.  Captain America and Iron Man are the heart of the Avengers, each representing different philosophical (and maybe political) sides of the coin when it comes to how we achieve security and freedom.  Each movie becomes a little more overstuffed and it becomes harder to keep track of all the new characters that pop up and potentially spin off into their own franchises, to the point where next summer’s Avengers: Infinity War is probably going to have 50 different Avengers.  The Black Panther spinoff coming out in February looks pretty awesome, though.

15. Manchester by the Sea When a teenage boy’s father dies, his uncle (Casey Affleck) comes back to Manchester to stay with him and help sort out his affairs.  There is a tight bond between the two, but the uncle seems reluctant to dive into the situation to really be there for his nephew, and at first it’s hard to understand why.  As the movie unfurls we learn more about Affleck’s past and why the city of Manchester haunts him.  It’s a powerful movie, and there are a few scenes that just wreck you, especially one between Affleck (who won best actor for this role) and Michelle Williams (who is also excellent).  In the end I didn’t love the movie as much as I thought I would, in part because it so raw, and there isn’t much of a sense of healing, but then again I guess sometimes it’s that way in real life too.  It’s powerful, well-made, well-acted, and worth seeing, but it certainly won’t leave you feeling good afterwards.  

14. Nocturnal Animals When Amy Adams receives an advance copy of a novel from her ex-husband, she can’t put it down.  The novel is a creepy story about a family confronted on the highway by potentially dangerous strangers.  Her ex-husband (played by Jake Gyllenhall) seems to be saying something to her in the novel, which gets darker and darker. The movie jumps back and forth between Adams’ current life (wealthy, sterile mansion, handsome but absent husband), flashbacks to her previous marriage with Gyllenhall, and the movie within a movie visualization of the novel.  It’s a unique, thought-provoking film, and left me thinking about it hours after the movie ended. I thought it was one of the most interesting movies I watched this year.  On a side note, one of the things that was fun about the movie was that a little ways in, one of the supporting actors appeared, and I thought “Hey, I recognize that guy!”  It turned out to be Karl Glusman, a former student from LOHS.  He’s been in a couple of other movies, but this was probably the biggest film he’s been in.  Pretty cool.

13. The Edge of Seventeen As a high school teacher, I am a big fan of high school movies (here’s a list of my all time favorites), even if I find most of them to be unrealistic.  This is the best “high school” movie in the last couple years.  Hailee Steinfeld plays a depressed high school outsider that has one friend and a twin brother(Blake Jenner) that is “perfect” (and also looks like he’s about 10 years too old to be in high school). When her best friend gets together with her brother one night, her world crumbles. Woody Harrelson is great as a sarcastic teacher, and overall it’s a fun, funny, and at times thoughtful high school movie.

12. Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 2 The first Guardians movie was an out-of-nowhere delight, and one of the funniest movies of the year in 2014.  There were great characters with great chemistry and a lot of fun action.  And it was an original take on the superhero movie. Since the original was good in part because it was original, the sequel is a couple notches down, but still a lot of fun.  Most of the gang is back, with Groot (Vin Diesel) replaced by Baby Groot, and Dave Bautista’s Drax has a bigger role and really steals the show.  It has plenty of flaws, but it’s a great summer movie that’s really funny.

11. The Lost City of Z  For all of the sci-fi movies that have been made over the years about people exploring different planets or worlds, there are relatively few exploration movies about our own planet, which is a shame, because when done well it is a great genre.  I think of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Apocalypse Now as part of that genre, and they are two of my top 25 movies of all time.  Even better, The Lost City of Z is based on the true story of Percy Fawcett, who spent his life searching for a mysterious city and civilization in the Amazon.  The story checks a lot of the boxes for a great adventure movie - great atmosphere and cinematography, a handsome, adventurous lead, dangerous encounters with natives.  If it’s lacking anything, maybe it’s the excitement of the truly great adventure movies, but it is still a pleasure to watch.  Real life adventure/exploration books are some of my favorite stories, but sadly you don’t see many of them brought to the big screen.  Nothing would make me happier than to see one or two of these types of movies in the theaters every year.  If you know anyone that makes movies, I’d be glad to get started on my adaptations of some of the great true adventure stories (Undaunted Courage, Astoria, The Worst Journey in the World……)

10. Westworld Ok, so I cheated on my list this year and added a couple of short TV series that I loved to the list.  Basically, the series had to be fairly short, and something that was good enough that I would’ve seen it in the theater.  I don’t watch many HBO series - I find that a show on HBO is going to be violent and overly sexual just because it can be (ahem, Game of Thrones).  And that’s actually true of Westworld, but I still thought it was fantastic.  It’s a futuristic Western, a world where rich tourists pay to spend the week living in a replica of the wild West populated by life-like robots that allow them to fulfill whatever fantasies they might have.  It’s was on HBO, but it is basically a long-form movie, with an incredible cast led by Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris, great cinematography, and great storytelling.  The heart of the show is the character Dolores, a robot played by Evan Rachel Wood, who gradually seems to be gaining more awareness of what is really going on, despite her Groundhog Day existence of getting killed every episode.  There were times when the violence was too much, but overall I loved the series.  Like Blade Runner (the trailer for Blade Runner 2049 looks awesome, by the way) it’s a movie about robots that is at its core about what it means to be human.

9. Moonlight  A coming of age story, told in three acts, of a young gay black man in Miami.  It’s a story that’s about the issues of poverty, race, inequality, and homosexuality. But it’s so powerful because it’s not just a movie about those things, it’s really a story about a boy.  And every act is a powerful statement about who the boy is, what has shaped him, and who he is becoming.  Movies like this are hard for me to watch at times, especially the first act, where you see this small boy with a drug addicted mother, bullying classmates, and the only person that notices him and actually cares for him is the drug dealer that is poisoning his neighborhood.  It is hard for me to watch this little boy and not see some of the foster kids that have lived with our family and have lived a similar story in real life.  This isn’t necessarily based on a true story, but it is true.  I have to admit, I felt a bit let down by the end of the movie.  I was left wishing there was more, and that is why I don’t have it ranked at the very top, but I have no qualms with it winning best picture, because it was certainly one of the best movies of the year.  

8. Stranger Things Stranger Things is another TV show, but it has elements of so many great 80’s movies (The Goonies, ET, Gremlins, and Stand by Me all come to mind) while still having its own story to tell. It nails the 80’s without being about the 80’s.   It’s a little darker than I thought it would be - I originally was going to watch it with my kids, and quickly realized that was a bad idea - but it’s great storytelling that has a perfect sense of time and place.  This was the best thing I watched last summer, show or movie.  

7. The Night Manager The Night Manager is a TV miniseries based on a John Le Carre novel, and it’s one of the best spy “movies” I’ve ever seen. I much prefer John Le Carre stories to James Bond movies, mostly because they are based in reality.  A number of his novels have been filmed, but this is the best of them.  Tom Hiddleston plays a former British soldier and night manager at a hotel in Cairo that reluctantly gets pulled into the world of espionage.  Hiddleston is the perfect spy - cool, handsome, poised, and in this role, a bit of a cipher.  He would make a great James Bond, and this role has a little Bond in it, but also more depth.  It doesn’t hurt to have 8 episodes instead of 2 hours to work with.  Like all Le Carre stories it’s more of a slow burn than an action story, but it also does have some great, tense moments.  I don’t want to say anymore about it because you should just watch it this summer.  

6. Lion For a Best Picture nominee, Lion didn’t get a lot of publicity, but it is a great movie.  It tells the story of Saroo (Dev Patel), a boy in India that gets separated from his family, ends up in an orphanage, and eventually gets adopted by an Australian couple.  Later in life he tries to figure out where he came from and what might have happened to his birth family.  It’s a true story, and it’s pretty hard not to get choked up at the end when they show a scene with all the real-life versions of the people portrayed in the movie.  The movie spends part of the time with Saroo when he’s little, and the second half shows him as an adult.  Both acts are excellent.  As an adoptive parent, this movie really pulled at my heartstrings.  It’s a beautiful, touching movie, but I think it also gives a very realistic picture of adoption.  Specifically it does a good job of showing that even when a child is placed in a loving home, there are still deep scars that remain from the separation from your birth family.  The movie also shows how hard it can be for adoptive parents dealing with some of the residual trauma that your child has experienced, even when they are now in a safe and loving home.  It’s excellent, powerful, and a must-see.

5. Hell or High Water You normally don’t think of a crime thriller as being something that would get nominated for Best Picture, but this is no ordinary heist movie.  Chris Pine and Ben Foster play brothers that come up with a scheme to rob banks to help get themselves out of debt.  Jeff Bridges is excellent as the Texas Ranger trying to track them down.  What makes it so great?  Well, the acting and action are terrific (Bridges was nominated for Supporting Actor, and Chris Pine is a breakout star), but it’s also a story about a lot more than a heist.  When the robberies start happening, a lot of people don’t seem to mind  that the banks that have been foreclosing on families are getting their money stolen. There’s a lot of moral gray areas in the story, and that’s a big part of what makes it great.  It’s never too clear exactly who you should be rooting for or against, but you care about all of the characters. I thought this was a movie I loved but other people wouldn’t be as high on, but then it got nominated for Best Picture, so I guess I wasn’t the only one that thought it was special. The director (David Mackenzie) and writer (Taylor Sheridan) are both young,  have a couple really good movies under their belt, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they do next.

4. Arrival  Science fiction is a genre that really ecompases two types of movies. (Here’s the list of my favorites, as of a couple years ago - it could use updating)   There are the action and effects movies (think Star Wars/Star Trek/Aliens/Terminator), and then there are the science fiction movies that aren’t really action movies at all, but use the future or technology as a device to help tell a particular story (2001, Gattaca, and recently Ex Machina come to mind as excellent examples).  Put Arrival among the all-time greats in the later category.  Despite the presence of aliens, it is is one of the most thoughtful movies of the year.  When eight giant spaceships arrive across the globe, it is unclear if they are benign, if they are gathering data, or if their intent is something more sinister.  Amy Adams plays a linguist working as part of a team that goes in to try to figure out what the aliens want.  The scenes with the aliens are interspersed with flashbacks of Adams and her daughter, and at first I thought that they detracted from the story.  By the end I came to realize these scenes were the heart of what the movie was really about.  Some years this would’ve been number one on my list, but this year there were three movies I enjoyed even more.

3. Get Out Not only was this the biggest out-of-nowhere surprise of the year, it was simply one of the best movies of the year.  I’ve heard it described as a horror movie, but it’s not.  Thriller might be a better fit, but it’s so much more.  Daniel Kaluuya plays Chris, an African American man that drives with his white girlfriend to visit her family for the weekend.  What unfolds is spellbinding - a mystery heightened by Chris’ presence in an all-white world that seems to put him on a pedestal but also treats him very strangely.  It’s a movie that wants you to think about race and privilege while still being a great, tense story.  It works on so many different levels.  It’s a movie filled with enough symbolism to study in a film class, but it’s also just a lot of fun to watch.  There are a couple movies that I have ranked higher because they were so much fun, but this was the movie of the year.  

2. La La Land  La La Land is a beautiful movie in every sense of the word.  The music is beautiful, the actors (Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone) are beautiful, the scenery in the jazz bars and along the skylines of LA is beautiful (the poster for the movie, with Gosling and Stone dancing with the city at night in the background is truly iconic) , and so is the story.  Mia (Stone), an aspiring actress, and Sebastian (Gosling), a jazz musician,  keep bumping into each other around LA, and eventually they fall for each  other.  It’s a love story about the two of them, but also the movies and music that they are passionate about.  I’m normally not a musical fan, and after the opening scene I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to sit through the whole thing.  By the end I was enchanted.  The final scene was my favorite scene in any movie this year, a brilliant, poignant, and unexpected end to a great film.

1.Rogue One I know this wasn’t the best movie this year, but it was the most fun.  The Star Wars franchise is by far my favorite, and there is just so much to love about the movies.  Yes, there are flaws (not a whole lot of character development), but everything I love about the Star Wars movies was on display: great action scenes, fun characters, impressive landscapes, cool creatures, exciting special effects, epic bad guys, and an engaging story  The movie is set right before (literally right before) Episode IV.  I thought it was a terrific stand-alone movie, but it also fit perfectly into the Star Wars universe.  I don’t know how I’m going to wait until December for the Last Jedi, but I’m already reserving a spot at the top of next year’s list.  

Extra Credit

A few older movies (and a TV show) I watched this year:

Lord Of the Rings: The Two Towers I own the trilogy and watch at least one of these movies every year.  As a whole, these movies are an-all time top 10 favorite for me.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory - I read the Roald Dahl book with my youngest daughter this year, and we decided to watch the movie (the original, of course) after we’d finished reading it.  Gene wilder is the best.

Game of Thrones, Season 1 I know I am in the minority here when I say that I thought that Game of Thrones wasn’t anything special.  I can see how people would get into it - it has a certain soap-opera drama to it, and there are a lot of good characters, but I never got hooked.  When season 1 ended with a woman emerging naked from a fire holding two baby dragons, I decided I’d had enough.

The Karate Kid It had been a while since I’d seen the original when I watched this with my daughters earlier in the year, and man is it awesome.  If I had to pick one movie that perfectly captured the 80’s, this might be my choice, narrowly edging out Top Gun and Ferris Buehler’s Day Off.  

Black Sheep and Beverly Hills Ninja My son and I watched Tommy Boy last year, so naturally he wanted to see some of Chris Farley’s other movies.  Neither of these is very good, but for a 12 year old boy, there isn’t much better.