The 25 Best 2016 Films You Might Not Have Seen - Page 5 of 5

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“The Treasure”
We can’t imagine what it was, but this obscure title, with no recognizable stars, in a foreign language, from the notorious fun-factory of Romania, that was promoted with a dusky still image of two guys digging a hole, for some crazy reason failed to set the box office on fire. And that’s really a shame, because Corneliu Porumboiu‘s “The Treasure” is exactly as its title suggests, a small, sparkly wonder that is all the more special and valuable for being a little buried. It’s a shaggy-dog story of a man who gets pulled into a neighbor’s harebrained scheme for digging up a potential fortune that he believes is hidden in a certain garden, but really it becomes a mordant, almost Jarmuschian three-hander (the two are joined by a truculent metal-detector technician), as well as being a winking indictment of Romanian bureaucracy and a kind of cock-eyed boys-own adventure carried out by men who really should be old and defeated enough to know better. Best of all, it transcends all of these strands and ultimately ends up as nothing less whimsical and lovely than a fairy tale — one that’s rendered all the more touching because of the resolutely straight-faced downplaying to that point.

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“Things To Come”
There are only two conceivable reasons for Mia Hansen-Løve‘s heartswelling “Things To Come” being so relatively overlooked. Firstly, the towering central performance from Isabelle Huppert was overshadowed by her equally great but more provocative turn in Paul Verhoeven‘s “Elle (and that’s not even mentioning her third great 2016 role in the fun, little-seen “Valley Of Love“). And secondly, “Things To Come” is dangerously close to perfect, so much so that, especially given that it bowed early in the year at the Berlinale, noisier, scrappier and more uneven subsequent films have managed to eclipse it in the conversation. It’s a real shame as, similar to Hansen-Løve’s last film “Eden,” “Things To Come” is a film to treasure, a piercingly funny, warm, clearsighted portrait of a woman in later life who is both wholly remarkable and completely ordinary. Loosely sketching the fallout when Huppert’s long-married philosophy professor divorces her husband, while also juggling professional pressure and negotiating a tricky relationship with her mercurial mother (Edith Scob), the film is magnificently unsentimental but also uplifting and gently progressive in showing a sixtysomething woman face an uncertain future with such practical wisdom, perspective and unflagging humor.

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“The Wailing”
Na Hong-jin‘s uncategorizable (yet definitely Korean) police-procedural-meets-ghost-story horror made it on to our collective Best Films of 2016, despite very few of us having seen it. Which just goes to show the regard in which it’s held by all who did. A bumbling cop, who’s also the doting father of a precocious daughter, gets embroiled in a potentially supernatural serial murder case, in which a kind of demonic possession is suspected to be responsible for a series of grisly deaths. But “The Wailing” is far weirder than even that logline suggests — long and deceptively loose-limbed, it seems to ramble off on intriguing tangents in an almost offhand way (informed by the terrifically engaging and unassuming performance by breakout Kwak Do-won in the central role), and it’s not till the tightly wound finale that you realize you’ve casually followed it right into the depths of the forest and there’s no way back to the beaten track from here. Na’s previous films (“The Yellow Sea” and “The Chaser“) were engrossing thrillers, too, but “The Wailing” sees him refine and redefine the kind of banal depravity that is his hallmark.

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“A War”
Tobias Lindholm‘s last directorial film — the unfeasibly taut “A Hijacking” — was also a staple on lists like this in its year. For whatever reason, the Danish helmer seems to have less success cutting through with his excellent directorial films than with his writing, whether in collaboration with director Thomas Vinterberg (“The Hunt“) or on television, with his widely acclaimed “Borgen.” But “A War” shows him getting stronger and more ambitious as a director, while his sure command of scenes of tension and conflict is again much in evidence. “A War” tells the story of a good Danish officer (Lindholm regular Pilou Asbaek) who makes a split-second decision in the course of an operation that ends up having tragic consequences and for which he will eventually face a court martial back home in Denmark. It’s a surgically precise dissection of personal guilt, collective duty and moral hypocrisy, exacerbated into an unusually sympathetic, righteously angry treatise on the impossible quandary of being a soldier on the front line of a war being waged by people a long, long way from the heat of battle.

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White Girl”
Told with the scuzzy sheen of Harmony Korine’s “Kids” and the sun-splashed photography of “The Virgin Suicides,” Elizabeth Wood’s remarkable debut, “White Girl,” is a vibrant and visceral piece of filmmaking. Centering on a hedonistic don’t-give-a-fuck college student (a breakthrough Morgan Saylor, previously known from “Homeland”), “White Girl” has a trainwreck, can’t-stop-but-gawk quality to it. Raw-nerved and electric, the film centers on the privilege of an affluent college kid who can afford to party, recklessly date the drug dealer next door and never fear the consequences. The same can’t be said for the girl’s beau, who gets involved in over his head in the drug trade. Her misguided journey to get him out of jail via a shady attorney has all the cautionary trappings of a naïve, thoughtless white kid who thinks she can rig the system thanks to her advantages — an attitude that leads her down the rabbit hole of depravity and desperation. A cautionary tale, but also a sharp examination of the hypocrisy of the white-savior ideal as well as the dangers of unthinking privilege, “White Girl” is both thrilling and ugly, and never less than utterly engrossing.

It can be a jungle out there for smaller indie and foreign titles, with so many films vying for our attention every week, and for every modest hit (we were happy to note that the delightful “Hunt For The Wilderpeople” made more than $5m), there are plenty more than simply sink like a stone. And that goes double for documentaries, which we’ve excluded from the list above purely because there are very few great docs that we would suggest are as widely seen as they deserve. This year, non-fiction titles such as “Tower,” “Chicken People,” “All These Sleepless Nights,” and “Homo Sapiens” all should have caused more of a stir than they did; just check through our Best Documentaries of 2016 for more recommendations there.

Elsewhere, a great film that’s only been on release for a hot minute but that seems destined to reach an audience smaller than it deserves is Maren Ade‘s brilliantly bizarre “Toni Erdmann,” which, along with relative arthouse hit “Embrace Of The Serpent,” “Jeff Nichols‘ low-key sci-fi “Midnight Special,” Andrew Dominik‘s immaculate Nick Cave doc “One More Time With Feeling,” and stunning Laika animation “Kubo And The Two Strings,” made our main, hotly contested 25 Best Films Of The Year list. Not getting the same shine, but still worthy of a fairer shake than they got overall, were unconventional sports drama “The Phenom” and pregnancy horror “Shelley,” which both featured in our Most Overrated/Underrated Films of the Year feature — again a treasure trove of neglected titles if you’re looking for some more.

And finally, there are quite a few titles so underseen that not even enough of the Playlist Collective have seen them to be able to make an educated wholehearted recommendation, but there are lone voices piping up for “Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party,” “The Land,” “The Other Side,” “If There’s A Hell Below,” “Little Wing,” “King Jack,” “The Ends” and “Blue Jay,” among many others. Looks like we have some catching up to do, too, and if there are other underappreciated 2016 films you feel we should be paying greater attention to, do call them out in the comments.

Click here for our complete coverage of the Best Of 2016

—with Katie Walsh, Oli Lyttelton, CJ Prince and Rodrigo Perez.