10. “The Levelling”
It’s a magical feeling to walk out of a festival film and feel like you’ve found the next big thing, and this year that feeling came after Hope Dickson Leach’s “The Levelling.” Overlooked somewhat among the scrum of TIFF but finding a homegrown audience at the BFI London Film Festival (it’ll open in the UK next year, no news yet on a U.S. distributor, but I’ll put it out myself if I have to), it’s the virtually one-location story of a young woman (“Game Of Thrones” actress Ellie Kendrick) who returns to her family farm and semi-estranged father (David Troughton) in the aftermath of a devastating flood and her brother’s suicide. Made with an assuredness and control that that belies its director’s first-time status, it’s both intimate to an incredibly raw degree, and somehow bigger than its modest scope, looking into an underexamined aspect of British life, the struggling rural middle class. Anchored by one of the best performances this year or next by Kendrick, it’s an incredibly special little movie.
9. “Manchester By The Sea”
I wrestled a bit about putting “Manchester By The Sea” in here, given the allegations leveled at Casey Affleck a few years back that emerged recently (after I saw and loved the film). As Jess wrote brilliantly earlier in the year, everyone has their own line, and while I’ll likely feel uncomfortable as and when I rewatch the film, there’s a risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, especially in a film of this sort of compassion and humanity, and the film’s strengths go far beyond Affleck’s (admittedly excellent) central performance. Indeed, beyond a distracting cameo from Matthew Broderick late in the game, “Manchester By The Sea” is close to perfect on a purely artistic level, with Kenneth Lonergan returning to the tighter focus of “You Can Count On Me” while retaining the sense from “Margaret” that this isn’t really a constructed story: its rhythms are drawn from life, not from movies. It’s a desperately sad piece of work, tackling a grief that feels insurmountable: that it ends on a strangely hopeful note is just a small part of Lonergan’s brilliance.
8. “Arrival”
I write this a day after President-Elect Babadook has perhaps managed to kick-start a nuclear arms race with a tweet, and for the umpteenth time in recent months, I thought of “Arrival,” a film that provided a shocking degree of comfort and hope in the bleak final quarter of 2016. Eric Heisserer’s outstanding adaption of Ted Chiang’s short story, helmed with his trademark meticulousness by Denis Villeneuve (a director I’ve admired but not loved before now) about a linguist (Amy Adams)’s attempt to establish contact with an alien race newly arrived on Earth is sci-fi of the best sort: one that tells us something about both our world and ourselves. And amidst all of its virtues — the inventive music, Bradford Young’s stunning photography, a career-best turn from Adams, a wonderfully generous supporting one from Jeremy Renner — it’s the film’s messages that continue to resonate with me. Both as a plea for the essential nature of communication and co-operation around the world, at a time when fear and suspicion rules the day, and on a more intimate level, that life is more than worth the pain, suffering and grief that comes with it.
7. “Things To Come”
I have a theory, despite the two films being oddly similar in many ways, that you’re either an “Elle” Isabelle Huppert person or an “Things To Come” Isabelle Huppert person. But while I enjoyed the provocations of Paul Verhoeven’s film, and was awed by Huppert’s turn there too, I think I’m a “Things To Come” Isabelle Huppert person. With her last couple of films, Mia Hansen-Løve examined youth (including “Eden,” my fave of 2014), but here turns her eye to late middle age with the same kind of wit, compassion and empathy that has typified her work so far. The tone is winningly low-key, but the exemplary editing, which tells pages of story with a simple cut, and Huppert’s deft, disarming performance, often playing about five different beats at once, builds to an utterly complete portrait of a fascinating and refreshingly unexceptional woman.
6. “The Wailing”
If “The Yellow Sea” director Na Hong-jin has so far failed to get the attention of countrymen like Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook, “The Wailing” deserves to change that: it’s a searing, batshit horror film unlike anything else you’ve seen. Set in a small mountain town, it follows a bumbling local police officer (Kwak Do-won) investigating a series of baffling outbursts of violence which may or may not be related to a Japanese drifter newly arrived in town, and which threaten to claim his own daughter. Relentlessly entertaining even at two-and-a-half hours long, it does what so much Korean film does so well and melds tones and genres in a way that somehow feels coherent, with bumbling comedy going hand-in-hand with procedural thriller, political subtext, horror and fantasy. The plot twists could threaten to feel relentless, but Na glues everything together with a pervading and utterly freakish atmosphere in a way that I’m still struggling to shake months on.