5. “Blade Runner 2049”
Haunting and haunted, crafting ceaselessly beautiful images from a wasteland of devastated ruins, “Blade Runner 2049” [our review] is the epic of our times. Ridley Scott’s original was visionary in many ways, but Denis Villeneuve’s sequel is more complete, with a narrative both more affecting and better executed. Ryan Gosling channels a beguiling emptiness tempered with yearning, perfect for the questing replicant, K. But the real MVP here is cinematographer Roger Deakins, who takes the great visual aesthetic of the original, both its conception of the future and its noir influences, and pushes it to a truly monumental scale. His vision of a collapsed California lurking in shadows has the same mournful majesty as Egyptian ruins, soulful and etched in stone. Almost every single frame of this film could hang in a museum. Despite the overwhelming environmental devastation, despite the even harder to escape systems of profit and control hanging over the characters, the heart of this film beats with hope. “Blade Runner 2049” shows that humanity is not given, it is searched for and found, and that even in the harshest conditions, life will endure. — Joe Blessing
4. “The Shape of Water”
This feels like the movie Guillermo del Toro was always destined to make, but he kept getting derailed by big-budget filmmaking to the point that it almost never happened. (Indeed, the only reason he moved forward was because his proposed “Pacific Rim” sequel was sidelined for six months.) “The Shape of Water” [our review] is a movie that makes you swoon – it’s a heartfelt, unorthodox romance that is also one of the least obnoxious “love letters to classic cinema” of all time. It’s overstuffed for sure, bursting with all of del Toro’s dark obsessions (creatures, fountains of blood, deviant sexuality, color-coded symbolism) but at no point does it feel ungainly. In telling the story of a mute janitor (Sally Hawkins) and her romance with a mysterious aquatic creature (Doug Jones) in retro futuristic 1960’s America, del Toro is able to pack every frame with stylistic detail and raw emotion. This is one of those movies that feels timeless but is undeniably timely – it’s a celebration of the other (and not only the creature, there are a number of fringe characters from a closeted artist to a clandestine operative), released into a world whose political atmosphere is very much against anything outside the norm. Few movies set in the past, with such grand stylistic ambitious, could remain so wonderfully now. Soggy and blood-soaked, this might be del Toro’s greatest, most mature accomplishment. — Drew Taylor
3. “The Florida Project”
Fifty years from now, for people wanting to know what it was like getting by in the crevices of America’s crumbling service-industry fantasy factory, Sean Baker’s rhapsodic and bittersweet fantasia “The Florida Project” [our review] would be a great start. It starts as a roustabout idyll about a loose band of Lost Kids banging around a hot-pink transient hotel somewhere on the far fringes of Disney World. But Baker, who distilled chaos into gutpunch drama last time out in his iPhone-shot “Tangerine,” pulls in quickly on the kids’ ringleader, the scampish Moonee (Brooklynn Prince, who should be first called if they ever re-reboot the Little Rascals) and explores what makes her tick. Behind Moonee’s happy-go-lucky freedom and pally relationship with her layabout mom Halley (Bria Vinaite) lies a darker reality of deep poverty, violence, and self-destruction. Watching over it all is the hotel manager, Bobby—played in an effective but unusually endearing lower register by Willem Dafoe—who would help everybody out if he could. Baker isn’t blind to the bad choices that some of his characters have made. But he doesn’t believe in punishment. That’s for the law, not art. — Chris Barsanti
2. “Dunkirk”
With “Dunkirk,” Christopher Nolan shed every well-known cliche of the war film, and ended up making an abstract, experimental art film about World War II, and somehow it’s one of his most emotionally moving and impeccably crafted films yet. Shedding all vestiges of familiar storytelling, Nolan utilizes film format to place you directly onto the streets of France, among a snowfall of Nazi propaganda fliers; in the air, in soaring, vertiginous shots over the ocean, and claustrophobically crammed onto the beaches of Dunkirk and the flooding hulls of ships. He stretches and compresses time and braids it together, creating an inextricably intertwined timeline of one week, one day, one hour. Hans Zimmer’s score whines and vibrates with anxiety, and a constant “tick-tick-tick” manifests the imminent threat growing with each passing moment, each bomb and torpedo and bullet— and it’s infinitely scarier when that ticking clock stops. “Dunkirk” [our review] swallows you whole with heart-stopping immersion as Nolan and his DP Hoyte van Hoytema push their IMAX cameras to the limit, plunging them underwater, strapping them to vintage planes in order to make bigger, realer, images that are equally breathtaking in their beauty and in their terror. Turns out exposition is overrated: The less the better, in fact. So you can’t hear what Tom Hardy’s saying? Who cares? You don’t need to. The story is in what happens, and we become emotionally bonded to these characters simply by witnessing their fight for survival. “Dunkirk” is the apex of experiential cinema. — Katie Walsh
1. “Lady Bird”
Watching Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut expands your heart to a size you didn’t think it could reach, even allowing room for affection for Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash” to creep (back) in. This seriocomedy about high school senior Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) is suffused with warmth, demonstrating love for every element inside: the city of Sacramento, rebel boys who read Howard Zinn, the polarized nature of mother-daughter relationships in adolescence, high school theater productions and Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River.” But what elevates “Lady Bird” [our interview with Gerwig] above a standard coming-of-age film isn’t just its precision; it’s the unique perspective as well as the performances that make it all ring true. Films made by women about high school are still rare, and there’s a feeling of revelation watching your experience on screen. (Is this how dude critics felt with “Boyhood”?) Though in its specificity and details, there’s still a universality to it in the exquisite pains of first love, the desire to leave home and the pull that brings you back. Gerwig’s film never feels too precious thanks to the both her directorial hand as well as the work done by Ronan, which never looks like work at all. As her mother, Laurie Metcalf is earning a lot of deserved praise as well for her brittle but loving performance, but Tracy Letts’ ever-supportive father, Beanie Feldstein’s BFF and Lucas Hedges and Timothée Chalamet’s love interests add even more veracity. Hella tight, indeed. – Kimber Myers
Unsurprisingly, given how close the final tally was, there were a whole host of titles that could have easily cracked the top 25, had just a couple of people ranked them one or two places higher on their lists. The very near misses include: Joachim Trier’s “Thelma”; Patty Jenkins’ “Wonder Woman”; James Franco’s “The Disaster Artist”; and Ruben Ostlund’s “The Square.” And following hot on their heels were titles like Noah Baumbach’s “The Meyerowitz Stories”; Steven Soderbergh’s “Logan Lucky”; Steven Spielberg’s “The Post”; Olivier Assayas’ “Personal Shopper”; James Mangold’s “Logan”; Agnes Varda’s “Faces, Places” (the highest placed documentary title); Hong Sang-Soo’s “On the Beach At Night Alone”; and even Terrence Malick’s “Song to Song” because we contain multitudes/there’s no accounting for taste/some folk be cray.
There were a further 50 or so titles mentioned, but of those many figured despite only showing up on one list and so we won’t mention them here. However Bertrand Bonello’s “Nocturama”; Andrey Zvyaginstev’s “Loveless”; Matt Spicer’s “Ingrid Goes West”; Kathryn Bigelow’s ” Detroit”; Craig Gillespie’s “I, Tonya”; Taylor Sheridan’s “Wind River”; Sofia Coppola’s “The Beguiled”; Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Ferris’ “Battle of the Sexes”; and Craig S. Zahler’s “Brawl In Cell Block 99” all made it onto more than one list, and so get to go home with a diploma, if not quite a ribbon.
Being as none of us are entirely 100% in agreement with the inclusions and rankings of the above, we’re pretty certain you aren’t either, so why not tell us what your top 10 would have been in the comments below.
Voter list:
Rodrigo Perez, Kevin Jagernauth, Oliver Lyttelton, Jessica Kiang, Greg Ellwood, Drew Taylor, Katie Walsh, Kimber Myers, Noel Murray, Nikola Grozdanovich, Ryan Oliver, Bradley Warren, Oktay Ege Kozak, Erik McClanahan, Eli Fine, Bennet Campbell Ferguson, Martine Olivier, Christian Gallichio, Lena Wilson, Julia Teti, Allyson Johnson, Andrew Crump, Will Ashton, Chris Barsanti, Gary Garrison, Joe Blessing, Reese Conner, Griffin Schiller, Kyle Kohner, Charles Dean, Jordan Ruimy.
