Critical Mass

The best and the rest: 30 of our favorite films this year

The year in movies wraps with three lists of 10

Alex Hibbert (left) and Mahershala Ali star in Moonlight, the story of the life of a young black man growing up in a rough neighborhood in Miami who struggles to find his place in the world.
Alex Hibbert (left) and Mahershala Ali star in Moonlight, the story of the life of a young black man growing up in a rough neighborhood in Miami who struggles to find his place in the world.

There is a chance the name "Theodore Sturgeon" means something to you. If you are a fan of science fiction and fantasy novels, you might know him as one of those artists who -- despite at one time being the most anthologized writer in the English language -- was more influential than successful. Sturgeon's deep humanism impressed and influenced Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison and Stephen King. They've all cited him as an influence.

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Director Jeff Nichols (left) and Joel Edgerton discuss a scene on the set of Loving.

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Kevin Wiggins (left) and Jeff Bridges star in Hell or High Water.

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Aaron Taylor-Johnson (left) holds Ellie Bamber, as Robert Aramayo restrains Isla Fisher in director Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals.

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Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck appear in a scene from Manchester by the Sea.

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Dakota Johnson and Ralph Fiennes star in A Bigger Splash.

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Jacob Kasch (from left), Macon Blair and Patrick Stewart star in Green Room, a film about a punk rock band that has to fight for survival after they see a murder at a skinhead bar.

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Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) and Nick Wilde (voiced by Jason Bateman) star in the animated Zootopia.

You might have also heard that Sturgeon was working alongside another science fiction writer when L. Ron Hubbard had a revelation: "Y'know, we're all wasting our time writing this hack science fiction! You wanna make real money, you gotta start a religion!"

But Sturgeon may be best known for coining an adage, usually referred to as "Sturgeon's Law," that declared "ninety percent of everything is crap."

Sturgeon was responding to critics complaining about the quality of science fiction writing. He was pointing out that his field was no different from any other. By definition, most creative work is mediocre -- most music, most books, most movies. Most newspaper stories. Only in Lake Wobegone can all children be above average.

We can quibble about percentages. If you consider the entire universe of movies made in a given year, I believe far fewer than 10 percent achieve a high standard of excellence. But there are lots of OK movies, adequate to the diversionary purposes for which they were designed. There are bad movies that might be enjoyed in special circumstances. It is even possible to find something redeeming in what a less generous moviegoer might regard as junk.

One of the prime qualifications for film critics should be that they like movies and are predisposed to allow the work under consideration to work whatever magic it may have. I saw a lot of movies this year; maybe 90 percent of them weren't all that great.

But these were.

I'm not sure my ratio is the same as Sturgeon's -- I had no trouble picking my Top 10, an alternate Top 10 and a list of near-misses. But I see an awful lot of movies. These weren't junk.

1. Loving -- This is a homer pick. Director Jeff Nichols is a Little Rock native and I feel an especial affinity for his humiliated Southern males trying to do (and doing) the right thing. While it's certain that not everyone will appreciate Loving's relaxed and nonsensational pace (the only explosion of violence comes early and, while it's appropriately shocking, it doesn't draw blood), this seemed the low-key hymn to decency that our country needs now.

As bad as things got in 2016, Loving, along with Ray McKinnon's similarly subtle television series Rectify and the Drive-By Truckers' more strident album American Band, were remarkable works of art from white Southerners who manage to portray working-class folks with empathy and without condescension. Work like this goes a ways toward counterbalancing unfair stereotypes.

The highest and best use of Loving is as a love story, a study of how human beings court affection and an affirmation of the primacy of private life. But it's also a useful cautionary tale, a reminder that it's not that difficult to get on the wrong side of history.

Loving will be criticized for not being more heavy-handed and conventional, but Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga have created deeply authentic characters that might simply be too quiet for awards consideration. No matter, they perfectly serve this tender film about ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary moment of our revolving, repeating history.

2. Manchester by the Sea -- Lots of people say they go to the movies to be entertained. I guess they mean they want to see flying robots and good guys scoring clear victories over bad guys. There's nothing wrong with that; we all can use a little ice cream now and then. But there's another idea out there: that art can be nourishing and sustaining, that it can in some small ways make us better people by allowing us to imagine lives and stories different from our own. Art can expand our compassion, allow us to feel as though we've experienced some other kind of existence.

Manchester by the Sea is a chance to vicariously experience the sadness of the saddest sort of man, to acknowledge the gray primer behind the bluest skies. Our life on Earth is a contained thing, with a beginning and an ending. Even the dullest of us might imagine it has an arc, that it is moving toward something. What, we don't know. We can guess. We can hope.

All we know is that we're in for the duration. That we're going to stand there and let it come at us. We can cower and cover up or we can laugh. We can do all three. In the end, it gets us anyway.

3. Moonlight -- Barry Jenkins' remarkable, poetic coming-of-age drama Moonlight is about a sensitive boy who grows up to be a harder man. That much is easy to say; what is more difficult is to convey the heart-crushing pain and, ultimately, the abiding sense of hope it evokes.

Informed by aching sexual tension and a palpable sense of waste, Moonlight is an elliptical and highly detailed study of sadness and resolve, about approach and rapprochement, how families dissolve and re-form. It is told more in bitter glances and fallen gazes than in words. (It's difficult to imagine how it might have played on stage, so minimal is the dialogue.) There's not a false performance or detail.

It presents us with a different Miami from the one we've come to know in movies and TV shows, a real and stark place where good intentions are fragile and scar tissue makes for body armor. It is a tough and beautiful film that one minute feels like Jean Genet transposed into the key of hard antiseptic sunshine before collapsing into a blue and lyrical Francois Truffautian night.

4. The Lobster -- In Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster, a puffy hangdog accountant named David (Colin Farrell) decides that if he can no longer be human, he will become a lobster. Because, he tells his brother Bob, who has been turned into a dog: "Lobsters can live for over 100 years, are blue-blooded like aristocrats, and stay fertile all their lives." Well, OK.

Absurdist, beautifully composed and assembled with preternatural confidence and filled with fine performances, The Lobster requires that its characters speak in an earnest, deadpan tone that resonates with the formal regulations they are living under. We're cued in quickly that this isn't our familiar world; but it's just a bit askance, drained of irony and subtext.

It's important to convey how funny this Franz-Kafka-meets-Charlie-Kaufman-in-Luis-Bunuel's-kitchen story is. While Lanthimos is after bigger game than a black relationship comedy, every detail (even the most horrifying) in the movie contributes to what is becoming Lanthimos' signature tone of heartbreaking hilarity. Lobsters may or may not be able to process pain -- who can decide what you want based on your politics? -- but there's no doubt that anything that can laugh or love can also hurt. Who's to say we're better off?

5. Nocturnal Animals -- Easily dismissed as a good-looking, cool movie by a fashion designer, Tom Ford's second film has the tensest highway breakdown scene I've ever seen. Add another commanding performance by Michael Shannon as a laconic, tubercular lawman and some brittle stylized humor and I'm ready to watch it again.

6. Hell or High Water -- Powered by a thoughtful script by actor-turned-screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, David Mackenzie's modern day Western/bank heist has a lot of old-school values, including a remarkable cast (Jeff Bridges, Ben Foster, Chris Pine), a recognizable plot trajectory and some tension-relieving moments of comic relief. This is a movie your friends who only show up for event pictures will love. As my colleague Piers Marchant wrote in his review: "This is a soulful film, truly intended for adults."

7. The Fits -- Anna Rose Holmer's debut feature is a brisk (72-minute) psychological mystery that features a remarkable performance from young Royalty Hightower, who plays an 11-year-old tomboy who quits boxing to join a dance troupe whose members share a strange ailment. This played at Little Rock's Fantastic Cinema & Craft Beer Festival in April; you can find it on Netflix and DVD.

8. Rams -- The only chance you had to see Icelandic director Grimur Hakonarson's black and dry film about two sheep-herding brothers who farm adjacent plots of land and haven't spoken to each other in 40 years was in an Arkansas theater last year during a summer class I teach for Lifequest. It's on DVD now. Rams is beautiful and tough.

9. Zootopia -- I'm not predisposed to like Disney's animation projects (Moana was OK for an hour, but I couldn't make it through Frozen). With its striking visuals, Zootopia grabbed, and held, my attention.

10. Kate Plays Christine -- Robert Greene's quasi-experimental documentary is a deeply interesting exploration of the relatively straightforward process an actor undergoes while researching a role. Kate Lyn Sheil prepares to play Christine Chubbuck, a newscaster who shot herself on the air in Florida in 1974. But it's also an absorbing study of how we assume identities and become people. Sheil regularly explains to people she interviews that she's preparing to play Chubbuck in a movie, but it takes a while for us to understand that the movie she's talking about is the one we're watching and that it's Sheil's transformation, not her realization of the character, that's the point.

AN ALTERNATE 10

1. Certain Women -- It hurts a little to leave Kelly Reichardt's precisely modulated film off the main list; so let's give it the place of honor here. There are no shootouts in this Western, this is one where confrontations are deflected and firearms feel impotent. What is most important about these stories is the Beckettian persistence of these women. They can't go on. They go on.

2. Sunset Song -- Gritty and poetic, with the sort of aching visual beauty we've come to expect from Terence Davies' films, Sunset Song is a work of intellectual rigor and deep emotion. It might still arrive in local movie houses so I'll save other thoughts for a possible review.

3. A Bigger Splash -- Worth it for Ralph Fiennes' wardrobe and uninhibited dancing, but director Luca Guadagnino's sunbaked, sensual remake of Jacques Deray's somewhat overlooked 1969 exploration of sexual jealousy, La Piscine, is a visual wonder that feels like it might have been made on the cusp of the '70s.

4. The Witch -- I don't like most of the horror movies that have been released since the mid-'80s. The predictable rhythms of most genre horror films, the teases and revelations, the slow crawls through banality rendered eerie by dimness, are something we may admire or mock depending on how well we've judged the filmmakers' efforts. We anticipate the way they prep and execute. If we startle, we might acknowledge it with a laugh, but we always understand that we're perfectly safe in our seats. We know it is a carnival ride and our enjoyment depends largely on the attitude we bring to it. We are sophisticated enough to receive the Guignol as satire.

But there are horror movies that burrow deeper into plausible realms or the peculiar psychology of the individual. We might disbelieve in ghosts, but we understand that monsters walk among us and maybe dwell inside us. Every so often an artist can tap his cold finger on your heart. Every so often you don't find this stuff amusing anymore.

The Witch is one of those movies. All hail Black Philip.

5. Green Room -- You don't want to overthink Jeremy Saulnier's latest, which is witty and gory in an old-school way and feels a lot like the cheap horror movies I remember playing in the drive-ins of my youth. It is not morally sophisticated. It isn't as emotionally arresting or as thoughtful as Saulnier's rural revenge thriller Blue Ruin (2013), which was a little too rough and rural for the art-house crowd and a little too philosophical and slow for the midnight-movie bunch. If one wants to keep making movies, one makes the necessary corrections. So we might expect Green Room to enjoy a long shelf life as a perennial scary movie, the kind that gets trotted out for special screenings and becomes a cherished essential in the home-video libraries of devoted cultists. Like the films of Dario Argento or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Green Room will persist in the imaginations of coming generations.

6. My Golden Days -- I'm a sucker for a certain kind of aspirational French cinema. Coming-of-age stories like Arnaud Desplechin's My Golden Days are in my wheelhouse.

7. Swiss Army Man -- For the first 15 or 20 minutes this is an extended none-too-subtle joke about how human bodies stick around after the person associated with them has ended. But then Swiss Army Man takes a surprising turn and becomes a wonderfully heartfelt meditation on what it means to become human and how we ought to cherish our sentient moments. It becomes a movie about what it means to have free will. It becomes beautiful.

It is a warm, inventive movie that owes a debt to the imaginative sorties of Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman while remaining singularly imaginative. Larkin Seiple's cinematography is lush and evocative, turning the small ($3 million) budget into a virtue. The way music threads through the characters and into the ether, binding them together and to the universe, is life-affirming.

8. Everybody Wants Some -- I didn't love Rick Linklater's latest exercise in jockish nostalgia as much as I thought I would, but I still liked it a lot. I knew those guys.

9. Krisha -- We saw this startling domestic drama back at the 2015 Little Rock Film Festival.

10. Command & Control -- Robert Kenner's documentary focuses on an incident familiar to many Arkansans. On Sept. 18, 1980, at 6:25 p.m., at the Titan II Launch Complex 374-7 near the community of Southside, just north of Damascus, an airman conducting routine maintenance on the Titan II missile silo dropped a wrench socket which fell some 70 feet, glancing off the thrust mount before striking and piercing the rocket's first-stage fuel tank, causing a leak. Base personnel and later civilians in the surrounding area were evacuated, and a haz-mat team was sent to assess the situation. About 3 a.m., the fuel exploded, killing 22-year-old Airman David Livingston and injuring dozens. The Titan II's 9-megaton warhead -- a bomb more powerful than the sum of all ordnance exploded during War War II -- was thrown 100 feet clear of the facility.

It goes without saying that it didn't explode -- if it had, history would have been altered in inexplicable ways. A 9-megaton blast would have had an impact on most of the state.

AND 10 MORE

1. Two Trains Running -- I could have put 10 documentaries on my third list. This one recounts a remarkable story about the hunt for two mysterious bluesmen.

2. Weiner -- That guy.

3. Hunt for the Wilderpeople -- A clever, moving coming-of-age story set in New Zealand.

4. Arrival -- Amy Adams' other movie; the one for which she'll probably win an Oscar.

5. Sing Street -- A sweet musical fantasy.

6. Tower -- A rotoscoped examination of the Charles Whitman sniper attack on the University of Texas campus in 1966.

7. Jackie -- Coming in January, I believe.

8. All the Birds Have Flown South -- So far as I know, Josh and Miles Miller's gritty and powerful independent film hasn't got a distributor yet but if you get a chance to see it you should. The same goes for Mark Thiedeman's off-the-cuff romance White Nights, which he isn't even listing in his IMDb profile. They are local filmmakers of remarkable authority and style.

9. Midnight Special -- If you liked Stranger Things, you should love Jeff Nichols' homage to a certain kind of '80s sci-fi movie.

10. I Am Not Your Negro -- I might have included O.J.: Made in America here, but somehow a seven-hour, 47-minute miniseries doesn't feel like it belongs on this list, even though it got a token theatrical release. I admired Beyonce's Lemonade, but not enough to list it here.

Last film off the list: Fences -- A victim of the numbers.

Honorable mentions: Elle, American Honey, Sully, The Alchemist Cookbook, Hail Caesar!, Captain Fantastic

Didn't see: La La Land, The Salesman

Year's worst (that I saw): Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party, American Pastoral, I Saw the Light, Collateral Beauty

Movie most people are wrong about: Sausage Party (I like it)

Movie I might be wrong about: Nocturnal Animals (although I don't think so)

Movie that is reputedly so bad I have to see it: Yoga Hosers

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Style on 12/25/2016

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