The calendar year is halfway over.
In a way, though, the movie year is just getting started. A lot of the year's "important" movies -- the ones that vie for and win awards -- won't be released until December. A lot of the movies that are going to end up on critics' best-of lists probably won't show up in Arkansas until 2017. So, pulling over to use the year's halfway point as a scenic overlook from which we might look back at how far we've come is a little specious. We still have a mountain in front of us.
And personally, I have a lot of catching up to do. There are still a lot of pretty significant movies from the first six months of 2016 that I've yet to catch. Some of them, like Shane Black's The Nice Guys, I look forward to even though people I trust have given me reason to doubt their quality. Others, which I'm not going to name here, I'm not so excited about. But I feel that I need to see them. That's why I watched Deadpool, which I enjoyed, though probably not as much as the people who made it. I am looking forward to Zootopia and 10 Cloverfield Lane, both of which are cued up on the Apple TV. I haven't even seen Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! which, despite its annoying double exclamation marks, I'm bound to like. (It should be on DVD next month. I'll catch it then.)
I'll get to them eventually, but probably only after I watch the 2012 British mystery I, Anna, which stars Charlotte Rampling and Gabriel Byrne and which I'd never heard of until it showed up in the mail last week. I've also got a stack of DVDs from the Cohen Film Group I want to dive into, including The Benoit Jacquot Collection (comprised of the films A Single Girl, The Disenchanted and Keep It Quiet) and Icelandic director Grimur Hakonarson's Rams, a recently released dry comedy that sounds like it's in my wheelhouse. It's about two middle-age brothers who farm adjacent plots of land and haven't spoken to each other in 40 years. (At one point I considered myself a connoisseur of Icelandic cinema, and I'm anxious to recertify.)
All this is my way of saying that while I'm going to get around to providing you the obligatory list of the best films of 2016 so far, I won't feel the least slighted if you don't take it too seriously. I certainly don't. I'm ambivalent about all these hierarchical ranking exercises. I'd rather just write about the movies and let you guys sort out whether they're worth seeing or not. But I understand people are looking for suggestions. I know I always am. So it's in that spirit I'm offering this list of:
The Best Movies of 2016, So Far
The Lobster -- While I reserve the right to revise these opinions, right now I'm thinking this might be the best film I've seen this year. Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos' absurdist comedy is a work of serious intent and rigor, yet it managed to provide moments of great warmth and humor.
A Bigger Splash -- Worth it just 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 also a visual wonder that feels like it might have been made on the cusp of the '70s. While it's gone from local theaters, expect a September home video release.
Midnight Special -- Though the smart money says this won't be the best Jeff Nichols' movie of the year (his next film, Loving, is scheduled for release Nov. 4 and is one of the early contenders for a Best Picture nomination), this is a stylish and smart evocation of a certain kind of sci-fi film that doesn't cave in to convention in the end. It has a couple of remarkable sequences and splendid performances all around.
The Witch -- I'm not a horror buff, but this movie reminded me of the sort of movies that really scared me when I was a kid, like Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Ken Russell's divisive (but truly frightening) The Devils (1971). It also put me in mind of a couple of disturbing Michael Haneke movies, Cache (2005) and The White Ribbon (2009). As I wrote in my review, "this is a significant film, wonderfully engineered to pollute one's sleep, that should be of interest to most people who enjoy sitting in the dark with strangers, sharing communal phantasms and nervous titters."
Born to Be Blue -- I'm thinking this fictionalized Chet Baker biography, which features a fine, unmannered lead performance from Ethan Hawke, might still show up in Arkansas theaters. I preferred it to Don Cheadle's enjoyable, but irrelevant, Miles Davis project Miles Ahead.
The Fits -- Another film I'm hoping shows up in the market before heading to home video, 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.
The Alchemist Cookbook -- An unclassifiable, but deeply interesting quasi-horror film from Michigan-based auteur Joel Potrykus that also played the Fantastic Cinema festival. It's about a punk rock kid -- check out his Minor Threat T-shirt -- who holes up in the wilds of Michigan with only his cat Kaspar for companionship and attempts to summon the Dark Lord to help him achieve his dream of turning base material into gold. There's probably no chance of this thing getting a theatrical release.
Youth in Oregon -- The best narrative feature I saw at this year's Tribeca Film Festival (I missed the widely praised Always Shine and Dean -- although our Piers Marchant caught the former and Karen Martin the latter) seems unlikely to get more than a token theatrical release in this country. Pity, though I imagine that a year from now you'll probably be able to see Joel David Moore's first feature, a dark comedy about an elderly doctor seeking euthanasia (Frank Langella) over the objections of his family (Billy Crudup, Christina Applegate and Mary Kay Place), on Netflix or the like. While it's far from a perfect film, it's much better written than most similarly pitched (i.e., mainstream Hollywood) efforts and only a little saccharine in the end.
Hail Caesar! -- I can't imagine why this Coen brothers production didn't get more love. It's a better movie than the similarly themed Trumbo, which wasn't bad.
Green Room -- I 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 that I remember playing in the drive-ins of my youth. It is not a morally sophisticated film. 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 arthouse crowd and a little too philosophical and slow for the midnight-movie bunch, and 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 of film that gets trotted out for special screenings and becomes a cherished essential in the home-video libraries of certain 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. It won't win Oscars, but that's hardly the point.
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MovieStyle on 06/17/2016