I know, I know... we're halfway through March of 2018, so why am I just now publishing my list of 2017's best movies? Well, I wanted to be sure I'd seen everything that was worth seeing, and sometimes that takes longer than I'd like. Anyway, I strongly recommend everything on this list, so I suggest you see the films on it, if you haven't already. You're unlikely to be disappointed.
1. A Ghost Story (David Lowery)
The central (ghost) figure in David Lowery's transcendent movie may just be the loneliest protagonist ever to roam the cinematic landscape. Spanning countless years - and perhaps even a few centuries into the past, then back to the already witnessed present, in a bold move suggesting the cyclicality of time - the alleged spirit of C (Casey Affleck) observes his wife's (Rooney Mara) mourning, and eventually all the tenants that come to occupy their house it in the ensuing decades. Seldom has anyone's (post)life been simultaneously so mesmerizing and heartbreaking as this Ghost's. When it's over, you may find yourself wondering how in the world didn't this film find a bigger audience, 'cause in 2017 there wasn't a movie more deserving of one.
2. Your Name (Makoto Shinkai)
Blending a body-switching fantasy between two teenagers of opposite genders with elements of time travel, a natural catastrophe and a years-long search for an enigmatic persona from one's dreams, Japanese animation wizard Makoto Shinkai has created an unforgettable movie that will challenge your intellect and your emotions equally. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Seldom has an Anime film looked this magnificent, its hand-drawn images brilliantly complemented by modern lighting effects, in which every shot of sunlight and reflective illumination resembles something real and otherworldly. This is worth watching once a month, for the rest of one's life.
3. I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach)
The trials and tribulations of the lower middle class on the English shores are at front and center in Ken Loach's brilliant film, I, Daniel Blake. Playing an elderly blue-collar worker with a weak heart, Dave Johns gives a subtle, powerful performance full of inner anguish and frustration as the titular protagonist who keeps getting denied his unemployment and disability benefits until he pulls a subdued, British style Howard Beale protest, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" in form of a graffiti demonstration, spray painted on the side of the very building that's been rejecting him and countless others on a daily basis. I, Daniel Blake is a gut-wrenching ballad about the lost souls barely holding on to the remaining shreds of decency in an establishment that is clearly not interested in their salvation.
4. Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins)
There is a scene late in Wonder Woman when its titular heroine, Diana Prince (played by Gal Gadot), nearly broken and defeated by her arch nemesis, Ares, The God of War, lays on the ground and contemplates if she can, in fact, ever stop the never ending carnage that he's inflicted on mankind during The Great War. Her realization, at that very instant, of what exactly needs to drive the human soul is a moment that will forever transcend the superhero genre and elevate it to stuff of action legend. More than any superhero movie that I can recall - DC or Marvel - director Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman is an exciting examination of a strong, ideological female's idea of - and eventual solution to - World War I bang-bang-and-blow-shit-up global bloodshed. Its juxtaposition of spectacle, action, myth and fantasy - with a touching romance at its center - is Hollywood's finest such blockbuster since James Cameron's Titanic.
5. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh)
After the murder of her daughter goes unsolved, Frances McDormand's Mildred Hayes publicly humiliates local police Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) - a man suffering from a terminal illness, and the only decent officer in Ebbing - by displaying the department's incompetence on the titular billboards in her little rural town. Naturally, her actions draw criticism from the locals, and soon she and her son (Lucas Hedges) are subjects of much scrutiny. A flashback scene involving the last day Mildred saw her daughter, including a fight between the two in which nasty words were exchanged, is powerfully ironic and heartbreaking. Director McDonagh just may be the best writer working in world cinema today.
6. Brawl in cell block 99 (S. Craig Zahler)
Brawl in Cell Block 99 is a rare prison movie, an ultra violent masterpiece about a somewhat decent man's descent into hell on Earth where he loses his soul, but perhaps not his humanity. The Shawshank Redemption may have been a more moving prison movie, but I can't think of any other film in recent memory that portrayed the savagery of life behind bars so unapologetically, and with such vile beauty. And it features the best performance of Vince Vaughan's career. That's saying something.
Seldom are documentary films as lyrical and as poetic as Ceyda Torun's passionate Kedi, a movie that looks at everyday lives of several different cats in present day Istanbul, Turkey. Interviewing various men and women who look after them on daily basis, the film is a combination of a beautiful travelogue about a historical European city and an examination of the feline species of all different sizes, colors and various temperaments. The lush cinematography will take your breath away, while the testimonies of the local citizens will move you the way only a melodic symphony or poetry can. Kedi is more than just a documentary: it's an ode to cats everywhere, a testament from the heart to that most domesticated of all house pets.
8. Loveless (Andrey Zvyagintsev)
This bleak, somber Russian drama about the failure of a marriage and the subsequent disappearance of a son of two people (Maryana Spivak and Aleksey Rozin) who've grown to dislike one another is surprisingly honest and real. Not only an examination of cold people whose compassion for one another has been replaced by selfishness and indifference, it's also a parable about life in Putin's contemporary Russia, a place where a people's superficiality and shallowness takes precedent above all else. There's very few, if any, happy moments in Loveless, and that is precisely the point: as the title suggests, this isn't a movie about love, but about its absence.
9. Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)
At long last, Paul Thomas Anderson, that virtuouso auteur of such modern classics as Boogie Nights and Punch Drunk Love, is officially back! Once again working with the masterful Daniel Day Lewis, Anderson examines the life of British designer Reynolds Woodock, an eccentric, complicated man who's at once smitten with a waitress, Alma (Vickey Krieps) he meets in a sea-side town, and whom he decides to make his muse. Their relationship soon begins to resemble a union between two people who could not be more different from one another, yet Anderson's film manages to be an ode to love without romanticizing it, with lush cinematography and an enchanting score to match its 1950s, post World War 2 London setting. A beautiful, understated, and unconventional romance. Ben Young's new Australian feature film, Hounds of Love, presents us with a twisted couple who get off on abducting teenage girls, only to chain them to a bed in their creepy house while torturing and raping them, before murdering and burying their bodies in the nearby forest. The real wonder here, however, is Emma Booth, an actress with raw talent that is heartbreakingly vast in the range of emotions her complex character has to convey. When Hounds of Love is over, you may find yourself wondering if what you've just seen is just another dramatic torture porn, or a film with unexpected depth that explores the thin line between good and evil in the most original way. My experience was of the latter kind.
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