Favorite Films of 2017

Favorite Films of 2017

Diving into movies - new and old - has been a saving grace this year, and the sheer wealth of wonderful and bold new entries into theaters and on screens at home makes me especially grateful. Below are my absolute favorite films released this year, along with several others I enjoyed a lot and didn't want to overlook. This is still a work in progress seeing how I live in a smaller market and haven't yet had the chance to see a couple films that I expect to vault towards the top of this list: Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread, Steven Spielberg's The Post and Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name for example.

With that said, these are the films that most enraptured, challenged, thrilled and moved me this year, and I'll be excited to revisit them again and again.



 

 

 

The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro)

 Breathtaking, magical, suspenseful, romantic. A delightful love letter to empathy, outcasts, classic cinema and fairy tales.  Go see it and fall in love with another of del Toro's exquisite creations.

 

 

Raw (Julia Ducournau)

 One of the most arresting debut films I've ever seen. An allegory, a coming of age story, a female-driven, cannibalistic psychological thriller. Raw left me in awe all year long.

 

 

Detroit (Kathryn Bigelow)

Much like how things went down with Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty a few years back, she once again crafted arguably the most essential sociopolitical narrative for our times and it went largely overlooked en masse. Detroit is riveting filmmaking, almost unbearably tense, and it shines a light on a brutal time of our recent American past and forces us to sit with all the despair and see how familiar it feels.

 



 

Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan)



 Jaw-dropping perfection across the board. Bold, suffocating and intense and all achieved with revolutionary storytelling execution and direction.

 

 

 

Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh)









 Frances McDormand is a goddamn American treasure. So are Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell. (Peter Dinklage and John Hawkes aren't far behind.) Together they make possibly the most pitch perfect ensemble of the year. Paired with the idiosyncratic genius of Martin McDonagh, we get one of the most pissed off, vulgar, riotously funny and absolutely devastating films of the year. It is expertly off-kilter in tone and packs all sorts of body blows in the most unsuspecting of places.    

 

 

 

Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig)

To hell with any fear of being redundant: Greta Gerwig is a goddamn American treasure. Lady Bird is Gerwig's autobiographical take on growing up in Sacramento with real communities populated by real families actual human quirks, dreams, shortcomings and setbacks. That she consistently finds ways to make all of this seem refreshing and relatable without being schmaltzy is nearly miraculous. The performances here are also minor miracles.

 

 

 

A Ghost Story (David Lowery)

What David Lowery and his leads, Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, pull off in A Ghost Story is a revelatory film experience. I can safely say I have never seen a movie quite like this aching beauty, and no film in memory filled me with such love, deep sadness and ephemeral optimism all at once. It's an agonizingly quiet meditation on grief, love, humanity and time, and it's a visual poem on life and death that hangs with you for months (and probably years).

 

 

 

Wind River (Taylor Sheridan)

At this point Taylor Sheridan can do now wrong in my eyes. I'm hard-pressed to think of a more staggering trio of screenplays right off the bat than Sicario, Hell or High Water and, now, Wind River. It's an American thriller that is fully built around ugly, systemic issues that are deeply American wounds like the white man's treatment of indigenous people and women, and it spins a relentlessly suspenseful, harrowing yarn of a procedural without easy answers, genuine pain and unsettling retribution.

 

 

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos)

 The Killing of a Sacred Deer is yet another film I can very safely say I had not seen before. The closest I have come was seeing Lanthimos' The Lobster last year, and he mines that territory to exquisite effect yet again in this parable of revenge, the human condition and impossible choices. Part Kubrick, part Haneke and totally Lanthimos, this brutally funny, discomforting and agonizing film wields incredible performances by Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Barry Keoghan (and even Alicia Silverstone) and toys with you until the breaking point, which non-coincidentally also packs the nastiest climactic punch of the year.

 

 

 

Columbus (Kogonada)

I loved absolutely everything about Columbus, and not merely because I live in Indiana a mere hour or so away from where the whole film is gorgeously shot. South Korean writer-director Kogonada's debut film is a modest coming of age story and a romance in a small city (much like Lady Bird), and as with Lady Bird it has incredible nuance and deeply genuine characters that ground everything in this town. Also grounded in the town is Columbus' storied architectural achievements which gave Kogonada the reason to make this film. Every shot, every angle is a work of strange, beautiful composition, much like creations the architectural greats brought to the town half a century ago.

 

 

 

The Florida Project (Sean Baker)

 Sean Baker's The Florida Project is yet another modestly paced, independently budgeted and produced little gem with a mighty power to take your breath away and open the floodgates behind your eyes. Willem Dafoe is humble and quietly heroic in one of the best performances of his career of great performances, and the rest of the cast make their acting debuts like true forces of nature off the gulf shore. The kids are incredible, and their story is part impoverished, ramshackle slice of life in rundown motels in the shadow of Disneyworld and part impossible fairy tale against all odds. Beautiful, daring, wildly empathetic, and totally heart-wrenching.

 

 

 

Ten more films I loved (in alphabetical order):

 

Atomic Blonde (David Leitch)

 

 

 

Baby Driver (Edgar Wright)

 

The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola)

 

 

The Big Sick (Michael Showalter)

 

 

Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve)

 

Free Fire (Ben Wheatley)

Get Out (Jordan Peele)

 

It Comes at Night (Trey Edward Shults)

 

 

The Lost City of Z (James Gray)

 

 

 

mother! (Darren Aronofsky)

 

 

 

  Honorable Mentions:

Colossal (Nacho Vigalando)

The Disaster Artist (James Franco)

I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore (Macon Blair)

Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd)

Logan Lucky (Steven Soderbergh)

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (Noah Baumbach)

Mudbound (Dee Rees)

Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello)

Okja (Bong Joon-ho)

The Square (Ruben Östlund)

 

 

 

Gang of Youths - Go Farther in Lightness

This is one of the only records in recent years that I've gone into blindly that abruptly, unfailingly arrested me from minute one and track one until the triumphant, final onslaught of horns that close out "Say Yes to Life" fifteen songs later. It's not that there aren't tons of records I've adored this year (there are dozens); it's that it is not often that I find an album from an artist I know next to nothing about - no bio knowledge, no preconceived idea of sound and influences - that hits me so deep to my core that I become almost obsessed with the record. The past few months have been that way for me with Go Farther in Lightness, and I'm all the better for it and didn't even see it coming. That's the kind of feeling that makes you fall in love with music in the first place, and I've realized that sort of surprise is maybe even more special once you've been jaded or cynical at some point. Gang of Youths are here to grab us by the heartstrings, help us get back on our feet and shout along to the heavens and replenish us with something like hope, which admittedly is pretty hard to come by these days.
 
The Australia-based rockers (David Le'aupepe, Joji Malani, Jung Kim, Max Dunn, Donnie Borzestowski) had me instantly enamored when I pressed play on opening track, "Fear and Trembling." The melancholy barroom vibe of Le'aupepe's piano and vocals hit my sweet spot with that Springsteen/Waits wistfulness and prosaic delivery, and then the Youths gloriously blast into up-tempo, effervescent rock-and-roll bliss hit me like a shot of adrenaline on that first listen and has only gotten more addictive with each new visit. I felt like a half dozen of some my most beloved bands (The National, Springsteen, Japandroids, The Gaslight Anthem, Broken Social Scene, Beach Slang) were woven into this one indisputable force, dizzyingly reaching many of the respective heights of each of them song after song, and I hadn't even known the band existed days before. What Gang of Youths have birthed into the relentlessly oppressive atmosphere of 2017 is nothing short of miraculous for someone still deeply in love with the abstract powers of rock and roll and deep-diving, personal songwriting.

Go Farther in Lightness is an unquantifiable gift for those who give themselves over to all of its generous humanity and insightful punk verve. Sometimes sad, often righteously pissed off and always soul-searching, the songs bounce between heartsick vocals with swooning, elegant string arrangements of classical DNA to thunderous, guitar-assault, shout-along rock choruses ready for arena detonation, and occasionally this happens within a song. Likewise, Le'aupepe's lyrics paint pictures headier and more heartbreaking than many top-shelf songs (rock or otherwise) theses days. They confront the reality and weight of terror attacks, soldiers in battlegrounds, deaths of mothers and children, constant realization of mortality, wrestling with spirituality and God, self-medicating tendencies and more, and they set the setting for a very real human existence many of us can't shake or fully process this year.

Perhaps then, Gang of Youths' most towering achievement throughout all of Go Farther in Lightness is how incredibly rousing these songs are - this album is - and how great it is that it somehow reminds you how fucking happy you are to be alive and in love with music. From the rapturous chorus "The heart is a muscle, and I wanna make it strong!" to "Say yes to sin, say yes to pain, say yes to sticking with our city through a thousand days of rain" to urging us to drink wine, heal, dance and make love in the wake of terror is all a way of weaponizing idealism, to remind us to rally around goodness to combat the fraudulent, greedy, and evil shit consuming our culture. As Le'aupepe says, "Go be part of the new sincere." It's an earnest request, and it's aimed at all the music lovers with wounded hearts who are still dying to chase dreams. 
With these songs, Gang of Youths have planted a defiantly optimistic, humanistic rallying flag and have generously reminded me that even when there is a darkness on the edge of town, it sure as hell ain't no sin to be glad you're alive.