My Top 10 Movies of 2017

For my picks for 11-20, go here.

No one reads these intros, so I'll be brief. It was a great year for film, though the seeming uniformity among a lot of Top 10 lists might have you thinking only 10 or 15 really good movies came out this year. There are a couple deviations in my list - I loved a few movies others didn't and was left cold by a couple that others breathlessly raved about. The really good stuff tended to leap to the top, but there was a pretty solid second tier too.

Picking a number one film is often as much about the statement it makes for the year in film as it is the quality of the film itself. Any of my Top 3 films could be justified as the Number One pick, but all things considered, I have to lead off with...

1. Wonder Woman - With the kind of year we've had politically, it was more cathartic than ever to see women kicking ass on the big screen. Considering how easy it would have been to screw up Wonder Woman (and don't kid yourselves with the "it's so easy" talk. It's hard to get a great adaptation of BATMAN and he's a far simpler concept to execute and get an audience to buy in on) the fact that we not only got a good movie, but a superhero film that stands with Donner's Superman and Nolan's Batmans in terms of quality is nothing short of a miracle. I want Patty Jenkins to be the first director besides Nolan to complete a superhero trilogy.

Yes, the climax it a slight stepdown when it threatens to become a pure CGI battle, but the film doesn't forget there are emotional stakes for Diana, and Steve Trevor's sacrifice is nicely one of those moments that shows Diana that even though mankind often uses free will to embrace evil, sometimes they choose good. Beyond that, the No Man's Land sequence is one of the most emotionally satisfying action sequences of the year and one of the best "debut of the hero" moments on film.

2. Get Out - Is there anything to say about this that hasn't already been said. Jordan Peele's dark Twilight Zone-y look at race relations is a great study in gradually-building paranoia and tension. It very savvily leads us to expect one reveal (that all the black people are brainwashed) and then flips for a darker one (the black people's bodies have literally been appropriated by the liberal white town folks.) It's a creepy look at the white establishment's fascination with and admiration of black culture and achievement, while also taking it all for their own without any empathy for the other side. One of Peele's best idea was to make the white characters liberal and even likable. It asked more of the audience than if they were a bunch of racist rednecks.

3. Logan - We've known Hugh Jackman's Logan and Patrick Stewart's Professor X for 17 years, traveling with them through good movies and bad. Now, in the tenth film X-Men film (and the ninth to feature Jackman in some capacity), we go on Logan and Xavier's final adventure together. Feeling more like a western than a traditional superhero outing, Logan shows that comic book films, even comic book franchises, are durable enough that not every film has to end with our lead actors facing off against CGI pixels. A weary Logan ends up with a young charge who has abilities very similar to his own. The father/daughter material gives the film some heart, even though the young Laura spends almost all of her screentime mute.

Most of all, the film doesn't flinch when it comes to shutting the door on this end of the X-Men saga. We've reached an era where superhero stories are allowed to conclude. Christopher Reeve's Superman never got that, instead going through a series of increasingly weaker sequels until the franchise died. A similar fate befell the Batman that began under Tim Burton. Logan knows that the best sagas actually conclude and the ending of this film packs more power than you'd expect from a Wolverine feature.

4. Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Look, I wanted Luke Skywalker to be a Jedi John Wick as much as the next guy, but instead writer/director Rian Johnson gave us a scarred, embittered Luke who's lost reason to believe in just about everything he was raised on. A lot of films last year reflected our political reality, both intentionally and unintentionally, and The Last Jedi clearly falls into that. What do you do when the old battles keep having to be fought and you've lost all faith in what was once your source of strength? I don't think this is Hamill's swan song as the character, but it's definitely his most interesting performance as Luke.

Meanwhile, Kylo Ren's story takes a major leap forward and ensures we won't get an easy redemption for this psycho. Adam Driver is fantastic at making Ren more and more unhinged, even as Daisy Ridley shows Rey growing more confidant even as her story moves away from "Chosen One" territory. At this stage in the game, some sacred cows probably had to be blown up just to make this trilogy more of it's own thing. I get why this is so divisive in a few corners of fandom, but I expect this'll be more accepted as time goes on.

5. The Post - I can understand a temptation to compare this to All The President's Men, or even Spotlight, which took the Best Picture Oscar just a couple years ago. The significant difference between those films and The Post, though, is that the former films are about reporting and the latter film is about publishing. In most "big story" journalism films, there's always that scene where the crusading reporter has to stand up to some lackey in legal and fight for the right to tell the story. Usually it's presented as one final obstacle easily disposed of. Here, that IS the main conflict.

As the story opens, The Washington Post has been scooped by The New York Times, which has just published the Pentagon Papers, stolen documents that showed several administrations knew the war in Vietnam was unwinnable, but they kept that fact from the public. The Times is enjoined from publishing more documents, and when The Post comes into possession of them, publisher Katherine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee weigh if they should publish in solidarity with the Times, knowing it will bring the full wrath of the White House on them, or play it safe and keep the paper out of jeopardy.

There's gonna be a temptation to compare Nixon to Trump, but for me, this is really a story telling journalists, "Hey! This is how you do your job, even in the face of a President determined to destroy the free press!" Liz Hannah and Josh Singer's script mines this conflict for everything its worth and the result is one of Spielberg's faster moving and impactful films of the last decade.

6. Wonder - I've not read the book that Wonder is based on and so the movie ended up being so much more than I expected. It's the story of a young boy named Auggie, born with facial deformities that have been gradually reduced via a decade of surgeries, though his face clearly isn't "normal." As he goes off to school and regular contact with kids his age the first time, the story expands and shifts POV. We go from Auggie's perspective to his sister's, and her estranged friend, and eventually get inside the head of a classmate who befriended Auggie and hurt him.

In many cases, someone will appear to do awful and selfish things in a way that we can't imagine has sympathetic motivations... and then the shift to their perspective puts their side of the story front and center and we begin to understand their private pain. It's a neat trick for a film that tells us from the start we shouldn't judge a book by its cover. Time and again it proves that we're all often too guilty of not looking below the surface. Between this and his earlier film Confessions of a Wallflower, I'm down for anything else co-writer and director Stephen Chbosky has.

7. The Disaster Artist - How do you tell a story about the making of the worst movie ever released? If you're screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, you latch onto the friendship between young aspiring actor Greg (Dave Franco) and his older friend, the enigmatic and eccentric Tommy Wiseau, played to the hilt by James Franco. I've never seen The Room, the notoriously awful film whose genesis is chronicled in this movie, but at no point did I feel I needed to. It's the story of a friendship that becomes a very strained friendship, as Tommy's jealousy manifests in how he uses the movie to control Greg.

There's also a lot here that will be familiar to any Hollywood dreamer, particularly those who have tried to make their own movie, or been acquainted with another wannabe with a passion project. It's all done in a way that doesn't feel too "inside baseball," though and as much as Tommy's ineptitude as a filmmaker makes you want to bang your head against a wall, Franco manages to get to feel for the crazy guy.

8. The Big Sick - The autobiographical story of how Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanijani met, fell in love, broke up due to culture clash and then become forced together when she suffers from a severe illness is one of the most unique films of the year. It's essentially a rom-com where the guy loses the girl halfway in, she falls into a coma, and he gets to know her parents, bonding with them even as he realizes he's not ready to let go of her.

I like that some parts feel messy. Kumail's parents are very adamant that he must marry a Pakistani woman, and so knowing they'd never approve of Emily, he keeps them from her. When that truth comes out, there's real hurt there and the movie doesn't pretend that it's gonna be alright. The same goes for the post-illness trajectory of Kumail and Emily's romance. Avoiding the fairy tale ends up making the very satisfying ending feel earned.

And of course there's that 9/11 joke. That alone should earn it an Oscar nomination.

9. I, Tonya - I remember the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan scandal well, one of the earliest 24-hour-a-day scandals that consumed the news for months. Then it turned out that was just a dry run for the O.J. Simpson murders, which happened just a few months later. I, Tonya tries to remake the narrative around the woman usually seen as the villain in this case, positing she's as much a victim of the media, a terrible mother and an abusive husband, as Kerrigan was from an attack meant to keep her out of the Olympics.

Margot Robbie delivers us a Tonya who makes us want to believe she's just a victim of circumstance. It's a narrative I've been skeptical of with regard to the real life case. One of the film's wisest creative move is that it embraces that to an extent. Using (eerily recreated and often conflicting) interviews with the participants as the basis for Steven Rogers's screenplay, the result is a movie that feels like an oral history. For two hours, I bought Tonya Harding as an underdog who never got a break and seemed to have the whole world conspiring against her. This could easily fit on a double-bill with The Disaster Artist.

10. Brigsby Bear - See this one as I did, knowing nothing about it. It's under the radar enough that I'm willing to bet you haven't heard about it. Here's what I'll say, Mark Hamill gives a great performance as sort of a twisted Mr. Rogers character and SNL's Kyle Mooney manages to hit a very difficult tone as a young man who... (man, this is hard without spoilers) ...finds it hard to adapt to adult life in the real world.