My Top 10 Films of 2016

You can find 11-20 here. These are my Top 10 Films of 2016

1. Arrival - I first read Eric Heisserer's script ARRIVAL about three years ago and found it to be a remarkable piece of writing that broke so many "rules" but was far and away better than anything else I'd read that year. I also felt like translating that script to film was going to be an incredible challenge, particularly in the execution of the film's big twist. Damn if the result doesn't look effortless and the result is an ending that lands on you like an emotional haymaker.

Through this first contact with aliens story, we explore how humanity deals with the unknown, through our worst impulses and best. I've heard this described as "competency porn" and I agree. After a Presidential campaign where educated people were dismissed as "elite" by masses who championed their own ignorance, it was good to see a film that championed science and problem-solving. And for all that to be legerdemain while the REAL question of the film snuck up on you? Masterful. I'm hoping I'll have time to write a longer piece on ARRIVAL, but this was the best film of the year.

2. OJ: Made in America - I've previously reflected on my fascination with the O.J. Simpson case, but director Ezra Edelman comes at it from an angle I'd not seen before. O.J.'s rise to football fame is juxtaposed with rising tensions between the L.A. black community and the police. Airing across five nights in two-hour blocks, so much groundwork is laid that it took until Night 3 to reach the murders. That gives the trial a context it's never had before, particularly after seeing O.J. work hard to separate himself from the black community, and then turn around and play the race card in pursuit of an acquittal.

In the same year that saw The People vs. O.J. Simpson, it was difficult to imagine the trial exploration feeling fresh, but every moment is captivating, particularly the recollections of former jurors. The final segment of the documentary covers O.J.'s post-acquittal downfall in jaw-dropping detail, with more footage and stories you're unlikely to have seen. It's 467 minutes that leaves its mark on you and never drags.

3. Swiss Army Man - "The farting corpse movie" is probably how you've heard of this film, but it's so much more than that. A suicidal man trapped on a desert island comes upon a corpse that has surprising utility for the stranded man. That's only the start of the weirdness, and soon the corpse is talking to him, asking him questions about life and love. Writer/directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan have crafted one of the more bizarre films of the year. I'll be honest - this is often the kind of shit I mock, but the Dans (as they are called) succeed where many other fail because the emotions of the story are real. We find ourselves relating to this lost soul who seems to be animating this corpse in his mind. Because of that empathy, a late-film twist really pulls the rug out from under the audience.

4. 10 Cloverfield Lane - And now we go from a film I never could have conceived to the kind of film I really, really want to make some day. I'm a sucker for limited location thrillers where the claustrophobia is like a pressure cooker for intense acting among a small cast. I've seen and read a lot of "captive woman in a basement" thrillers, so I know all the pitfalls here. The script by Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken, and Damien Chazelle manages to avoid every exploitation trap and cheap scare.

John Goodman gives one of his best layered performances as a guy who keeps us off balance the entire film. Is he dangerous? Is he a decent man who's gone a little off kilter due to PTSD? Is he lying to keep Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character captive or is he telling the truth about the attack that's forced them into his bomb shelter? Goodman walks a difficult tightrope through the entire film until he's forced to show his hand. Director Dan Trachtenberg's next smart move was casting Winstead, who's able to hold her own against Goodman and make her role more than the victim that the situation could cast her as. Some people really don't like the ending, but I think it's the perfect payoff to all the suspense Goodman's claims generate. This is a genre premise done exceptionally well.

5. 13th - Ava DuVerney's comprehensive documentary is an incredible piece of work that draws a straight line from how the Reconstruction Era's 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery, paved the way for mass incarceration of African-Americans. Following that path, we trace the entire history of racial inequity in America. The film's most powerful moment comes during a montage where Republican candidate Donald Trump's rally speech about longing for "the good old days" when protestors would be beaten is juxtoposed with police assaulting civil rights protestors in the 60s.

6. Moonlight - Most of my list is made up of high-concept films, issue-oriented movies, or stories that are so unusual and bizarre that they can't help but make an impression. And then there's MOONLIGHT, which isn't quite any of those, but instead is a rather moving story about a young fatherless African-American boy who has the odds piled against him. His mother's a junkie, the guy who becomes a surrogate father to him is a dealer, he's bullied at school, and he's dealing with the fact he's gay. There are a hundred ways to write this wrong. It's almost literally one cancer diagnosis from "cloying indie movie awards bait BINGO." And yet... there's honest emotion to this. We're drawn into Little's story in a way that makes him a person and not just a martyr to whom bad things happen. Writer/director Barry Jenkins sticks a difficult landing here.

7. The Jungle Book - I hate 3D. It's more often just a way to jack-up ticket prices and almost never enhances the storytelling in any meaningful way. There are only three films where I believe it truly added value: Avatar, Gravity... and The Jungle Book. It was a constant mind-blowing experience to watch this film and remind myself that just about everything on screen but the boy was created in a computer. Everything in this movie looks photo-real, and director Jon Favreau stages everything in a way that only further convinces us that this jungle is a real place that exists.

When I was a kid, The Jungle Book was one of my favorite Disney cartoons. Looking back, that seems odd. The story's pretty slight and the musical numbers have a couple good entries, but are less frequent than other films. Justin Marks's script brings a little more structure and weight to the film than the source material, but the real secret weapon here is young Neel Sethi as Mowgli. There are veteran actors who are thrown by the process of acting against a green screen, but the way Neel interacts believable with CGI animals, you'd never guess this was his first feature role. (Read my interview with screenwriter Justin Marks here.)

8. The Shallows - A lot of what I said in the 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE review applies here. This is the ultimate "chase your protagonist up a tree, then throw rocks at her" movie. Blake Lively plays a surfer who gets stranded on a reef far from shore... and in the path of a great white shark. Writer Anthony Jaswinski provides the survival techniques that are a staple of this genre. (Think THE GREY, but with a warmer climate and a female lead.) Director Jaume Collet-Serra makes the most of the beautiful scenery and the entire film is quite gorgeous. Better still, he wrings every last drop of tension out of Lively's struggle to outwit the shark. I wish we got more of these low-to-mid-budget thrillers like this and 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE.

9. The Edge of Seventeen - Sign me up for whatever writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig does next. This is another film that puts character first and doesn't give a damn if we find them unlikable. Hailee Steinfeld plays Nadine, a troubled and often abrasive teen who's rendered with so much empathy that most viewers will likely see some of their own teenage selves in her. Even as she's pushing away and alienating the people closest to her, we understand why she's doing it and we find ourselves rooting for everyone else to just back off and cut her some slack. It feels raw and honest to the point where it can stand with the best of the John Hughes catalog. This is another one that's not a high concept story, but its three-dimensional characters linger with you long after the movie has ended.

10. Hell or High Water - I have a theory that Chris Pine is not so much a Leading Man, but more of a "Michael Keaton in a Tom Cruise body." HOHW finds a way to make that work for this story of two brothers pulling off a spree of bank robberies to save the family farm. The writing lesson for this one? Have smart protagonists and face them off against smart antagonists who seem capable of beating them. I'm not usually one for westerns, but this one had my attention from the start and knew just how to pace itself.

SELMA illuminates our present state of race relations by revisiting the past

I have this memory of being in first grade and just learning about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for the first time. We had some kind of worksheet that gave us some basic facts about him, along with a drawing. I very clearly recall squinting at the date of his death: 1968.

1968? That made no sense to me. He was fighting for black people to be seen as equal. A year earlier I had played Abe Lincoln in a school play, so I understood about the Civil War and how black people were consider slaves then. But that war ended in 1865. Surely this information about Dr. King meant to say that he died in 1868. 1968 was only about 20 years ago. The Batman TV show I watched in reruns every afternoon was from 1968. You mean to tell me that when Batman was fighting crime, there were still major civil rights issues?

I told my mom there was a mistake on the ditto. She informed me the date was right, that he hadn't died all that long ago. I just couldn't process how people could still be so racist in so recent a past. I grew up in the midwest, where as far as I was concerned, everyone WAS equal. There were black kids in my class, no one treated them any different. I just couldn't process how racism had lingered so long after the days of Lincoln, and then how it seemingly had disappeared so much since Dr. King.

It's funny how it all makes sense to a child that everyone should be equal. Of course today I look around and all I see is how much further we have to go. 

It seemed so odd to me then because it wasn't my experience. It was so far outside the realm of what I knew, that I couldn't process it. I thought about that a lot during SELMA, a film deftly brings the experience of oppressed southern blacks into the audience's awareness.


Like THE CRUCIBLE, SELMA tells a story about the past with very direct commentary on our present. Some of the parallels are so of the moment that for a moment, you might almost think that it was conceived in direct response to incidents like the horrifying police brutality in Ferguson, and the abominable dismantling of the very Voting Rights Act that's origins are depicted in the film.

The film wisely doesn't attempt to be a full biopic on Dr. King and instead focuses on the marches Dr. King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in an effort to protest obstacles put in place to prevent black citizens from registering to vote in the South. Though they legally have the right to vote, a number of provisions have been put in place to achieve the end of disinfranchising black voters. In turn, this ensures that racist, bigoted elected officials remain secure in office, and also that blacks can't serve on juries, meaning that that the system shields racist officials and individuals even if they manage to be brought to trial for crimes against the black community.

Dr. King has appealed to President Johnson to step in and call for a congressional law outlawing these practices. Johnson has bigger fish to fry, and there's more than a suggestion that he doesn't want to piss off a large chunk of the Southern electorate by calling for legislation sure to be unpopular among angry reactionary bigots who will vote him out of office. He tries to pass the buck on down to the state level.

The film essentially becomes a chess match between King and Johnson, with King recognizing that their endgame needs to be to shine enough light on the injustice in Alabama that Johnson has no choice but to act. As long as these actions are taking place in darkness, Johnson can afford to ignore it. But if the eyes of the nation are fixed on Selma, Johnson is going to have to get his hands dirty somehow.

There's a simplistic view that activism is just about making a lot of noise. Hell, I think there are plenty of activists who think the best way to achieve their ends is to be loud and disruptive. There's not a lot of big picture thinking going on there. There are some brilliantly-written scenes that lay out this strategy. It's not just about making noise - King insists they work out a plan so that when Johnson caves, they can give him specific solutions that can be implemented as part of the law they will call for. They're not just doing pie-in-the-sky "raising awareness." It's very much a "Now that we have your attention, here are the solutions we want in a language you can understand."

There's a scene where King and his associates have to decide what the single most important aspect of the issue they need to address is. It's a moment of exposition, but it doesn't play totally as such. It feels like problem-solving, and in one efficent scene, the stakes and the solution are swiftly laid out.  We know what the law has to address, we know that King has an endgame, and we understand what it will take to get there.

There's another intriguing moment of gamesmanship where Malcolm X offers his own form of assistance in a meeting with Coretta Scott King. It's made clear more than once that politicians like Johnson see King as the more "acceptable" figurehead for the civil rights movement, as opposed to the more militant and aggressive Malcolm X. Malcolm X knows this and offers to be the "worst-case" alternative that sends the power structure running into King's arms. (As it turns out, he's assassinated before much can be done, but it's interesting to see the dynamics at play here.)

There's a pitfall cliche that a number of older films about civil rights efforts fall into - they're often centered on the acts of a white savior. It doesn't seem like a huge problem until you struggle to find such a film where the black protagnist is truly at the center: To Kill A Mockingbird, A Time to Kill and especially The Ghosts of Mississippi all fall into this trap. That doesn't automatically make any of those movies bad, but it's a trope that one should always be sensitive to.

I bring this up because in a way, SELMA addresses this "white savior" tendency. It's spelled out that the real victory will come when the struggles facing African-Americans are put on display for the white Americans. Then they will call for change and Johnson will have to listen. There is the unfortunate implication that white activism carries more weight than black activism. Particularly at that point in time, that's an unfortunate reality, and I would love to see film scholars more intelligent than I dissect this point in a little more depth. King definitely comes across as a man who is determined to use the system to change the system.

I don't recall any prior instances of Dr. King being depicted on screen, which means that David Oyelowo has to break ground as the first performer to personify this icon. That's no small task, though it might be aided in part by the fact that Oyelowo is still a relative unknown. We're not asked to accept Will Smith as Martin Luther King and so Oyelowo's challenge is to find a way to make the "behind closed doors" depiction of King feel like a piece of the great orator whose "I Have a Dream" speech every school child is familiar with. He pulls it off and perhaps the greatest compliment is that I cannot think of any other actor who could have done a better job.

It's hard to watch some of the sheer police brutality in some scenes and then realize that too many recent tragedies echo the same circumstances. Cops are show beating unarmed citizens, and at one point shooting another citizen dead long after they'd fled the scene of the riot and ceased to be a problem. You want to watch it and think, "Damn, that's horrible, but at least it's in the past." And then you remember that a Ferguson cop emptied his gun into an unarmed kid a hundred feet away and the case was never even brought to trial! The injustice these marchers face is far from in the past.

Even more so, it's a sad irony that the entire climax of the film comes down to Johnson calling for the Voting Rights Act that will shut down all of the red tape that has been disinfranchising black voters. In one early scene, we see just how capricious these laws are when a woman played by Oprah Winfrey goes to the registrar's office and he asks her increasingly arcane questions about how many local judges there are and what their names are. When she fails to answer a question that I'd wager most white voters would flunk, he uses that as a means to deny her.

Why is that said? Because just over a year ago, the conservative wing of the Supreme Court struck down some major parts of that act. This opens the door for future legislation to again restrict voting. For those who didn't quite grasp the full implications of this when the decision came, SELMA could be an eye-opener.

I'd put this on the list of 2014's must-sees, and I suspect that it'll become a tool for many a history teacher. I can't point out the virtues of the story without noting that this was no easy film to produce in the first place. This film not only faced the challenge of a comparatively small $20 million budget, but it also legally could not use any of the text of King's actual speeches. Every speech given is a line-for-line paraphrase of his actual words. (The script is credited to Paul Webb, but there was no WGA arbitration and interviews have made clear that DuVernay made considerable contributions there too.) 

This is a film as much about 2014 as any other contemporary film. I'm aware this is an intensely competitive year, but director Ava DuVernay deserves to be singled out by both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Directors Guild of America for her extraordinary work here. SELMA is more than an "eat your vegetables" movie. It's an important film that honors some brave men and women who stood up for their rights and forced a nation to look hard at it's own shame.