Best films of 2016

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

To call 2016 an unusual year is to grant massive latitude to the term “understatement.” Nothing made sense: Within a week’s time, the Cubs won the World Series for the first time since six years before the start of the First World War, and a billionaire reality TV star — improbably, impossibly, bucking all predictions and against both all odds and a sense of common decency — was elected the 45th president. Celebrities departed this mortal coil in droves, including, this week, the seemingly unkillable Zsa Zsa Gabor, George Michael and now Carrie Fisher.

(However, as Keith Valcourt, a writer for this publication, said this week, even 2016 couldn’t kill Keith Richards.)

And the movies. While there were the typical biopics and Oscar bait epics, 2016 broke all the rules as far as what constituted “quality” cinema. Last year’s crop was especially exceptional, and while I personally did not feel 2016’s offerings necessarily stacked up against what the previous annum had to offer, what I did find was that its strongest films were especially wondrous, experimental, powerful and unmatched in their quality and execution.

As with the year itself, all models proved useless in the end selection process. Here then are my picks for the best films of 2016.

 

Honorable mentions

Filmmakers have for years tried to take us into the minds of serial murderers, but it’s an impossible task as there remains a barrier of empathy beyond which we cannot tread. However, “The Clan,” from Argentinian filmmaker Pablo Trapero, takes the true story of a family of ransomers who nab the rich while maintaining a veneer of normalcy, and somehow does breach that final frontier, turning the bloodthirsty family into a group we somehow root for, even in the midst of their misdeeds. The rock ’n’ roll soundtrack somehow adds both irony and counterpoint to the proceedings. Fine direction and superb acting from Guillermo Francella as family patriarch Arquimedes show a country whose leaders heralded that state-sanctioned kidnappings were now a thing of the past, thereby opening the door for those like Arquimedes who saw a grisly way to make a little money.

Time was when Mexico exported its best filmmakers to America, but the past few years have seen South American auteurs like Pablo Larrain, who also directed “Jackie” with Natalie Portman, bringing their sizable gifts north of the border. “The Club” has a priest sent to investigate a crime at a remote location, where the Catholic Church sends its defrocked pedophile priests, mentally ill former servants and a lone nun (Antonia Zegers), excommunicated there for other reasons. Outstanding cinematography by Sergio Armstrong creates an atmosphere of dread and remorse behind a murder mystery.

“The Dark Horse” from New Zealand featured a stunning performance by Cliff Curtis as a real-life chess prodigy battling both mental illness and his less-than-understanding Maori brother Ariki, brilliantly portrayed by nonprofessional actor Wayne Hapi.

Kitchen sink realism was back on painful display in British filmmaker Ken Loach’s hard-to-watch “I, Daniel Blake” about a carpenter on disability who befriends a single mother in similar circumstances. There was nothing funny about comedian Dave Johns’ searing performance as the titular bloke, whose ineptitude with computers makes his attempt to find work and claim state benefits even more difficult.

“Dough” from the U.K. saw an elderly Jewish baker (Jonathan Pryce) employing his African cleaning lady’s son, a young Muslim, at his failing London bakery. The boy Ayyash (Jerome Holder) begins selling cannabis-flavored bread to Nat’s customers, who are soon flocking to the joint like never before. A combination screwball comedy and social-realism film that made you think in between the laughter.

“I Saw the Light” had Tom Hiddleston (“The Avengers”) as tormented country pioneer Hank Williams in a performance that shows he has far more to offer beyond the Marvel universe.

“Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?” was the smartest comedy in 2016 — actually, in years. This modern-day take on the “Lysistrata” saw the women of a small Texas town go on a sex strike until their men agree to get rid of their guns. Funny, charming and witty from start to finish, this was a rare comedic gem in a year of yet more unfunny “funny” flicks.

“Life Animated,” a documentary about a teenager with autism who is able to relate to the world through animated films and cartoons, shows a family applying love and immeasurable patience with young Owen as he grows into a young man.

Actor Don Cheadle ably tried his hand behind the camera in “Miles Ahead,” a film about Miles Davis (Mr. Cheadle as well) that respected the jazzman’s incomparable trumpet skills without shying away from his dark side.

The First World War was raging through Europe a century ago, and many of its tales away from the battlefront remain untold. Director Terence Davies adapted Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel “Sunset Song,” about the coming of age of a Scottish woman in the days of the war, magnificently. Agyness Deyn anchors the film as Chris Guthrie, the headstrong young Scotswoman, but it is Peter Mullan as her monstrous, domineering father who will be long remembered for this admirable film. The Scottish countryside is beautifully captured by homegrown DP Michael McDonough (“Fear the Walking Dead,” “Downton Abbey”).

I also enjoyed the Scandinavian revenge drama “In Order of Disappearance,” “Elvis & Nixon,” about the famous meeting of the odd couple at the White House, the stirring documentary “Last Man on the Moon” about astronaut Gene Cernan, the doc “Miss Sharon Jones,” about the recently deceased singer who refused to let cancer take away from her on-stage performances, Ewan McGregor’s turn as both Jesus and the Devil in the thoughtful “Last Days in the Desert,” “Hell or High Water,” with Jeff Bridges as an aging Texas lawman on the trail of a pair of sibling bank robbers, the political black comedy — much needed these days — “The Congressman” and “Nina,” starring Zoe Saldana as the tortured jazz artist Nina Simone.

 

10) “Hacksaw Ridge”

We all love a good comeback story, and no one in Hollywood has been as far on the dark side as Mel Gibson. A decade after his notorious drunken rants, the actor returned behind the camera for the first time since “Apocalypto” for this intriguing true-life tale of a WWII G.I. (Andrew Garfield) who, despite being a conscientious objector, enlists anyway to become a medic for his platoon-mates. Based on the real-life tale of Private Desmond T. Doss of Virginia, “Hacksaw Ridge” gruesomely recreates the notorious hill on Okinawa, with Pvt. Doss, through sheer courage, rescuing his band of brothers from Japanese fire — all without ever firing a shot.

Faith and spirituality underline Doss’ tale, but Mr. Gibson — unlike some of his, ahem, earlier works — wisely doesn’t make the film preachy or condescending. Rather, this is the extraordinary tale of an extraordinary man who refused to budge from his pacifist beliefs, while also desiring to serve his country. It’s the stranger truth in a year of often-dismal fiction.

9) “Fences”

Denzel Washington both starred in and directed this filmed version of August Wilson’s play, which the actor has taken on as his first salvo in capturing the late playwright’s “Pittsburgh Cycle” on film. Mr. Washington directs with an ear for Wilson’s singular dialogue as well as a master’s interpretive of Wilson’s complex themes and family dynamics. Mr. Washington, who is incapable of giving a bad performance, imbues patriarch Troy with a burning wrath at his own poor life choices. Viola Davis shines as his put-upon wife, Rose.

8) “Jackie”

Natalie Portman goes for broke as former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, whose tortured state of mind in the aftermath of her husband’s assassination is explored in an absolutely stellar performance for director Pablo Larrain (“The Club”). Recreating the early-’60s down to the smallest detail, “Jackie” sees Miss Portman channeling Jackie O during such moments as the famous TV tour of the White House, and she delivers such pain during the scenes of being interviewed by a journalist (Billy Crudup) at the Kennedy family’s Massachusetts compound.

Odds are high for an Oscar nomination, or another win, for Miss Portman.

7) “Denial”

Still the stubborn refuse to acknowledge history — or reality. Based on yet another true story, “Denial” featured Rachel Weisz as American Holocaust professor Deborah Lipstadt, a New Yorker-turned-Atlantan sued by Holocaust denier David Irving (Timothy Spall, hopefully destined for Oscar glory) for libel in British courts.

Professor Lipstadt told me this fall that what she hopes people take away from the film about her ordeal is that there is a vast difference between truth and opinion, and that those who seek to pass off their lies as fact must be called out. Alas, the election of 2016 showed that truth is in short supply these days, which makes it all the more incumbent upon reporters and intellectuals like Ms. Lipstadt to continue their work. For when truth loses, we all become lost.

6) “A Monster Calls”

Films too often treat children as either far too smart for their age or with utter condescension. “A Monster Calls” is that rare film that is both about kids but also a perfect film for their elders. In this outstanding adaptation of Patrick Ness’ book, young Connor (Lewis MacDougall) is faced with the unpleasant reality that his ailing mother may not be getting better. This leads to a trip to the fantastic as a mystical tree on the hillside (voiced by Liam Neeson) comes alive and visits him. The Monster offers Connor a deal: He will tell Connor three stories if Connor will then tell the Monster a final tale about his greatest fear.

“A Monster Calls” is a brilliant film, and one that deals in hard truths the best way we humans know how to do: by turning pain into fiction.

5) “Weiner”

Anthony Weiner simply will not go away. Arguably, his antics influenced the outcome of the 2016 election, but it was his improbable — and, ultimately, unwinnable — bid for mayor of New York City in 2013 that found the disgraced pol back in the spotlight. And for a brief, shining moment, it seemed that the ghost of Carlos Danger had been exorcised and a second-act political comeback was on the horizon.

Not to be, as documentarians Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg show the former congressman’s promising campaign disintegrate into more sex scandals, shouting matches with constituents as cameras roll and that infamous middle finger on Election Day.

Mr. Weiner and wife Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide, have since split up, and it was his alleged sex messages with an underage woman that once again had the FBI seeking out the family laptops in the run-up to Mrs. Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump. “Weiner” shows a man so high on his own legend that he becomes disconnected from reality even as the numbers show it is over.

The spiral has continued ever since.

4) “Mammal”

The uncommonly gifted Rachel Griffiths has deserved better than many of the offers tossed her way after the success of “Six Feet Under,” and thank God for “Mammal,” that extremely rare specimen of film that not only features an actress of a certain age as the lead, but has the audacity to allow her to be sexy, vulnerable, strong, resourceful and flawed all at once. Miss Griffiths’ Margaret, a divorcee grieving the loss of her son, develops an at first unusual and later downright uncomfortable relationship with a young Dubliner named Joe (Barry Keoghan), a homeless gang member.

Miss Griffiths is fearless in embracing Margaret’s pain, humiliation and need to take control and manipulate, with Margaret’s relationship with Joe veering into “Vertigo” territory.

It’s the best work Miss Griffiths has yet committed to the screen, and one of the year’s best performances.

3) “Indignation”

Of this year’s two adaptations of Philip Roth books, “Indignation” was the work of art, with Ewan McGregor’s admirable but forgettable “American Pastoral” barely a blip of stir. Screenwriter/director James Schamus translates Mr. Roth’s novel about a Jewish New Jersey teen attending a WASP-y Ohio prep school as a way to avoid the Korean War into a masterwork of acting. Young Logan Lerman is Marcus, whose relationship with a local Gentile girl of “questionable morals” (Sarah Gadon) sets into motion circumstances that unravel both his sense of propriety as well as put him into combat with both his traditional parents and a dean (Tracy Letts) with none-too-subtle anti-Semitism. Mr. Lerman and Mr. Letts have a 20-minute-long tete-a-tete at the film’s midpoint that is the year’s best scene in any film, and Mr. Schamus’ scripting and blocking of the scene shows a master’s handling of a sequence of drama that might have slid dangerously into melodrama in a lesser director’s hands.

All of the proceedings are underscored with a haunting musical score by Jay Watley.

2) “The Innocents”

Too often movies are afraid of questions of moral complexity, which made director Anne Fontaine’s outstanding “The Innocents” stand out from the crowd earlier this year. Wondrous actress Lou de Laage stars as Mathilda, a French nurse summoned to a Polish convent at the tail end of World War II to tend a pregnant nun. A sudden cluster of sisters in such an interesting condition is a searing, horrifying final testament to the horrors of the war, as Mathilda discovers the nuns were raped both by the retreating Nazis and then by the “liberating” Soviets.

This sets the stage for a weaved moral tapestry in a cloistered environment where the assaulted women are taught not to even mention their genitals — let alone have them examined by another person — and where the institutionally imposed shame of their pregnancies is greater than their deserved rights to have judgment. Poland’s own Agata Kulesza is the icy mother superior, who makes choices that strike the viewer as both horrifying and yet, in a twisted, perverse way, entirely logical given the circumstances.

“The Innocents” is a movie about faith that is never preachy and, in the best tradition of religious teachers since time immemorial, rather than traffic in lecturing, invites the viewer into introspection and discussion.

1) “Cameraperson”

There has never before been a film like Kirsten Johnson’s singular masterpiece “Cameraperson,” a movie that single-handedly transformed the definition of what cinema is and can be. Ms. Johnson, using outtakes from films she worked on over a decadeslong career as a cinematographer, in conjunction with her own home movies, fashioned a work that is neither narrative or documentary, but is somehow both at the same time. Her footage travels the globe and sees many humans in settings both exotic and familiar, going through life but as seen through her unique perspective as a lens operator.

Along with the outtakes of other films is the heartrending footage of Ms. Johnson’s own mother, whose mind is being rapidly erased by Alzheimer’s.

“I certainly became very obsessed with memory and its function and what it’s for,” Ms. Johnson told me earlier this year.

In the end, that’s what cinema is for us: record and interpretation, with its use acting as its own interpreter and its devices as much a part of the story as that which it captures.