Finding ourselves, as we do, in the midst of awards season, much cultural bandwidth is currently being taken up with endless squabbling as to which movies are being cruelly overlooked/dramatically overpraised/insufficiently woke.
Personally, I prefer to think that these things are ultimately fairly meaningless, and that the amount of energy expended on hammering away at what are, after all, mere industry backslaps, could better be spent on more worthwhile pursuits, such as – well, watching/talking about more movies. They’re only movies, after all, and they’re meant to be fun.
With that in mind, I’d like to ask: what are the five best new (by which I mean “new”, rather than “new to you”) movies you’ve seen in the last 12 months? Apart from Gary, whose steadfast refusal to agree with me on matters celluloid is both wearying and distasteful.
Please feel free to symbolically link arms with an activist from the field of your choice while posting.
I’ll start:
1. Call Me By Your Name
A truly beautiful movie that has stayed with me over the months.
My initial prejudice was that this was mere homage to the sort of high class, mildly erotic European cinema that you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting on the late night schedule of Channel 4 during the 80s and 90s. But – lovely as it is – it’s so much more than that.
Amidst the sumptuous visuals and the tremendous sense of time and place, there’s a lot of heart and soul to this movie, a lot of wisdom about life and love. Timothee Chalamet delivered what has to be the year’s best performance, completely belying his age, and the whole thing was packed with nuance.
In a year where cinema seemed to be dominated by a certain sort of hysterical hyper-realism, this was the truest and most honest thing I saw onscreen, and it resonated accordingly. Also had the Sufjan factor, which makes it a guaranteed AW crowd-pleaser (or not).
2. Paddington 2
Surely, this was the best time most of us had in a cinema last year? It may not be classic awards fodder, but it’s a vastly superior film to almost anything that will collect a gong this month.
Perhaps the last twenty minutes dipped a tad, but otherwise this was breathless stuff. From the sheer likeability of its central cast, to the immense fun Hugh Grant was clearly having in his role, to the gentle and affectionate Wes Anderson pastiche, this was cinema as it was meant to be. I saw it in the presence of three generations of Clan Little in a packed house – every single person had a great time, a proper delight. One of those rare movies where you’d have stayed another couple of hours to watch more of it if only there were more of it to watch.
3. Mother!
A movie with all sorts of things wrong with it (in particular, Jennifer Lawrence is badly miscast), but enough right to end up deep, deep in credit.
Early on, you clock the allegory. And it’s clever and all that, but about halfway through, you start to wonder if it’s really enough to sustain the whole thing. But then the last section of the movie leans in so damn hard, and is so utterly out of hand, that it justifies just about anything.
Visually spectacular, refreshingly loony and utterly ill advised on almost every level, I loved this movie. The fact that it tanked badly only adds to the charm.
4. Thor: Ragnarok
Probably the only movie that challenged Paddington for sheer smile factor in 2017.
Anyone who’d seen Hunt For The Wilderpeople knew this was gonna be good, but if anything it outperformed expectations. For the first time, a superhero flick that was as wild and boundless as some of the best that comics themselves had to offer, and that at least attempted access to the spirit of Jack Kirby (why has this taken so long?).
Two of the very best hours I spent in the cinema this year just gone.
5. Coco
The other four films on this list were all movies I sort of knew I’d love even as I bought the ticket – their reps preceded them. This was the year’s great surprise.
It’s a slow burn, and I wasn’t full enamored with it, even at the halfway stage. But the last 15 minutes… yeesh. I have to admit that I was fighting back the tears, hardcore. Possibly even tops the notorious Up for sheer, wanton plucking of the heartstrings.
Well worth seeing if you have the necessary kids to justify it. Just be sure to take a hanky and a photo of your grandma.
Bubbling under: Dunkirk, A Ghost Story, Logan, Valerian (hey, I liked it), Okja, Get Out, Detroit, Killing of a Sacred Deer, Girls Trip, Good Time, The Beguiled, Aus Dem Nichts, Ayla, Death of Stalin, Geostorm (kidding).
Over to you (apart from Gary)…
Ha Ha! I absolutely LOATHED Thor: Rangythingy and Paddington 2. And I can’t believe we’ve got this far down the thread without anyone mentioning my favourite: The Strange Ones.
(Actually, that’s not true. I didn’t loathe Paddington 2. I thought it was a very nice film for 12-year-olds and below.)
Gary, have you ever considered that perhaps your immediate, none-more-Gary impulse to assert the dominance of your own tastes and opinions is a deeply unhelpful contribution to the dialogue, and risks upending this critical effort to establish a non-Gary space in which UnGarys are able to freely discuss and compare their lived experiences and attempt to reconcile their own authentic truths, unhindered by the usual surfeit of Garyness? #notallgarys #afterwordsogary
Nope, not really.
Here you go, as requested:
1. The Strange Ones – Slow and ambiguously compelling. Sort of Terence Davies slow and Terrence Malick compelling.
2. Three Billboards… you all know the rest.
3. Detroit – Kathryn Bigelow’s film starts out like a documentary (I thought it was at first) before narrowing its field and turning into a very specific drama about racial tension during the riots of 1967.
4. Dunkirk
5. A futile and Stupid Gesture – The biopic of National Lampoon’s founder, Doug Kennedy. A must for fans of Animal House. Not dissimilar in tone to Man On The Moon.
I will check out The Strange Ones – sounds promising. Ditto A Futile and Stupid Gesture, although I’d heard mixed things about that one.
Dunkirk and Detroit both absolutely superb.
A surprisingly palatable list. Disappointed to see there’s only one cartoon though.
A Futile & Stupid Gesture is not as good as the documentary “Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead”
There was an ace interview with Tony Hendra on recent Iain Lee radio show is well worth seeking out – fascinating stuff about nearly being a Python, supporting Lenny Bruce and comedy in general as well as being Tap manager.
Cheers, DFB – duly added to the list.
In replying to @Gary in the way that Bingo thinks @Gary replies to everyone else Dunkirk is complete crap of the highest order.
Three Billboards and Call me by your name are two of the best films I have seen in this last year with Baby Driver being the other but for completely different reasons.
Ah see now, I liked Baby Driver not one jot. I can see its appeal -fast, flashy, cool- but underneath that, so vacuous and trite. It said nothing to me. Whereas Dunkirk, despite its faults (jingoistic) genuinely moved me, making me reflect a lot on how fortunate I am.
To be completely honest, Dunkirk made me reflect on my grandfather.
Dad’s dad, he died long before I was born, and when my father was still a small boy.
I’ve never heard much about him, and have only ever seen one photo (and even that not until well into my thirties). His loss was always my father’s alone, and we all sensed he didn’t much care to share it, which was fine – we never probed.
What little I know of my grandfather is that he fought in WW2, and that he was on board the Lancastria when it went down in June 1940 in the course of evacuating troops from Western France. The story that I had heard since boyhood, and never much considered in depth, was that he watched his best friend jump from the deck of the boat while wearing a life vest, breaking his neck on impact with the water and dying instantly. He subsequently slid down a rope, shredding his hands, and then swam through burning oil to safety. He survived the war, but died a few years later. The above is presumably what little of his war time experience he chose to share with his family.
To this day, for complex reasons I won’t go into, neither my father or I know where he’s buried. He’s always been a notional figure in my life at best; an absence, the grandfather that was not.
I watched Dunkirk at a work screening a few weeks before its release. As I sat in that cinema, I found myself confronted with scenes very similar to those passed down to me above; not of men as heroes, but as terrified insects being fed through the meat grinder of history, surviving by virtue of having been stood a foot to the left, rather than a foot to the right.
For the first time in my entire life, I thought at length about my grandfather, and what he actually went through, and then my own life, watching this stuff on a big screen before heading back to a nice lunch in my office. To be honest, if made me feel a little sick, and I walked back on unsteady legs.
There are all sorts of things wrong with Dunkirk. Not enough people on the beach, the wrong weather, maybe too little story, planes that fly too long without fuel. All sorts of things that perhaps diminish the entertainment, or the historical accuracy.
But it still resonated, for me at least, with a sort of unvarnished truth in presenting the human element of conflict, largely shorn of narrative or any of the usual bells and whistles. Just events, colossal, uncontrollable, historical events, bearing down on people and whisking them helplessly away. That total loss of agency. That connection to a still recent past so alien that it may as well have existed in another dimension entirely.
See, Bing, we do share quite a lot of tastes after all. Except for your penchant for kids’ films.
I’ve been thinking about this for the last minute and a half and here’s my theory on why I don’t get adults liking for kids’ films: all the films I like, I would also like if they were books. If Thor or Paddington were books (I guess Paddington is) I wouldn’t bother reading them no matter how well written they were. Nor, I suspect, would you.
Take Harry Potter, for example. The reasons I wouldn’t be interested in watching it are the same reasons I wouldn’t be interested in reading it. (Whereas I’d happily have read Three Billboards as a book.)
I haven’t really thought this through much, so don’t analyse it too deeply. It might be that I’m just a grumpy old childless snob.
That’s just a really weird way of looking at movies. It’s akin to saying “I only like paintings if they would also function as buildings”. You can take that approach, but get ready to miss out on a whole lot of fun, and indeed the point. You wouldn’t read 2001 if it was a novel, would you?
My approach to movies is to consider them in their context. I watch a lot of kids films because I have kids, but also because I’m interested in (ahem) the language of cinema, and a kids movie simply sees that language being used for different purposes. Which is why 20 minutes into Frozen I found myself oohing and aahing over the visual economy with which the movie had created audience empathy with the two leads. It doesn’t mean the movie is some sort of masterpiece, but I can still admire the proficiency of the creators in achieving their goal. Likewise, I can watch Mad Max and admire the fact that the film effectively works as a silent movie, because the quality of the visual storytelling is so high (incredibly refreshing in an age where the dominant mode is “tell, don’t show”). Similarly, when I read the kids Roald Dahl, I’m impressed by the writing. It isn’t Proust, but it’s incredibly clever and perfect for its audience, which is exactly what it needed to be.
That’s half of it, but the other half is that I think it’s healthy to retain a bit of your childhood inside you. To let yourself be wowed by a lightsabre fight every now and then. I don’t think that reflects a lack of maturity, just an acceptance of different facets of your being. None of us are all one thing.
I also don’t see much point in culture snobbery, because that stuff extends all the way down. We on here might like to tell ourselves that the records we like are clever or worthy, but – really, in the grand scheme – they’re not. They’re disposable pop culture, just as surely as Paddington 2 is – no smarter and ultimately no more enlightening. I don’t say that as a knock, I just say I prefer to enjoy the ride and take these things for what they are.
FWIW – there are plenty of books on Thor, and indeed I read one last year (Neil Gaiman’s lovely take on the Norse myths).
I think we’re very different in that respect. I just have zero interest in kids or kids’ things. Both bore me tremendously. Not saying that makes me more mature (I doubt anyone who knows me would say that), I’m just always gonna find watching a kids’ film as boring as actually being in a kid’s company. (Vice-versa isn’t true – for some bizarre reason kids seem to like me. If I knew why, I’d do something about it.)
I was lucky I guess – both of my Granddad’s survived both World wars. My Paternal granddad was at Ypres and described his experience there in his memoir of that time that my Nan did her best to keep from me.
So I don’t have the loss that you so eloquently describe BL.
However for me Dunkirk was a big disappointment I guess because it wasn’t the Dunkirk I was expecting to see. I was expecting a big story about the mobilisation of all the vessels in Dover instead we got a prolonged dogfight and an action packed film admittedly with high quality aerial scenes. We didn’t get any emotion and frankly I couldn’t engage with either the film or the characters.
But Harry Styles! Do the words One Direction mean nothing to you? Did David Cassidy die in vain? Was it really only Puppy Love?
I agree with @stevet : it was trite shite.
…planes that fly too long without fuel…
I’ve heard that criticism before and I think it’s not what Nolan intended. There are 3 strands in the film (air, sea, land) and each is prefaced with a subtitle of a time duration, one measured in days, one in hours, one in minutes, and they each take up about the same amount of screen time. The Spitfire one is prefaced in minutes and so the plane stays in the air for a realistic time.
I could be talking crap, but I think I’ve remembered it right.
No, you’re exactly right.
I wouldn’t say Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead is better. It’s more in depth and factual, certainly. So arguably more interesting, especially to fans of National Lampoon magazine. But it’s a talking heads style documentary and as such nowhere near as entertaining as A Futile & Stupid Gesture.
I’ll have you know Puppy Love was a smasheroo for the gorgeous Donny Osmond
– signed D Osmond
I mainly see kids films in the cinema, thought Paddington 2 was great, but think I preferred the first one. Coco was wonderful. As for more grown up stuff I have only seen 3 recently, Star Wars VIII was ok, I enjoyed Bladerunner 2049 and thought The Post was dismal.
Without wanting to rain on anyone’s parade, I also thought The Post was enormously disappointing.
Thought The Post was well made but pretty dull. The bit where Meryl walks down the court steps under the adoring silent gaze of mostly young women was like a ‘DO YOU SEE WHAT SHE REPRESENTS?’ neon sign going off
In the screening I was in there were actual laughs in the cinema at that scene.
I also don’t think it was too smart segueing into a much better movie at the end.
Re-screened Spotlight over the weekend as a point of comparison and my main takeaway is that this sort of story is probably better served by a proper ensemble, rather than two heavy hitters.
Oh, and what a dreadful waste of Alison Brie.
There’s another scene where she says that women are invisible in the office, and moments later she’s standing in the newsroom and some young fella barges into her. Spielberg does symbolism like a dog does make up.
On the other hand I though Streep played the final act superbly. She didn’t become a man to take them on, Thatcher style. She doesn’t suddenly grow balls, she’s still hesitant and deferential, but she knows what she wants and she gets it.
For me, that was sort of the problem. She didn’t need to fight or argue. She owned the company and spent the entire movie effortlessly hobnobbing with and generally handling many of the most powerful individuals on the planet. Consequently, I never got the sense she was anything less than fully in control – she may have broken into a flop sweat every time the conference room doors swung open to reveal another sausagefest, but her authority was clearly absolute and she never struck me as anything less than an accomplished operator.
Her issue was never really authority, it seemed to me. It was the gravity of the decision, and rightly so.
Rarely get a chance to get to the cinema except to watch things my kids want to see which is distinctly hit or miss so have to rely on the old online rental or Netflix. That said I have been watching
1. The Big Sick
This was a genuinely touching and believable rom-com that managed more often than not to hit the heights on both the “rom” and the “com” scale while throwing in some pithy observations on race, identity and the inexorable pull of family. The relationship between the boy Kumali (1st gen American to Pakistani parents) and the girl Emily (WASP) is the beating heart of the film but it’s the developing relationship between Kumali and the girl’s parents – played by Holly Hunter and Ray Romano – that provides the biggest laughs and emotional surprises, culminating in a film that by the end delivers all the popcorn tropes of the genre but manages to say an awful lot more about familial relationships in a way that is both witty and thought-provoking.
2. Get Out
Not as brilliant as many critics have claimed this is still a good film about racism that successfully blends horror and satire to make its points. If anything the film undersells its mash-up of genres and could have made some sharper stabs – literally and metaphorically – at skin colour. That said in less capable hands one could easily see the film descending into cheap jump scares and amateur dramatic farce but the director Jordan Peele finds enough meat in his own script to keep the plot riveting and avoid descending into virtue signalling and ham-fisted observations about race relations.
3. The Meyerowitz Stories
A Netflix film with a great cast. Despite the presence of thespian heavyweights like Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thomspon it’s Adam Sandler who excels in this film about the problems of being the offspring of an egotistical and self-centred artist father. It’s a small film that doesn’t make it easy for the viewer to empathise with the individual family members or to sympathise with their predicament. It eschews cheap sentimentality and obvious attempts at demanding an emotional investment in the characters. It succeeds in making us care because it understands that its our personal flaws and our fallibility that make us human rather than our achievements, be they commercial or artistic.
Great list (and welcome back).
I ummed and aahed about including The Big Sick. It’s a really good movie, and I LOVED Holly Hunter’s performance, but I’d heard so much great word of mouth around it that by the time I actually saw it I think my expectations were unreasonably high. Wish I’d seen it without the fanfare, because it was quite lovely.
Yes, I enjoyed the Big Sick, too.
But I wish I hadn’t seen the trailer beforehand. It was one of those trailers that basically shows you a compressed version of the entire story, including all the best lines, and so by the time you come to see the actual film, it’s inevitably a bit of a letdown.
This is also a very good point.
I was massively disappointed in the Big Sick.
Kumail Nanjiani is just too deadpan to be a good actor, and too old for the role. I couldn’t get over the arrogance of casting himself as himself ten years or so younger, and in a role all about how noble he is. He should have cast someone different, someone who didn’t look so creepy hanging about with a bunch of twenty-somethings wearing a hoody, and made the character a lot more flawed and imperfect.
Here’s my thing about Call Me By Your Name, seeing as you’ll be wanting to know and everything. I agree it was a beautiful film, beautifully shot, and Timothee Somethingfrench was indeed quite brilliant in it. And Mystery Of Love and Visions Of Gideon are both outrageously beautiful. And it did capture the poignancy of first heartbreak so well. But… I sort of couldn’t help thinking that if it had been about a boy and a girl of the same age it would have been a bit boring really.
But then I think, so what?
Yeah, I get that. That’s sort of what I was getting at with the “European Cinema” bit in the OP. Flip one gender, take the Americans out and there are probably a million other similar movies with lovely shots of the Italian countryside that we’ve all seen before.
Ultimately, what made the film transcend that comparison for me was a combination of the sheer strength of the performances (Armie Hammer is also very good indeed, in fairness to him, despite having seemingly been named on a dare), and then that wonderful speech from the father near the end, plus the brilliance of the final shot.
Or, to put it another way, if it had been a boy and a girl it wouldn’t have been Chalamet and Hammer, and the chemistry between Chalamet and Hammer is what makes the movie.
Dammit! Now I really want to see a tv show called Chalmers and Hannett, in which a glamorous, bronzed, globetrotting travel show presenter and an idiosyncratic music producer somehow team up to solve international (music-based? tourist resort located?) crimes..
I’d like to say ‘Mistress America’, which although it came out in 2015 was written by (and starred) Greta Gerwig, and was the reason I was so disappointed by ‘Lady Bird’ (so there’s a very up-to-the-minute link).
Oh, can I also say that I thought Get Out was way over-rated? 4/5 for the social satire, 2/5 for the horror, abysmal ending.
Call me by your name
Wind river
The florida project
The phantom thread
Young Offenders
Saw the Florida Project last week. Superb. Liked it a lot more than ‘Three Billboards’. But I suspect I’m in the minority in this.
Nope, I’m with you both. Great movie, should have been on my list.
Yeh, me too
Found three billboards a bit unbelievable
We were on a family trip to New York and went along to the IMAX to see Thor on the day of release. Blimey, those American audiences are a bit barmy aren’t they! Whooping, shouting, cheering, the works. Me and my 7 year old lad enjoy trying to be the first to spot the Stan Lee cameo (we’re both claiming victory for Black Panther the other day!), but we couldn’t miss it in Thor, as the audience went crazy, standing, cheering, whistling…
We enjoyed the film, but the experience was, well, different. The only disappointment was the butchering of a perfectly enjoyable cinema treat. We love popcorn. Sweet popcorn. Our local independent cinema does the best. In the IMAX in New York, however, they choose to pour hot butter over it. The smell was horrendous (nearly as bad as our house after our dishwasher decided to set itself on fire earlier today – I can’t imagine how we are ever going to get rid of the smell and the kitchen is a right mess, but I digress).
I am going to be calling into a bookies at some point though, because I am convinced that the Oscars will be won by The Shape of Water, Guillermo Del Toro, Gary Oldman, Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell and Allison Janney. I need to think about the best screenplay ones too, and I can then pop a few accumulator bets on (I think that’s what they call them). My guess is that Three Billboards will win whichever section of the screenplay awards it is in. I’m pretty confident of the first six though.
The Shape Of Water rather than Three Billboards is the only real gamble there.
I think the latter was favoured by BAFTA because it’s a ‘British’ film. Having seen them both I think The Shape Of Water will appeal more to a mostly American panel. Also, there’s the feeling that Del Toro’s film may get rewarded for his body of work (although In Bruges and The Guard are also excellent).
I think what I’ll do is have a five-fold, six-fold and seven-fold bet!
Ah but, Three Billboards won the Golden Globe. While it’s hardly unheard of for the Globes and the Oscars to choose a different winner, it’s not that common. I have no idea what a five-fold, six-fold and seven-fold bet means, but don’t wager the house.
I suppose it’s complicated by the fact that:
1. The Oscars has only one award for Best Picture
2. The Golden Globes has two awards: ‘Best Motion Picture – Drama’ and Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy
Not strictly true.
The Golden Globes and Oscars have only shared the same best picture in 5 of the last 15 years. It’s pretty common for them to have different winners.
Facts! Pah, I spit on them! Pft! Don’t you be swayed by Bingo’s facts, young Paul. You listen to my made up whimsy instead.
Well, I dithered for so long whilst deciding which the best gambling website was that by the time I got round to it the four acting Oscars had such ricidulously low odds that I decided not to bother, although I probably should have because I had added a few more to my list of dead certs (cinematography for Blade Runner, Coco for animated film and I’d changed my mind from Three Billboards and had decided on Get Out for whichever of the screenplay sections it was in). But I figured that by setting up an online gambling account and winning £20 on my Oscars accumulator, as I wouldn’t have bet big, I would have ended up losing that amount countless times over when I decided to start having little bets on the football and boxing, which I rarely get right.
Still, I finally won something on the lottery this week, although I think it’s the closest I will ever come to hitting the jackpot, getting four numbers right and missing the other two by two numbers and four numbers respectively. They do need to do something about how they dish the lottery money out though, as 5 numbers would have got you £1,700, whereas 6 would have netted you £3.2m. Although, to be fair to Camelot, the say that only the lure of big wins sells tickets these days, hence engineering rollovers by increasing the numbers. Anyway, £131, I’m going to spend, spend, spend…
I don’t think anyone would want the house at the moment. I thought the smell of smoke after the kitchen fire had started to go away, but having been out this evening at the football (watching Barnsley get beaten as usual, slightly worse than watching your kitchen on fire) and coming back in I realise I had simply got used to the smell. It was quite demoralising actually, the strong smell of the smoke hitting me as soon as I stepped into the house, as I really thought it was going. We have a ‘disaster clean-up’ company being sent round by the insurer, so hopefully they can help get rid of the lingering smells. The irony was I had only finished sorting out the insurance renewal 4 hours prior to the fire, as it has taken weeks because of all my collections (all, thankfully, remain unperished), ending the conversation with the words “the only way everything would go would be a thorough burglary or the house burning down, and we’re not planning on having a fire!” and we had put a deposit on a new kitchen on Friday!!! The deposit was more to secure a deal, although we weren’t 100% certain we were going to proceed. I guess we are now and it’s become a much bigger and more urgent job than we had planned.
So no, won’t be putting the house on it, just a couple of quid, but I’ll do it over a few bets, starting with 5 categories and adding one at a time. I think a lot are odds on, so I can’t imagine I’m going to win enough to get the kitchen my wife has her eye on.
Salted popcorn (with or without butter) is the norm in North America.
Salted popcorn, okay-ish in small amounts. With butter, urrggghhhh!
As Mrs M said about something else salty, it’s not worth the calories.
Am I the only one who simply doesn’t get popcorn at the movies? Is it because it’s ‘traditional’ to hoover up buckets of the stuff, or do people actually like it? Is it really impossible for them to get through two hours without stuffing their faces?
To my huge surprise the stuff is actually good for you, but I doubt if nutritional value is uppermost in people’s minds. Certainly won’t be uppermost in the minds of the poor drones who have to sweep it up between shows because people are incapable of conveying it from bucket to mouth without dropping half of it.
As you were.
How is it possible to not “get” popcorn, Mike?
You make it sound as if people are banging nine inch nails into their thighs while watching movies. It’s a (generally) sweet, high volume, low calorie snack that people enjoy while at the cinema. Do people “actually like it”? Yes, of course. That’s the essence of its popularity – it’s not some sort of sinister CIA plot. They’re not all pretending, or deluded.
The term “as you were”, on the other hand, wants taking round the back and shooting. 😉
I spent a long time on my carefully curated list but it seems to have disappeared, so you’ll have to make do with just the list.
1. Three Billboards
2. Sweet Country
3. This Beautiful Fantastic
4. The Meyerowitz Stories
5 . Their Finest
Their finest is top of my must see list
Watched it last night on Netflix. Very enjoyable – Nighy on top Nighy form.
Don’t go to cinema enough to pick out five stand-outs (put off by price of tickets and enduring food munchers most of the time), but seen three that I’ve greatly enjoyed over the past year:
Arrival – Great intelligent sci-fi.
Dunkirk – As good as the reviews said.
The Shape of Water – Best described as an intriguing and visually stunning fantasy.
Biggest disappointment was Blade Runner: 2034. Faaaarrr toooooo loooooong.
You were lucky. The version I saw went on to 2049.
I absolutely adore Arrival – one of the very best films of recent years. Sadly, it’s a 2016 joint, but I propose to allow its inclusion in this thread anyway, so we can all bask in its warming glow. I will also make the same exception for the wonderful Personal Shopper.
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is the most tantalising prospect, isn’t it?
Cannot wait. Could be absolutely spectacular. Very glad he turned down Bond.
What was wrong with David Lynch’s version?
Nothing at all, and the good news is that it’ll still be possible to watch the Lynch version even after Villeneuve takes a crack at it. In much the same way that the Wes Anderson Eraserhead reboot didn’t sully Eraserhead.
In much the same way that Sick Of The Flicks didn’t sully Pick Of The Flicks!
Riiiiiight.
In much the same way that Sully the film didn’t sully Sully the bloke?
I would have gone to Monsters Inc here, personally.
Difficult to know exactly which films qualify for which year.
For example, I’m sure I saw “Manchester By The Sea” and “La La Land” less than a year ago.
Anyway, my fave of all the nominated (though not, bizarrely, for Best Film) ones is “Florida Project.”
I avoid the war like I avoid the 1980s so “Dunkirk” and Oldman’s Churchill film are non-starters and each passing day makes me think a little less of “Phantom Thread.”
Why on earth does Mark Kermode like it so much?
It’s pretty straightforward, they have to be released in the year in question i.e. 2017. A number of Oscar contenders are released in Dec so they are still playing at this time of the year.
Yes, nowadays, almost all the contenders for the 5 heavyweight Oscars (Best Picture, Direction, Screenplay, Lead Actor and Lead Actress) are released in the October – November – December of the year, so that they are fresh in the Academy members’ minds when voting in February.
I think I’m right in saying that the last time that a film released in the FIRST half of the preceding year went on to win Best Picture was TWENTY-SIX years ago, in 1992 (“The Silence of the Lambs”, which opened in the US in January 1991).
Is Phantom Thread a biopic of bricameron?
No, that’s The Phantom Menace
More like the Phantom Flan Flinger.
Most recent film I saw – Early Man. Brilliant stuff – funny, warm, clever, and made of plasticine.
I’m gonna venture a choice which I suspect will chime with a very narrow constituency, that being probably just myself.
The Greatest Showman. An unashamed feel -good movie with an utterly joyful, life-affirming vibe and bold, engaging performances from all concerned. Not historically accurate? Musically anachronistic? I didn’t give a shit – it’s entertainment, and glorious entertainment at that. The critics were predictably sniffy, but the people, wow – they’ve really taken to this in a huge way, and on this occasion, I’m with ’em.
I’ve heard great things. Will try to see it soon.
Not one mention for ‘The Death of Stalin*’! One of the funniest and most disturbing movies I’ve seen.
And Michael Palin’s best performance.
*Unless someone’s mentioned it and I’ve missed it.
Ahem – it was in the OP!
Very sorry, it’s been a long day.
No worries at all, Comrade. Great movie.
The more I see The Last Jedi, the more I think it is one of the very best Star Wars films.
Blade Runner 2049 was tremendous.
I really liked Colossal.
After The Storm was another excellent Kore-eda film.
The Boy And The Beast was maybe a slight disappointment after the superlative Wolf Children, but was still head and shoulders above any other animated film. If he keeps going like this, in ten years time people will talk about Mamoru Hosada the way they talk about Miyazaki now.
I’m a sucker for a low-budget monster movie, and The Ritual was the pick of last year, and one for once where the final reveal of the creature wasn’t a disappointment
I need to see Colossal. Surprised it didn’t make a bigger impact, seemed to just vanish off the radar.
You also need to see the same director’s earlier Timecrimes – one of the best time travel films I’ve seen. Unless you have seen it, in which case you need to see it again.
I love Timecrimes! Had no idea it was the same director.
I originally saw Time Crimes in a double bill with Primer. That was one seriously trippy evening.
I’m with you. Blade Runner was just excellent. And I thought SWTLJ was terrific as well – good for the kids and good for the adultkids as well.
Oh yes, a big yes to The Ritual. One of my standout movies of the year. Just gripping horror cinema. And yes the monster was terrific.
All these comments and no mention of what this thread should really be about: bogeys.
For what it’s worth, this was my top ten of 2017 that I prepared for my film discussion group:
1 Baby Driver
2 Dunkirk
3 La La Land
4 Toni Erdmann
5 Get Out
6 Mother!
7 The Ritual
8 T2 Trainspotting
9 The Death of Stalin
10 The Meyerowitz Stories
Three Billboards deserved to sweep those BAFTAS, beautiful and poignant film with astonishing performances across the board
Other opinions are available… I thought it was overhyped and a bit lukewarm and aimless… Agree it has some amazing performances though.
Delighted to see Paddington 2 and Coco getting a mention.
A few suggestions from me.
Aquarius (Brazil). Sonia Braga in fine form as a feisty, retired music journalist fighting developers who are trying to take over her building.
Same blood (Sweden). A 1930s childhood among the Same herders of Lapland set against the racist ideologies of the time. One girls struggle to find her own path.
On body and soul (Hungary). Poetic, suggestive, low-key and amusing. Two socially awkward slaughterhouse employees discover that they are having the same dream.
Patterson (USA). Jarmusch’s beautifully restrained celebration of the simple joys of everyday life.
Finally got round to Wind River this evening – very good indeed.
Paul Wad wrote, on Feb 20th:
“I am convinced that the Oscars will be won by The Shape of Water, Guillermo Del Toro, Gary Oldman, Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell and Allison Janney. ”
Blimey! You were right! On all of ’em! I hope you placed that accumulator bet.