Has it been a year already? I guess it’s time for my third (!) annual anti-Oscars retrospective, wherein I totally-objectively rank all of the movies that came out from January through August. This year had a particularly strong crop of not-artsy movies, and I’m actually going to have to go ahead and number my honorable mentions (11-20) before diving into the real top 10. I’ll try to keep the reviews brief, as 20 is a helluva big number when we’re only talking about 8 months worth of content. Could there really be, on average, about two and a half great movies per month? Read on and find out! That sounds like click-bait, sorry. But number 5 will shock you! P.S. As always, I was unfortunately not able to see every single movie despite my Herculean efforts to do so. Maybe next year with MoviePass it’ll be easier. Apologies to Beguiled, A Ghost Story, Trainspotting 2, Good Time, Detroit and anything else I’m forgetting. P.P.S. I didn't enjoy War for the Planet of the Apes as much as everyone else did. Not sure why, just didn't love it.
Lastly, before I begin, I think everybody should do the same 2017 Dane Dehaan-double-feature I did and watch A Cure for Wellness and Valerian and the City of 1000 Planets back-to-back because they are both visually spectacular and otherwise just insane trainwrecks of movies. Easy on the eyes doe. Okay onto the list:
Honorable Mentions:
20. Wind River - coming off two hits (Sicario and Hell or High Water), writer Taylor Sheridan makes the jump adequately to director for this bleak and bloody crime movie that takes place on a Native American reservation. It stars Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen, aka two actors who are better when they’re not playing Avengers.
19. The Lego Batman Movie - The Lego Movie had no right to be hilarious and great, and this (first) spin-off movie reaaaallly had no right to be hilarious and great, and somehow they did it. While not quite as awesome as its predecessor, that’s still an impressive feat.
18. Logan Lucky - Soderbergh’s un-retirement movie is fun and slick, but Ocean’s Eleven it is not. There are quite a few plot holes if you start to think about it, which you probably shouldn’t. Enjoy Channing Tatum and Adam Driver planning and executing a heist at a Nascar track in West Virginia.
17. Baby Driver - While quite fun, Edgar Wright has set the bar so damn high for himself that this can’t really be considered him in top form (Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim get that honor). This movie was well-written and brilliantly directed, but the stakes felt weird and the wink-wink-this-is-a-movie nature of it made it difficult for me to care about the characters.
16. War Machine - I’ve heard this described as a kind of spiritual sequel to Dr. Strangelove for the modern age, and that’s a good thing. Strong performances abound in this satire that looks at what America has done wrong in the war in Afghanistan. It’s both funny and super depressing.
15. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword - Let’s get this out of the way: this movie is dumb. But it’s also insanely fun action and the score is maybe the best of the year (sorry Nick Cave). Turn your brain off and enjoy.
14. Spiderman: Homecoming - Marvel continues to amaze me by refusing to let me stop going to their movies. I’m sick and tired of the MCU and I’m really sick and tired of Spiderman reboots, but somehow they dragged me back in! And by making it a John Hughes-esque high school comedy, they actually made this feel pretty funny and fresh. Whatever Kevin Feige is feeding his cadre of writers, I want some.
13. Kong: Skull Island - Yet again, here’s a movie that is a reboot of a reboot, and it’s shoehorned in a cinematic universe to (re) boot! It should not work, it should not be good, but by putting this one in an Apocalypse Now-type Vietnam setting, it really feels exciting and different. Plus Sam Jackson hams it up with the best of them in his fight against a giant gorilla. Speaking of giant animals and hamming it up...
12. Okja - Bong Joon-ho’s movies are perfect for this list because they feel so anti-Hollywood. They’re fun and bizarre and totally bonkers. This movie (about a giant pig being rescued from a slaughterhouse) is quite good but it basically made me quit pork, which is delicious, so I knocked points off. Damn you, adorable giant pig!
11. Logan - In the era of oversaturated superhero movies, there’s really only one option: make a totally different kind of superhero movie. Deadpool kicked the door down by making a successful R-rated raunch-fest, so why not make a gritty, bloody, cuss-filled R-rated drama? And make it star Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart, two of the original X-Men who kicked off the modern superhero era almost 20 years ago? And make it thoughtful and satisfying? Why not!?
Top 10:
10. Atomic Blonde
If you’re only going to see one John Wick movie this year, make it Atomic Blonde. While John Wick 2 was pretty fun, the senseless murder got a little repetitive by the end. By keeping the kill-count lower, Atomic Blonde makes each action sequence a little more meaningful. Granted, there is still a lot of devastatingly violent carnage in this movie, and I’ve heard others complain that it got monotonous as well. But I didn’t feel that way- I thought the direction was top-notch and the hyper-stylized Cold War-era Berlin kept the neon visuals interesting. And Charlize Theron might just be a better John Wick than Keanu.
9. It Comes At Night
It Comes At Night is a phenomenal title, but it has nothing to do with this movie. Nothing ever comes at night, spoiler alert. Anyways, this one is about a mysterious and extremely contagious disease that has apparently turned the world into a grueling dystopian wasteland. I say apparently because the film barely ever leaves a little house in the woods where a family has holed up. Things get mighty tense in this little shelter, where you can never be totally sure of anything or truly trust anyone. While it’s fairly light on true horror elements (whatever that means), this one has no shortage of extremely suspenseful moments. Stretch your knuckles beforehand, they’ll be white afterwards.
8. Wonder Woman
It’s unfortunate that Wonder Woman has to be a statement rather than just a movie, but you can’t fault the movie for the circumstances of the world that produced it. Those circumstances, by the way, are this: there have only been about 4 (depending on how you count them) superheroine movies ever, and there have been no female-led superhero films since 2004’s atrocious Catwoman. The 13 years in the interim have given us no less than three dozen male-led superhero movies, including 15 in the MCU since 2008. That’s a sad state of affairs, revealing that movie executives don’t trust audiences (of either gender) to come out to support a female lead. Boy were they wrong. Wonder Woman is not a perfect movie, but it is so great and (at the risk of sounding high-falutin’) important to see an empowered female kicking some evil ass for once that the audience turned out in droves and it became one of the few real hits of the summer. People cried and cheered in my screening, myself included. It felt good. It felt right. It’s 2017 goddammit. Time for some equality in our spandex.
7. The Big Sick
Between Hello My Name Is Doris and The Big Sick, Michael Showalter is really making a play to become the rom-com director to beat. Big Sick is rarely laugh-out-loud hilarious, but it is genuinely funny and the true-story nature of it gives it some added emotional heft. I also really appreciate a falling-in-love story that doesn’t exclusively concern white people. Good job Hollywood.
6. Free Fire
Why did no one hear about this movie? Why did no one see this movie? Am I taking crazy pills? Ben Wheatley’s most-accessible movie is also his most-hilarious, although it’s not strictly a comedy. This gun-deal-gone-wrong scenario takes place almost entirely in one bullet-filled warehouse, which is a fun and interesting choice. There are generous helpings of both gore and wry & dry British wit, which go surprisingly well together. Brie Larson. Cillian Murphy. Armie Hammer. Sharlto Copley. Are you not sold yet?
5. Brigsby Bear
These lists have tended to include one genre-defying movie, and this year that spot belongs to Brigsby Bear. How/where to even begin trying to explain this? A young man emerges from an unnecessary fallout shelter and has to try to rejoin his family and society, but he misses a children’s TV show that was produced entirely for him, so he sets out to continue making the show. That… sounds pretty weird and bad, so it’s frankly astonishing that writer/star Kyle Mooney was able to turn this into both a hilarious comedy and a resonating drama. He has some help from fellow SNL alums including the Lonely Island gang (who produced), but this is not your typical SNL fare. It’s weirder, and maybe better.
4. Dunkirk
One of my chief complaints with Christopher Nolan movies is that I can never understand what the hell anybody is saying (looking at you, Bane), but the director solved that problem in this movie by almost entirely getting rid of the dialogue. It was a bold choice, especially for a film that employs a unique time-jumping narrative device, but it totally works. This movie is completely about suspense- when are the enemies going to strike next, and where? Can the soldiers make it home, and how? Can the allies from home make it to save the soldiers, and how? Dialogue isn’t really necessary to convey fear; the harrowing looks on these boys’ faces more than does that job.
3. Ingrid Goes West
This movie will likely end up being an interesting time capsule for this particular moment due to its extreme reliance on how people use Instagram today as a plot device. It might not hold up, especially if people forget about Instagram the way they’ve already started to forget about Vine and MySpace and etc. But for now, this is a masterpiece effort in satirizing the social media age. Why are we compelled to make our lives look more glamorous than they are? Why are we so offended when people don’t react to our offerings the way we expect them to? How can we be self-satisfied in an era when it’s normal to boast and show-off? These are just some of the questions my little group discussed as we left the movie. Ingrid Goes West has a couple of rough narrative issues, but it nails a lot of the hypocrisy that plagues all social media users, and especially those living in hyper-guilty Los Angeles. I had to do some soul-searching after leaving the theater, and that can never be a bad thing. P.S. O’Shea Jackson as the Batman-obsessed landlord steals every scene he’s in.
2. Get Out
When people ask me why I like horror movies, I tell them it’s not really about being scared (although I do appreciate that). It’s more because horror movies have no problems breaking down expectations and trying something radical. Characters can die, stories can veer off into strange territories, and big philosophical themes can be explored. Granted, not every horror movie manages to do all this, but the great ones strive for it. Enter Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out. This is what I’m talking about. This is what we need more of. It’s part social commentary, and it’s even part comedy, but it’s definitely a horror film. The atrocities that the characters endure are exaggerated to be sure, but the daily bullshit that black people in America have to deal with is exquisitely thrust into the spotlight as well. It begs to be looked at, aired out. Often if a movie is just a delivery mechanism for a message or a moral, the viewing experience suffers. Not so in this case. This movie rocks, and it manages to be thoughtful and inspiring too.
1. Raw
