This list was compiled from the individual top ten lists of Jim, Craig, Alexander, Sarah, Matt, Ian, Julie, Marya, Rudie, Aaron, Scott, Tyler, and David. Each film was weighted according to its placement on each individual list. As such, a film that appeared on only two writers’ lists could still wind up on the finalized list if it placed particularly high. Conversely, a film could conceivably be on everybody’s list, but not make the final list, due to low point value.Honorable Mentions: American Honey, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, O.J.: Made in America10. PatersonUpon hearing that Jim Jarmusch’s next movie was going to star Adam Driver and an English bulldog, I wondered if he could see into my soul and knew my deepest desires. That dream trio produces something even greater than the sum of its parts – a gentle, poetic, and frequently very funny portrait of being an artist with a day job, and finding contentment within what might appear to others as a mundane life. Stacked with great cameos and a pitch-perfect supporting turn by Golshifteh Farahani, it’s also a very touching exploration of romantic relationships. -JS9. JackiePablo Larrain and Natalie Portman seem to pull off the impossible inJackie: to make an incredible internal film about the importance of grandeur. How we deal with grief became a running theme in the films of 2016, and in this film Jackie Kennedy processes her loss by creating the myth of JFK’s Camelot. While most films about such subjects attempt to deflate such myths, here we see the personal struggle that comes from creating such myths in the first place. Mica Levi’s grinding score often plays as a counterpoint to Jackie’s patrician demeanor, but she herself sheds the mask in a few vital scenes. Seen through the film’s time-hopping structure, it is clear just how deep Portman’s illustration is of a woman who finds confidence in her while never losing a sense of helplessness. -IB8. The LobsterTrying to nail down a single theme for a year such as this may be a difficult task but I am willing to try. I think 2016’s overarching cinematic theme is the idea of finding purpose amidst the absurd melancholy of life (this would be an apt theme for La La Land, Peter and the Farm and at least three films forthcoming on this list). And no film exemplifies this theme better than Yorgos Lanthimos’ (the anomalous auteur behind 2009’s sensational Dogtooth) The Lobster. The Lobster sees an impotent oaf (played with pitch perfect despondency by Colin Farrell) check-in to a villa where guests must find love or be turned into an animal. Like his films before it (in addition toDogtooth, Lanthimos’ Alps is an avant-garde oddity), Lanthimos creates a premise that is outlandish and hyperbolic, but uses this absurdist humor to whittle away at the characters. And from a bizarre piece of experimental comedy, Lanthimos yields a poignant story of love and belonging. -CS7. ArrivalArrival is another film with incredibly relevant themes. It asks so many questions and brings up so many topics that it feels like essential viewing right now. I liked so much about the film it is hard to know where to start. One of my favorite things about Arrival is that it is about a linguist and the film focuses on language and how language works. It was endlessly entertaining to watch Louise (Amy Adams) and Ian (Jeremy Renner) teach the aliens language and diagram sentences. I also loved what the film does with time, I won’t spoil anything but time is important to the film and it was very effective for me. The other themes of “fear of the other” and “fear of the unknown” were very powerful and used to great effect. I also want to mention how much I loved Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score. It is eerie and haunting in a way that fits the film perfectly. Overall, Arrival pushed all the right buttons for me and I think it is a film I will revisit many times. -SB6. Manchester by the SeaAs portraits of grief go, not enough spend time considering the many ways people try to avoid thinking about their grief. In Manchester by the Sea, Lee (Casey Affleck) drinks, watches sports, gets in fights, works, gets in arguments, and just tries to fall asleep before he’s left alone with his thoughts too long, all to avoid thinking about what he’s done and what’s happened to him. And that’s even before his brother (Kyle Chandler) dies, leaving him in charge of a teenager (Lucas Hedges) who doesn’t have any time for his grief, he’s got band practice to go to. Lee is not a great guy; he can be a bit of creep at times. But he’s sort of trying to be there for his nephew, and sort of trying to not get himself too attached, and sort of trying to deny the damaging influence his hometown is having on him just by being there all the damn time. And writer/director Kenneth Lonergan is terribly attuned to people’s triggers. He knows how to latch onto weird specific things that set people off at just the moment when a relationship was just sort of starting to work. And we’re all too caught up in this denial and these specific chores and these triggers to realize that suddenly we have grown attached to one another, and really want the best, but are too heartbroken to summon the courage. We can’t always be the people we want to be. It doesn’t take tragedy to know that; but it has a way of raising the stakes. -SN5. The HandmaidenSome directors grow, but Park Chan-wook has evolutionary growth spurts, and if it takes another three years for a feature from South Korea’s frontrunning modern directors then so be it. There’s an edge to Park Chan-wook’s work matched by an irreverent humor that coats the sometimes audacious sex and violence making the sumptuously erotic material smooth, urbane and even beautiful. Every facet of The Handmaiden, its themes, style, and story are pregnant with detail, with a film is so richly executed it feels as if Park Chan-wook was in love withThe Handmaiden. Breaking down historical melodrama, it sounds like a heaping mess of contradictions and indulgences, but we’ve ushered through this labyrinthine saga, and every beat is laden with double crosses, lavish symmetry, fetishistic detail, pulpy sex and torturous violence. I would like the think that this would transform Park Chan-wook from “the director of Oldboy” to “the director of The Handmaiden.” -AM4. SilenceThe most brutal of 2016’s films about faith and its cost, but also the most curious. Scorsese delivers another film that is incredibly forceful in its narrative while perfectly ambiguous in its conclusions, while still being fulfilling and thought-provoking. Andrew Garfield is the center of a film about Portuguese Jesuits who travel to Japan to find their mentor during the 17th century. The film is another tour-de-force, an epic spanning decades that will remind some of David Lean’s work. But like Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, the film finds power in the central character’s apparent contradictions. Is Garfield’s Rodrigues bringing salvation to the Japanese people or is he indulging his own needs of self-actualization? When man chooses to suffer, is his doing so for the glory of God or for the glory of himself? Garfield faces this question many times, both internally and from characters who mean different things to him. This core question builds as Rodrigues faces the consequences of his action, usually taken out on those he tries to save. The torture and failure may be repetitious but under Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker’s well-honed skills, they become almost ceremonious, befitting Rodrigues’ Catholic faith. They have given us a film as complex as it is expansive. -IB3. The WitchIn a year with films like Moonlight, La La Land, Arrival, The Love Witch, etc. Robert Eggers’s “New England Folk Tale” is the most distinctive looking and sounding film of 2016. What’s strange is that I kept misremembering The Witch to have the stark black-and-white look that suits the material’s period. If The Witch had been shot in black-and-white, it would have been kinda boring and obvious (and, of course, this would deprive us of all that delicious blood). Instead, Eggers uses color, but drains almost all of it out, leaving an even bleaker palette of greys and browns and pale whites. Additionally, the period dialogue, reportedly crafted from historical texts of the time, is often difficult to parse but strangely pulls you fully into the world. The actors blend into their roles so well as if they couldn’t exist as anyone else—Ralph Ineson is particularly striking as the patriarch, especially considering I know him primarily in the David Koechner role on the British version of The Office. Unlike many recent psychological horror films, The Witchdoesn’t try to trick the audience on the presence of evil; Eggers is keen to show us straightaway that the witch is real and is as terrifying as you can imagine. Yet still, despite an overarching mystery, the film builds thoroughly, with plenty of tension and fair share of reveals. The long, slow build breakdown of the family (metaphorically, the breakdown of America) finally explodes into a delirious final 20 minutes, full of nightmarish images—the very final one lends to one of the most provocative endings of the year. There is a lot more to unpack within the deeper meanings and metaphors of The Witch (how we push minorities to radicalization, for example), but purely as an artistic and visual endeavor, it warrants a place among the best of 2016. -AP2. La La LandDamien Chazelle’s La La Land is a force of cinema. It harnesses the charisma and glamour of old Hollywood musicals and inextricably links them with the disconsolate life of struggling artists in the twenty-first century. Seb and Mia (played by Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, whose chemistry is only overshadowed by the magnitude of Stone’s performance) are very real characters inhabiting a world built upon a Hollywood facade. Chazelle (who has had one hell of a year, also sharing a writing credit on 10 Cloverfield Lane) and composer Justin Hurwitz strike the perfect balance between show-stopping musical sequences and brooding melodies that culminate in a stunning finale that challenges anyone to find an artistic medium more extraordinary than film. -CS1. MoonlightMoonlight is an intimate movie in every sense of the word. And like a lot of films unfolding on a small scale, Barry Jenkins’ soulful, self-actualization triptych reads an expertly minimal short story, one where every moment is perfectly calibrated for maximum efficiency and evocative impact. And as with all successful character studies indie or otherwise, Moonlight protagonist Chiron’s experience is so specific—queer, black, poor, Floridian—that the themes of the film actually become hugely universal. Some complainers out there have bitched that the film’s middle chapter stands in weak contrast to the first and third. But that’s nonsense. These nit-pickers are all just jealous that no one’s ever tried to jerk them off at the beach, or cooked them a nice plate of Cuban food. And Moonlight is as much a technical achievement as it is an emotional one, full of subtly expressionistic camerawork, pointed close-ups, and expertly orchestrated long takes. It’s also one of the best-lit and best color-timed (color corrected?) films of the year. InMoonlight’s wake, much has been said about how the Kodak film stocks of yore have been deficient in picking up a sufficient amount of information reflected off the surface of black faces. But the black faces Jenkins photographs in Moonlight, thanks to specially imported German lenses,are inarguably electric, even when those faces seem to change into something completely different every 30 minutes or so. -MW
This list was compiled from the individual top ten lists of Jim, Craig, Alexander, Sarah, Matt, Ian, Julie, Marya, Rudie, Aaron, Scott, Tyler, and David. Each film was weighted according to its placement on each individual list. As such, a film that appeared on only two writers’ lists could still wind up on the finalized list if it placed particularly high. Conversely, a film could conceivably be on everybody’s list, but not make the final list, due to low point value. Honorable Mentions: American Honey, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, O.J.: Made in America
10. PatersonUpon hearing that Jim Jarmusch’s next movie was going to star Adam Driver and an English bulldog, I wondered if he could see into my soul and knew my deepest desires. That dream trio produces something even greater than the sum of its parts – a gentle, poetic, and frequently very funny portrait of being an artist with a day job, and finding contentment within what might appear to others as a mundane life. Stacked with great cameos and a pitch-perfect supporting turn by Golshifteh Farahani, it’s also a very touching exploration of romantic relationships. -JS
9. JackiePablo Larrain and Natalie Portman seem to pull off the impossible inJackie: to make an incredible internal film about the importance of grandeur. How we deal with grief became a running theme in the films of 2016, and in this film Jackie Kennedy processes her loss by creating the myth of JFK’s Camelot. While most films about such subjects attempt to deflate such myths, here we see the personal struggle that comes from creating such myths in the first place. Mica Levi’s grinding score often plays as a counterpoint to Jackie’s patrician demeanor, but she herself sheds the mask in a few vital scenes. Seen through the film’s time-hopping structure, it is clear just how deep Portman’s illustration is of a woman who finds confidence in her while never losing a sense of helplessness. -IB
8. The LobsterTrying to nail down a single theme for a year such as this may be a difficult task but I am willing to try. I think 2016’s overarching cinematic theme is the idea of finding purpose amidst the absurd melancholy of life (this would be an apt theme for La La Land, Peter and the Farm and at least three films forthcoming on this list). And no film exemplifies this theme better than Yorgos Lanthimos’ (the anomalous auteur behind 2009’s sensational Dogtooth) The Lobster. The Lobster sees an impotent oaf (played with pitch perfect despondency by Colin Farrell) check-in to a villa where guests must find love or be turned into an animal. Like his films before it (in addition toDogtooth, Lanthimos’ Alps is an avant-garde oddity), Lanthimos creates a premise that is outlandish and hyperbolic, but uses this absurdist humor to whittle away at the characters. And from a bizarre piece of experimental comedy, Lanthimos yields a poignant story of love and belonging. -CS
7. ArrivalArrival is another film with incredibly relevant themes. It asks so many questions and brings up so many topics that it feels like essential viewing right now. I liked so much about the film it is hard to know where to start. One of my favorite things about Arrival is that it is about a linguist and the film focuses on language and how language works. It was endlessly entertaining to watch Louise (Amy Adams) and Ian (Jeremy Renner) teach the aliens language and diagram sentences. I also loved what the film does with time, I won’t spoil anything but time is important to the film and it was very effective for me. The other themes of “fear of the other” and “fear of the unknown” were very powerful and used to great effect. I also want to mention how much I loved Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score. It is eerie and haunting in a way that fits the film perfectly. Overall, Arrival pushed all the right buttons for me and I think it is a film I will revisit many times. -SB
6. Manchester by the SeaAs portraits of grief go, not enough spend time considering the many ways people try to avoid thinking about their grief. In Manchester by the Sea, Lee (Casey Affleck) drinks, watches sports, gets in fights, works, gets in arguments, and just tries to fall asleep before he’s left alone with his thoughts too long, all to avoid thinking about what he’s done and what’s happened to him. And that’s even before his brother (Kyle Chandler) dies, leaving him in charge of a teenager (Lucas Hedges) who doesn’t have any time for his grief, he’s got band practice to go to. Lee is not a great guy; he can be a bit of creep at times. But he’s sort of trying to be there for his nephew, and sort of trying to not get himself too attached, and sort of trying to deny the damaging influence his hometown is having on him just by being there all the damn time. And writer/director Kenneth Lonergan is terribly attuned to people’s triggers. He knows how to latch onto weird specific things that set people off at just the moment when a relationship was just sort of starting to work. And we’re all too caught up in this denial and these specific chores and these triggers to realize that suddenly we have grown attached to one another, and really want the best, but are too heartbroken to summon the courage. We can’t always be the people we want to be. It doesn’t take tragedy to know that; but it has a way of raising the stakes. -SN
5. The HandmaidenSome directors grow, but Park Chan-wook has evolutionary growth spurts, and if it takes another three years for a feature from South Korea’s frontrunning modern directors then so be it. There’s an edge to Park Chan-wook’s work matched by an irreverent humor that coats the sometimes audacious sex and violence making the sumptuously erotic material smooth, urbane and even beautiful. Every facet of The Handmaiden, its themes, style, and story are pregnant with detail, with a film is so richly executed it feels as if Park Chan-wook was in love withThe Handmaiden. Breaking down historical melodrama, it sounds like a heaping mess of contradictions and indulgences, but we’ve ushered through this labyrinthine saga, and every beat is laden with double crosses, lavish symmetry, fetishistic detail, pulpy sex and torturous violence. I would like the think that this would transform Park Chan-wook from “the director of Oldboy” to “the director of The Handmaiden.” -AM
4. SilenceThe most brutal of 2016’s films about faith and its cost, but also the most curious. Scorsese delivers another film that is incredibly forceful in its narrative while perfectly ambiguous in its conclusions, while still being fulfilling and thought-provoking. Andrew Garfield is the center of a film about Portuguese Jesuits who travel to Japan to find their mentor during the 17th century. The film is another tour-de-force, an epic spanning decades that will remind some of David Lean’s work. But like Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, the film finds power in the central character’s apparent contradictions. Is Garfield’s Rodrigues bringing salvation to the Japanese people or is he indulging his own needs of self-actualization? When man chooses to suffer, is his doing so for the glory of God or for the glory of himself? Garfield faces this question many times, both internally and from characters who mean different things to him. This core question builds as Rodrigues faces the consequences of his action, usually taken out on those he tries to save. The torture and failure may be repetitious but under Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker’s well-honed skills, they become almost ceremonious, befitting Rodrigues’ Catholic faith. They have given us a film as complex as it is expansive. -IB
3. The WitchIn a year with films like Moonlight, La La Land, Arrival, The Love Witch, etc. Robert Eggers’s “New England Folk Tale” is the most distinctive looking and sounding film of 2016. What’s strange is that I kept misremembering The Witch to have the stark black-and-white look that suits the material’s period. If The Witch had been shot in black-and-white, it would have been kinda boring and obvious (and, of course, this would deprive us of all that delicious blood). Instead, Eggers uses color, but drains almost all of it out, leaving an even bleaker palette of greys and browns and pale whites. Additionally, the period dialogue, reportedly crafted from historical texts of the time, is often difficult to parse but strangely pulls you fully into the world. The actors blend into their roles so well as if they couldn’t exist as anyone else—Ralph Ineson is particularly striking as the patriarch, especially considering I know him primarily in the David Koechner role on the British version of The Office. Unlike many recent psychological horror films, The Witchdoesn’t try to trick the audience on the presence of evil; Eggers is keen to show us straightaway that the witch is real and is as terrifying as you can imagine. Yet still, despite an overarching mystery, the film builds thoroughly, with plenty of tension and fair share of reveals. The long, slow build breakdown of the family (metaphorically, the breakdown of America) finally explodes into a delirious final 20 minutes, full of nightmarish images—the very final one lends to one of the most provocative endings of the year. There is a lot more to unpack within the deeper meanings and metaphors of The Witch (how we push minorities to radicalization, for example), but purely as an artistic and visual endeavor, it warrants a place among the best of 2016. -AP
2. La La LandDamien Chazelle’s La La Land is a force of cinema. It harnesses the charisma and glamour of old Hollywood musicals and inextricably links them with the disconsolate life of struggling artists in the twenty-first century. Seb and Mia (played by Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, whose chemistry is only overshadowed by the magnitude of Stone’s performance) are very real characters inhabiting a world built upon a Hollywood facade. Chazelle (who has had one hell of a year, also sharing a writing credit on 10 Cloverfield Lane) and composer Justin Hurwitz strike the perfect balance between show-stopping musical sequences and brooding melodies that culminate in a stunning finale that challenges anyone to find an artistic medium more extraordinary than film. -CS
1. MoonlightMoonlight is an intimate movie in every sense of the word. And like a lot of films unfolding on a small scale, Barry Jenkins’ soulful, self-actualization triptych reads an expertly minimal short story, one where every moment is perfectly calibrated for maximum efficiency and evocative impact. And as with all successful character studies indie or otherwise, Moonlight protagonist Chiron’s experience is so specific—queer, black, poor, Floridian—that the themes of the film actually become hugely universal. Some complainers out there have bitched that the film’s middle chapter stands in weak contrast to the first and third. But that’s nonsense. These nit-pickers are all just jealous that no one’s ever tried to jerk them off at the beach, or cooked them a nice plate of Cuban food. And Moonlight is as much a technical achievement as it is an emotional one, full of subtly expressionistic camerawork, pointed close-ups, and expertly orchestrated long takes. It’s also one of the best-lit and best color-timed (color corrected?) films of the year. InMoonlight’s wake, much has been said about how the Kodak film stocks of yore have been deficient in picking up a sufficient amount of information reflected off the surface of black faces. But the black faces Jenkins photographs in Moonlight, thanks to specially imported German lenses, are inarguably electric, even when those faces seem to change into something completely different every 30 minutes or so. -MW
