Like his first film Blue Ruin - do we have a Kieślowski color trilogy going here? - Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room portrays in naturalistic fashion a bad situation growing increasingly worse. Green Room: Antifa, meet the Ain’t Rights.
Throw in that ripped-from-the-comics airline melee, Spidey-done-right, and Daniel Bruhl as the best and most nuanced Marvel villain to-date (until the 2017 list, at least), and you have another jewel in Marvel’s gauntlet. (#TeamCap4life).Ĭlearly Cap is the hero we need right now, even if, in these Hail Hydra times, he’s not the one we deserve. In Civil War, Cap makes the case for free-thinking dissent as the proper form of democratic consent, and punches that billionaire war profiteering egomaniac Tony Stark a few times in the face to boot. Captain America: Civil War: In his last installment, our hero took on the military-industrial complex that had made his beloved country more like Hydra than the New Deal America of his youth. Harkening back to other LA neo-noirs like The Long Goodbye, Inherent Vice, and maybe even a smattering of Lebowski, Shane Black’s throwback buddy-cop misadventure was one of the smartest, funniest, and most purely enjoyable movie experiences of the year (even if I saw it on a plane.)ģ. The Nice Guys: Not to bag on La La Land in every entry, but if you saw Ryan Gosling in one burgeoning (b)romance in the City of Angels in 2016, I hope it was this one. But at a time when too many films feel swallowed by their own ambition, Moonlight told a powerful, personal, memorable, and resoundingly human story on a small and colorful canvas.Ģ. I have some quibbles with the movie - the classical score can be occasionally cloying, and some of the characters - Naomie Harris’s junkie mom, Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monae’s saintly neighbors - occasionally felt too broadly drawn. Er…Yeah, I know, a little late for that joke - Anyway, we’ll get to La La Land later on.įor now Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight was a perfectly-contained short story about a young boy forced to toughen up in a harsh and uncaring world, and a man trying to be brave enough to shed that lifetime’s worth of armor. Moonlight: Damien Chazelle’s meet-cute May-December musical romance featured Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone at their…wait, one second. I even missed a few movies I still really want to see ( Silence, Toni Erdmann).īut of the ones I did see, I suppose these are my… I missed the maybe-better-than-you-expect B-movies ( The Shallows), the high-rated Disney outings ( Moana). I missed some big tentpole remakes ( Beauty and the Beast, The Jungle Book, The Magnificent Seven, Pete’s Dragon.) I missed a bunch of unnecessary sequels ( Now You See Me 2, Ride Along 2, London Has Fallen). I missed the big winter dogs ( Passengers, Assassin’s Creed), the summer dogs ( Independence Day: Resurgence, The Legend of Tarzan), and the just plain dogs ( Alice Through the Looking Glass, Deepwater Horizon).
I missed promising indies ( Captain Fantastic, American Pastoral) and movies with cult-cachet ( Swiss Army Man, High-Rise, Elle, Kubo and the Two Strings). I missed Oscar contenders ( Hidden Figures, Hacksaw Ridge) and Oscar bait ( Allied, Florence Foster Jenkins).
Queso, usually I’d put a bunch of excuses in this opening paragraph about why this is going up so late, when the real question is: nearly ten months into 2017, why even do this Best of 2016 movie list at all? (Answer: I’m a completionist and it was bugging me.) But really the bigger issue here is: I missed a LOT of movies last year.
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