Screen gems

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This article was published 30/12/2016 (3414 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The most notable box office trend of 2016 was undoubtedly the failure of the sequel.

Generally considered to be a dependable money-spinner to capitalize on undiscriminating audiences, the sequel suffered a repeated failure to launch throughout the year — Independence Day: Resurgence, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Alice Through the Looking Glass and yes, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 — and even fairly reliable franchise entries — Jason Bourne, X-Men Apocalypse — earning underwhelming box office returns. One, the Divergent series’ supposedly penultimate entry Allegiant — effectively killed the series altogether even before the bigger story was properly finished.

It’s a small wonder that the realm of Top 10 lists tends to be franchise-free. For moviegoers and critics, the sequel’s more-of-the-same ethos runs contrary to a unique cinematic experience.

Here, Free Press movie critics Alison Gillmor and Randall King offer up their five favourite films of the year for a cumulative Top 10.

 

Alison Gillmor’s Picks

Love & Friendship: In this crisply hilarious, wonderfully heartless adaptation of Jane Austen’s early novella Lady Susan, American director Whit Stillman trains his eye for upper-class misbehaviour on the scheming of an impoverished, aristocratic and utterly amoral 18th-century English widow (Kate Beckinsale). With Austen at her sharpest, Stillman at his snappiest and the talent-packed cast right on form, L&F ditches period-piece fustiness in favour of killing — and often up-to-date — comic satire.

 

Hell or High Water: In this haunting neo-western from American scripter Taylor Sheridan (Sicario) and Scottish helmer David Mackenzie (Young Adam), two bank-robbing West Texas brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) face off against a pair of lawmen (Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham). Mixing laconic dialogue and vast, big-sky landscapes, this character-driven cowboy drama is both classically old-school and strikingly contemporary: in rural communities still hollowed out by the financial crisis, the black-hat villains are now predatory lenders and dodgy debt relief.

 

Sing Street: This absolute darling of a coming-of-age film is wonderfully sweet and shyly funny. In 1980s Dublin, an outcast kid (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) starts a band to impress a girl. (Why else?) Writer-director John Carney (Once) generously mixes up adolescent melancholy and first-love poignancy, musical influences both cool and uncool, and a veritable comic cavalcade of bad ‘80s hair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_YqJ_aimkM

 

Loving: Stubbornly modest and profoundly moving, this fact-based drama centres on Richard and Mildred Loving (Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga), an interracial couple whose marriage was declared criminal by a Virginia court in 1958. With underplayed but immediate performances from the two Oscar-worthy leads, and scrupulously intelligent writing and quiet, cliché-busting direction from Jeff Nichols, this slow, tender film offers an everyday hopefulness that feels absolutely necessary right now.

 

Manchester by the Sea: With a broken but humane heart and a hard, wintry line of humour, playwright Kenneth Lonergan’s family drama looks at unresolved — and maybe unresolveable — emotional pain. As a tortuously introverted guy reluctantly heading back to his working-class hometown, Casey Affleck gives a career-defining performance. This is probably the saddest film I saw this year, but also the most powerful.

 

Alison Gillmor’s Honourable Mentions: Weiner, a morbidly fascinating documentary look at politics and marriage that has taken on even more tragicomic layers since its release; Kubo and the Two Strings, an animated children’s tale of extraordinary beauty; and Sleeping Giant, an unusually assured debut from filmmaker Andrew Cividino, set in Canadian cottage country.

 

Randall King’s Picks

Arrival: Even the Star Trek series has essentially turned its back on real science fiction in favour of Star Wars-like fantasy, so authentic sci-fi was hard to come by in 2016. Fortunately, Quebec director Denis Villeneuve filled the gap with Arrival, a story of a linguist (Amy Adams) enlisted to help communicate with a race of aliens that have mysteriously appeared in a dozen locations all over our planet. Paranoid governments and media believe an attack is imminent and it falls on Adams’ character to determine the truth of why the aliens have come. The outcome is challenging and provocative, a refreshing departure from the typical apocalyptic spectacle to which we’ve become accustomed. We need more science fiction like this.

 

Hunt for the Wilderpeople: The intergenerational movie about a troubled boy bonding with a grumpy old man is as old as Ed Asner, bt New Zealand director Taika Waititi, of the vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, gives the tale a fresh take, with a twist of Kiwi. Would-be gangster Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) is taken under the wing of reluctant foster parent “Uncle Hec” (Sam Neill) when both are forced to become fugitives from the relentless New Zealand child-welfare agents. A movie targeted at both kids and parents alike, it ultimately flies on Neill’s performance, who elevates the film’s low-key charm by sheer movie-star presence. 

 

The Nice Guys: As in his 2005 directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, writer-director Shane Black has big fun with the gumshoe genre, teaming a seedy shamus (Ryan Gosling) with a strong-arm enforcer (Russell Crowe) to solve the case of a missing girl in 1970s-era Los Angeles. Black conjoins the elements of noir-mystery and violent slapstick with startling ease. Gosling turns out to be surprisingly adept in the comedy arena, playing surely the most shriek-y private eye in film history. Crowe likewise benefits from his comic turn. Why he doesn’t do this kind of thing more often?

 

Midnight Special: Another movie by Jeff Nichols (Loving), revisiting the deeply personal approach to apocalyptic themes he first explored in Take Shelter. That film’s star, Michael Shannon, returns as the father of Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), a child with extraordinary powers sought by both the minions of an Alton-centred cult and government authorities headed by a benign-seeming tech genius (Adam Driver). Nichols often presents fractious father-son relationships, so it’s refreshing that the one at this movie’s centre is one of fierce devotion. While the film follows in the footsteps of movies such as Starman, Nichols is not one for even a hint of gooey sentiment. He also lets the film’s central mystery stay mysterious.

 

Kubo and the Two Strings: The Portland, Ore.-based animation studio Laika may have surpassed the Disney animation factory Pixar in a strictly artistic sense with its singular stop-motion films. Certainly this effort offers thrills denied by the mechanical sequel Finding Dory. Inspired by Japanese folk tales, Kubo is the story of a young boy who supports his near-catatonic mother by telling stories in a nearby village, using a kind of origami animation of his own design. When his two sorceress aunts track him down, Kubo must go on a real-world adventure to track down three objects that will help him defeat his evil grandfather, the author of his family’s supernatural misfortunes. Devoted to stop-motion, Laika is rather like the English animation house Aardman with their shared tactile esthetic, which comes as a relief from the ever-more-realistic look of CGI these days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vex0gPFnBvM

 

Randall King’s Honourable Mentions: Son of Saul, a harrowing 2015 concentration-camp film that arrived in Winnipeg in 2016; Zootopia, a Disney film that taught kids not to be manipulated by their fears (kinda wish their Trump-voting parents had been paying attention); High-Rise, Ben Wheatley’s intriguing ‘70s-set movie of social apocalypse; and finally Deadpool, the Id Monster of superhero movies, in which Ryan Reynolds cuts loose as a hilariously immature mutant.

 

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing