Here Are The 30 Best Films Of 2017

Have You Seen The List? The 30 Films Of 2017. From your old bean, Film Carew. Listmas is the merriest season of all, taking the unimaginable sprawl and terrifying chaos of a year of stuff, and condensing it into the best, brightest, boldest, in an easy-to-read format! To whittle things down in the face of plenty makes for a clear mind. I mean, I saw 331 films this year, and, anyway, how’s your sex life?

Commiserations to The Disaster Artist (USA, director James Franco), though, for ending up in the Elephant-Stamp also-ran section. Much love —but not that much love— to our others-deserving-merit friends: Have You Seen The Listers? (Australia, Eddie Martin), Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond (USA, Chris Smith), The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected) (USA, Noah Baumbach), The Beguiled (USA, Sofia Coppola), The Lost City Of Z (USA, James Gray), A Man Of Integrity (Iran, Mohammad Rasoulof), Wolf & Sheep (Denmark/France/Afghanistan, Shahrbanoo Sadat), On Body & Soul (Hungary, Ildikó Enyedi), and Happy End (France/Germany/Austria, Michael Haneke).

Two notes: 1) If you’re looking for Olivier Assayas’s wondrous Personal Shopper —which hit Australian cinemas in April— on this list, alas, it’s not. But, fear not, it’s on last year’s Top 30 Films of 2016 list; for it is all kinds of ghost-txting wondrous.

2) A rousing fuck-you to 50 Shades Darker, Pitch Perfect 3, Transformers: The Last Knight, Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, and Justice League. As always, the worst films of the year —of this, or any other year— were unwanted contractual-obligation sequels and witless instalments in already-awful franchises.

But, shall we forget the bad, and concentrate on the oh-so-good? Let’s count ’em down…

30. Baby Driver (UK/USA, Edgar Wright)

Sure, the final act —with too much 'cool' gunfire and Jon Hamm hamming it up as unstoppable-killing-machine villain— kinda sucks, and comparisons to the infinitely-superior Scott Pilgrim vs The World don’t do it any favours. But Wright’s getaway-driver lark is one of the year’s most memorable movies, rewriting the action-film as postmodernist musical: action cut to soundtrack placements, car-chase choreography made dancerly, Ansel Elgort’s sandwich-prep verily balletic.

29. Okja (South Korea/USA, Bong Joon-ho)

Family fable meets eco-thriller meets action romp, Bong’s boisterous, bonkers Netflix rumpus is a searing critique of industrialised agribusiness and the commodification of livestock; its villainous horrors GMO, forced insemination, factory farming, the slaughterhouse floor. It’s also a lovable riff on the monster movie, with the love between a young Korean girl and her genetically-modified, hippo-sized, Totoro-ish ‘superpig’ the film’s beating, bleeding heart.

28. Glory (Bulgaria, Kristina Grozeva & Petar Valchanov)

In years of endless toil at the film-critic coalface, never before had yr old bean Film Carew reason to use the phrase ‘Bulgarian black-comedy’. But, oh, how that phrase now shines bright thanks to Glory. Here, a single event —a railway worker finds a bag of cash on the train tracks, and turns it in to authorities— spirals out into a delightful indictment of the realm of ‘spin’, with both manipulative media and corrupt politicians out to use the story, and the man behind it, for their own gain.

27. Eternity (France, Tran Anh Hung)

Tran’s first French film is a strange, singular chamber-piece chronicling three generations of a wealthy family, with wild colour-grading, magnificent wallpaper, and lifestyle-porn-worthy house & garden. The drama largely consists of celebrity French actresses cradling babies, Mélanie Laurent walking down a hallway in ultra-slow-motion, and characters laid delicately on their sumptuous deathbeds. It’s odd, obsessive, hypnotic, thrillingly-hollow viewing, a kind of 19th-century-Kardashians-in-the-south-of-France scenario that’s at once wholly profound and utterly meaningless.

26. The Idea Of A Lake (Switzerland/Argentina, Milagros Mumenthaler)

A pregnant artist assembles a photography book based on memories and images from childhood summers spent at her family’s lakeside house. Swimming back into the past, she’s chasing after the phantom of her father, who was ‘disappeared’ in the Dirty Wars; but also heading into a time in which reality, fantasy, dream, and desire bled into each other. Sometimes her formative experiences are etched with personality-shaping pain, othertimes a car cavorts on a lake in a Herbie-esque sequence; the latter one of 2017’s most pleasingly-ridiculous moments of cinematic whimsy.

25. Rey (France/Chile, Niles Attalah)

Pretty sure Rey is the only movie on this list where the director shot it on film, then buried the celluloid in his backyard for five years. Making ‘experimental cinema’ ridiculous, impish, and (gasp!) fun, Attalah turns a crazy real-life tale —French lawyer tries to inspire Native uprising in Patagonia so he can appoint himself king of these newly-independent lands— into a wacky period-piece mixing men riding on horses through psychedelic landscapes and papier-mâché-head-festooned local-theatre.

24. Hermia & Helena (USA/Argentina, Matías Piñiero)

Piñiero’s ultra-specific filmmaking obsession —urban theatre students tending, in either literal or spiritual fashion, to Shakespearean adaptation— hits a career high, here. An Argentine playwright lands an artistic residency in New York, where she works on a Midsummer Night’s Dream translation and meets a host of local characters (played by filmmakers Mati Diop, Dustin Guy Defa, and Dan Sallitt). Piñiero treats his film as act of happenstantial storytelling, whimsically bouncing between BA and NYC, past and present; detouring into stories-within-stories and, even, a film-within-the-film.

23. Lemon (USA, Janicza Bravo)

Setting human ‘lemon’ Brett Gelman loose amidst a game comic cast (Michael Cera, Gillian Jacobs, Judy Greer, Martin Starr, Jeff Garlin, etc), this wicked, wacky black-comedy chronicles male entitlement in all its horror; Gelman, clueless and arrogant to the last, committing cringe-worthy acts of pettiness, prejudice, tone-deafness, and stupidity. Bravo delights in social awkwardness and deadpan absurdity, delivering a movie halfway between high farce and satirical tragedy.

22. 20th Century Women (USA, Mike Mills)

Mills’ latest cinematic memoir is a worth successor to his sublime Beginners, once again showing the filmmaker as the master of a particular, idiosyncratic montage. Breaking from narrative, these montages show characters speaking over archival photos, a taxonomy of personal items, and isolated moments of their lives; an arch, literary device that places his stories within the context of history, both fictional and global. A valentine to the influence of formative women in Mills’ life, 20th Century Women is a coming-of-age movie stripped of coming-of-age clichés, filled with difficult characters, not easy nostalgia.

21. Good Time (USA, Benny & Josh Safdie)

The Safdie Bros take an evolutionary leap with this things-fall-apart crime-thriller, in which an electric, never-better Robert Pattinson plays a small-timer New Yorker lost in a downward spiral of bad choices. It climaxes with a final eye-of-God overhead showing him as rat, trapped in the borough of Queens, escape never a possibility.

20. It Comes At Night (USA, Trey Edward Shults)

A worthy successor to Shults’ electric debut, Krisha, It Comes At Night is another flick in which the family home becomes a surreal prison. Here, it’s a house in the woods, a safe enclave surviving amidst some apocalyptic dystopia. Rather than a mere zombie-movie, Shults mounts a masterful study of mood and tension, a claustrophobic parlour-drama in which the looming unknown sows doubts in the mind of both character and viewer; showing the sort of states in which paranoia can flourish.

19. Blade Runner 2049 (USA, Denis Villeneuve)

Picking up a seminal sci-fi 35 years on sounds like a bad idea, except when Denis Villeneuve’s in command. Here, he blows out one of cinema-history’s most vivid visions of the future to even-vaster vistas: 163-minutes of world-building grandeur, wide-screen imagery set to thrumming sound-design and a speaker-rattling Zimmer/Wallfisch score. Its most striking moment is when the flick cuts to “the place where the memories are made”, a neat allusion to both filmmaking and years-later sequelising.

18. Raw (France/Belgium, Julia Ducournau)

A veritable new-French-extremity revival, Ducournau’s debut picture openly riffs on Marina de Van’s In My Skin and Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day. Effectively drenching coming-of-age in buckets of blood, here nascent female desire is writ as cannibalism; the standard predation of horror movies upended as young women are made the agents of animalist desires, not the victims of them. It’s an audacious gambit matched to brilliant filmmaking; Ducournau displaying a dynamic use of light and dark, delivering endless eye-catching images, and the promise of a provocative career to come.

17. Get Out (USA, Jordan Peele)

Armed with a simple premise —horror-movie in which black men are the victims, wealthy white people the perps— Peele delivers one of 2017’s most definitive movies. Get Out works as creepy psychological thriller and laugh-out-loud comedy, but it’s, really, at heart, a scalpel-sharp satire, slicing into the soft underbelly of All-American racism. Here, cult-Brit-TV hero Daniel Kaluuya finally gets a leading-man role, and his performance —the forced smiles and self-deprecating laughs, the emotional distancing and layers of terror/trauma in his gaze— is remarkable.

16. I Am Not Your Negro (France/USA, Raoul Peck)

“The story of the negro in America is the story of America,” intones Samuel L. Jackson, in his grave narration. “It is not a pretty story.” These are the words of the late James Baldwin, the veritable poet laureate of the Civil Rights movement. And Peck, the great Haitian director, finds the contemporary resonance in Baldwin’s excoriation of America’s dark history of race-relations, segregation, and demonisation, setting these words to grim images from ’60s Birmingham to ’10s Ferguson.

15. A Gray State (USA, Erik Nelson)

An alt-right conspiracy theorist —ex-soldier turned filmmaker— is out to make a big-budget action-movie depicting the totalitarian dystopia he’s sure America will soon become, bankrolled by a kickstarter cash collected from Infowars gun-nuts. Only, he ends up dead, wife and child killed with him. The far-right hive-mind suspects foul-play, but Nelson’s documentary goes behind the bluster via thousands of hours of collected home-video footage; offering an uncomfortably-intimate portrait of a man whose conspiracy-theorisin’ is really a symptom of dangerous delusional-paranoia.

14. City Of Ghosts (USA, Matthew Heineman)

Heineman follows his embedded-witness classic Cartel Land with another fraught picture filled with danger. A chronicle of the dissident citizen journalists chronicling ISIS atrocities for their website Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, it’s a documentary stitched together from footage covertly-filmed both on-the-ground and on-the-lam. Its subjects —be they at home, in hiding, or in exile— all live in fear of being assassinated. And, true to their perilous lives and the real horrors of modern Syria, some don’t make it to the end of the movie.

13. Last Men In Aleppo (Denmark/Syria, Firas Fayyad, Steen Johannessen & Hasan Kattan)

“We’re going to die like everyone else here,” says one of the White Helmets at the centre of this sterling, staggering documentary; men who go out, in the wake of bombings, to dig out survivors —or corpses— from the rubble. Built from on-the-ground, filmed-on-the-fly footage, Last Men In Aleppo gives you a front-row seat to life, and death, in a city under siege.

12. Dunkirk (UK/USA/France, Christopher Nolan)

Tick, tick, tick. With Hans Zimmer’s fussy score set to metronomic rhythms, and its parallel narratives set in different timeframes and told at different rates, the king of the bespoke blockbuster makes yet another thoughtful study of cinema & time. Here, Nolan’s three-way take on the Dunkirk Evacuation —stories set on land, sea, and in air— is drawn together like a tightening winch; the effect making for 106 breathless minutes, the war-epic sliced back to a lean, mean survival thriller.

11. Jackie (USA/Chile/France, Pablo Larraín)

Thank fuck for Pablo Larraín. This past awards-show season, the dude who made the mighty Post Mortem staged a one-man crusade against the safety and pleasantry of the celebrity biopic; exploding all the old tedious tropes with the meta-fictional Neruda and free-associative Jackie. The latter portrays the titular First Lady in the wake of the assassination of her husband, and it does so with vivid imagery, raw feeling, narrative impressionism. It’s history as poetry, alive for interpretation, fluid for the telling.

10. Mother! (USA, Darren Aronofsky)

The year’s most divisive film, Aronofsky’s daring assault on its audience was not for the faint-hearted. A sustained cinematic nightmare, Mother! is a disturbing dream that proceeds with the logic of the subconscious; a work in which the anxieties of its titular heroine (and, indeed, the viewer) are amplified into grand horrors and humiliations. In an era in which the ‘studio picture’ is synonymous with brand-management, committee-thinking, and neutered audience-flattery, sticking something this batty, bratty, and bellicose into a multiplex is a pleasing act of subversion.

9. The Killing Of A Sacred Deer (USA/UK, Yorgos Lanthimos)

Anyone fancy a game of General Anaesthetic? Greek weird-wave genius Lanthimos takes his deadpan-parable shtick Stateside for his first US film, delivering an audacious contemporary riff on Ancient Greek myth. Here, All-American cinematic staples like justice and vengeance are poked at, played with; weaponised to harm both protagonist and audience. Barry Keoghan, fresh off playing fresh-faced George in Dunkirk, delivers a name-making performance, punctuated by the most memorable scene of disturbing spaghetti-eating since Gummo 20 years ago.

8. A Ghost Story (USA, David Lowery)

Dressing Casey Affleck in a kids-Halloween-costume white-sheet and trapping him within a boxy 4:3 aspect-ratio (with rounded, vintage-TV corners), David Lowery makes a ghost story that’s less about spectral haunting, more about the movement of time, the planet, the human species. It’s also about real-estate, both literally and spiritually; addressing the themes —the changing face of cities versus the fragility of memory, the haunting of buildings by both memories and ghosts— familiar to Tsai Ming-liang’s filmography.

7. Brigsby Bear (USA, Dave McCary)

The most-unexpectedly beautiful film of the year, Brigsby Bear rehabilitates so many dire cinematic sub-genres —the quirky Sundance crowdpleaser, the SNL alumni in-joke, VHS-nostalgiacore— with such empathy and charm that it seems like a minor miracle. Kyle Mooney plays a boyish manchild raised in a Dogtooth-esque bubble, who becomes obsessed with recreating the beloved TV show of his youth. It’s a sentimental portrait of the impulse to return to the totems of childhood innocence in the face of adult tumult, and an empathetic valentine to the outsider-artists who use artmaking as a form of therapy.

6. Family Life (Chile, Alicia Scherson & Cristián Jiménez)

It sounds like some sitcom sit-up: when a bourgie Santiago family head off to Paris for a few months, they leave housesitting duties to an old, odd, very-untrustworthy friend of the husband’s. Chaos ensues, of course; but the chaos, here, isn’t comic farce, but the kind of chaos that disrupts a narrative, makes Family Life feel like it could go anywhere, be anything. The film’s at once sweet and strange, a modest, micro-budget, 80-minute marvel that nestles in a mildly-disturbed mind, making its home in whimsy, anxiety, and confabulation.

5. A Fantastic Woman (Chile/USA, Sebastián Lelio)

Lelio’s Gloria follow-up is at once achingly classical and strikingly modern: a grand, matinée-worthy melodrama about a trans woman reeling from the sudden death of her lover; matching sumptuous cinemascope colours and tragic-heroine turns to eerie atmospherics and a tilting, oddly-angled narrative. A Fantastic Woman exists at the sweet-spot of such contrast and contradiction: at once confronting and crowdpleasing, caustic and sweet, warmly funny yet deeply sad.

4. Summer 1993 (Spain, Carla Simón)

Instantly one of cinema’s greatest-ever depictions of childhood, Simón’s autobiographical portrait of an orphaned girl moving to her aunt and uncle’s countryside home was shot on the rural property Simón, herself, ended up living at in her childhood. Gifting us a pair of principle characters who’re six and four years old, Summer 1993 sets its kids loose in the environment, watching on, carefully, at their perceptions of the world around them. It’s a film about what children do and don’t understand; centring around how a six-year-old processes death, grief, and unwanted change.

3. Call Me By Your Name (France/Italy, Luca Guadagnino)

An instant queer classic, all first-love and peach-fucking and dancing to the Psychedelic Furs, Call Me By Your Name is one of those films so good that it makes you think about the wonder of cinema. Whilst Michael Stuhlbarg’s warmhearted loving-father turn delivers the parental-empathy-to-coming-out speech of any queer kid’s dreams, the real magic is found in the sustained mise-en-scène, the way Guadagnino utterly inhabits its location, and watches his actors move through it; its evocation of a boyhood summer —the sweat, swimming, and stone-fruit— feeling somehow tangible, tactile.

2. The Challenge (France/Italy, Yuri Ancarani)

A chronicle of a falconry tournament in the Bedouin desert —and the collision between ancient tradition and decadent capitalism in upwardly-mobile modern Qatar— made by an Italian video-artist, The Challenge out to challenge your notions of cinema. There’s no facts, little narrative, and scant character, but across 67 minutes there’s so many eye-popping images —men driving pet cheetahs in Lamborghinis, eye-of-God overheads of 4WDs doing burnouts in desert sands, bikie gangs stopping roadside to pray to Mecca, taking wing via ‘falcon cam’— that your head feels like it’s going to explode.

1. The Square (Sweden/Germany/Denmark, Ruben Östlund)

Well, now. Östlund takes the dark, dank cinematic impulses of his past two pictures —the Hanekean bleakness of Play, the ruthless male-vanity satire of Force Majeure— and weds them in one wild, wicked ride. For all its jokes mocking marketing malarkey and flimsy modern-art concepts, The Square dives deep into meaningful themes: public space, social responsibility, shared humanity, the bystander effect, mob-mentality. Östlund rolls out a parade of memorable, uncomfortable scenes (the condom fight, the tourettic press-conference outbursts, the man-as-ape performance-art, the letterbox-drop cross the wrong side of the tracks) that poke at the vulnerabilities of bourgeois audiences; that seek not to charm viewers, but discomfit them. It’s both a funny movie for dark times, and a dark drama for the absurdist socio-politico clusterfuck of this year; not just the film of 2017, but the most 2017 of films.