Aliens, Humanity & Sausages: The 30 Best Films Of 2016

At times, in cinemas, the Sweet ’16 sure was sweet. Whether watching Turkish cats (Kedi), recalcitrant Kiwis (Hunt For The Wilderpeople), animated Stuxnet worms (Zero Days), or straight-up horse-cock (The Scent Of Mandarine), 2016 delivered a host of singular cinematic creatures that surprised, defied, and delighted.

Sure, there were also plentiful pre-fab popcorn-movie products that made me reconsider my will to live —Dear Suicide Squad, Zoolander 2, and X-Men: Apocalypse: Fuck You; Sincerely, Film Carew— but, with the year just about out, let us not remember the bad times. Here, instead are the best o’ times. If you’re looking for the unspeakably amazing Evolution, Chevalier, Anomalisa, Room, Green Room, or The Witch, well, congratulations on having great taste; but all those suckers were in the 2015 countdown. With that bit of housekeeping kept, scroll on, gentle readers. With all the love still remaining in my black heart, here’re the Top 30 Films Of 2016.

30. Love & Friendship

(UK, Whit Stillman)

Flambéing all the mannered clichés of the frocked-up period piece, Stillman transplants his ongoing cinematic chronicles of the ‘urban haute bourgeoisie’ to 18th-century England. It’s an Austen adaptation without any of the weighty classic-lit baggage, a comedy-of-manners that’s actually a real —genuinely hilarious— comedy.

29. 45 Years

(UK, Andrew Haigh)

Haigh’s portrait of a couple approaching half-a-century together is filled with notable silences: the unspoken connection between a long-married pair, sure, but also all the things they don’t say. Tellingly, its definitive moment —the instant-classic projector-in-the-attic scene— takes place without a word spoken. Oh, and, bonus love to Haigh for Looking: The Movie, the bittersweet sign-off to his tremendous TV series.

28. Fear Itself

(UK, Charlie Lyne)

An exploration of the way horror-movies tap into our deepest fears and psychological hang-ups, Lyne’s mosaic showreel of dark cinematic visions is both a work of perceptive film-criticism and a window unto the Jungian shadow-worlds of our psyches.

27. Everlasting Love

(Spain, Marçal Forés)

Finally finding its way to local screens, this surrealist Spanish take on Stranger By The Lake —i.e.: a queer cruising spot turns murderous— is an artful mash-up of animal attraction, nocturnal terror, and doom-laden synth outbursts; its Lynchian woods a shadow-world in which darkness abounds, and where Sonny & The Sunsets randomly show up and play.

26. Childhood Of A Leader

(France/UK, Brady Corbet)

Bookended by an operatic overture and a bravura, turning-the-film-on-its-head epilogue —both of which show off the bonkers Scott Walker score— Childhood Of A Leader otherwise makes like The White Balloon, using childhood recalcitrance to foreshadow the horrors of fascism.

25. A Magical Substance Flows Into Me

(Palestine, Jumana Manna)

Excavating 1930s radio broadcasts and exploring the history of Palestinian music, Manna’s lyrical, artful documentary eventually becomes a thoughtful, philosophical conversation on ethnic histories, national identities, and Middle Eastern politics.

24. Embrace Of The Serpent

(Colombia, Ciro Guerra)

Shooting the verdant, fecund Amazon in high-key black-and-white, Guerra turns the familiar jungle alien by summoning the look of old daguerrotypes and ethnographic films. Embrace Of The Serpent depicts parallel quixotic quests, 40 years apart, by foreign explorers; its narrative journey downriver heading into colonialist darkness, then, eventually, an explosion of psychedelic colour.

23. Sherpa

(Australia, Jennifer Peedom)

A workplace-protest documentary set on Everest, here local guides agitate not just for better working conditions, but to throw off the stereotypes of the compliant, smiling native, dutifully facilitating the dreams of white, wealthy Westerners. Sherpa captures a post-colonial power-shift as it’s happening, on the ground, 6000 metres above sea level.

22. Chasing Asylum

(Australia, Eva Orner)

This portrait of the institutionalised inhumanity of offshore detention facilities brings Australia’s great national shame to screen in sobering light and unflinching detail.

21. Starless Dreams

(Iran, Mehrdad Oskouei)

Across a year at a juvenile detention centre for Iranian girls, Oskouei slowly enters the film, drawn into the narrative by the inmates who treat his camera as both confessional and prism for performance.

20. A Dragon Arrives!

(Iran, Mani Haghighi)

Haghighi’s Modest Reception follow-up is a playful, surreal, psychedelic rumpus miles removed from Iranian socio-realism. Claiming, suspiciously, to be based on real events, his freewheelin’ film comes filled with daydreams and vision quests, pirouetting through the deserts of a remote Iranian island populated by local yokels, superstitions, earthquakes, and secret-police conspiracies.

19. Ma

(USA, Celia Rowlson-Hall)

Told minus dialogue, Ma shakes off the baggage of the American-road-movie with its every wildly stylised set-piece, choreographer-turned-director Rowlson-Hall reimagining the Virgin Mary myth amidst an endless parade of desert highways and motel rooms.

18. Paterson

(USA, Jim Jarmusch)

Jarmusch’s Zen-like portrait of the quotidian routines of a New Jersey bus driver is about the poetry of daily life, and poetry itself. Where Jarmusch films are normally drawn to deadpan and concerned with cool, Paterson aches with real humanity, and is shot through with sweetness.

17. The Red Turtle

(France/Japan, Michaël Dudok de Wit)

Marshalling the might of Studio Ghibli, de Wit authors a dialogue-free movie that plays like mythical fable. Its desert-island-castaway tale is less concerned with humanity, more with nature: rapturously depicting weather, environment, and the ocean; every animated wave a work of line-drawn wonder.

16. Your Name

(Japan, Makoto Shinkai)

If you only see one body-swap-comedy-cum-time-travel-chin-scratcher-cum-teen-romance-melodrama-cum-mystical-disaster-movie-cum-psychedelic-animé-fantasia this year, make it Your Name; a film that —on its way to being Japan’s all-time box-office king— entrenches Shinkai’s status as ascendant animé auteur.

15. Sausage Party

(USA, Conrad Vernon & Greg Tiernan)

The dick-jokes begin with the title, but the latest Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg stoner romp takes its Pixar-parodying the-secret-life-of-supermarket-products set-up, and uses it to stage a searing, incisive takedown of organised religion and blind faith.

14. Toni Erdmann

(Germany, Maren Ade)

With her cultishly-beloved, dads-do-the-most-embarrassing-things comedy, Ade pulls off quite the cinematic feat: marrying absurdist humour with real emotional ache, moving from sitcom set-ups to utterly unexpected dramatic digressions.

13. Lo & Behold: Reveries Of The Connected World

(USA, Werner Herzog)

The absurdities of life in the digital dystopia are, of course, glorious grist for the dean of oddball documentary philosophising, there few cinematic joys as reliable as Werner Herzog narration.

12. Weiner

(USA, Josh Kriegman & Elyse Steinberg)

This documentary chronicle of infamous, unfortunately-named US senator Anthony Weiner begins as a redemption story, cataloguing the politician’s comeback from a sexting scandal. But when a whole new dick-pic disaster breaks out mid-film, Weiner becomes an astonishing exemplar of unfettered access, capturing the behind-closed-doors, all-hands-on-deck disaster-plan that kicks in when shit hits fan.

11. A Monster With A Thousand Heads

(Mexico, Rodrigo Plá)

A lean, mean, savage thriller about a Mexican mother taking insurance-company hostages, the film’s title evokes that unbeatable foe of modern-day myth: inhuman bureaucracy. The film is remarkable for the way it pivots into each scene, Plá finding a host of approaches —inspired, inventive, incisive— to come at each location, each set-piece, from a fresh perspective.

10. Family Film

(Czech Republic, Olmo Omerzu)

When a pair of bourgeois Prague parents set off to sail their boat around the Indian Ocean, they leave behind their teenage kids, who, surely enough, embrace their newfound freedoms. But Omerzu’s quietly astonishing film subverts any expectation of that set-up, radically reversing course with shifts of genuine formal daring; especially in the profound, human-free sequences where the family collie, Otto, takes centre-stage.

9. Personal Shopper

(France, Olivier Assayas)

Whilst it lacks the meta-textual profundity of his great Clouds Of Sils Maria, Assayas’s latest cinematic exploration of digital identity, the currency of celebrity, and the lingering spectres of memory poses as a straight-up ghost story. After a number of stylistic shifts that range from unnerving to ill-considered to sublime, what results is a film singular, unsettling, lingering; with Kristen Stewart’s lead turn one of the year’s best performances.

8. Elle

(France, Paul Verhoeven)

In only his second film since 2000, Hollywood’s prodigal provocateur-in-exile returns to savage form, with a psychological thriller that plays more like a ‘rape comedy’. Isabelle Huppert —the world’s greatest actor— submits a commanding turn as a woman who won’t let sexual assault, masked intruders, macho employees, kooky mothers, married paramours, awkward dinner parties, horrific memories, or shameful infamy keep her down.

7. Nocturnal Animals

(USA, Tom Ford)

A genre-movie within an art-film, Nocturnal Animals examines the personal and cultural resonance of revenge narrative. In a literary gambit, Amy Adams is drawn out of her world of haute-bourgeois, modern-art complacency —and into memory, regret, guilt— by a bloody, pulpy novel penned by the ex-husband that she fucked-over two decades prior.

6. Suntan

(Greece, Argyris Papadimitropoulos)

A searing, unflattering, unnerving portrait of middle-aged-male insecurities, Papadimitropoulos’s Wasted Youth follow-up finds a depressed, doughy doctor on a Grecian Isle growing terrifyingly obsessed with the young, tanned, uninhibited revellers who, come summer, flock to the local beaches and nightclubs.

5. The Demons

(Canada, Philippe Lesage)

A sterling work of Hanekean unease, The Demons is a coming-of-age movie shot through with anxieties both individual and social. As Lesage’s camera looks calmly, coldly on, we see our 10-year-old kid (Édouard Tremblay-Grenier) realising that he won’t remain forever sheltered in the bosom of Montréal suburbia, with the beckoning, unknowable adult world —especially the mysteries of sexuality—a source of terror and horror.

4. The Neon Demon

(USA, Nicolas Winding Refn)

Refn’s latest hyper-saturated synth-pop style-piece is essentially Showgirls reimagined as body-horror, depicting fashion-biz Los Angeles as a deadpan dystopia stalked by predatory males and cannibalistic women. It’s utterly empty, a work of (wild) style over substance, but that’s the point: The Neon Demon, like society itself, obsessed with the way things —and women, especially— look.

3. The Handmaiden

(South Korea, Park Chan-wook)

2016’s most ridiculous cinematic thrill-ride, The Handmaiden, gives you all the familiar Park style —gymnastic camera moves,wild wardrobe, dark shadows, stories-about-storytelling, narrative misdirection, sexual perversion, squids— in the form of a bodice-rippin’, girls-kissin’, double-crossin’ thriller.

2. La La Land

(USA, Damien Chazelle)

In the year’s most rapturous piece of cinema, Chazelle doesn’t just bring the musical back from the dead, but truly to life: his bittersweet shrine to holding onto young dreams turning circles through song, dance, and time.

1. Arrival

(USA, Denis Villeneuve)

It’s a movie about aliens, but it’s really a masterwork of humanity. Tackling first-contact exchanges through the prism of linguistic relativity, Arrival is, ultimately, a work addressing temporality, using cinema —that great artform of time— to explore our very experience of consciousness. It’s not just a popcorn blockbuster with a brain, but a film that addresses the grandest of themes on a wide-screen canvas, all whilst retaining an unexpected, thrilling intimacy. Going to the cinema is a way of both tapping into our emotional memories and making new ones, and no film in 2016 was more memorable than Arrival.