10 Best Films of 2017

1.Dunkirk

Another great film by Christopher Nolan, the plot is simple. Eight months into World War II, following a series of setbacks, British troops find themselves stranded on the shores of Northern France. Behind them, Nazis are closing in. Bombs fall from the sky, torpedoes from U-boats in the sea, soldiers waiting for a boat to come to their rescue.

Dunkirk is first and foremost a mood-piece, and a really effective one. The movie’s set-up is basic, but its narrative structure is anything but. Nolan applies the temporal trickiness he pioneered with Inception, intercutting three timelines that move at different speeds. We follow young soldier Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) on the land for a week, Ramsgate yachter Dawson (Mark Rylance) on the sea for a day, and faced covered and hard to recognize RAF pilot Farrier (Tom Hardy) in the sky for an hour. The result, as the crisis hurtles towards its climax and the three stories converge and overtake each other, it is meticulous and mesmerizing. There have been many World War II epics but there’s never been one like this.

2. Call Me By Your Name

A beautiful story set in the summer of 1983 in the north of Italy, and Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), a precocious 17- year-old American-Italian, spends his days in his family’s 17th century villa transcribing and playing classical music, reading, and flirting with his friend Marzia (Esther Garrel). Elio enjoys a close relationship with his father, an eminent professor specializing in Greco-Roman culture, and his mother, a translator, who favor him with the fruits of high culture in a setting that overflows with natural delights. While Elio’s sophistication and intellectual gifts suggest he is already a fully-fledged adult, there is much that yet remains innocent and undeveloped about him, particularly about relationships and love. One day, Oliver (Armie Hammer), a charming American scholar working on his doctorate, arrives as the annual summer intern tasked with helping Elio’s father. Elio and Oliver discover the beauty of awakening desire over the course of a summer that will alter their lives forever.

3. Lady Bird

Lady Bird, a film by actress-turned-writer/director Greta Gerwig’s autobiographical coming-of-age drama, Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson played by Saoirse Roman is a Catholic high school senior who longs to escape her frustrating lower-middle-class in Sacramento for East Coast college life. Set in 2002, her story is one of romantic ups-and-downs—with both Lucas Hedges and Timothée Chalamet playing romantic suitor and familial tension, the latter felt in her strained relationship with her mother played by Laurie Metcalf. There’s nothing Earth-shattering here, but Gerwig’s script has a sharp sense of time, place and the roiling emotional turmoil of its protagonist, whose attempts to carve out a mature identity are authentically messy. 

4. Baby Driver

Edgar Wright is just about the perfect 21st-century genre director as he proves yet again in his thrillingly movie Baby Driver. The senselessness of human nature is his subject, genre the lens through which he studies it. Ansel Elgort plays the title character, the designated driver for a crime boss who calls himself Doc (Kevin Spacey). Members of Doc’s crime teams change, but there always seems to be one paranoid hothead who gets edgy because Baby never talks and always has headphones on. Is he a mute? Is he slow? No, but Baby has a hell of a story involving a car crash and juvenile robbery that put him in Doc’s debt. As the movie begins, he’s on the verge of paying off that debt and becoming free.

Referencing Walter Hill’s 1978 The Driver with Ryan O’Neal, the title character is one of those ultra cool existentialists who defines himself through action. Baby has a little more inner life. There’s none of the smash-cut spatial incoherence of most modern action sequences. Wright’s chase scenes are wild but classical and elegant. He also doesn’t care for the green-screen, computer-generated unreality of the Fast and Furious series. This is the first thriller we’ve seen in a long time that feels handmade.

In the grand tapestry of Daniel Day-Lewis’ acting career, Phantom Thread will be sewn in as a colorful swatch, though for a retirement role, he leaves us wanting a little more. 

5.Blade Runner 2049

I was skeptical about the film simply because having been a fan of the original. I was doubtful whether the new film will stand up to the first film.  Blade Runner may have shaped the future, but it’s easy to forget its past. The film is now universally accepted as a classic, Ridley Scott’s future-noir fantasy from 1982, widely dismissed in the beginning as an exercise in spectacular emptiness. It was only when Blade Runner was reconfigured via a 1992 Director’s Cut, and later Scott’s definitive Final Cut, that its masterpiece status was assured, compared to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Kubrick’s 2001. Architecturally, the production designs evoke Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, all angular lines and expressionist shadows.

This is the context for Blade Runner 2049, it was a tough act to follow, Ridley Scott’s original. Director Denis Villeneuve’s audacious sequel is really as good as the hype suggests, spectacular enough to win over new generations of viewers, yet deep enough to reassure diehard fans that their cherished memories haven’t been forgotten and betrayed. Villeneuve teases away at the enigmatic identity riddle at the centre of Scott’s movie, brilliantly sustaining the mystery of a blade runner’s true nature.

6. Phantom Thread

One of my all time favorite director is Paul Thomas Anderson. With Phantom Thread, Anderson has crafted one of his best-looking works to date, this new film is truly amazing and sophisticated. The fashion-centric period dram and second collaboration with Daniel Day-Lewis, following the exquisite 2007's There Will Be Blood.  It's also apparently Day-Lewis' last film as he has announced his retirement.

Day-Lewis plays Reynolds Woodcock, a fussy A-list dressmaker in 1950sin London who wears his public face well outfitting princesses and debutantes but is kind of a disaster with his personal life. He has a string of girlfriends but none seem to take, as he keeps them at arm’s length in terms of actual commitment.

On a trip to the country, Woodcock locks eyes with a clumsy young waitress named Alma (Vicky Krieps). He's smitten by the time he’s finished ordering breakfast and they had a date that’s at first affectionate but turns confusing once his newest muse moves into his townhouse and he uses her as a model. But Woodcock begins to be annoyed by her presence.

As Phantom Thread flits between complicated character piece and unusually funny romantic comedy, the movie becomes much more about Alma. It’s an acceptable though not exceptional goodbye and one hopes, even somewhat selfishly, for Day-Lewis to stitch together a more memorable final bow someday.

7. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is the latest film of writer-director Martin McDonagh. The billboards are on a remote road near the home of Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), whose teenage daughter Angela (Kathryn Newton) was raped and murdered seven months before the story starts. With money she's scraped together, Mildred rents them for a year, using them to spell out a blunt message about her desire to see the killer hunted down.

This is language as weapon, with a vengeance. The premise sets the tone for a series of confrontations between the implacable Mildred and the generally disapproving townsfolk, including her volatile ex-husband (John Hawkes) and the weary town sheriff (Woody Harrelson). These scenes are as charged, yet much of the dialogue retains an innocent silliness, despite the serious subject matter, encouraging us to laugh where we shouldn't. It's clear that McDonagh's ideas about the American heartland, such as they are, derive more from pop culture than anywhere else. Above all, the blend of quaintness, bloody violence and tongue-in-cheek metaphysics shows a debt to the Coen brothers, McDormand is a longstanding member of the Coen team. Three Billboards could be described as an entertaining story, but McDonagh leaves certain connections to be made by the viewer. Ultimately there's more redemption for the characters than might be expected.

8. BPM

Robin Campillo’s exquisite “BPM (Beats Per Minute)” stands out as the most authentically queer film I’ve seen in a while. Campillo writes from his lived experience, turning a painful history into a moving and often joyous work of art that bears witness to the past while offering the current generation an insight into the queer history. The movie is about a group of young activists running ACT UP Paris, the AIDS advocacy group originally started by Larry Kramer in New York City in 1987. The film exists mainly within the framework of ACT UP: chaotic meetings and heated debates about everything from Pride slogans to pharmaceutical companies, nerve-wracking direct actions involving fake blood balloons and free condoms, and a tender love story.

When we meet Nathan (Arnaud Valois), he is a fresh recruit, thrown into his first meeting with a rushed introduction and not even a wink. Campillo achieves incredible immediacy by keeping the viewer over-stimulated. One of the greatest contradictions in the movie is how much fun the characters seem to be having a good time, flirting in the heat of the actions, laughing at the meetings, and going clubbing together after a friend dies. It’s this lived-in experience that sets Campillo’s film apart from others about the AIDS crisis, and even other gay films directed by well-meaning straight filmmakers. 

9. Good Time

Good Time gives Robert Pattinson easily the best part he’s ever played, a fever-brained small-time crook in New York, who has no kind of master plan, just a series of quick initiatives. Directors the Safdie brothers,Benny and Josh – previously best-known for their street-savvy junkie saga “Heaven Knows What” have injected the film with a shot of restless narrative dynamism. We start not with him, but on an uncomfortably intense close-up of his brother Nick (Benny Safdie), a brute of a guy with learning difficulties, in mid therapy session. Connie bursts in and takes him straight off to rob a bank. The sequence is grueling, but it’s funny, too.

The general stress levels are intense, and the sound score keeps bashing you around. Connie (Pattinson) is a weirdo, but not too much of one to ever lose our curiosity. He’s an opportunist with as many killer instincts as bad ideas. Pattinson rises his way through the movie, saying some truly ridiculous things. His sudden decision to dye his hair is deeply funny, and a twist that’s sprung involving the bandages on someone’s face is so cleverly nested it makes you laugh out loud.

The Safdies are certainly offering a love/hate-it style proposition, above all with the infernal sound grinding away. It’s Pattinson here who manages to centre and save it, stripping himself free of artificial mannerism and working beautifully with the non-professionals bulking out the cast. The film’s last third lets it down, in part because the point of view shifts away from Connie at damaging situations. Good time is a good, intense and explosive movie. 

10. Ojka

This film premiered on Netflix, who paid for it, rather than cinema screens.  Cannes has never had  a competition film named after a giant, farting pig before. Even when properly up and running, the film slips in and out of its groove. A diverting, intermittently clever, sometimes awkward blend of find-the-missing-pet adventure and anti-meat satire, it comes from the pen of Jon Ronson (a vegetarian with a dark sense of humour) and Korean director Bong Joon-ho. It’s a goofy concept, oscillating on the edge of facile, but Bong has a good track record for cooking up such weird concepts and spinning them off in productive, tonally brave directions.

The relationship between Okja, a prize specimen being raised in the Korean countryside, and Mija (Ahn Seo-Hyeon) the young farm girl who has raised him from piglet hood, feels more cut out for a family-friendly story. The Mirando Corporation, represented by a squeaking TV animal pundit called Mr. Johnny (Jake Gyllenhaal), arrive to claim their property, and Mija can only watch as the massive mound of grey blubber she thinks of as a best friend. Okja shares about equal screen time with the stars like Gyllenhaal, who makes a promising fist of his first scene and then rapidly lets himself go way overboard. Much more inspired is Swinton, in the double role of sisters with no love lost and an interestingly opposed take on corporate values.

Okja is plenty of fun, and smart around the edges, but the girl-and-her-pig stuff can drag, and it feels like it’s pressing for resonance more than properly achieving it. We wind up in a slaughterhouse, of course. It’s more like a kids’ meal for adults than an adult one for kids.