All caught up with our top 50 films of 2016? It’s now time to look to the new year, and, ahead of our 100 most-anticipated films, we’re highlighting 50 titles we’ve enjoyed on the festival circuit this last year (and beyond) that will likely see a release in 2016. While the first batch have confirmed dates all the way through the summer, we’ve also included a handful that are awaiting a date and some we’re hopeful will get a release by year’s end pending acquisition. U.S. distributors: take note!
Staying Vertical (Alain Guiraudie; Jan. 20)
Those only familiar with Alain Guiraudie’s sublime Stranger By the Lake, which finally brought the gifted French director to a (relatively) wider audience following a laureled Un Certain Regard premiere in 2013, will likely find themselves confounded by its follow-up, Staying Vertical. With his first entry in Cannes’ main competition, Guiraudie returns to the psychoanalytic mode of the features preceding Stranger, where he gradually and stealthily eroded the boundary between reality and fantasy to probe the complexities of human desire — particularly of the sexual kind — exposing the stifling effects of social norms and conventions to thoroughly bewildering results. – Giovanni M.C. (full review)
Dark Night (Tim Sutton; Feb. 3)
In many ways, writer-director Tim Sutton‘s third feature, Dark Night, exists in the same world as his first two films, Pavilion and Memphis. As we follow a collection of young men and women drifting through a long day in the American suburbs, many of the themes from his earlier work shine through — boredom as punctuated by anger, lust, and artistic ambition, to name a few. Where the day will end we already know, thanks to the film’s blunt title, a not-so-subtle reference to the 2012 shooting at a showing of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado. – Dan M. (full review)
Lovesong (So Yong Kim; Feb. 17)
Tender and haunting, So Yong Kim’s Lovesong is a carefully observed, nuanced character study beautifully written, directed and edited. Much of the action, like in her pervious features In Between Days, Treeless Mountain and For Ellen occurs at the edge of the frame. Exploring the bounds of motherhood, childhood and maturity, Lovesong is an impressive and observant feature in which Kim allows the relationships the breathing room they require for authenticity. – John F. (full review)
Contemporary Color (Bill Ross IV & Turner Ross; March 1)
For its combination of rocking performances from famous musicians (the line-up included St. Vincent, tUnE-yArDs, Nelly Furtado, and Byrne himself), the dazzling work of athletic, often high school-aged color guard teams (those flag- and baton- and rifle-waving types who perform synchronized dance routines), and the compelling success story that comes with their meeting in an arena — to say nothing of the presence / brand carried by the show’s mastermind, David Byrne — last year’s Contemporary Color tour is an exceedingly film-friendly show: a visual-aural presentation the likes of which most directors would be thrilled to have placed before them. That also makes it potentially dangerous territory: if the glut of bland concert movies are any indication, many of those same directors might be tempted to do little except observe, essentially having their subjects meet them 70% of the way. – Nick N. (full review)
Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas; March 10)
After Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper confirms Olivier Assayas as the director most adept at drawing the best out of Kristen Stewart. Here she follows in the footsteps of Maggie Cheung and Asia Argento, actors whose exceptional central performances prevented fundamentally flawed films by Assayas – Clean and Boarding Gate, respectively – from foundering altogether. Stewart’s achievement is arguably even more remarkable considering that for the bulk of Personal Shopper’s running time, her only co-actor is an iPhone. – Giovanni M.C. (full review)
After the Storm (Hirokazu Kore-eda; March 17)
Can our children pick and choose the personality traits they inherit, or are they doomed to obtain our lesser qualities? These are the hard questions being meditated on in After the Storm, a sobering, transcendent tale of a divorced man’s efforts to nudge back into his son’s life. Beautifully shot by regular cinematographer Yutaka Yamasaki, it marks a welcome and quite brilliant return to serious fare for writer-editor-director Hirokazu Kore-eda following last year’s Our Little Sister, widely regarded as one of the slightest works of his career thus far. – Rory O. (full review)
Free Fire (Ben Wheatley; April 21)
TIFF’s Colin Geddes was correct when introducing Ben Wheatley’s bottle episode of a film Free Fire with the words: “This will wake you up.” The gunfire alone risks perforating your eardrums as John Denver blares from a 1978-era van’s eight-track, but I think it’s the surprising wealth of comedy that ultimately gets the blood pumping and synapses triggering. Wheatley and wife/writer Amy Jump’s latest isn’t for everyone — fair warning to Hardcore Henry detractors, Sharlto Copley refuses to quit his shtick — but those willing to break free from a desire for plot complexity will undoubtedly be entertained. This is low-brow Reservoir Dogs, extreme genre action meant to energize you with an insane cast of characters hell-bent on killing each other on principle. Although that briefcase of money is appealing too. – Jared M. (full review)
Dean (Demetri Martin; March 17)
The most piercing comedy is often mined from the darker aspects of life, presenting our fears in a new, hopefully amusing light. While Demetri Martin‘s stand-up has tinges of this, represented in his lo-fi sketches and carefully constructed one-liners, his directing and writing debut Dean effectively melds, both on the page and stylistically, a dramatic backbone with his personal brand. – Jordan R. (full review)
David Lynch: The Art Life (Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, and Olivia Neergaard-Holm; March TBD)
Before David Lynch was a filmmaker, he was a struggling painter, whose lifeblood was to “drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and paint.” That’s what he dubbed “the art life,” and what an image – as featured in the many contemporary photos seen in this new documentary – it is, the bequiffed 20-something Lynch sitting back in his Philadelphia studio, composing transgressive abstract artwork. Bookmarked by footage of Lynch working on his latest paintings in his Hollywood Hills penthouse, the wonderful new documentary David Lynch: The Art Life showcases the artistic developments of one of America’s most singular directors. – Ed F. (full review)
A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies; April 14)
“You are alone you your revolution, Ms. Dickinson,” spouts a stoic headmistress in the opening sequence of A Quiet Passion, a biopic of 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson and the latest work from proud Liverpudlian auteur Terence Davies. In the scene, young Emily has apparently rejected both a life in the seminary and the option to be a practicing catholic, a decision the famously atheistic director clearly vibes with. That sense of empathy and understanding with his subject is rife throughout this quietly cleansing and exquisitely considered film, which shows the writer from her late teens (portrayed by Emma Bell) through to adulthood (Cynthia Nixon) and old age. – Rory O. (full review)
The Lost City of Z (James Gray; April 14)
It is the little-stated, undeniable truth that critics are surrounded by nearly innumerable factors when experiencing the work they’ve been assigned to review. Presentation is rarely treated as a basic on the level of form, theme, or auteurist interest, and most mentions will come only if something had gone terribly wrong. This issue sometimes being rather important, I feel compelled to say James Gray’s The Lost City of Z is a rather forceful thing when projected on 35mm, as befits the writer-director’s wishes and with which the New York Film Festival, premiering this picture as the closing title of their 54th year, complied. I can and will compliment the movie for a number of reasons not necessarily pertaining to what material it was printed on and what machine it came out of, so let it be stated upfront that this is most likely the best (only?) way to experience what Gray and cinematographer Darius Khondji, reuniting from The Immigrant, have achieved: a film that will often truly and totally appear to have been made in decades past and just discovered today. – Nick N. (full review)
The Happiest Day In the Life of Olli Mäki (Juho Kuosmanen; April TBD)
The Happiest Day In the Life of Olli Mäki is a boxing biopic that has no interest in the sport of boxing. Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Juho Kuosmanen’s dryly funny, blissfully sweet, and deceptively absorbing work revels in Olli Mäki’s psychological surroundings as he contends with the strangeness of national promotion, the accruing pressures of competing, and a burgeoning romance that’s feeling more permanent than he expected. – Michael S. (full review)
Paris Can Wait (Eleanor Coppola; May 12)
With her last feature directorial credit being contributions to 1991’s Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, Eleanor Coppola is perhaps better known as Francis Ford Coppola’s wife than a filmmaker. Yet, she triumphantly returns this year with one of the sexiest and most joyful road movies in some time with Paris Can Wait. – Jordan R. (full review)
All These Sleepless Nights (Michal Marczak; Spring TBD)
Blurring the line between documentary and fiction like few films before it, Michal Marczak‘s All These Sleepless Nights is a music-filled ode to the ever-shifting bliss and angst of youth set mostly in the wee hours of the day in Warsaw, Poland. Marczak himself, who also plays cinematographer, is wary to delineate the line between narrative and nonfiction, and part of the film’s joy is forgoing one’s grasp on this altering perspective, rather simply getting wrapped up in the immaculately-shot allure of its location. – Jordan R. (full review)
The Bad Batch (Ana Lily Amirpour; Spring TBD)
Ana Lily Amirpour’s second feature shoots for Harmony Korine meets Mad Max and would have nearly almost hit the mark were it not for the gratingly aloof attitude and the swaths of directorial license being taken. The Bad Batch — an ambitious, expansive dystopian sci-fi western which features partying, drugs, and cannibals — might come as music to the ears of diehard fans of films like Spring Breakers and Gummo (a kid doesn’t quite eat spaghetti in a bathtub, but a kid does eat spaghetti after being in a bathtub). However, beneath its dazzlingly hip surface the script and characters leave much to be desired. It’s like taking a trip to Burning Man: a pseudo-spiritual, uniquely punky experience perhaps, but one that’s full of annoying rich kids and ultimately emotionally shallow. – Rory O. (full review)
Ma’ Rosa (Brillante Mendoza; Spring TBD)
Not a huge amount happens in Ma’ Rosa, the relentless new film from Filipino director Brillante Mendoza, which premieres this week in competition at Cannes. In present-day Manila, a woman and her husband are arrested for dealing methamphetamines and taken to the police station for interrogation before rounding up their three children who, in turn, must collect the sufficient sum of money to bail them out. It’s a bit of a slog, not least in the first half, but it’s also the kind of film that seeps into the viewer in the minutes and hours and days afterwards. Returning to the style and locale that brought him international acclaim with Kinatay in 2009, Mendoza shoots it like a pseudo-documentary, employing erratic, grainy handheld camerawork and relatively few cuts. Critics often say he’s an uncompromising director. It’s easy to see why. – Rory O. (full review)
My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (Dash Shaw; Spring TBD)
Who amongst us has not wished for something like a snow day or a power outage that would get us out of school or work? As the title suggests, in My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, it’s the hard-hitting high school student journalists’ good fortunate that an entire high school sinks while they’re on the beat. Dash and Assaf (the voices of Jason Schwartzman and Reggie Watts, respectively) seek to expose their principal’s misdeeds as Tides High School has been built on a cliff, under a fault-line, and has just opened a new auditorium on the top of its senior floor. Not since Wayside School have civic engineers and architects have greater failed the American Education System. – John F. (full review)
Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey (Terrence Malick; Spring TBD)
You could argue that Terrence Malick has been trying to find or express catharsis in his films as far back as 1978’s Days of Heaven. That trope has become more and more synonymous with the director as decades have passed, and Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey — a high-caliber visual essay that some people say has been developing for almost 40 years, although it’s probably more accurate to say it’s been in production for “only” seven — always looked like the most direct expression of that search for divinity. It could deliver that experience for some in the audience, and, as narrated in feature length by Cate Blanchett (a 45-minute version narrated by producer Brad Pitt will arrive on IMAX screens), it might be better defined as a voyage of life. Through sometimes-dated (but often glorious) CGI and live-action footage, Malick’s long-gestating epic charts the birth of the cosmos through to the evolution of earth and, finally, to our supposed inheritance of the planet. – Rory O. (full review)
Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd; June 2)
Before William Oldroyd‘s first foray on the silver screen with Lady Macbeth, he was an experienced theater director, which clearly has aided his adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The gothic allure of this period piece about a woman forced into marriage and deciding to take things into her own hands is both refreshing and captivating, and make no mistake: there is nothing theatrical or stiff about the film. – Jordan R. (full review)
The Ornithologist (João Pedro Rodrigues; June TBD)
Publicly stated by its director to concern Saint Anthony, the Portuguese priest and friar who legend calls the most supernatural of saints, The Ornithologist luckily manages to see the profane outweigh the sacred — no white elephantine “spirituality,” but rather a progression of set-pieces. We have something of a return for João Pedro Rodrigues to his debut feature Fantasma, a nocturnal “erotic thriller” of sorts that moved by the logic of its own images, this in opposition to more character-driven films such as Two Drifters and To Die Like a Man or his most recent The Last Time I Saw Macao, a tad too much an academic exercise in mirroring post-colonialism through a deadpan “non-mystery.” – Ethan V. (full review)
Awaiting Release Date and/or Distribution
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (Steve James)
Steve James’ filmography has long been about finding entry into larger conversations through intimate portraits. The director’s landmark debut, Hoop Dreams, and latter-day efforts like 2014’s monument to critic Roger Ebert, Life Itself, don’t have much in common on the surface, but they both use their central characters to tell larger stories about big picture topics like structural dysfunction and the purpose of film criticism. – Michael S. (full review)
Austerlitz (Sergei Loznitsa)
Having experimented with feature-length fiction films, shorts, and archival-footage documentaries in the course of his career, Sergei Loznitsa’s output since his 2014 Ukrainian crisis documentary Maidan has both garnered him greater acclaim than before and zeroed in on cinema as a collectively generated form. – Tommaso T. (full review)
Bangkok Nites (Katsuya Tomita)
Two echoing images. The film’s very first, a reflection cast as our heroine, Luck (Subenja Pongkorn), stares into the glass window of a high-rise building as a man who claims to love her is in the adjacent room. Our second is in a Bangkok brothel: women wait behind a sheet of glass for men to greet, but what do they do all day? The impulse behind both is repetition, yes, but also patience for a change that may never come. – Ethan V. (full review)
The Bleeder (Philippe Falardeau)
The Bleeder looks a bit familiar. A film of browns and greens; disco music and ‘70s rock tunes; big haircuts and even bigger lapels. Indeed, in a way reminiscent of recent period efforts such as Black Mass and David O. Russell’s last two outings, The Bleeder is drenched in that particular decade’s elaborate trappings. It also owes a lot to the school of Scorsese, complete with wise-guy narration, east-coast working-class lilts, and a sense of “You gotta be shitting me! Is this really my life?” But it’s a sports film at heart and a rather good one at that, all plucky underdog right hooks and tragic, humiliating falls. In a way, it’s also a film about movies, too. Coming from decorated Québécois filmmaker Philippe Falardeau, it is the true life story of Chuck “The Bayonne Bleeder” Wepner, the man who fought Muhammed Ali after the champ’s victory in the Rumble in the Jungle, and later the main influence for a certain film by Sylvester Stallone. – Rory O. full review)
Boys in the Trees (Nicholas Verso)
We’ve all lost friends whether from naturally parting ways or an avoidable blow-up proving petty in hindsight. Age advances and tastes evolve — we don’t often think much of the phenomenon because they find peers more attuned to who they’ve become just like you. But sometimes the severed relationship carries with it pangs of guilt. Maybe the fracture was triggered by lame excuses like the concept of survival of the fittest, you joining your oppressors in order to stop being oppressed. Perhaps you cut loose the person you once said you’d do anything for in a way that transforms them into your enemy. And as graduation approaches with a clean break from the immaturity you’ve grown to resent, that guilt eats away at your conscience in search of relief. – Jared M. (full review)
Brooks, Meadows and Lovely Faces (Yousry Nasrallah)
The wedding, in cinematic terms — the opportunity to present dozens of extras of mingling amidst an ever-expanding backdrop (e.g. the Visconti quotations from The Godfather or The Deer Hunter) — is, to say the least, a very exciting opportunity. Though within Brooks, Meadows and Lovely Faces, the idea of a wedding points to a pressure for national unity when the narrative in question is all about splintering: separate couples all living in fear of their true feelings for others in the shadow of class and age. – Ethan V. (full review)
Carrie Pilby (Susan Johnson)
The synopsis for Carrie Pilby can sound atrocious on paper. Most films utilizing an eighteen-year old Harvard graduate do so as periphery color because the trope lends itself to obnoxious pedantry and an unsympathetic notion of “first world problems.” Having your titular lead (played by Bel Powley) be that person is therefore a risky proposition. She’s an introvert bagging on society for willingly lowering their IQ to fit a cesspool of mediocrity despite making no attempt to engage or discover whether that assumption is true. We should despise her and harbor frustration towards director Susan Johnson for wanting the opposite. Well the joke’s on us because her character proves utterly likable in her failings — likable and relatable while traversing the landscape of life and love. – Jared M. (full review)
Clair Obscur (Yesim Ustaoglu)
Life for a woman like Elmas (Ecem Uzun) in Turkey is a living nightmare. An eighteen-year old all but sold to a willing husband (Serkan Keskin‘s Koca) much older than she to clean his house, give her mother-in-law (Sema Poyraz‘s Kaynana) across the hall insulin shots, and — marriage or not — get raped every night, she’s gradually losing her sense of identity and mind. She’s so young and unversed in the world that she makes a game out of folding the sheets atop their bed to see whether a coin will slide from one end to the other without hitting a fold. Elmas’ sole release is watching her neighbor in the adjacent building dance to pop music while sneaking a cigarette on the balcony when no one is looking. – Jared M. (full review)
Colossal (Nacho Vigalondo; April 7)
Whether the existence of time travel or an alien invasion, writer/director Nacho Vigalondo has proven king at dealing with large-scale concepts affecting small-scale characters. Always looking to portray how genre catastrophes are handled by nobodies on the ground without government credentials or scientific degrees, he continues this trend again with his latest monster movie Colossal … for the most part. After certain truths are revealed, it’s easy to discover how two former classmates in a sleepy city with one watering hole may have more to do with the chaos wrought by a giant Godzilla-sized humanoid creature in Seoul, South Korea than anyone would believe. Gloria (Anne Hathaway) and Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) have unfinished business together that’s ready to be unleashed and not even they know it’s there. – Jared M. (full review)
The Death of Louis XIV (Albert Serra)
A fair question to ask: why The Sun King now? Perhaps American icons are always ripe for deconstruction as, after all, we have the world’s greatest (or rather dwindling) superpower shoved down our throats seemingly everyday. Yet, on the subject of Louis XIV, having to ascribe any current European crisis to the need to resurrect one of France’s greatest kings seems foolhardy. But The Death of Louis XIV succeeds just enough on the pure terms of a formalist exercise, with mostly static shots in a series of rooms lit by candlelight as historical context seems to somewhat recede into the dark. – Ethan V. (full review)
Despite the Night (Philippe Grandrieux)
Philippe Grandrieux’s Despite the Night is a relentlessly morose, miasmic thing that, like much of his work, alternately seeks to narcotize and brutalize its viewer into submission until the distinctions between agony and ecstasy, tenderness and violation, are indistinguishable. Grandrieux is, in many respects, a wildly contradictory figure: a tough sell for most audiences; an easy pitch for prospective fans (the maximalist Denis? the haptic Lynch? the narrative Brakhage? the goth Malick? etc); a niche artist even in the realm of “festival cinema”; yet (for instance) a favorite of Marilyn Manson, who once recruited him to direct a music video. – Ian B. (full review)
The Dreamed Path (Angela Schanelec)
Angela Schanelec’s The Dreamed Path is so beguiling that we, the audience, have to take comfort in pointing out its one clear structural point: it’s split into two halves, each about a different couple in separate time periods. Our first is Kenneth (Thorbjörn Björnsson) and Theres (Miriam Jakob), who we see arriving on vacation in Greece in 1984; the film is quick to divert our attention to a protest about the nation’s place in the European Union, and here already feeling the weight of democracy and mythology. A young, attractive couple (easily the film’s liveliest sequence is when they busk “In the Jungle”), circumstances suddenly drive them apart when Kenneth’s parents in England fall sick and Theres gets a teaching job back in Germany. – Ethan V. (full review)
Endless Poetry (Alejandro Jodorowsky)
Three years ago, Alejandro Jodorowsky returned to filmmaking for the first time since 1990 with his sumptuous autobiographic epic The Dance of Reality. Now the octogenarian’s second part of a planned five-part series — think the tales of Antoine Doinel on acid — heralds the madcap hippie director of El Topo and The Holy Mountain as a master of a deeply personal magic-realist genre, effortlessly moving as it is psychologically and artistically rich. – Rory O. (full review)
Hermia & Helena (Matías Piñeiro)
For beginning with a dedication to Setsuko Hara, recently departed muse of Ozu and Naruse, Hermia & Helena — the new film by Viola and The Princess of France director Matías Piñeiro — perhaps aligns us to be especially attuned to the Argentinian auteur’s use of female collaborators. One to already emphasize the charisma and big-screen friendly faces of frequent stars Agustina Munoz and Maria Villar, he still seems to have an ability to make them points of representation, not fetish. – Ethan V. (full review)
Hounds of Love (Ben Young)
Premiering in the Venice Days section ahead of its 2017 Australian release, director Ben Young’s feature debut is the kind of film you wish you could un-see – except not really. Sure, its extended depictions of physical and psychological abuse will upset/offend many. At the same time, there’s no denying the level of craft and performance involved that probes human depravity so compellingly, you’re left with much more than just rattled nerves and a taste of bile. – Zhou-Ning Su (full review)
The Human Surge (Eduardo Williams)
To put it upfront, Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge is pretty much a film that, by nature, is unlovable. Often blatantly ugly or boring, it’s not so much deliberately confrontational in the way so many experimental films are (or pride themselves on being), but rather risk-taking for the sake of something almost impossible to articulate — even if based in something obvious. – Ethan V. (full review)
Jesús (Fernando Guzzoni)
Adolescent hijinks turn tragic on multiple fronts in Fernando Guzzoni‘s Jesús despite my not being sure there was going to be a solid point to the film until mid-way through. Everything previous merely sat as a slice of life for the titular character, a normal everyday Chilean punk named Jesús (Nicolás Durán) with too much autonomy and not enough direction. He’s practically raising himself after the death of his mother, Dad (Alejandro Goic‘s Héctor) constantly out of town working. So the eighteen-year old roams the streets dancing with a Korean Pop band for kicks, breaking into parks at night to drink and do whippits, or cruising for girls at parties to earn a blowjob. He means well most times, but his malleability when drunk inevitably spells trouble. – Jared M. (full review)
Mimosas (Oliver Laxe)
A “religious western” is how Moroccan-based Spanish director Oliver Laxe describes his second film, Mimosas, winner of the top prize at Cannes’ Critics’ Week. It’s a spiritual, ambiguously plotted journey through the Atlas Mountains, and those willing to give in to its mystical embrace and gorgeous visuals should find it a sensual, engrossing watch. – Ed F. (full review)
Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello)
Here’s an elevator pitch: Nocturama is Robert Bresson’s The Devil, Probably in a homegrown-terrorist garb that substitutes transcendental style for the form of contemporary thrillers and music videos, all the while filtering a faux-intellectual’s anger through a consumer-culture criticism that, in its place and mood, most recalls George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. This almost sounds like an easy sell, notwithstanding the fact that this elevator ride would need to take us to a building’s higher floors. But for plumbing the depths of radicalized Parisian teens’ desires and actions less than a year after ISIL-led attacks shocked the globe, every ounce of appeal that his film might — and, I think, ultimately does — offer can’t prevent writer-director Bertrand Bonello from being a victim of poor timing. Timing is so relative, though; doubly so when his is a picture that grows (some might go the cancerous route and say metastasizes) in days and weeks after being seen, the kind that feels at once explicitly of its moment and vaguely outside of any temporal trappings. – Nick N. (full review)
Prevenge (Alice Lowe)
Veering between dark comedy and somber drama is a flavor of the times in indie film, but Prevenge puts a new spin on this, tying those emotional shifts more directly to the mindset of its lead character than any other movie of its ilk has yet. That’s because the lead is heavily pregnant. Combine that with serial killing, and the stage is set for an agreeably bloody-minded oddball of a film. – Dan S. (full review)
Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu)
For this critic’s money, of the several excellent filmmakers to emerge from the Romanian New Wave, Cristi Puiu ranks as the most formidable. After kicking off his career in 2001 with the outstanding Stuff and Dough, a small-scale but expertly modulated road/drug-deal movie, Puiu made two bona fide masterpieces back to back: The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Aurora. While his newest dramatic feature, Sieranevada, may fall just short of M-word classification by not reaching the same level of radical invention as its two predecessors, it is nonetheless another proud entry in Puiu’s stellar filmography. – Giovanni M.C. (full review)
Ta’ang (Wang Bing)
A text against a black screen informs us of the Ta’ang ethnicity belonging to Myanmar, a nation engulfed in an endless civil war, which happens to be driving its citizens, chiefly this group, out. Crossing the border between their home and China, the Ta’ang refugees are in a constant state of displacement, if still unity. Though if deceived by this simple, prosaic way of dosing out information to the audience, which will likely consist 95% of bourgeois festival attendees, a counter is swiftly served. Its first real image is one of violence, both in form and content; what appears a father striking a child, like a camera suddenly, and ungraciously, emerging out of thin air, as if birthed into this dire situation as an uneasy necessity for what seems an emergency. – Ethan V. (full review)
Tramps (Adam Leon)
The romantic comedy formula is one that can’t help but become redundant in premise. How many different scenarios are there for two people to converge? Even so, Adam Leon may have found a new one with his meet-cute during a dead-drop gone wrong called Tramps. It should have been a painless exchange: Ellie (Grace Van Patten) picks up Danny (Callum Turner), they retrieve a briefcase with unknown contents, and deliver said case to a woman with a green purse at the train station. She may have second thoughts and he may be pinch-hitting for brother Darren (Michal Vondel) who’s currently in jail, but how could anyone screw this up? – Jared M. (full review)
Una (Benedict Andrews)
“It’s a long story.” So says Una, a young woman with a going-nowhere office job and an emotionally devastated past, when asked about her relationship with Peter — the man she knew as Ray. Indeed it is a long story — a morally complex and cruelly realistic one, too. The debut feature from theater veteran Benedict Andrews, Una is an astonishing success. Anchored by two exhilarating performances from Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn, the film is also harsh, moving, and extraordinarily riveting, one of the more unsettling works to play the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival and undoubtedly among the most provocative. – Christopher S. (full review)
Wakefield (Robin Swicord)
Bryan Cranston’s Howard Wakefield seems to have a great life. He is a successful New York City lawyer, is married to a loving wife, has two teenage girls, and owns the ideal house. However, problems do lurk beneath his psyche and, before we could even get to know him a little better, he decides to disappear from his own life. He hides in the attic, where his family never really cares to go, and observes how his loved ones deal with his disappearance. – Jordan R. (full review)
Weirdos (Bruce McDonald)
Weirdos, the latest film from the quintessentially Canadian auteur Bruce McDonald, is on its face just another road trip comedy with the spirit of Andy Warhol, but this time Warhol actually appears on screen — although for legal reasons, per the credits, Rhys Bevan-John plays “Not Andy Warhol.” It’s the summer of 1976 in Nova Scotia when Kit (Dylan Authors) takes out on the road with his radiant pal Alice (Julia Sarah Stone). She’s as confused as he is when she asks if they’ll be having “goodbye sex,” something they’ve been putting off for an obvious reason. – John F. (full review)
A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery and The Woman Who Left (Lav Diaz)
Starting with the Spanish conquest of the Philippines in the mid-16th century, the country was under the colonial rule of four different foreign powers for nearly 400 years. Independence gave way to two decades of vicious dictatorship and a democracy severely compromised by corruption and extensive external influence. As a nation that encompasses a staggering number of ethnicities and languages, the Philippines’ centuries-long experience of oppression has engendered an enduring identity crisis. It’s this crisis that has brought forth the films of Lav Diaz. They are dedicated to an excavation of his country’s turbulent past in search of its identity; the simultaneously chimeric and vital nature of this endeavor constitutes the emancipatory dialectic that drives his cinema. Having addressed Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship from a variety of angles in several earlier features, Diaz turns his attention to the Philippine Revolution of 1896-97 with A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, an extraordinarily rich, initially exasperating, yet eventually marvelous postmodern epic. – Giovanni M.C. (full review)
Lav Diaz’s Golden Lion winner from this year’s Venice Film Festival feels like something of a surprise because, for all its extended shots, luminous black-and-white photography, and socio-historical weight, The Woman Who Left is ultimately an unostentatious work. Compared to, say, Norte, The End of History’s remarkably grim ending, with its reaches into fantasy / metaphysics (don’t forget that Tarkovsky-esque levitation), there doesn’t seem to be quite the same need to impress or belabor the point. – Ethan V. (full review)
Yourself and Yours (Hong Sang-soo)
See enough films by any director and you’ll start to think you’ve got a grip on the whole thing. See everything they’ve directed — “everything,” here, constitutes 17 features and three shorts that are in excess of half an hour — and expected pleasures are chief among the reasons for continuing the journey. Yourself and Yours is enjoyable the way every other Hong Sang-soo film is enjoyable: funny, relatable and emotionally honest, structurally innovative, and composed with a patient eye that favors the peaks and valleys of conversation over standard get-to-the-point construction. Here, though, he wields a sharper blade: in its defiance of internal logic, character motivation, or even a conventional understanding, the film’s narrative (about doubles or twins or doppelgängers or all or none) brings contemplation of romantic relationships’ hardest edges — those gaps between men and women that no one’s quite figured out, perhaps because they’re entirely irreparable — to a point more digestible than the standard dramatic formats of shouting, crying, confrontation, etc. Largely because it’s funny. Hong’s continued fixation on idiocy will never not hit this writer’s funny bone, and cultural barriers mean nothing; it’s among the few universal languages. – Nick N. (full review)
Honorable Mentions
We could’ve easily extended this list beyond 50 with a number of other titles we liked. First up, there’s 2016 awards-qualifying films that will get official releases in 2017, including The Red Turtle (1/20), The Salesman (1/27), I Am Not Your Negro (2/3), and My Life as a Zucchini (February TBD).
Next up, there’s a selection of films landing in the next few months we were more mixed (or negative) on, including I Am Michael (1/27), A United Kingdom (2/17), Raw (3/10), Frantz (3/15), The Belko Experiment (3/17), Their Finest (3/24), and The Promise (4/28). There’s also the Berlinale drama Paris 05:59, which just missed the cut, arriving on January 27 and The Lure, coming on February 1.
Moving onto more recommended films we’re awaiting either on distribution or a release date for, one should check out our list of the best undistributed films of 2016, which includes a handful of the films above. There’s also another film titled The Lure, Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation, The Road to Mandalay, the Riz Ahmed-led City of Tiny Lights, I Called Him Morgan, Scarred Hearts, This Time Tomorrow, Donald Cried, Laura Poitras‘ new documentary Risk, After Love, Folk Hero and Funny Guy, Women Who Kill, I Promise You Anarchy, Kill Me Please, The Patriarch, Death in Sarajevo, and, lastly, we seem to be in the minority on Walter Hill‘s (Re)Assignment.
What are you most looking forward to this year?
Read More: Our 100 Most-Anticipated Films of 2017
