1. Wormwood
Errol Morris’s Wormwood is a groundbreaking hybrid of non-fictional and fictional storytelling modes—although no matter how you classify it, it’s the year’s towering cinematic achievement. The filmmaker’s second release of the year (after the charming The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography) recounts the tangled saga of Frank Olson, a government biochemist whose mysterious 1953 death out a New York City hotel room window was first deemed a suicide, then the byproduct of a CIA mind-control program, and then something more sinister still. With Olson’s sleuthing son Eric as his guide, Morris immerses himself in this thorny true-crime case, using dramatized sequences—starring a phenomenal Peter Sarsgaard, Molly Parker, Tim Blake Nelson, and Bob Balaban—for his 1953-set sequences, and documentary interviews and material for the rest. Wormwood is assembled as a hallucinatory, psychologically penetrating collage and plays like a pulse-pounding thriller, a damning indictment of institutional malfeasance, and a chilling portrait of both self-destructive obsession and the elusiveness of truth. Simultaneously released as both a 241-minute theatrical movie and a six-part Netflix mini-series, it’s a masterpiece that breathes new life into the documentary form, and further confirms Morris’ peerless greatness. Consequently, it’s our pick for the best film of 2017.
2.Lady Macbeth
Hell hath no fury like a woman oppressed, as is shockingly born out by William Oldroyd's phenomenal feature directing debut—an adaptation not of the Bard but, rather, of Nikolai Leskov's 1865 novel Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. In a breakout performance of coiled intensity and ruthless cunning, Florence Pugh is Katherine, a young woman sold into marriage to an older landowner (Paul Hilton), whose nastiness is only surpassed by that of his domineering father (Christopher Fairbank). That union is rife with problems from the start, though despite the film's Shakespeare-referencing title, the path it wends is an original and horrifying one. Suggesting a period piece version of a film noir saga as envisioned by Stanley Kubrick, this twisted feminist drama is rooted in contentious racial- and gender-warfare issues, employing a meticulous formalism to recount its cutthroat story about Katherine's at-any-cost attempts to attain liberation. Like its protagonist, it's a film that's placid and refined on the outside, ferocious and pitiless on the inside.
3. Dunkirk
Christopher Nolan dispenses with the exposition in favor of immersive aesthetics with Dunkirk, a dramatic account of the WWII evacuation of Dunkirk, France's beaches in 1941. Fractured between three interwoven time frames and perspectives (land, sea and air), and shot almost entirely in 70mm IMAX—which stands as the ideal format in which to see this overwhelmingly experiential work—Nolan's wartime tale cares little for character detail or contextual background. Instead, it thrusts viewers into the chaos engulfing a variety of infantrymen (including Fionn Whitehead and Harry Styles), commanders (primarily, Kenneth Branagh), fighter pilots (led by Tom Hardy), and civilian boatman (notably, Mark Rylance), all of whose sacrifice, selfishness, cowardice, and heroism is thrown into sharp relief by Nolan's grand set pieces. Through its towering scale, superb staging, and inventive structure, Dunkirk melds the micro and the macro with a formal daring that's breathtaking, along the way underscoring the unrivaled power of experiencing a truly epic film on a big screen.
4. Marjorie Prime
The year’s most moving film, Michael Almereyda’s adaptation of Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated play takes a Twilight Zone-ish concept into surprisingly profound, poignant territory. At a seaside home, Marjorie (Lois Smith) spends her final days conversing with a holographic projection that resembles her late husband Walter (Jon Hamm), all as her daughter Tess (Geena Davis) and son-in-law Jon (Tim Robbins) cope with her failing health and their own personal and marital issues. In Marjorie and Walter’s conversations—the latter’s personality shaped by information given to it by its human owners/programmers—as well as later chats between other people and holograms, Marjorie Prime plumbs not only complex familial dynamics but also the thorny intricacies of memory: how we prioritize, shape, erase, and warp them to fit more comforting conceptions of ourselves and our lives. It’s a superb, subtle portrait of conscious and unconscious (self-) deception, perpetrated so we might grapple with the pain, disappointment and tragedy of existence—and how, as a result, we create a dialogue that gives birth to a living, breathing new future.
5. Columbus
As strikingly unique as the Indiana buildings its characters visit, Columbus is a boy-meets-girl tale that cares less for romance than for the unlikely, intrinsic ties that bind seemingly disparate souls. Arriving in Columbus to tend to his ailing, and estranged, architect father, Jin (John Cho) falls into a friendship with younger Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), who’s set aside personal dreams in order to stay home and care for her recovering-addict mother (Michelle Forbes). While admiring Haley’s favorite local architectural landmarks, the duo engage in conversations about family, obligation, and ambition in the process locating the beauty—and power—of those deeper ideas, and feelings, lurking beneath familiar surfaces. The feature debut of director Kogonada, it’s a work of astounding formal beauty and precision, one that sees universality even in difference, and which—courtesy of the charming rapport shared by the fantastic Cho and Richardson—is infused with a pitch-perfect air of both melancholy and hope. To borrow a description used by one of its characters, it’s asymmetrical and yet balanced.
6. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
Suspenseful and hilarious, despondent and optimistic, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore is a masterful genre film, one that immerses itself in the small, painful indignities of everyday life, and then casts the battle against those wrongs as a serio-comic odyssey of sleuthing, heavy metal, and nunchakus. After her house is burglarized, nurse Ruth (Melanie Lynsky) partners with her rat-tailed martial-arts-loving neighbor Tony (Elijah Wood) to recover her stolen belongings. Their ensuing black-comedy adventure is grimy, bloody, and ridiculous, as director Macon Blair (best known for his performances in Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin and Green Room) pitches his material as an absurdist neo-noir saga about combatting existential despair. Courtesy of a great Lynsky performance that's equal parts miserable and furious, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore (which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance before premiering exclusively on Netflix) finds humor and horror in the notion that "everyone is an asshole"—and then locates hope in the closing-note idea that, rather than worrying about them, life is best spent in the company of those precious few who aren't.
7. Okja
Bong Joon Ho's Okja is many things at once: a rollicking kid's fable about the bond between a young South Korean girl (An Seo-hyun) and her genetically enhanced super-pig (named Okja); a satiric critique of the corporate food industry; a wacko comedy about transcending cultural boundaries; and a fantastical adventure full of kidnappings and chases, buoyed by over-the-top performances from Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal, and culminating with a Times Square spectacular and a Holocaust-esque trip to the slaughterhouse. Most of all, however, it's the year's most exhilaratingly idiosyncratic work, indebted to the spirit of both Steven Spielberg and Hayao Miyazaki, and energized by the distinctive signature of its director. Vacillating between mirthful, madcap and morose on a dime, Bong's latest—about the heroine trying to reunite with Okja after the animal is reclaimed by the conglomerate that created her—is both all over the place and yet assuredly coherent. Whether viewed on a big screen or via Netflix (its exclusive distributor), it's a wondrous whatsit unlike anything you've quite seen before.
8. Phantom Thread
It comes as little surprise that Daniel Day-Lewis’ second pairing with his There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson is a triumph, but that doesn’t preclude Phantom Thread from upending expectations. An enthralling, rapturous psychodrama set in the world of 1950s London high fashion, the duo’s latest collaboration stars Day-Lewis as Reynolds Woodcock, a celebrated dressmaker who lives by a prim-and-proper daily (and artistic) routine. Such orderliness is toppled by his relationship with a waitress, Alma (newcomer Vicky Krieps), who soon becomes his model and his companion in his house, which he also shares with his severely no-nonsense sister-partner Cyril (a transfixing Lesley Manville). Marked by lithe tracking shots, piercing close-ups, sumptuous transitional fades, and evocative use of Jonny Greenwood’s classical score, Anderson’s film is nothing short of breathtaking, and his leading man’s performance is (as usual) multifaceted and mesmerizing. More captivating still, however, is the script’s canny investigation of the volatile (if well-ordered) interplay of romantic power and desire, which develops in thorny, complex, and always unpredictable ways.
9. The Lost City of Z
Acclaimed American filmmaker James Gray (Two Lovers, The Immigrant) ventures for the first time outside New York City—and into the dark heart of the Amazon—with The Lost City of Z, an adaptation of David Grann's 2009 non-fiction book of the same name. Such a geographic relocation, however, does little to alter Gray's fundamental artistic course, as his latest—about early 20th century British explorer Percy Fawcett's (Charlie Hunnam) repeated efforts to locate a lost South American civilization that he believed to be more advanced than any previously discovered—boasts his usual classical aesthetics and empathetic drama. Energized by a hint of Apocalypse Now's into-the-wild madness, this entrancing period piece is at once a grand adventure, a social critique about class and intolerance, and a nuanced character study about an individual caught between his love for—and desire to escape—his environment. Led by Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, and Sienna Miller, it's also one of the finest-acted dramas of the year.
10. I Called Him Morgan
Lee Morgan was one of the mid-century jazz scene's brightest lights, until his life was cut tragically short when his wife Helen fatally gunned him down in a New York City nightclub on the snowy night of February 18, 1972. Using copious archival footage, newly recorded interviews with friends and collaborators, and, most illuminating of all, a tape-recorded 1996 interview with Helen made one month before her death, Kasper Collin's transfixing documentary I Called Him Morgan recounts this sad real-life saga as two separate stories—Lee's and Helen's—that eventually dovetailed, intertwined, and then combusted in horrific fashion. Abandonment, drug abuse, and betrayal all factor into this sorrowful equation, as Collin assuredly conveys the messy stew of passion, need, ego, loneliness, and fury that eventually begat such a calamity. In doing so, it recognizes the jazzy spirit of Lee and Helen's doomed romance—and, also, the riffing-our-way-forward nature of life itself.
Source: https://www.esquire.com
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