The Hollywood Reporter critics chose top films of 2017, amongst which the most popular film was Call Me by Your Name, followed by Lady Bird and The Shape of Water.
FOREIGNEDITORIAL
It was looking pretty grim there for a while. Sundance gave us Call Me by Your Name in January, but by the end of June, people whose job it is to speculate about what other films might be up for year-ends awards and critics’ lists were weighing the chances of good genre entries like War for the Planet of the Apes, Get Out, Wonder Woman and Baby Driver — not normally the kind of stuff of which Oscar dreams are made.
Nor the did Cannes Film Festival in May yield much of potentially enduring value. Yes, there was a wonderful documentary, Agnes Varda and JR’s Faces Places, and one mesmerizing out-of-the-blue entry in the Directors’ Fortnight, The Florida Project. But where were the rest of the contenders?
The first one, Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated Dunkirk, flooded theatres in July and planted a flag for quality big-budget Hollywood fare. A few very good indies turned up but were not widely seen, including Columbus, Logan Lucky and Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer.
Finally, the major early autumn festivals once again signalled that all was not lost after all, and enough very-good-to-excellent films have emerged since September to have made 2017 a pretty decent year after all. Here were the ten best films of 2017.
10. Dunkirk
There was never much doubt that Christopher Nolan would deliver an exceptionally vivid panoramic depiction of the enormous event that first suggested Hitler might not roll unimpeded to victory in World War II. The way Nolan told his story was the surprise, in fragmented vignettes, on land, sea and in the air, with no artificial build-up of pre-packaged heroism or emotion. It’s the rare modern film in which the dialogue could be discarded with no loss of meaning or power.
9. The Shape of Water
Guillermo del Toro was unquestionably the most visible and voluble directorial presence on the fall festival circuit this season, and the beautiful film he brought with him provided a lot to talk about. A traditional fairy tale mated with a Cold War monster movie, it also features a mute heroine (played by Sally Hawkins) whose resilience and resoluteness were approached this year only by that of Frances McDormand in the almost equally fine Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
8. Faces Places
French New Wave pioneer Agnes Varda may be 89, but she’s still got her ear to the ground and her eye is as sharp as ever in this covert report from the front in a France we seldom see. Starting as a sort-of larkish road movie in which Varda and co-director JR decorate parts of the countryside with huge posters of the latter’s photographic portraits of ordinary people, the film becomes an amiable but unsettling portrait of the nation’s by-passed and disenfranchised. A late bit in which Varda is rudely stood up by her old friend Jean-Luc Godard is unforgettable.
7. Graduation
Romanian master Cristian Mungiu is within a couple of turns of the screw of top form in this corrosive look at how old-style communist-era cynicism and depression are alive and well in post-Ceausescu times. The director’s ability to almost imperceptibly grow his story from the specifically human to the pervasively societal remains awe-inspiring.
6. Phantom Thread
After three weighty, life-gushing yarns, all of which had third-act problems, Paul Thomas Anderson ventured out of the United States’ Wild West and into English chamber drama in a poisonous romantic yarn hinging upon who will get the upper hand in an intimate triangle. As eccentric as its characters, the film is claustrophobic and controlled as well as wild and rangy, along with the melodiously melodramatic score by Jonny Greenwood, ultimately makes something rich and strange out of the director’s risky roll of the dice.
5. The Florida Project
Once again finding amazing subjects, faces and stories for cinema where no one else would presume to look, Sean Baker expands his horizons considerably with this walk on the wild side of Orlando. Set amid the scruffy, borderline derelict denizens of a low-end motel within spitting distance of Disneyworld, the film forces you to come to grips with down-and-outers most people would go out of their way to avoid in real life.
4. My Journey Through French Cinema
Zig-zagging through the decades, the filmmaker offers incomparable insights into acting, film music and overlooked talents as well as into the official classics. He has now finished a ten-part television companion piece, which we can presume will make its way to local screens before too long.
3. Lady Bird
What a debut, what a surprise, what a welcome arrival of a new auteur! Like Joan Didion having escaped her native Sacramento for New York, Gerwig returned home and conquered with a captivating autobiographical first film possessed of a fleet-footed style, as well a real knack for flitting between comedy and drama with no bother at all.
2. Call Me by Your Name
This piercing account of a summer’s ardour between two young men in Northern Italy is a film in which every element had to be just right — and they absolutely are, from James Ivory’s knowing script and Luca Guadagnino’s searching direction to the lovely settings and, above all, the chemistry, grace and physical force of stars Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer.
1. Downsizing
Alexander Payne’s film addresses one of the weightiest subjects there is, that of humanity’s long-term viability on the planet, and does so as a humane comedy-drama without an ounce of pretension. A sort of Everyman tale like Hollywood used to make, this one zeroes in on Matt Damon’s average Joe as he voluntarily joins the ranks of the miniaturized and embarks on an odyssey that is dramatic, picaresque, packed with unusual characters and quite impossible to predict.
– Courtesy: hollywoodreporter.com
