Unsane (2018)

Score: 4.5 / 5

You know that feeling you get when one of your favorite artists does something brilliant all by himself? I just got that.

That's Steven Soderbergh and his newest flick, the horror-thriller Unsane. In content, it's nothing groundbreaking or revelatory. Sawyer (Claire Foy), a strong-minded but troubled young woman, is disturbed as she keeps seeing her old stalker, though she has moved and started a new life. After seeking professional help, she unwittingly commits herself to a mental hospital, wherein her cries for help are seen as symptoms of her illness. Continued visions of her stalker force her to come to grips with herself and with reality, facing her demons and her past while trying to escape the horrors around her.

The difference with this movie is all in the craft. It's got a streamlined screenplay (and it clocks in just over 90 minutes) that sharply focuses everything; there's not a moment to spare. Soderbergh, in addition to directing, also photographed and edited the whole thing, so you know it's exactly his vision we're watching. He shot it all with an iPhone 7 Plus, which makes the experience jarring and nervy. Definitely do not watch this movie if you have severe anxiety. Nothing is calm in its delivery.

At first I figured a feature film shot with a smartphone would be gimmicky. Unsane isn't at all. In fact, if anything, it grounds the bizarre story and brings it to a much more immediate, gritty vividness than any other approach I can think of. It's also deeply psychological, as phones represent, in many ways these days, our lifelines. It's a phone Sawyer uses to try dating, to reconnect with her distant mother; it's her one phone call she relies on for help in the hospital, and it's another inmate's phone that plays a significant role in saving her. To shoot the film on a phone is technically savvy, but it's also thematically savvy.

The film, for all its sparkling wit, is one of the darkest pictures I've seen in a while. Knowingly bleak, it assaults the conventions of filmmaking while also firing volleys at our understanding of mental health, the institutions of mental medicine, and our cultural sexism when it comes to disbelieving women. No one believes Sawyer, a successful businesswoman, doesn't belong in the hospital. No one believes her that her violence is actually self-defense from other inmates. None of the men believe that she doesn't want to have sex with them. No one (except her mother, significantly) believes her when she says her old stalker has infiltrated the hospital and is posing as one of the attendants. And, I have to confess and challenge you, often during the film we also question her reality: Is she crazy? Is she seeing her stalker where he simply isn't? Maybe this is some hardcore gaslighting, maybe it's some Shutter Island shit, maybe it's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It's really hard to say during the first half.

But by the second half, the film rallies behind Sawyer as she manipulates events and people in her quest for freedom. She is brave and smart in her escape attempts, even when people are being tortured and murdered all around her. The film also lampoons the medical institution in a particularly brilliant sequence of events that I won't spoil here. It was what, for me, elevated the film from "good" to "great".

I'll support any film as topical as this -- mental illness, sexual harassment -- that is also steadfastly true to its own purpose and aesthetic. Leave it to Soderbergh to be awesome.

But seriously, don't watch this movie if you get anxiety about things like mental illness and sexual harassment. I was feeling ill walking out, just because of the content, and I don't have bad anxiety.

IMDb: Unsane

The Open House (2018)

Score: 1 / 5

Sometimes even good technical skill can't redeem a terrible movie.

"Have you ever thought about how, like, weird open houses are?" That's a line from The Open House, a recent Netflix film about an open house. Well, it takes place in an open house, a gorgeous mansion up in the Pacific Northwest mountains isolated from neighbors. Its main players include a mother and her son, grieving the loss of their husband/father (Aaron Abrams), respectively, who left them in such a financial state that they are forced from their home. The mother's sister allows them to squat in her mansion which is up for sale, as long as they leave every open house afternoon.

Strange things begin to happen to the pair, as dishes and phones move around the house, doors open, and things go bump in the basement. Naomi flirts with a man from town as her son Logan grows more reclusive and angsty, and each suspect the other of playing mind games, presumably in an effort to scare them out of the house and go back home.

But this film isn't smart enough to play many psychological games (a la Funny Games or, really, any other home invasion thriller worth its salt). Instead, by about the halfway point, we are shown that there is, in fact, another person inside the house, watching and waiting for a moment to strike. This is after, mind you, about 45 minutes of incredibly slow scenes that attempt to build tension. I say "attempt" because it only marginally succeeds.

The screenplay is incredibly stupid. The actors -- themselves stultifying in their whiplash-inducing turns between stoic realism and melodrama -- choke over groaners like "I am your mother and I am allowed to be upset!" And "I have so much on my plate right now that I can't deal with you too." Really, mom? Because as far as we've seen, you don't work, you have no money, you have no neighbors or friends, and you guys sit around cooking macaroni, going for runs, and watching movies together.

And Logan's part is just as awful: After he comments on how weird open houses are and elaborating on how anyone could just come inside, hide, and lie in wait for the realtors to leave, his mother scolds him mildly, noting that she won't be sleeping tonight, thank you very much. His response? "Maybe you shouldn't." Son, you get an A+ for being a jerk. And, later, when the intruder has made himself known by setting a beautiful dinner table, Logan is allowed the magnificently stupid moment of "Something is clearly going on."

A gorgeous set -- really, the woodwork will make your knees weak -- is the only worthwhile part of the film. Even this is undermined, though, as most of the action takes place in the weird little basement. It's a dark descent on wooden stairs to a stony, labyrinthine hallway. Why is this little tunnel the basement to a gorgeous, wide open mansion? Apparently we aren't supposed to ask that. On his first foray to the lower level, Logan breaks through a step on the stairs; the next two times his mother goes down there, the step has apparently been repaired. Yet, during the climax, Logan again goes down there, and behold, the broken step has returned.

Other technical moments are even more poorly executed. Again, who wrote this garbage? The pilot light for the water heater keeps going out and the characters have to go re-light it a total of three times in almost shot-for-shot repetitious scenes. While some of the cinematography is brilliant, tracking the characters through the house and, in wide shots, showing strange goings-on in different rooms at the same time, some is laughably ripped off from other (better) horror films. In fact, some of the ripoffs are so clear I wonder why this didn't debut on some fanfiction website. When Naomi enters the shower, water comes at the camera just like in Psycho. Calls come from inside the house, as they do in Black Christmas and When a Stranger Calls. The basement is almost certainly a throwback to Silence of the Lambs.

SPOILER ALERT. Doors open in wide shots and shadows move in the dark like in The Strangers; like that movie, too, the whole plot here concerns a crazy, faceless killer with no motive. The last shot shows his car driving off in search of the next open house he can, presumably, infiltrate, torment its tenants or guests, and kill them off one by one. He clearly has no motive, but even his MO isn't clear. He starts by psychologically tormenting them (ish), then he slits a guy's throat, then he leaves Logan outside in the cold to catch hypothermia, then he terrorizes Naomi, ties her up, tortures her by breaking her fingers. He manipulates events so that (in the film's ridiculous climax) Logan unintentionally kills his own mother.

Actually, that's where I'm going to stop. The first half, stupid and slow but effectively chilling, screeches to a halt by the third act. The ending isn't just bad. It's offensively bad. It's so stupid, you'll want to quit watching. People die and they seem sad about it. But you don't even feel bad because they were all so stupid. And you don't even care because the filmmakers were so bad at their jobs. Huge plot holes and thematic ambiguity and poor execution make The Open House one to regret watching.

IMDb: The Open House

Love, Simon (2018)

Score: 3 / 5

Oh boy, here it is. The "groundbreaking" gay teen romance everyone's been losing their minds over. Listen, folks, because I'm only going to say all this once.

I liked the damn thing, but it is super problematic. So let's all agree to stop calling it "groundbreaking". There is nothing groundbreaking here, except that a major studio backed this project. That's it.

The trouble for me started in the first scene, when Simon's voiceover began with "I'm just like you". I choked aloud on my peppermint. I don't know about you, but I was nothing like Simon. He's unbelievably privileged, living in a gorgeous house with hot parents and a bff-sister. He gets a car for his birthday and drives his group of incredibly diverse friends -- who are all much more intelligent and adjusted than any high schooler should be -- to school every day, where their teachers are impossibly crass and crude and somehow don't get fired for swearing or touching the kids but are nevertheless so charming and funny and kind that you don't care. Oh, and the school is so liberal-minded that the kids are performing Cabaret for the musical. That's right, Caba-gaddam-ret. Are you kidding me?!

I know what you're thinking, yeah but Micah every high school rom-com features unrealistically wealthy/intelligent/funny characters. Maybe. But not all of them start off deliberately selling themselves as a mirror image of their audience. And not all of them deal with real-life life-or-death situations that have conveniently disappeared from the narrative. For instance: Bullying. The film is about a gay kid anxiously agonizing over when and how he'll "come out"; the whole movie is about this super-privileged "problem" Simon has, even though he successfully passes as straight in so many ways and for so long, apparently. But why, exactly, does he agonize over this? His parents are aggressively liberal, and he says in voiceover he knows they'll be fine with it. His friends obviously wouldn't care. None of the characters cite religious objections. The vice principal of the school wears a pride flag pin. The only suggestion of bullying comes from two jerks who pretend to be Simon and Ethan, the token gay of the school, dry-humping on a cafeteria table. As if that was even comparable to the bullying some of us have received.

Speaking of Ethan, who is pretty great in a severely underwritten role, there is one nasty little scene I want to comment upon. After the "bullying" incident, Simon sort-of kind-of apologizes to him for never standing up for him, although he pointedly remarks that bullying never really happened that their school before he, Simon, came out. That is some tone-deaf bullshit if I ever heard it. Ethan, black and notably feminine, has surely not had it as easy as Simon thinks; and yet the film denies Ethan any chance to respond. The scene shifts and the moment is gone.

Simon's privilege extends to other spheres as well. He can actively perform in the school musical -- again, Cabaret, I just can't -- with no suspicion of faggotry, and even when the obnoxious star of the show tries to blackmail him, the two are a sort of friends. He thinks dancing to Whitney Houston with a bunch of peers in vibrant, colored t-shirts is too gay. After he learns that his crush likes Game of Thrones Simon walks down the school hall hunting for guys wearing fan shirts. For each he sees, worn by boys who are clearly more interested in comics and television than sports, he all but recoils in disgust. I can just read the bro-college version of Simon's Grindr profile now: "No fats, no femmes, masc4masc, not racist but...".

Think I'm wrong? Try again. Simon isn't even a great protagonist. He allows himself to be blackmailed (again, for no discernible reason) into manipulating his friends into dating each other. It's weird. Not even like Dangerous Liaisons weird. Just a sort of banal, irritating, stupid sitcom kind of weird. And then, at the end, after he realizes he screwed up all his friendships, they magically (and with no clear motive) all come flocking back to love and support him and even cheer him on as he kisses his newfound love interest.

I'm being pretty harsh here, but I was a little embarrassed to be supporting this movie. Greg Berlanti, you know better. You should have done better. I mean, come on, Josh Duhamel plays an "every dad" and Jennifer Garner is his hardcore white liberal wife. There are no stakes in this movie.

Which, if I may change my tone a tad, was endearing as all hell. After Oscar season, it was a little refreshing to just mindlessly enjoy a movie. It's a very funny, very sweet movie, and it even brought a tear or two to mine eye. It's got a killer soundtrack, too. And, yes, it normalizes gay teen romance by disturbing heteronormative conventions (sort of?), yadda yadda. I was a little empowered to hear the reasonably-full theater applaud and laugh and cry to the film, and I couldn't help but wonder how different my life would be had I seen a flick like this in middle school or high school.

But I also couldn't help but wonder how many people a movie like this will hurt, will convince that their situation is inescapable or hopeless, will push just that much closer to the brink. Even I, well past my high school years, walked out of the theater a little disheartened because I knew I was heading back out into the real world, where terrible things happen to people who aren't as lucky as Simon.

IMDb: Love, Simon

Tomb Raider (2018)

Score: 3 / 5

Confession: I've never played any of the Lara Croft games and I've not yet seen the films starring Angelina Jolie (though I'll be watching them soon). This was my first experience with the character and franchise.

What a blast! It's a sort of origin story -- I assume it's a reboot -- of the character with Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina, Tulip Fever, The Danish Girl) playing Miss Croft. She's totally badass, a hardcore action star that I certainly didn't see coming. Tough and reckless, her character is almost as impressive as Vikander, not letting the brute violence around her keep her down long. It's the sort of stuff that makes a star, and Croft, being one of the only survivors of the film's climax, is every minute a rousing hero.

That's not to say it's all a fun and fabulous movie. The story feels like a half-baked, half-eaten, and half-digested meal of Indiana Jones; that's not such a bad thing, but surely there were other ways to film sequences than copying them from Crystal Skull or Last Crusade. It's also irritatingly sentimental for an action movie and relies on excessive flashbacks to unravel the emotional connection Croft has with her father (Dominic West), whose lengthy absence and possible death serves as the major MacGuffin.

The story is simple and dull, that is, until the very end. The denouement is chilling and terribly exciting, as it suggests much more to come as Croft seeks to undermine the villainous Trinity organization, a powerful shadow group that has infiltrated her family's many business holdings. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for more appearances by Derek Jacobi and especially Kristin Scott Thomas as potential Big Bads!

What else is there to say? The action is very exciting, the special effects are pretty great, and the physical work done by the actors is amazing. If you want a mostly mindless action adventure of the old-fashioned kind, watch it. If you love Alicia Vikander (like me) and want to watch her kick lots of booties (and a few balls), watch it. If you like video games and get excited by movie adaptations, well, I can't really speak to that, but you should still watch it. Two hours of preposterous, blood-pumping genre film viewing won't be wasted time.

IMDb: Tomb Raider

A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

Score: 4 / 5

I don't know why this movie's getting so much crap. It's beautiful.

Disney's latest reclaiming of old territory tackles Madeleine L'Engle's sci-fi fantasy A Wrinkle in Time, a work of profound weirdness and abstraction. While critics and audiences seem intent on proclaiming the weirdness of this film, the excessive style over substance, and some sizeable plotholes, I'd argue the same things about the source material. It's a children's fantasy, for goodness' sake. In fact, compared with Lewis or Carroll or even Rowling, I'd argue that L'Engle's fantasy is notably inferior in style, scope, and detail. So before you hear any more criticisms about these elements, question the critic: Do they really know what they're talking about? And do you care?

While this new film is indeed a victory of style over substance, that totally fits its messages of beauty and empowerment. Its trippy visuals and fabulous interplay of light and darkness feel more like the book than any amount of world-building details might. More importantly, its beauty is found in its casting and design aspects. The characters quietly reveal themselves as the most diverse group I've seen from a Disney movie, and even the interracial romance at the center of the story is a total nonissue. This is the future, guys. This is the new normal. And it is glorious.

The three Mrs W (Whatsit, Who, and Which), played by Oprah Winfrey, Mindy Kaling, and Reese Witherspoon are lovely, but it's their costumers and stylists who take the real glory here. Along with the production designers and artists. Everything in this movie is colorful, extravagant, and kinetic. A Wrinkle in Time is pure escapism, pure cinema: magic cooked up on the screen and blasted into your retinas with full force. The music is as soaring as the visuals, the acting pitch-perfect, the cinematography awesome. It's got the splendor of Avatar and the heart of Narnia and a spirit all of its own, fully embracing its own glorious diversity and female empowerment.

Of course, all this praise is not to say that the movie is perfect. Far from it. Its screenplay is mostly clunky and sparse: unfocused and seemingly without real inspiration, its stumbles its way through the story with no grace. Actually, my impression of the film was that Disney spent its resources on visual artists, good actors, and a great director, and then realized they needed some kind of script. They should have just let DuVernay do her thing. Which is to say that it's pretty clear there are significant power struggles here between her visionary vision and the studio's. And it has its weird moments, to be sure. I could have lived a long and happy life without watching Reese Witherspoon turn into a flying head of lettuce. I didn't need Michael Pena falling apart like a marionette. I didn't need Zach Galifianakis at all, especially not in a part that was female in the book. And giant Oprah -- though wonderful to behold -- felt a little unnecessary.

But when a movie can so easily transport you across the galaxy, steal your heart, and leave you breathless in wonder, who cares if it's densely plotted or thickly descriptive? Again, it's a children's fantasy, y'all! Movies like this are what America needs. Honest, sweet, and quietly insinuating its political correctness into mainstream entertainment. So go. Go watch it right now. See it on as big a screen as you can. Watching this movie right now is a political act. Support it. Give in to love and hope and light and all the things this movie champions. "Be a warrior!"

IMDb: A Wrinkle in Time

The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018)

Score: 3 / 5

Call it The Trailer Park that Dreaded Sundown or The Trailer Parks Have Eyes, but this movie is a total throwback to horror flicks 40-50 years ago. Listen to the John Carpenter-esque synth music, watch Bag-Headed Killer trying to cut up a girl in the back of a pickup, or just soak in the foggy atmosphere of a trailer park at night, and you're transported to iconic genre films of decades gone by. While Prey at Night is nominally the sequel to Bryan Bertino's now-classic The Strangers (2008 -- a decade already!?) and creates an interesting two-part dimension to its own potential franchise, it seems first and foremost to be a stylish homage to another age of horror.

Johannes Roberts, who recently directed the creepy and silly 47 Meters Down, is again working with a skim budget here but manages to do some really interesting things with what he's been given. Bertino, serving now as a writer, throws us into another family's sordid life as they visit family members who run a trailer park. They're on their way to dropping off Kinsey (Bailee Madison of Once Upon a Time) at boarding school and are totally unaware that the off-season abandoned park is also a killing ground. That's right, the trio of masked killers are back, torturing and slaughtering people for no real reason. It doesn't take long before the bodies pile up.

Roberts films everything with long takes, most of which pan slowly around the nighttime park as characters run around. These long shots and long takes are interspersed with super close-ups (also often long takes) on the actors as they respond to pain or terror; these shots serve to make us claustrophobic and to force us to peer at the unfocused background, anxiously awaiting the killers' figures to emerge from the shadows. It's a difficult balance, and I think Roberts' editor and cinematographer make a good team in that regard. There aren't many jump-scares, but there are some nasty shockers, most of which involve the sort of torturous, gory violence that the first film embraced in its climax.

But the film doesn't quite measure up to its predecessor in freshness or integrity. This one is self-conscious and deliberately tries to up its own ante when it really should know better. The trappings of a bigger, badder sequel are all there. More family members to die. No introduction to the killers is necessary. Instead of being locked in a house, we have the full range of a trailer park. And yet nothing really new or interesting happens. The killers always pop up in places that don't really make sense, if they should be stalking their prey; why is Doll-Face hiding under a blanket in a random bedroom of a random trailer playing with a Jack-in-the-Box? Creepy? Sure, but it does strike the viewer as gimmicky and illogical.

The leads are nothing terribly special either. I just didn't care about any of them the way I cared for Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman in the first. Christina Hendricks is always fun to watch, but (SPOILER ALERT) she dies first. Her hunky husband (Martin Henderson) and pretty son Luke (Lewis Pullman) are fun to watch, but have almost no character depth. And daughter Kinsey, though played arguably well by Madison, is so stock she's hard to watch. She weeps her way through the whole movie in every single scene, occasionally smoking a cigarette in her Ramones t-shirt and red flannel, and she has no express reason for her antisocial, resentful behavior. None of the characters is very smart, either, which doesn't help. Granted, they're more cautious and thoughtful than many horror protagonists, but in this case their introspective terror is what hurts them. They should be running, getting weapons, or even getting in their damn car instead of splitting up, hiding in plain sight, not checking their surroundings, and not communicating with each other.

It's sometimes irritating and often too familiar, but Prey at Night isn't a bad way to spend 90 minutes. At least, not if you like misanthropic horror flicks with some really gruesome, sadistic deaths. Plus, it's got a downright great sequence where Luke fights two of the killers at once in the park pool, illuminated by neon palm trees and backed by "Total Eclipse of the Heart" on the speakers. Go figure, the director of a shark movie shows off his skills in a water scene.

IMDb: The Strangers: Prey at Night

Red Sparrow (2018)

Score: 3 / 5

Despite the cacophonous outcries of people who think it's a Black Widow ripoff, Red Sparrow is upon us with the integrity of its source material largely intact. It's a lovely film to behold, richly detailed and determined to tell its story with the style and flair that worked so well between director Francis Lawrence and star J Law in the Hunger Games series. The problems here are that the film is tonally confused and thematically problematic, and that the screenplay is just a little too bland to keep things interesting.

I don't want to totally blame screenwriter Justin Haythe, whose successes include Revolutionary Road and whose failures include The Lone Ranger (2013). I would compare Red Sparrow more to his and A Cure for Wellness, as it attempts to do some fresh and interesting things but only marginally succeeds. Here, the story flirts with "sexpionage" as some have called it, a sort of spy style that relies heavily on sexual prowess and ingenuity to extract information and protect secrets. It's fascinating, to be sure, and J Law delivers a fascinating performance as the duplicitous protagonist. She is a killer from the start: after an injury during a ballet performance, she brutally attacks the culprits seemingly without a second thought. Yet, in turns, she appears weak and fragile, unsure, desperate, even romantic. We're never sure of the truth of her character, which makes the film endlessly watchable.

The problem comes from the other characters, and this is where things get murky. She's surrounded by equally brutal men who exploit her time and again, force her to do their bidding, torture her to make her stronger and then torture her again to break her. The women in her life are either weak, stupid, or vile, and all operate at the whims of men. Even the extent to which our protagonist has agency is up for debate (there is no clear-cut argument here). She is invited to the Sparrow program quite unwittingly and somewhat unwillingly, though her violent streak and increasingly deceptive motivations belie her unwillingness. She's aware of being used (and sometimes abused) but she actively continues in her role, perhaps because she feels she has no choice (to save her ailing mother) or because she wants revenge on the people in power (such as her charming and abusive uncle, a character I'd liken to the mother in Manchurian Candidate). Her tenuous relationship with the American spies lead her to physical torment, but she then determinedly continues her work to become a crucial asset as a double-agent.

If this thematic mess sounds a little extreme, you should know it's only my pared-down understanding of some of the stakes of this film. It's really long and really complex, and I got more than a little lost halfway through. Who is in cahoots with whom? And why? Sometimes these questions matter. Here, I think not. What matters here is the film's style, which greatly exceeds its substance. Glamorous life meets unspeakable horror in this series of games between powerful people. It's dark, cold, and vicious, brutal and sometimes difficult to watch, sexy enough but always creepy.

Feminist or not doesn't really seem to be an applicable argument here. This film espouses almost no doctrines beyond exploring a human's capacity for deception. It's not even a totally satisfying movie, and I think that might be the point. It's part of a trilogy of books, and my hope is that they all get made into films like this (Actually, now I think on it, it seems tonally akin to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which I also wanted to see more of). I don't want to say it's good or bad, even that I liked it or not, but it was by far one of the most interesting movies I've seen in some time.

IMDb: Red Sparrow

Game Night (2018)

Score: 4.5 / 5

I'm not always interested in big-screen comedies, but give me some laugh-out-loud dark humor, great acting, unexpected twists, and some quality production techniques and I am all in. Game Night is even more fun than I expected. It complicates what seems to be an ensemble-driven crime-comedy in provocative and exciting ways that kept me on the edge of my seat and crying from laughter.

Its almost-meta premise is this: A golden couple who loves their game nights a little too much get in over their heads when a role-playing game becomes real. Everything goes well until, well, it doesn't, and the players work through decades-old sibling rivalries, romantic fidelity, a secret crime ring, fight clubs, Danny Huston, the witness protection program, a jilted former game night regular, a Faberge egg, and a man who looks a lot like Denzel Washington. Who lives and who dies? What's part of the game and what isn't? Are there more games than one being played? That's all a part of the fun.

Apart from some of the tightest plotting and wittiest dialogue I've seen in a comedy in ages, this film rises above its ilk because of its technical brilliance. Its use of gorgeous miniatures to introduce new settings is fascinating, as it suggests the characters are players in a game long before we know the game has begun. It also features lovely set pieces, notably the alienated brother's house that gets invaded, as well as the rich man's house in which they seek the Faberge egg. In the latter, there is an amazing single tracking shot that follows the "chase" with exquisite choreography, as the egg trades hands and is run all around, up, down, and through the house before the team escapes.

Plus, the acting is all top-notch. I especially loved (as always) Billy Magnussen and his sweetly stupid character, Kyle Chandler getting pretty crazy, and Rachel McAdams being badass. I'm still laughing about her getting some "lovely chard" to help clean her hubby's wound; that sequence is one of the funniest in the film. Game nights aren't always this much fun, so enjoy this one as much as you can!

IMDb: Game Night

My Top 10 Favorite Films of 2017

It's that time again when we can celebrate the many wonderful movies of the past year! Because it's one of my favorite things to do, I now present my favorite ten films of 2017. This is not my list of "great" or even the "best" films of the year, just ones that I found especially resonant and meaningful, ones that I will happily watch many times again. Of course, there were many more than ten that I loved, and so you'll see a couple ties and many references to other pictures. All the films I've referenced in this post were in the running for my favorites, so if you haven't seen them all, I highly recommend you do!

This year, as usual, I found it difficult to limit my selection simply because of how timely so many films have been lately, commenting on the many anxieties, fears, and hopes of 2017 USA, sometimes recreating those in fabulous artistic form. Also, as sometimes happens, this year featured a great many films that seemed to be in dialogue with each other, tackling the same issues, characters, and plots. Consider the fascination with Wonder Woman, racial horror, women maneuvering a man's world, Stephen King, and even World War II in western Europe. We also saw huge franchises doing huge things this year with superheroes, Jedi, apes, and ghosts.

Are you ready? Let's do this.

10. TIE: Wonder Woman and Logan
Really, how do you pick between two of the best superhero movies ever made, especially when neither lies in Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe? Logan is a bleak, sad, yet rousing finale for Hugh Jackman as Wolverine even though it's really Patrick Stewart as a broken old Xavier who steals the show. Macho in the best possible ways, it plays with genre conventions and with its own franchise before allowing a hero's story to finally end.
Wonder Woman, on the other hand, is a fabulously realized movie -- easily the best in its respective franchise -- and an explosive beacon of hope in a year of hotly debated sexist politics. It's also just a damn good superhero action flick. Interestingly, it came accompanied this year by Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, detailing the true story behind the hero, which is itself a remarkably vivid, sensual, and progressive take on a biopic.

9. Detroit
The historical thriller of the year, for me, had to be something fresh, which is why Mudbound, lovely as it is, didn't make my list. My pick was about the war for the bodies of Americans and took place in one of the deadliest, most destructive riots on U.S. soil. Detroit, though perhaps poorly titled, concerns the events of the Detroit riot of 1967 but investigates almost exclusively the Algiers Motel as a grand centerpiece. The movie takes the chaos and horrors of the riots and turns this narrative into a microcosm, and in-depth examination on a small scale of what was happening on a huge scale. This sequence -- the body of the film -- is a horror cinema masterpiece as we watch murderous white psychopaths and terrified black bodies play out a sadistic game for their lives. Stopping short of making any grand pronouncements on racism, the film nevertheless forces viewers (of any identity) into the headspace of at least one person unlike themselves. The film is meant to be an immersive, provocative experience, and is (thank heaven) not a moral treatise. That makes it endlessly complex. Kathryn Bigelow has done it again!

8. Get Out
Horror films don't often make the Best Picture race, but this year had some doozies. Gerald's Game was just gorgeous, and Annabelle: Creation turned its maybe-franchise into a full-fledged cinematic universe. Then there's the Greek tragedy of The Killing of a Sacred Deer with its weird aesthetic and thrilling climax. But nothing beats Get Out, the daring movie that took us by storm last spring. When a young man goes to meet his girlfriend's family, it's only a matter of time before tensions run high, right? Add some of the smartest social satire in years, a dash of classism, sprinkle some fanciful psychology, and then pour all that onto the main course: a blistering indictment of casual racism in America. From the uncomfortable problems of "colorblind" white liberalism to outright racist eugenics, this movie runs the gamut and is determined to disturb. This is one of those films that has something devastating to say with every word, every shot. It requires multiple viewings to catch everything, but it will take a toll on you, so proceed with caution.

7. The Shape of Water 
For a period, ensemble romance/horror feature, I was going to go with The Beguiled, but then The Shape of Water just kept kicking to the fore of my mind. Whereas the former features psychological thrills, southern Gothic sensibilities, and no small amount of racist implications, the latter is a love letter to cinema, to classic horror, and to love itself. The plot is boring and derivative, but the style here is everything, as are the updated characters. It celebrates itself spitting in the face of Trump's rise to power: Our heroine has incredible agency and is disabled, her best friends are a black woman and a closeted gay man, and with the help of a Soviet spy they escape the laboratory to set the monster -- and themselves -- free. More importantly, this film reminds us that romance is always present in horror and that horror is always present in romance.

6. TIE: Dunkirk and Darkest Hour
Two movies about the evacuation at Dunkirk, each as lovely as the other. One, helmed by, arguably, the Best Director this year, uses nonlinear storytelling and amazing effects to immerse us on a beach under siege. It's a devastating look at war in fresh and exciting ways; it also daringly puts the audience in states of anxiety and terror much like those experienced by its characters. The other uses, easily, the Best Actor this year to riveting success in the government houses also under siege. It showcases him, moreover, in dramatic lighting and excellent makeup and gives him an incredibly well-written part. These films are two great filmmakers at the top of their games, getting everyone unified in vision to make something really special.

5. I, Tonya
There were at least three great crime movies this year with killer soundtracks. Baby Driver did it with some sharp comedy and wicked car chases. Atomic Blonde did it with a badass leading woman, some slick spy work, and fabulous costumes. Both also featured some amazing editing and cinematography. Even Colossal, though not a crime movie, is fabulous and weird, funny and profound, sweet and silly, a totally unique viewing experience with strong feminist elements. I, Tonya blew them all away. Densely plotted and character-driven, the film uses a mockumentary style to revisit the life of Tonya Harding. Hilarious and dark, this is a work of genius writing and directing: With all its interruptions conspicuous editing, and downright manipulative storytelling, we're never quite sure what to believe. It's not unlike Black Swan except in tone; it shares a portrayal of desperate characters descending into an amoral madness to achieve their goals, issues of violent lovers and terrifying mothers, and remarkably similar camerawork. Who knew this movie would be so great?

4. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
This is a tough decision for me. In terms of basic plot and themes, Wind River is not a far cry, as it also (more sensitively and aesthetically) investigates a rape-murder in a racially-charged environment. As a crime-driven thriller and unlikeable-character study, you might not do better this year than All the Money in the World, which also features top-notch performances and direction. But, for me, Three Billboards is a more complex, less bleak, and ultimately more fascinating film. Martin McDonagh's incredibly dense screenplay and direction make for a movie that smarts like a whip and makes you laugh when you're not sure you should. It also makes you gasp from fright, gasp for air, and grasp for meaning in a world where meaning is increasingly difficult to make. It's not a solution, it's not even really a drama; it's a mirror (albeit a funhouse mirror) on ourselves, and that makes it painfully uncomfortable to watch or talk about afterward.

3. The Post
Pretty much a given "great" movie for 2017, The Post brazenly assaults the idea of "fake news" in times of crisis and lionizes the virtues of a free press. Apart from its true story of publishing the Pentagon Papers under Nixon's vengeful administration, it is a fabulously detailed period drama and a nail-biting thriller. Following other great news-centered dramas, it revolves around great performances from an all-star cast directed by a pitch-perfect Spielberg, who, even when his hand is heavy, gives us a film crafted with genius. It is also a feminist snapshot of a woman succeeding where men fail in an atmosphere dominated by and solely populated by men, much like Molly's Game and its legal thrills, another crucial movie in the year of #MeToo.

2. The Greatest Showman
It's almost hard to remember that this year started off with Beauty and the Beast, but that was actually 2017. Back then, I thought Disney would have the musical of the year. I was wrong. The Greatest Showman is a fabulous love letter to show business, freaks, and, well, love. An infectious, joyful film that perfectly matches substance to the most stylish glamour this year on screen, it also boasts easily my favorite movie-musical score in years. The cinematography, production design, choreography, and costumes all closely follow the score as some of the best in recent memory. It's become fashionable to hate on this movie for its lack of historicity, its skim relation to the real-life P.T. Barnum, its glossing over of violent animal-abusing. But the reality is that this film is not meant to be a biopic. If its lead character simply had another name, no one would bat an eye. As it is, the film's championing of artists and everyone who has ever been marginalized and cast out make it both timely and important viewing.

1. mother!
I really loved Novitiate, but for religious/feminist/historical psychodrama, I am all about mother!. It's only the most aggressively weird, palpably pretentious, balls-out-and-on-fire movie of the year, maybe the decade. mother! is a real motherfucker of a movie, and that's about the sum of it. What starts as a psychosexual domestic thriller quickly becomes a bizarre allegory of biblical stories and the violent history of the world, and by the end we've been assaulted by crazy-porn until it feels like our eyes are bleeding. Besides some amazing filmmaking, sound mixing, acting, and cinematography, the film also invites deep discussion. What I took from it was a powerful feminist critique of Judeo-Christian-patriarchy, as it depicts the horrors of a trophy wife to a Great Man against an Edenic setting. That's not the only storyline or theme, and it's not even necessarily a correct take on the film. But that's what makes this film so amazing. It's a consummate work of art, the sort of trash-meets-high-art that only occasionally pays off; here, it's the queen of the crop. Go on, let it violate your eyeballs. You won't regret it. Maybe.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *

Finally, I'd like to praise some top-shelf 2017 Science Fiction features. I had to cut these from my list of favorites, but all deserve a mention. A sequel to the classic, Blade Runner 2049 brought even more cerebral beauty to one of the best genre films ever made, directed by visionary Denis Villeneuve. Star Wars: The Last Jedi, though polarizing fans, is unquestionably one of the most beautiful films of the year. Incredible visual storytelling, devastating drama, and lots of heart make the latest installment a game-changer for the franchise that hit a wretched low spot with The Force Awakens. Finally, War for the Planet of the Apes brought an end to an unlikely franchise that far surpassed any earlier incarnations of the story. This severely underrated prequel trilogy to the classic features Andy Serkis in his best dramatic role since Gollum, picturesque visuals and morally complex themes, and some of the most arresting war action on film that doesn't center on WWII or Vietnam. Make sure these movies find their way into your watch list.

So what do you think? Did I unfairly recognize a picture? Neglect one of your favorites? Leave a comment and let's talk movies!