17) Mountains May Depart
For over a decade, Jia Zhang-ke has kept a watchful cinematic eye on the shifting economic and societal landscape of his native Fenyang, a small town in the rural coal-mining Shanxi Province of China. Mountains May Depart is both a culmination of and a departure from Jia’s previous films; a classical love-triangle melodrama that expands in narrative scope and aspect ratio into the story of parallel changes in the lives of a woman and a country from the end of the 20th century to the hypothetical future of 2025. Jia’s frequent collaborator Zhao Tao gives an astonishingly sensitive performance which grounds the ambitious film in emotional immediacy – Mountains May Depart is not a nostalgia piece so much as a reckoning with past choices and their consequences, and Zhao conveys the weight of every one of those decisions on her character. The divisive third act, which steps into the realm of globalized, speculative science-fiction, focuses on her grown son Daole’s alienation from his home, language, and culture, and though it is somewhat awkwardly written and performed in English (a first for Jia), it’s deeply moving. Daole’s tender connection with his teacher (played by Hong Kong screen veteran Sylvia Chang) and unexpected encounter with the same Cantonese pop classic that played a pivotal role in his mother and father’s courtship back in Fenyang complete Jia’s portrait of lives, landscapes, and language transformed by forces beyond their control, while songs and the longing they reflect manage to endure. — Alex Engquist
16) Hell or High Water
Who knew such an intense paean to the Old West would be made in the year 2016? Hell or High Water is modeled directly after the films made when Westerns were in their heyday, but there’s a distinctly mournful aspect to its nostalgia, as if it knows it’s copying something that’s either already dead or dying.
The nostalgia is felt rather than expressed: a moment of pause when cowboys on the backs of speckled horses drive their herd across an asphalt road; miles of otherwise unblemished fields dotted with looming oil rigs; one shot when Jeff Bridges walks out of his motel for a breath of fresh air, his heritage print blanket billowing in the breeze behind him like a character out of a John Ford film except older, grayer, more tired. Two brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) play their outlaw roles and hit their outlaw beats with precision and familiarity, because their characters are both archetypes built from those who have come before. The only difference is the cut of their shirts and that they ride cars instead of horses. The memory of the romance and adventure of the western frontier is there, simmering just under the surface like a heat mirage. It’s a modern Western full of ghosts. — Emma Stefansky
15) Cemetery of Splendor
Yet another story steeped in memory, Cemetery of Splendor sets the past loose on the present in a profoundly dreamlike, poetic way. The film itself feels like a dream, with long take after long take, scenes starting in the middle or at the end of a conversation. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s camera keeps a wide distance from his subjects, the way you feel when you’re in a dream, watching people do things but unable to interact with them.
It almost isn’t a movie you can actively participate in watching — instead, the viewer must immerse themselves in the experience, let themselves slip down into long scenes of someone flipping through the pages of a diary, or one take that lasts for almost five minutes and consists of nothing but a view of a hospital floor, light therapy columns leisurely changing from pink to green to blue and back while the inhabitants sleep. The memory of the place that existed before in the same space haunts and enhances the new structure, and seeps into the minds of those who sleep there as if unable to bear the thought of anyone forgetting. And it’s through those who sleep that the memory ultimately makes itself known, in a beautiful imaginary tour of a long-forgotten palace whose walls have been replaced with by time with trees, vines, and empty air. — Emma Stefansky
14) No Home Movie
Certainly, in light of Chantal Akerman’s death in late 2015, it’s inevitable that one will read a meditation on mortality into No Home Movie, her last completed film. But it’s not just this extra-textual fact that warrants such an interpretation. The film is a feature-length document of Akerman’s relationship with her mother, Natalia—an important presence in some of her previous documentary work, and, one gleans especially from this film, just plain important to her overall—in the last few years of the latter’s life. And boy, is it frank, with the film made up of lengthy Skype conversations; extended in-person discussions about Natalia’s past as a Polish refugee and an Auschwitz survivor, some of the conversations exposing gaps in her memory; and shots of Akerman’s camera merely observing her mother going about her daily routine. Only in its last third does No Home Movie tip over into the truly devastating, as Akerman, and by extension the audience, bears witness to her mother’s physical decline, her gaze remaining as stoic as ever. Akerman was such a consummate film artist that all she needs is a single still shot of the interior of her mother’s apartment at the end to suggest a profound sense of loss. But at least the late, great Akerman was able to leave us with this cinematic memorial, deeply moving in large part because of how unsentimental it is. — Kenji Fujishima
13) La La Land
Bursting with color, enthusiasm, and an impulse to break out into song in the vein of classical musicals like Singin’ in the Rain and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, La La Land is both a detailed, almost calculating homage to such classics as it is an attempt to revive them for the new millennium. This is not a failed attempt, but rather the impressive product of the once-impossible dreams of its young screenwriter/director, Damien Chazelle, whose reach-for-the-stars career trajectory is reflected in all of his work. The theme of rags-to-riches-stardom is more than emphatically consistent in La La Land, which finds two artists—Ryan Gosling as a jazz pianist/aficionado who dreams of opening his own jazz club, and Emma Stone as an aspiring starlet—finding love in each other as they try to carve out their career paths in the most superficial city of all, Los Angeles. Backdrops underscore that superficiality, as do countless scenes in which the harsh realities of being a starving artist are drawn in broad strokes. It’s the rude coffee-store customer, or the nano-second judgment of a casting director, or the spirit-crushing toll of “selling out” one’s art—such scenes spell out predictability, but La La Land somehow stays fresh and entertaining, even when veering into melodramatic territory. Perhaps it’s the song-and-dance numbers, or maybe it’s just that Chazelle knows how to take the story and aesthetic ideas to their extreme and get us to fall in love with The Dream as much as its romantic leads. — Tina Hassannia
12) Lemonade
To non-fans, it can sometimes feel like Beyoncé’s pedestal in the music industry is impossibly sacrosanct, but this year, she proved the validity of her title as Queen Bey for 60 straight minutes in April with the release of the visual album Lemonade. Somewhere between the first utterance of Somali writer Warsan Shire’s devastating poetry and the moment, a few songs later, when Knowles-Carter venomously throws her wedding ring at the camera, Lemonade’s indelible scope becomes apparent. A bevy of directors created evocative visuals–stylistic tributes to cultural and regional histories, images of families and women in poses of isolation and togetherness–that charted their subject’s journey from denial to redemption, but it’s the narrative vision that makes the film feel more likely to be remembered as a work of art than an extended music video. Like some ancient playwright, Knowles-Carter takes a personal story of one marriage and weaves it into a musical odyssey through America’s past and present. The result is a constellation of points as wide-ranging as violence against Black bodies, generational pain, gendered expectations, and the healing power of forgiveness. During a year of so much anguish and unrest, Beyoncé’s ability to take her grandmother’s advice–to make lemonade–feels like a bittersweet, beautiful victory. — Valerie Ettenhofer
11) Love & Friendship
There is no one better suited to adapt Jane Austen than Whit Stillman. Having transformed Lady Susan, Austen’s epistolary novel, into a screenplay with Love & Friendship, the contemporary master of the comedy of manners has created an immersive, period-detailed milieu, a colorful variety of characters, and a non-stop train of witty repartee. But rather than having conversations recounted second-hand via pen and paper, as in Austen’s novel, Love & Friendship sees these characters engage in the flesh, beautifully blending Stillman’s talent for social dignity and character-driven scorn with Austen’s own brand of respectability politics in polite society. The film concerns the powerful manipulations of one Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale, whom Stillman has described as being Lady Susan come to life), a beautiful and cunning young widow whose intrusion into the estate of her in-laws causes quite the stir. The film is a beautiful marriage of two complementary sensibilities—Stillman’s modern take on irony, Austen’s narrativization of the interpersonal lives of 19th century women—that are eerily alike, despite a couple of centuries between the two authors. — Tina Hassannia
Tomorrow: Our writers’ picks for the 10 best films of 2016, plus our separate ballots.
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