December 8, 2017
By Richard Brody
In 2017, the most important event in the world of movies was the revelation, in the Timesand The New Yorker, of sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein, and the resulting liberation of the long-stifled voices of the women and men who had been abused by him or other powerful men in the movie business, and, for that matter, in other arts and industries, too. The prevalence of sexual abuse, and the network of complicity that prevented Weinstein’s abuses from coming to light, and which inflicted additional emotional and professional abuses on the victims, have legal, moral, and political implications that are inseparable from aesthetic ones—from the art of movies.
It’s true every year, but all the more conspicuous now, that any list of the year’s best movies has gaps—of the movies, performances, and other creations that are missing because they are unrealized, unrealized because the women (and, yes, also some men) who were working their way up to directing, producing, or other notable activities in the world of movies, who were already acting or writing or fulfilling other creative positions, had their careers derailed when they were threatened, intimidated, silenced, or otherwise detached from the industry by powerful men abusing their power for their own pleasure and advantage.
It has always been so for women in the movie industry, and it is all the more so for women of color, who have faced, both in the corridors of the business and in the columns of critical consideration, a double dose of indifference, neglect, and dismissal.
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What’s missing from the year-end list, and from the era in movies, isn’t only the unmade work by these filmmakers but the artistry and the careers of cast and crew members who would have been in their unrealized films. Great directors discover the talent and develop the artistry of great actors, directors of photography, editors, and others, whose absences now scar the industry. The mentoring, collaborating, and inspiration they could have provided for others to follow in their footsteps have all been permanently lost, too.
It is no coincidence that Hollywood and its tributaries have rarely seemed as empty as they do now, the films rarely as hollow as the ones that have been on display recently. The world of Hollywood and off-Hollywood (i.e., films produced independently but featuring actors and directors who have worked on studio films) has been artificially thinned out, diminished both in human and artistic terms, by the absence of women and people of color, whose artistry (like all artistry) is inseparable from and indicative of a particular and personal range of experience.
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The best movies aren’t only ones that include new voices; they’re also ones that include voices in new ways. Work of that sort is reflected on this year’s list, as on last year’s; it has always been the summit of the art.
- “Get Out” (Jordan Peele)
In his horror comedy, Peele uses familiar devices to convey philosophically rich and politically potent ideas about the state of race relations in America.
- “A Quiet Passion” (Terence Davies)
Davies’s Emily Dickinson bio-pic is an absolute, drop-dead masterwork.
- “Good Time” (Josh and Benny Safdie)
“Good Time,” starring Robert Pattinson, streaks and smears and shreds the screen with a sense of furious subjectivity.
- “A Ghost Story” (David Lowery)
The movie’s dramatic power is inseparable from its quiet, sensuous splendor.
- “Slack Bay” (Bruno Dumont)
Dumont, who is from the region where the film was shot, fuses genre with his intimate knowledge of its mysteries and myths to create a cinematic universe of his own.
- “Phantom Thread” (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Strange, beautiful, absurd, and brilliant; a furious, tightly controlled, even violent love story done with a chill of decorum. Daniel Day-Lewis, for his last performance, is like a ballet dancer with his eyes and his voice.
- “Beach Rats” (Eliza Hittman)
Hittman’s second feature makes talk and its absence among rough-and-tumble South Brooklyn teens the painful core of its story.
- “Faces Places” (Agnès Varda and JR)
The directorial duo travels to small towns in France that are threatened by the economic and social forces of modern life.
- “Song to Song” (Terrence Malick)
Within his story of a shifting romantic triangle, Malick develops an overwhelming, rapturous variety of visual experience.
- “Sylvio” (Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney)
A generous, achingly tender comedy that offers some of the loopiest, most wondrously inventive humor this side of Jared Hess.
- “Lady Bird” (Greta Gerwig)
Daring, distinctive, and personal in text and theme, the film is recognizably conventional in texture and style.
- “Columbus” (Kogonada)
The film looks at a young architecture connoisseur, and considers the Indiana city’s buildings with as much analytical ardor as its protagonist does.
- “Hermia & Helena” (Matías Piñeiro)
The fanciful twists of this romantic roundelay keep the Shakespearean promise of the title.
- “On the Beach at Night Alone” (Hong Sang-soo)
There’s a dark romanticism powering this furious, tautly controlled, yet coolly comedic drama.
- “Rat Film” (Theo Anthony)
The Baltimore-based filmmaker investigates the city’s rodent infestation and uncovers its surprising political roots and odd byways.
- “Strong Island” (Yance Ford)
Ford’s extraordinarily dramatic documentary is both personal and investigative.
- “The Meyerowitz Stories” (Noah Baumbach)
Baumbach’s latest film can be thought of as a remake of, a sequel to, and a drastic improvement upon “The Squid and the Whale.”
- “The Son of Joseph” (Eugène Green)
The vast thematic scope and high moral purpose of Green’s film are joined to a cinematic vision that’s also mightily, incisively comedic.
- “Hissein Habré, A Chadian Tragedy” (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun)
Haroun delves into his country’s history in this intimate, experiential, and impassioned documentary.
- “The B-Side” (Errol Morris)
Morris’s portrait of Elsa Dorfman conveys a lifetime of wisdom, self-awareness, frustration, and survivor’s pride. It’s also a magnificent tribute to photography itself.
- “Félicité” (Alain Gomis)
The movie is a virtual documentary of Kinshasa’s city sights and moods, and also a bitter exposé of a country without a social safety net.
- “Dawson City: Frozen Time” (Bill Morrison)
Morrison’s documentary links the gold rush with the rise of Hollywood.
- “Colossal” (Nacho Vigalondo)
This genre mashup revels in the power of cinematic artifice to tell a story that confronts big questions about real life.
- “I Called Him Morgan” (Kasper Collin)
A documentary about the life and tragic death of the great jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan traces the relationship between Morgan and the woman who shot him dead.
- “The Unknown Girl” (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
A young doctor’s investigation of a prostitute’s killing causes her to discover the moral failure of her entire life.
- “Actor Martinez” (Nathan Silver and Mike Ott)
With their imaginative new film, Ott and Silver set themselves apart by daring to be dramatic.
- “Whose Streets?” (Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis)
This passionate, intimate, analytical documentary, centered on residents of Ferguson, Missouri, in the aftermath of the killing by police of Michael Brown, considers the political conditions that led to it and efforts to seek change.
- “Logan Lucky” (Steven Soderbergh)
With its combination of giddy narrative finesse and a delight in regional idiosyncrasies, Soderbergh’s new heist film may be his most Coen-esque.
- “Planetarium” (Rebecca Zlotowski)
Natalie Portman gives a great bilingual performance in Zlotowski’s glossy historical fantasy about the French movie industry of the nineteen-thirties.
- “Marshall” (Reginald Hudlin)
Hudlin brings an apt blend of vigor and empathy to this historical drama, set in 1941.
- “The Lost City of Z” (James Gray)
The story of a search that doesn’t come to fruition, a series of missions that don’t achieve their goals, and that nonetheless reverberate powerfully and enduringly.
- “Icaros: A Vision” (Leonor Caraballo and Matteo Norzi)
The hallucinatory power of ayahuasca and the incantatory lure of rituals fuse with existential dread in this darkly hypnotic drama.
- “Mimosas” (Oliver Laxe)
A metaphysical road movie about a group of travellers accompanying an ailing Moroccan sheik through mind-bending mountain and desert wilds to his home town, starring the visionary nonprofessional actor Shakib Ben Omar.
- “Wait for Your Laugh” (Jason Wise)
A showcase of Rose Marie’s long career, from radio stardom to “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “Hollywood Squares,” paints a picture of her times—and dispels nostalgia for them.
- “The Rape of Recy Taylor” (Nancy Buirski)
Essential viewing, not least for its emphasis on the crucial role of women in the civil-rights movement.
One of the most noteworthy movies of 2017 is a TV show, “Twin Peaks: The Return,” all eighteen episodes of which were directed by David Lynch and written by Lynch and Mark Frost. The series came in at the No. 1 spot on the Cahiers du Cinéma list, and at No. 2 in theSight & Sound poll. It’s not on my list, and not only because it’s not a movie but, rather, a TV show that shares some important traits with movies—most significantly, having one director throughout. Most of what’s good in “Twin Peaks: The Return” is good in movie-like ways—the pacing and framing, the space and time and tone that develop around, and are inseparable from, the realization of certain main characters (especially the ones played by Kyle MacLachlan and by Lynch himself) and some secondary ones. But most of its worst aspects, such as the jigsaw plotting, the episodic separations and anticipations and echoes, and the overblown fantasy (as in the excruciating eighth episode and the recurrences of the Red Room) are TV. The crucial inspiration of the series—the cosmic centrality of rape, incest, and the murder of a young woman, and the impossible quest for justice, the irresistible temptation to try to put the damaged world back into joint—spans both cinema and television; it’s the mark of Lynch’s over-all artistic greatness.
*Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999, and has contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Samuel Fuller. He writes about movies in his blog for newyorker.com. He is the author of “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.”
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2017-in-review/the-best-movies-of-2017
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Emma Olive 