Best Films of 2017

As an immersive, unpredictable sensory experience, The Human Surge is a prodigious accomplishment from a filmmaker full of ideas about rhythm, texture, and scale. It leaves one anxious to see what he’ll do next. "

Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki’s unworldly drollery, unchanged across 20 films since 1983, feels like it’s from another time—until it’s ruptured by the shocking contemporaneity of the global refugee crisis against which the movie is set. "

Here [Baker] reasserts his commitment to 35mm film, and the garish sun-blasted color of the cheap motel buildings and the grassy lots where the kids play, as if they are young animals learning to go on the run because that may well be all the future holds for them, captures the attention better than the twists of any narrative—not that there isn’t a narrative here, though it’s all but hidden until the heartbreaking end. "

The thread, or rather the long unwinding reels, running through Bill Morrison’s latest filmic excavation is a cache of 500-odd movies, discovered after decades under a swimming pool in a former Gold Rush town in the Yukon. Dawson City: Frozen Time… proves to be Morrison’s best film in years—a bona fide adventure through history, hopscotching across the turn of the 19th century. "

Opposite Daniel Day-Lewis as Reynolds Woodcock, Vicky Krieps’s Alma emerges as the perfect figure for Woodcock’s purposes (and designs)—embodying the freshness of youth, while stolid enough to withstand his frenzies. Intriguingly, and for the first time in Anderson’s career, the woman becomes the real protagonist. "

On the Beach at Night Alone is a staggering series of pained reflections upon the challenges that love faces in an era when we are all far too concerned with everyone else’s business and when opinions—the more judgmental the better—are treated with a sanctity beyond question. "

Haynes simulates, in remarkable, loving detail, varieties of popular art in order to both penetrate and put into context the periods from which they came: not only does Haynes evoke the movements and physicality of the silent screen in telling Rose’s story, at one point he even crafts a silent film within the film, with Moore’s Lillian Mayhew doing her best Lillian Gish as she tries to protect a baby while on a storm-battered plain. "

Clocking in at a meaty 134 minutes, Mudbound is thrillingly ambitious and complex, and features daring experimental flourishes, including a multi-character narration that, while initially a touch overbearing, ultimately lends the film an apposite epistolary quality—repressed characters who are physically or emotionally adrift from their families are given voice, to powerful dramatic effect. "

For the most part, BPM doesn’t worry much about undertaking formal innovation, and instead focuses squarely on helping audiences honor (or perhaps discover) the years of die-ins, guerrilla pamphleting, and peer-led immunology seminars. This is pedagogical cinema made warm and rousing—lively, and against heavy odds. "

The Square’s broad topics function as satellite inquiries to the types of investigations Östlund has also been after in his prior features: how our daily behaviors and responses are ruled or inhibited by forms of psychological makeup and social conditioning. "