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Before getting into this year’s roundup, here are a few honorable mentions for movies that probably aren’t going to make a lot of best-of lists this year. But I enjoyed them for one reason or another, and wanted to highlight them for you here.
Caught Stealing is a feel-bad movie that nevertheless is a lot of fun, just a great example of Darren Aronofsky monkeying with tones in a way that most filmmakers would feel uncomfortable with. It was marketed a little like a Guy Ritchie movie but this is very much a Darren Aronofsky picture, one suffused with notions of addiction and religion and suffering. But it’s more hopeful than most of his movies, offering a light at the end of the tunnel.
David Mamet’s Henry Johnson had my single favorite scene of the year, the twenty-or-so-minute opening sequence. It’s just two men talking—Evan Jonigkeit (the titular lead) and Chris Bauer, probably best known for his work on The Wire and True Blood—but their conversation is part mystery, part philosophical treatise, and absolutely mesmerizing.
I am very much on an island when it comes to Ethan Coen’s second solo outing. And I don’t think Honey Don’t entirely works; it’s the very rare movie that could’ve afforded to be ten minutes longer just to set up the big reveal at the end a little more effectively. But it’s a knotty, sexy, original movie, the sort of thing critics are always claiming they want more of. I still think a lot of reviewers were simply put off by the film’s conclusion, which cuts across the average critic’s ideological sensibilities in fairly striking ways.
One Battle After Another is another movie that I don’t think entirely works, but the first forty minutes are fabulous. If this movie had skipped the last five or ten minutes of codas, it might have made my top ten. But it veers into repetition and sentimentality in a way that I simply find grating every time I watch.
I’m a sucker for Bruce Springsteen, so take this with a grain of salt, but I found Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere pretty gripping. It helps that the film doesn’t hew to the traditional musical biopic form; it’s an odd, combative movie.
After the Hunt, contra Honey Don’t, is the sort of movie that very much could’ve afforded to be ten (or maybe twenty) minutes shorter. But I’m including it here solely because it is, alongside a handful of movies that did make the cut, one of the better movies in recent years to really grapple with the nature of social media and its pernicious influence on society.
And now, on to the top ten!
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10: Black Bag/Presence (tie)
Two Steven Soderbergh originals in one year? How am I supposed to choose? The answer is, I don’t, and I cheat by putting them both at the end of the list! It’s my list, I can do what I want.
Anyway: Presence is a fun little experimental sort of movie with a clockwork-tight script that reveals the ending about thirty seconds before it happens, meaning that it’s perfect. (I got goosebumps just now while thinking about it! Good screenplay by David Koepp, there.) Black Bag, meanwhile, is the sort of high-concept spy thriller that falls squarely under the category of “movies for adults.” Which means none of you went to see it in theaters. But it’s streaming now, so I hope you check it out.
9: Bugonia
What if the “Do your own research” people are right? That’s not precisely the question asked by Bugonia, but it’s not not the question. Either way, it’s a provocation from Yorgos Lanthimos, one that lands almost entirely thanks to the work done by Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone in the lead roles.
8: Train Dreams
I’m a sucker for this sort of voiceover-narrated journey through American history, sue me. Train Dreams is the sort of Malick-tinged movie we deserve more of, dangit! And just beautiful to boot.
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