Cinemacy Staff/www.cinemacy.com
What we here at Cinemacy consider to be the best of 2016 represents a combination of the movies that had the greatest emotional impact on us, matched with movies that felt innovative or groundbreaking. Here are the films we consider to be last year’s best. Happy new year!
Morgan – The Lobster
The name Yorgos Lanthimos should be on your radar. The 43-year-old director, born in Athens, Greece, is a visionary unlike any other in modern cinema. Bringing strange and surreal worlds to the big screen with such confidence, his past feature films, Dogtooth and Alps, have won numerous awards (as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film). In the ambiguously titled film The Lobster, Lanthimos sends up this idea to make a darkly absurd, yet hilarious and thoughtful look at the amount of artificial and confining rules and structures that humans have put into place to connect with others. The Lobster, which stars Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, takes place in a dystopian, near future world, where single people are apprehended, arrested and then taken to ‘The Hotel,’ where they must find a romantic partner in forty-five days or else (cue the absurd twist) be turned into an animal and released into the woods (it’s not so cruel – they get to choose which animal they would like to be turned into to live out the rest of their days). This is Lanthimos’ third feature film, first in English, and in true Yorgos fashion, he finds the perfect balance between sharp-edged satire and romantic fable in such a way that makes The Lobster the best film of 2016.
Ryan – La La Land
Writer and director Damien Chazelle’s years-in-the-making passion project (he conceived the idea before making 2014’s drum-tastic Whiplash), La La Land checked all of the boxes for me last year: an old Studio-style throwback starring an irresistibly great Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone (the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of our times), a story of artists with both dreams and fears of making it big, a beautifully styled Los Angeles backdrop, a fantastic original score, and altogether incredible direction come together to achieve such a mastered vision of this modern musical. And even past its slick, lovely, fun, and wonderful exterior is a real story and conflicted drama of what it takes to follow your dreams, especially when love – both the love for one’s work and the love for their counterpart – lies at the heart of it. The song and dance numbers are out of this world – literally so in a wonderfully choreographed dance in the famed Griffith Observatory’s Planetarium. With locations all over Los Angeles, I was so moved by the film’s spellbinding jazz music that not long after seeing the film I found myself with Cinemacy’s Editor, my sister Morgan, at Hermosa Beach’s Lighthouse Café for a Sunday Jazz Brunch to take in a location that’s featured in the film. And with a movie that climaxes to such an emotionally soaring level, and ending with perhaps one of the most fantastically choreographed endings of the year, La La Land is the movie that rewards dreamers. And sometimes, people’s faith deserve to be rewarded.
Nelson – Cameraperson
Can you imagine a film exists that has the emotional range of 20 films combined, the singular fingerprint of one artistic vision, speaks volumes about our current generation, all while pushing the boundaries of what the cinema medium is capable of offering? I speak in grand levels about Cameraperson because it is worthy of being recognized as a top-shelf masterpiece. Director Kirsten Johnson has been a cinematographer for 25 years in documentary film and has worked all over the globe on everything from Citizenfour to the most obscure indie docs. In Cameraperson, she compiles footage from her entire career and organizes it as a memoir of her own life experience, both personal and professional. This is an experimental film by nature, but its ability to capture the emotional realities of people throughout her entire journey make it universally relatable. We jump everywhere from Bosnia to Sudan, Brooklyn to Yemen. These images are pulled from the context of other stories, often of mass conflict and sometimes tragedy, but here, Johnson uses them to tell a biographical story of her own journey while miraculously also covering the human condition as a whole. When two outwardly different clips are juxtaposed together, a larger narrative unfolds that is exponentially more effective. I’ve never seen a film like it, and yet for all its boundary-pushing, it’s nonetheless engaging and emotionally enriching from start to finish.
Jasper – 20th Century Women
One of Mike Mills’ many talents as a storyteller is his gift for time and context. In this era of borrowed nostalgia, too often we stop short to define a specific time period by only their looks and sounds. But Mills does something extraordinary with 20th Century Women. He defines 1979 in the city of Santa Barbara, CA by its people. Mills treats his characters with a rare tenderness, free from strict narrative constraints, that allows them to breathe. The humanity that fills his titular trio of women and their femininity is, at once, refreshingly authentic, honest and playful. And through their tribulations, 20th Century Women does something almost otherworldly; it allows you to feel this particular moment in time, in this particular place. Warm, but anxious. Lost, but optimistic. It doesn’t feel to far off from our own moment in time. As matriarch Dorothea points out – punk was ending, Reagan was coming, among other things. 2016 was a similar cultural and political watershed. So, in a funny way, Mike Mills made, perhaps, the most comforting film of the last year; a story brimming with hope and tenderness, that reminds us to listen to the past, but embrace the future. And in that way, 20th Century Women proves to be, simply, timeless.
