Initially, it seemed as though 2016 was shaping up to be a moderately disappointing year in cinema. Front-loaded with a handful of stand-out achievements, the year quickly became mired in the underwhelming and the downright awful where film was concerned. Then, around April and May, something started to shift, even as the multiplex tentpole offerings settled into unusually durable mediocrity. Exquisite, invigorating, and original films started to appear faster than one could keep up with them. By September it was apparent that 2016—for all its catastrophes and heartbreak in other respects—was a fantastic year to be a cinephile in St. Louis. In assembling this catalog of the best films to screen in local venues in the past twelve months, it was uncharacteristically tough to pare the list down to just ten cinematic triumphs. The list of runners-up is, accordingly, uncommonly long this year, and dense with films that are superlative in their own right.
A film qualifies for this list if it could be viewed theatrically by the ticketed general public in the St. Louis metropolitan area between January 1 and December 31, 2016.
10. Approaching the Elephant (Amanda Wilder; USA)
It took some time for director Amanda Wilder’s captivating, wondrously complex portrait of one year at an experimental New Jersey free school to alight in St. Louis, but it was worth the wait. What makes this modest, sparing, and often emotionally agonizing film the documentary feature of the year is how effortlessly Wilder conveys every prickly nuance and daunting challenge in the teacher-student relationship—and all within a setting that upends that relationship. Reviewed here.
9. Zootopia (Byron Howard and Rich Moore; USA)
Disney Animation’s best feature since entering the digital age is not an allegory, as so many have mischaracterized it, but a massively charming fable and astonishing work of speculative fiction. Anchored by Ginnifer Goodwin’s endearing portrayal of Judy Hopps, Zootopia vividly expands the potential of the family-family cartoon, sustaining the silliest visual gags while also deftly handling sophisticated themes ranging from urbanism to institutional racism. Reviewed here.
8. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins; USA)
Barry Jenkins’ achingly marvelous saga of a man’s long-delayed emotional opening is a feat constructed on a foundation of vibrant aesthetics and superlative performances. Moonlight is miraculously dense with the conflicting feelings and charged silences that so often characterize real-world relationships—parent-child, mentor-child, friend-friend—but it’s the authentic electricity of latent romantic love that renders its final act one of the most ecstatic will-they-or-won’t-they cinematic dances of the past decade.
7. The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi) (Chan-wook Park; South Korea)
It’s been all been done before: the tragedy of the grifter who falls for the mark; the forbidden love under the nose of a despot; the story retold from a new perspective. However, it’s never been executed with the style, thrills, and daring eroticism that Chan-wook Park brings to The Handmaiden. A puzzle box of limitless delights, it’s that rare cinematic jewel that is even more captivating once all its secrets are already known.
6. Our Little Sister (Umimachi Diary) (Hirokazu Koreeda; Japan)
Director Hirokazu Koreeda has been making superlative humanist dramas for over two decades, but Our Little Sister might be his most perfect film. There’s not a single extravagant or histrionic gesture to found in this tale of three adult sisters who take in their adolescent half-sibling, just a typically generous and breathtakingly precise rendering of a family struggling together to find happiness in a complicated world. It’s lovely, nourishing cinema about real people, pure and simple. Reviewed here.
5. Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford; USA)
Director Tom Ford’s dazzling and ominous sophomore feature is a cinematic triple threat: It’s at once a gorgeous work of art, a deliriously satisfying pulp pleasure, and disquieting provocation about regret, revenge, and the power of fiction. Cunningly structured, it leaps between three storylines with flawless timing and irresistible aesthetic flourishes. Wryly self-aware but earnest in its ambitions, Nocturnal Animals is a seductive fusillade, barraging the viewer with relentless elegance, terrors, and thematic agitations. The film’s final scene, an audacious, stinging slap to its heroine and the viewer, is just the exquisitely rotten cherry on a superbly luscious creation. Reviewed here.
4. The Neon Demon (Nicolas Winding Refn; USA, Denmark, France)
A New Girl in the Big City fable set in Los Angeles’ high fashion modeling world, The Neon Demon seems like a recipe for facile tut-tutting about beauty standards and the commodification of the female body. However, director Nicolas Winding Refn’s glittering marvel of a film is so much more than a social critique. The film plies the viewer with the pink champagne of a dreamy synth-pop score and candy-hued visuals, all the while laying the foundation for a multi-faceted depiction of unfulfilled desires and oh-so deadly sins. The echoes of Lynch, Argento, and Bava that surround hapless ingénue Jessie signal exactly what sort of story she is inhabiting: a tale of horror, as grim and bloody as they come. Relentlessly chic and unexpectedly harrowing, The Neon Demon isn’t so much a vision of a world gone mad as a peek at a new amoral order… and it’s delectable. Reviewed here.
3. American Honey (Andrew Arnold; UK, USA)
At the core of Andrea Arnold’s stunning Post-Millennial American road epic is a miracle. It should be absolutely intolerable to spend nearly three hours with the film’s tribe of fidgety, foolhardy door-to-door hustlers as they wander through Flyover Country in search of their own cut-rate American dream. However, director Arnold crafts this tale of misadventure at the margins of society into a breathlessly and ceaselessly poetic work of social realism—without ever awkwardly rushing to paper over the grime. Sasha Lane’s revelatory breakout performance as dreadlocked newcomer Star provides a incomparable window into this world. At once representative and an outsider, she’s presented as a riot of live-wire impulses, bruised cynicism, and ephemeral, fastidiously fortified dreams. Through Star, the viewer is bewitched into sharing her little band’s fleeting joys, while remaining ever aware of the perils that may lurk beyond the horizon of tomorrow. It’s gritty splendor the likes of which American cinema hasn’t seen in an age. Reviewed here.
2. The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos; Greece, Ireland, UK, France, Netherlands)
The premise of director Yorgos Lanthimos’ sere dystopian comedy seems like the setup for an epic groaner of a shaggy dog joke: In the future, single people are compelled to pair off based on superficial traits, lest they be transformed into animals as punishment. By means of that surreal zoological conceit, however, The Lobster positively savages the screwy business that is contemporary romance. Draining all traces of discovery, passion, and generosity from the reciprocal process of coupling, the film paints a hideously raw picture of human folly, one all the more tragic for the authentic, desperate pain at its heart. It’s a ration of bone-dry suffering, but also perversely hilarious, in a way that no film about loneliness, resentment, and conformity has any right to be. And then there’s that ending: In one of the bleakest final shots of the past decade, The Lobster presents a dilemma that is damn near perfect in its cruelty.
1. The Witch (Robert Eggers; USA)
Director Robert Eggers’ masterpiece of colonial terror comes tapping at the windowpane at a crucial point in the history of American horror, just as the genre’s capacity for winking referentiality has reached a saturation point. The Witch makes the bogeyman real again, and transports the viewer impeccably to a time and place where his existence is an article of faith. Yet the film succeeds in part because it is timeless: It is not an American horror story, but the American Horror Story, the one the nation has been telling with various generic set and costume changes for three centuries, a tale of invasion, abduction, and corruption. And while there might be a monster in the woods, the fear lies within the palisade, and fear, as they say, is the mind-killer. In its portrayal of a nuclear family that turns on and annihilates itself, The Witch creates a hellish and quintessentially American nightmare that stands alongside milestones such as Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Shining. Every formal aspect of the film is peerless—performances, screenplay, score, cinematography, design—but beyond its merits as an auteurist triumph, Egger’s work will resonate for years to come as a potent, desolate fairy tale. Its darkling supremacy can be discerned in a single chilling query: Wouldst thou like to live deliciously? Reviewed here and considered further here.
The Next Best
11. Certain Women
12. Arrival
13. Hail, Caesar!
14. Toni Erdmann
15. 45 Years
16. A Bigger Splash
17. Elle
18. Sunset Song
19. Kubo and the Two Strings
20. Swiss Army Man
Honorable Mentions: After the Storm; Anthropoid; Boy & the World; City of Gold; Green Room; Eye in the Sky; Fences; Jackie; Kate Plays Christine; Love and Friendship; Manchester by the Sea; Midnight Special; A Quiet Passion; The Revenant; Weiner.
Overrated, Slightly or Highly: April and the Extraordinary World; Doctor Strange; The Jungle Book; La La Land; Loving; Moana; My Golden Days; Sully; Tower; A War.
Underrated: Allied; The BFG; Do Not Resist; Free State of Jones; Knight of Cups; Kung Fu Panda 3; Rogue One: A Star Wars Story; The Shallows; Shin Godzilla; Wiener-Dog.
Best Overlooked Performance: Gabriel Byrne, Louder Than Bombs.
Most Watchable Mess (Summer Franchise Film Edition): Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice
Most Watchable Mess (Opaque Art Film Edition): Knight of Cups.
Best Sex Act: Ines eats a gooey petit four in Toni Erdmann.
Best Sexual Detail: Star offhandedly removing her tampon before her second tryst with Jake in American Honey.
Best Act of Love: Kevin makes dinner for Black in Moonlight.
Notable Films I Missed: Aferim!; Aquarius; Cosmos; Don’t Think Twice; Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words; The Innocents; Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World; NotFilm; One More Time with Feeling; Southside with You.
Films We’re Still Waiting for in St. Louis: 20th Century Women; Cameraperson; Hidden Figures; I, Daniel Blake; The Love Witch; The Mermaid; No Home Movie; Paterson; Silence; Things to Come.
