Best of 2016

Ten films I liked that came out in Australian cinemas in 2016, in no particular order:

Elle - a confronting film in that it consistently refuses to give the audience what they expect (to the point where several synopses tend to describe a far more conventional film than what we get). This is absolutely a vehicle for Isabelle Huppert to play a character who seeks no sympathy and instead is relentlessly fascinating and engrossing. This asks a hell of a lot of questions about sex, violence and female empowerment and answers almost none of them, but it's fascinating none the less.

The Witch - I had a friend who claimed this isn't a horror movie. As far as I'm concerned, he's wrong. This is creepy, twisted cinema that uses the premise "what if everything the puritans feared was real" and goes with it into disturbingly destructive territory. It's about spreading insanity inside an isolated family as the forces that keep them retreated together tear them apart rapidly once darker thoughts come in.

Zootopia - I love this film unabashedly. It's an unusually political film for Disney, about how fear is used in manipulating people, and it's one of Disney's best thought-through worlds, as every animalistic feature is chosen perfectly for the character. It's a film about a society as much as its protagonists, and if it's ultimately more hopeful than the real world has turned out to be this year... well, that's what filmic fantasy is for. Hope.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople - I love this film so much I recommended it to practically everyone I know - there are some films you only recommend to people who are on the right wavelength, but with this one, you just need to be human for it to work. It's a funky fun film about childhood and family and finding your place in the world with its own unique sense of humour, an adventure with heart and soul and toughness in all the right places. It's got Sam Neill's best performance in ages, it's got a kid whose personality bleeds off the screen in Julian Dennison, and it proves Taika Waititi is absolutely a director to watch out for.

Hell or High Water - A west-texas crime thriller that operates without clear goodies and baddies (all the characters live somewhere in a morally grey area), this has Jeff Bridges in possibly his most Jeff-Bridges-iest performance ever, along with strong work from Ben Foster and Chris Pine as a pair of bank robbing brothers - one responsible, one not. If the ending is slightly inevitable, it's none the worse for that - there's a grim logic to this that really works.

I Daniel Blake - Ken Loach apparently came out of retirement to do this, and if so, it's only because this is the film that absolutely sums up all of his strengths (and precious few of his weaknesses). A personal story that also doubles as an indictment of the uncaring economic forces that crush a working-class man struggling to keep afloat after a heart attack, adrift in a social security system that sees him as nothing more than an obligation they want to discharge. It's funny, it's brutal, it's entirely contemporary and it was a justifiable Palme D'Or winner.

Kubo and the Two Strings - This is pure magic from Laika, a story about a boy facing loss and adversity with bravery and compassion. It's got beautiful production design, with strange exotic creatures and landscapes to be traversed, it's got characters of strength and integrity, it's got humour and it's got a clever ending to wrap up things quite unexpectedly.

Room - This is a film that absolutely commits to its core idea and thereby makes something palatable that should by all rights be incredibly off putting. By taking the kids eye view of a situation that is brutal and unpleasant, we somehow get to know exactly what is happening and how horrible it is without ever being completely crushed by it. This idea of a kid's fantasy world redeeming awful events is a concept that Terry Gilliam notably stumbled in with "Tideland", done completely right. Performances by Brie Larson as the mum and Jacob Tremblay as the kid are the pure centre of this film, and both are gripping. If Lenny Abrahamson can do both this and the completely different but also best-of-the-year "Frank", there's no telling what he'll be up to next.

Steve Jobs - Aaron Sorkin cannot write ordinary people having ordinary conversations, or people doing regular things. Stick them anywhere conventional and his people will inevitably sound like self-important twats over-inflating their own worth. Stick them somewhere where that self-importance is at least somewhat justified, though, and you have magic. This is a classic example of "screenplays are structure" - the three-product-launch structure and the conversations taking place beforehand are, of course, absolutely a contrivance (the film even admits to it) but by keeping everything focussed on a couple of small events rather than trying to get everything into two hours, we get to go a bit deeper into what makes Jobs tick, and I found this absolutely compelling viewing.

Green Room - A simply designed but well-excecuted tight thriller as a punk band ends up besieged in the green room of a neo-nazi club (with the nemeses led by an appropriately skin-headed Patrick Stewart), this is tense, gripping cinema to rattle your nerves, effective in keeping the audience tense for as long as possible.

Moana

The Disney princess is an ever-expanding world, taking in a wide variety of girls from fish to redheads to even Sarah Silverman (dammit, Vanelope Van Der Schweetz is a Disney Princess). But Moana may be one of their more proactive princesses - there's not even the vaguest hint of a handsome prince in this one, and she's suitably plucky and determined and has a heroic theme-song to voyage forth.

Disney clearly know what they're doing with this sorta thing, and do it very well. Voice casting and direction is top-notch - Dwayne Johnson, for instance, could be counted on to get the braggart and the self-important bits of his demi-god Maui, but who'd have guessed he could be so touching when he needs to be? Clearly Disney did.

This is the typical Disney semi-musical, and in this case the songs are part-written by Broadway Wunderkind of the moment Lin-Manuel Miranda. The're an eclectic bunch - some islander chanting for "We know the way", a traditional heroic-girl-I-want song for "How Far I'll go", a Bowie tribute for Jermaine Clement's monster with "Shiny", and a rumpus for Dwayne Johnson (yes, the Rock sings! Quite well, too!). If there's no breakout "Let it Go" sized hit here, that's probably going to be gratefully appreciated by parents everywhere.

In short, this is good quality Disney work to provide happiness to many, with cute animal sidekicks and everything. Recommended.

Allied

Tis the season of everything-old-is-new-again, with this return to the world-war-two thriller genre. Brad Pitt and Marion Cottilard play two anti-german agents in Casablanca, both preparing to kill the local ambassador. Their cover requires them to pose as husband and wife, and faking intimacy leads to a real relationship (including the return of Brad Pitt's bum, the body part that give him his big break back in "Thelma and Louise"). After their mission succeds, he brings her to London, marries her and starts a family - but then the higher ups advise she may actually be a German double-agent. What will he do to find out truth, and what might he have to do once he finds it?

Pitt is much less interesting as a leading man than he is in character roles, and while handsome, that doesn't always translate to romantic chemistry. While the film is a tad more explicit than the old school stuff (Pitt and Cotillard have a big lust-in-the-desert scene and another grapple in the english countyside, plus he drops a few F words, he has a lesbian sister, and there's one party during the blitz that turns into a free-for-all-bachannal), it's still very retro in its general manner. The setup phase during the mission in Casablanca is a bit touch-and-go, too - the film only really starts firing on all cylinders late in that mission, and that rolls into the English sequences.

Ultimately, this is probably pretty disposable stuff - if you miss it, you haven't missed much, but if you see it, you probably won't be too irritated by it.

The Edge of Seventeen

The coming-of-age movie has a long history to it - and the dysfunctional female-lead teenage comedy goes back to at least "Heathers". "Edge of Seventeen", though, is a strange kinda breakthrough, in that it feels like it's actually about a teenager in all their inward contradictions, rather than an adult who happens to still be in high school. Nadine, our protagonist, desperately wants to transcend everything that keeps her where she is - her family, her virginity, her own personal incompetence - but is trapped by the fact that she's just not ready yet, and frequently lashes out quite unpleasantly at everyone around her. The film sympathises with her without letting her off the hook for her failings - she is a wildly immature young woman, but not a monster. Her crashings and burnings through the trials of teenagehood, when nobody seems to be on her side, is awkward, hilarious and touching.

Paterson

Jim Jarmusch's minimalism can be disconcerting to someone who is, as I've mentioned elsewhere, as massively-plot-focussed as I am. It seems to work best either in films that have a short-film structure (either directly, like "Night on Earth" or "Coffee and Cigarettes", or mildly hidden, like "Broken Flowers", which essentially restarts the plot every time Bill Murray encounters another character), or films that have a genre-through line that keeps them engaging ("Down By Law" has the prison escape, "Ghost Dog" has the samurai/revenge plot). "Paterson" has little of these (maybe a little of the hidden short-film structure) but instead has a Monday-Sunday structure dealing with Paterson's everyday life as a bus-driver, occasional private poet, and partner to the more ostentatiously artistic Laura. The everydayness (and repetitiveness) can be a little wearying in the early stages, though there is a zen-like calmness and acceptance that comes (it possibly helps that the incidents on Friday, Saturday and Sunday feel a little bigger and more impactful than the early stages).

Adam Driver spends a lot of the film reacting rather than necessarily taking particularly active action, but he's a solid protagonist to lay everything else on (and there is one hysterical moment where he tries to keep down an unspeakable meal that Laura makes for him). I wound up quite enjoying this, although I do still feel that the opening thirty-or-so minutes are a bit of a slog (and will admit to having shut-eye during some of them). And this is a small story about a mild man of mild accomplishments. But it does have that certain human something that feels generous of soul.

Sing!

Sometimes a movie comes along that is so good at what it does that it kills other movies that are trying to be in the same genre. That movie this year, for me, was "Zootopia", which was so good at creating a culture and a purpose for its city-of-talking-animals premise that it's managed to make two of Illumination's animated features look feeble by comparison. "Secret Life of Pets" was generic in several other ways too, from its borrowed-from-Toy-Story-premise of two rival dogs who need to get home downwards, but "Sing", while nice enough in the watching, is separately flawed.

For a start, there's never really a clear idea where it's meant to be taking place. Iconography appears to be grabbed at random between San Francisco and Los Angeles, And there really isn't a reason why many of the animals are the particular animal they are - or if there is, it's used in service of a one off gag only (the payoff to why the impresario of the theatre is a Koala and why his best friend is a sheep is pretty good, but the rest don't really do a lot). The subplots are overloaded and rarely overlap particularly, meaning that the finale concert is just a series of individual endings rather than a team effort. Nothing really seems to be thought through beyond it's immediate effect - Reese Witherspoon's Rosita invents an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine to help her get away to rehearsals, but there's no payoff within the context of the wider film, her abilities are only confined to her subplot).

I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a little bit of entertainment in this - but for a film with a long-ish running time, this doesn't feel like it's been fully thought through and worked on - it feels like the kinda thing Disney would send back for a second or third or fiftieth redraft until the film went from "okay" to "utter perfection". Which is why Disney is Disney and Illumination ... isn't.

Office Christmas Party

A film that's pretty much as generic as it's title, "Office Christmas Party" is very much a standard issue US comedy where the heroic protagonists engage in all kinds of unruly behaviour both to celebrate the season and to hopefully win one big business account. Few actors emerge with particular credit - Jason Bateman is still stuck in roughly exactly the same role he's been performing since 2003's "Arrested Development", TJ Miller's playing a less interesting variation on his "Silicon Valley" character, Jennifer Aniston's applying the same bitchiness she had for "Horrible Bosses", and so on down the cast list. Kate McKinnon almost manages to make her uptight HR figure work (despite more than one fart joke). But really, this feels utterly photocopied from several other movies without an original thought in its brain.

Well, mostly. The last-minute-twist that saves the company is so utterly ludicrous I don't think any other movie would be dumb enough to include it. But one last minute ludicrous twist is not enough to save this from the ranks of the truly inessential.

Rogue One

"Star Wars" is my generation's mythology. It's simply ingrained in us. There's something fundamental about the battle between good and evil, in a galaxy far far away, where pure heroes fight dark villains.

"Rogue One" takes a couple of interesting risks with this formula - some of which work, some of which don't as well. For starters, this is a story very much about the soldiers on the sidelines - those whose bodycount forms the background for the other films' heroics. A team assembled just to allow other people to get a chance to end the suffering.

The opening couple of scenes are a bit all-over-the-place - our characters aren't quite focussed on a mission, so much as all out for their own ends, without a clear idea where everything is going. But as the plot develops, everything starts to pull together, until the final half-hour is pure epic heroics with a brutal undercurrent, as we know not all the heroes are going to make it out alive.

Director Gareth Edwards excels at the big stuff - the battles and explosions and space battles. The individual character-level stuff is a bit spottier - the two highlights being Alan Tudyk's sarcastic droid and Donnie Yen's blind monk (paying slight tribute to the saga's samurai roots by basically being Zatoichi). Yes, this is a nostalgia trip, but it's a trip that feels rich in its own right, rather than just picking up reflected glories (or, as some nostalgia trips have done, lessening the impact of the first films).

Rosalie Blum

Vincent is a mildly lonely hairdresser, living downstairs from his mum in a small town, with a life that isn't quite going anywhere. Then a trip across town suddenly introduces him to Rosalie Blum, a woman he's sure he's seen before. And so struck is he by her that he feels the need to follow her. Frequently. Until suddenly something very different starts to reveal itself...

This does sound an awful lot like a "stalking is very charming" film. And to a certain extent, yes, that's the opening premise. But the story does eventually open up to be about something else - somewhere around the one-third mark. This is still a bit of a French Charm Offensive, with everybody kinda sweet and wacky and a little bit odd, but it's an offensive that works - you are won over by these odd people in their individual quests to find something to keep themselves occupied. The story unravels in a smooth, gentle way - not something that's ever going to rock your world, but it's going to make you feel nice and cosy. Jean Rappeneau directs with a firm hand - again, there isn't really anything here where you're going to be knocked out, but it works as what it is, a fun gallic trifle.

La La Land

The old-fashioned Hollywood Romance, with singing and dancing and all that, has been long in abeyance. Attempts in the seventies and early eighties to give it a comeback by Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola were signature flops ("New York New York" and "One from the Heart" respectively). So how is it that Damien Chazelle is able to capture it so well?

Well, it turns out it's the chemistry, stupid. Robert DeNiro and Frederick Forrest are both highly skilled actors, but romantic chemistry is not in their wheelhouse. But it is definitely in Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone's. Chazelle bets a lot on that chemistry - they are basically the only two characters in the film, and if that doesn't work, the entire film disappears down the drain - but it pays off well. You want to see these two people together and you enjoy it when they are.

Of the other elements - the songs themselves are no more than middling, and the plot itself is mostly something that exists to give the characters things to do rather than something particularly driving. But this is such a gorgous film to look at (lush retro cinematography and the not-inconsiderable-charms of the two leads) that it barely matters. It's a bit of a lopsided love-letter to LA, the city that both offers dreams and denies them simultaneously, where this kind of simple fantasy can come alive under the ever-present sun.

This is a very comfy film to go into awards season with - its major intent is to entertain rather than to deeply plow into the human condition - but none the worse for that.

Up for Love

Romantic comedy throws a lot of awkward obstacles in the face of true love. Can two people find love on opposite sides of the country (Sleepless in Seattle)? Can love bloom in what starts as a financial transaction? (Pretty Woman) Or in this case - can love bloom when the guy is a whole lot shorter than the girl?

Yes, that does not seem like a particularly compelling concept. And when you consider Jean Dujardin is a regular-highted actor and therefore is only shrunken through special effects, meaning that he and Virginie Efira (as the girl) aren't able to touch particularly regularly (as everytime they do, it's an expensive effects shot), it's even further weakened. With all this obvious baggage on board, the rest of the film is pretty mild and charming in that not-trying-very-hard-French-way, and the story starts to be "can a woman fall in love if all her friends are horrible people". Dujardin's character is a pleasant charmer with not a lot of complications, Efira is a lovely lady with a dodgy ex-husband and a doepy secretary, and it's only very rarely that we get any suggestion that there's anything particularly holding them apart (a brief moment where seeing him in a mirror shows his i childlike proportions to Efira, which is momentarily a bit interesting, but then that's hurried away from again).

This isn't an utterly uncharming way to waste an hour and a half, but it is kinda pointless. It's not so much a "go see it" as "you don't have to run in the opposite direction if this is showing near you"

Dancer

There are two things in making a good documentary. First, you must have a good subject. Second, you must exploit that subject to full effect.

"Dancer" has the first, but doesn't quite hit the second. Sergei Polunin is an incredible dancer, with a grand array of leaps and movements and an agressive ability to stalk the stage, dominating it. He's also deeply conflicted about his own job - his family sacrificed incredibly to allow him to train at the top level, but while performing at the UK royal ballet he had a mental snap and fled back to eastern Europe. There's drugs, there's confusion, there's a young man trying to figure out what he wants to do when he's been carved very distinctly into being good at this one, physically demanding, thing.

Alas, this is also an authorised film, so it doesn't quite dwell deeply enough into the various issues involved. The drugs in particular are almost skirted over - we don't really know what this meant to his body, or what this meant to his mind, Polunin's declarations that he's quitting dancing feel particularly weird as ... well, he doesn't actually appear to be doing that. The climactic video, shot by David LaChapelle, is an emotional and artistic crescendo, but the follow up as the video gets comments like "inspires me to be a dancer" should feel far more conflicted than they actually do - is bringing more people into a body-breaking profession like this really a good thing?

Still, this does have Polunin's dancing compiled in interesting ways and a broad outline of the issues that his life gives rise to, even if it doesn't, for my taste, cut quite deep enough.

The Fencer

A Finnish/Estonian co-production that tells the story of events in post world-war 2 Estonia, where a country that had been occupied by the Nazis was now occupied by the Russians instead, and where people's pasts could very easily be suddenly used against them. It's a paranoid time into which arrives a new schoolteacher who sets up a fencing club. Many of the kids are orphaned or just have a mother after the war and the soviet purges that have followed, so the activity becomes increasingly appealing to them. But the headmaster and the local political officer are increasingly against the club, and it seems inevitable the secrets of the schoolteacher's past are going to have to come out....

This is a film that has a little bit of cliche at the centre of it - the kids are a ragtag bunch who get inspired by their teacher, and there's elements of the sports movie in the climax as the schoolteacher take the kids to a tournament in Leningrad. But the reason cliches come back is because, if deployed correctly, they work. And they largely work in this - in particular, some of the kid actors are pretty damn good, I can't argue that this is amazing and unmissable, but it is a nice story nicely told.

The Founder

Ray Kroc is known as the founder of McDonalds. But, well, he isn't. He's the guy that spread the fast-food gospel, getting the franchise to move from one burger stand to the across-America phenomena it became (future CEOs would get it to go international). That simple inflation, though - that desire to be just a bit more than he actually is, defines the guy. He's that dark side of American Capitalism, a kind of pointless desperation just to be the best guy, not for any financial reasons, just because if you're not the best you don't count.

Michael Keaton almost manages to make this creature vaguely sympathetic. It's easier in the early stages, where he's struggling, than it is later on, when he's demolishing people around him just cause he can. He dismisses his marriage (this is a flaw in the film - Laura Dern's wife character disappears after the divorce and doesn't even get the benefit of a closing wrapup "this is what happened to her later" - possibly nothing much did, but I wish the screenwriters had thought her at least wothy of five minutes of research), he dismisses the guys who actually came up with the McDonalds concept (the McDonald brothers, played well by John Carroll Lynch as the avuncular Mac and Nick Offerman as the somewhat more technically minded Dick) and a couple of other business partners along the way.

This is a little bit "failed oscar bait" - it doesn't seem to have picked up on the awards circuit and that does appear to be kinda the reason why it was made. And this is a little soft at the centre - it's not quite willing to commit to blackening the name of American Capitalism, though it does incidentally make it look kinda bad. But it does have a nice motion to it, and a pretty strong cast. I fully admit that I probably buy into the "lives of awful men" trope a fair bit, so I was happy to go with this, but this isn't exactly the strongest meat out there. Still, it's effective in telling the story it's got