The best (and worst) movies of 2017

Image courtesy Disney

Two thousand seventeen was a pretty solid year for movies. This is the first year the number of films on the worst list were outpaced easily by some pretty great choices on the best film lists, enough to require knocking off some really lovely movies from this list. What's left is a collection of reality altering indie movies, a tremendous horror movie, and a great movie about the frailty of marriage.

The films below are all ones reviewed from 2017. I kept the list to the top six to focus on the films most worth a second look, leaving out some wicked good selections. Just missing this year's list are Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Baby Driver, American Made, and Ingrid Goes West. 

Image courtesy Cohen Media

No. 1: The Salesman

Winner of the Best Foreign Language Film at the 2017 Academy Awards, The Salesman is a gut punch of a film about how a happy and fulfilling marriage can fall apart from obsession and anger.

Writer/director Asghar Farhadi uses a performance of Death of a Salesman as a backdrop for a story about a man who simply cannot let things go, despite the protestations of his wife. Moving on is an impossibility for a prideful person, one who is awful enough to use an attack on his wife as a means of taking control of the marriage. What was once a partnership devolves into something much darker, and The Salesman makes that transition hurt.

Image courtesy A24

No. 2: The Florida Project

The Florida Project is happily heartbreaking. It's a movie about the innocence of childhood and the need/desire to escape the sadness of the circumstances people are stuck under. The small family at the center of the movie doesn't have much going for them besides each other, and even that isn't enough to make for a sustainable lifestyle.

Buoyed by a wonderful performance by Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project succeeds at the small things that make childhood memorable, like making sandwiches with friends and pretending a firework show is just for you. Even the cruelty of reality that strikes at the end can't prevent the movie from engaging in one last flight of fancy, to provide at least a glimmer of a happy ending before everything falls apart.

Image courtesy Universal Pictures

No. 3: Get Out

Writer/director Jordan Peele is clearly a student of horror, knowing exactly what tropes to invert and which ones to follow to make Get Out a terrifyingly bleak look at the black experience in America. Peele swings a mighty strong hammer, explaining why a seemingly bucolic upper-class neighborhood can be a place of discomfort and fear from a certain viewpoint, as even the most welcoming of environments has an underlying evil to it.

Get Out is brilliant for many reasons, but the film succeeds at the most basic component of horror; making viewers feel uncomfortable and frightened. It's a horror movie that succeeds at scaring the audience for the frights it produces and for the thoughts it invokes.

Image courtesy Fox Searchlight

No. 4: The Shape of Water

Certainly the strangest film on this list, The Shape of Water is also the purest and sweetest love story to come out in many, many years. The film shows how powerful love can be, and how easily it can be taken away by the evils of man

The Shape of Water doesn't stray too far from writer/director Guillermo del Toro's history, inserting supernatural elements while undercutting the rosiness of bygone eras. This film layers on the romance more than he has in the past, putting the emphasis on the story of two awkward beings finding each other. That the central couple is a mute woman (a great performance from Sally Hawkins) and a fish creature makes it all the more interesting.

Image courtesy Warner Bros.

No. 5: Dunkirk

Dunkirk is the most efficient war movie to come out in the last two decades. Telling three intertwining stories in less than two hours, director Christopher Nolan gets at the desperation and despair found amid the young men trapped on a beach waiting for either death or a miracle.

What makes Dunkirk so remarkable is the tension that builds from the first moment through the end. Nolan keeps his foot on the gas, replicating the real life experience at Dunkirk and never providing his soldiers, or the viewers, a moment of true comfort. The reach of danger is never too far away, and even a celebratory round of jelly and tea can come to a crashing halt with a well-placed explosion.

Image courtesy Disney

No. 6: Coco

Coco is a pretty glorious animated movie. It's fluffy, brightly lit exterior is gorgeous enough to draw kids into a story about the inevitability of death and the uncertainty waiting in the afterlife.

A hallmark of good children's entertainment is how cleanly and directly it addresses complex and often said issues. Coco simply excels at just that, not just through the honest conversation about death, but the fear of becoming forgotten completely by time. The film treats it as a sad eventuality, a fact of life that is, ultimately, okay. Everything has to end somehow, and Coco provides a little cheeriness to that fact.

Image courtesy Warner Bros.

Worst film: Fist Fight

Even if this wasn't a perfect year for movies, there were still very, very few movies that could qualify as outrageously bad. Only seven films ended up on my worst films list, which is a drop from years past. With hindsight some of those selections aren't overly painful either; King Arthur: Legend of the Sword has a couple of decent sequences, and The Mummy comes close on occasion to being kind of fun. The Bye Bye Man is a train wreck, but still more fun to watch than the drivel spewed by Transformers: The Last Knight.

Two films battled neck and neck to be the year's worst. The Snowman came in a super close second – almost nothing goes right for that movie – but it lacks the loathsome factor that makes Fist Fight the absolute worst movie of 2017. Fist Fight takes no advantage of what is on paper a pretty stacked cast – Charlie Day, Tracy Morgan, Jillian Bell, Dean Norris, and Kumail Nanjiani should go off somewhere and make their own comedy – and has a loathsome plot to boot. Loathsome and irksome only wins at being awful, which is the best victory Fist Fight will manage.

Coco an emotional, spiritual journey

Miguel enters the Land of the Dead in Coco. Image courtesy Disney.

Coco is the darkest movie in Pixar history. Pixar has a knack for diving into some dark and sad territory, but this is the first time the company has centered its story on death. This story is literally about spirits and aging and the ever present thought of mortality. Pixar, being Pixar, translates a story about death into a visually-stunning, family-oriented, crowd-pleasing musical rife with joy and a few lessons for everyone. (Except the bad guy, whose moral retribution is among the most dreadful in Disney's long history of making the villains pay for their transgressions.)

At stake in Coco is both life and eternal life. The life of the precocious but impetuous Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez) is the most trenchant threat the movie has to offer, given the fear of dying at a young age is about as close to a universal horror as it gets for Coco’s young target audience. More existentially horrifying is the death that comes after death, as the spirit Héctor (Gael García Bernal) describes to Miguel after watching the already dead dissolve away into nothing. All life effectively ends once the world has forgotten about you, the memory imprinted into others is the flickering candle that keeps the souls fresh in the Land of the Dead. Death is inevitable, but a second death caused by the world forgetting you, and knowing that is exactly how one is fading toward oblivion, is terrifying and inevitable. Coco attempts to cover the darkness of its subject matter with what is a gorgeous depiction of the Land of the Dead. What could be shown as a dark and morbid place is depicted instead as a lively city light brightly and festooned with garish lights and lots of light hues, showing how the denizens of the Land of the Dead haven’t lost their humanity.

And yet, this is still a movie about an impossible to know subject explained to children with little cognizance of what death actually means. Coco resides in a very dark place for a Pixar film, putting its child protagonist at risk of a premature entry into the Land of the Dead from the start of act two. The film gives its young character an easy out by requesting forgiveness from long-dead matriarch Mamá Imelda (Alanna Ubach), under the condition Miguel abandons his love for music and adopts his family's shoemaker life. Miguel actively resists his dead family's help and instead searches for  guitar legend Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt) for absolution, preferring the possibility of death over the death of his passion. It's a headstrong and dangerous choice, albeit one the movie doesn't fault him for either. It's a Pixar tradition to have complicated moral lessons, never quite showing one side of an argument to be more right than the other. There are shades of correctness, areas in which compromise between the warring parties should take precedence because of their shared bond. A lesson is learned by all, but everyone learns their own lesson to reach the important middle ground. The problem, at least for Coco, is the plot machinations to get to those points is a little sloppy, even granted the relative lower bar set for animated movies (and the expository nature of musicals). The lessons are a little too easy to figure out for the characters, the journey toward self discovery a little too convenient. One of the major plot points is telegraphed in a manner that remains inexplicable, relying on a character making an incredibly dumb admission of guilt in a fictional format. The narrative can’t be this pointed to work as effectively as it could; being too blunt about the process lessens the effect of the lesson shared to the character, and to the audience as well.

It’s a frustrating problem, but forgivable for how wonderful the rest of the movie is. Coco is really, really easy to get lost to, the visuals complementing the music, which adds brightness to the morbid story. This movie is a reminder of what Pixar is capable of when it isn't chasing Cars money, providing joyous and heartfelt viewing experiences for children and adults. It's hard not to bob one's head along to the addicting songs and laugh at the gallows humor and enjoy Miguel’s family run by his Abuelita (Renee Victor). And it's especially hard not to sob uncontrollably in the third act when Miguel plays a heart-wrenching song to his great grandmother, the eponymous Coco. The build up to that moment is brilliant, the moment plays out gorgeously, and the movie earns every tear that will cascade from your eyes.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 109 minutes

Genre: Animation

Ask Away

Target audience: Families and Pixar junkies.

Take the whole family?: Coco is appropriately morbid given the subject matter, but it's bright enough to not scare off kids much younger than 7.

Theater or Netflix?: Totally worth watching it in theaters with the kids, especially after a long day of Black Friday shopping.

How's the soundtrack?: Pretty great, actually. Inspired by the Mexican milieu and its themes of memory, the music oscillates between fun and cheerful to mournful and heartbreaking. They're catchy, but in a quality way that doesn't make replaying the music for two days straight feel regrettable.

Watch this as well?: Most of the Pixar library is some variation of good to excellent. This one fits alongside Inside Out and Up in the break your heart category.