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.

Dunkirk a lean, intense war movie

Soldiers contemplate their fates in Dunkirk. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

The sound of a ticking clock comes out and in throughout Dunkirk. The clock never strikes, but the sound persists as the body count grows and the odds of surviving the titular French town shrink hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second. Ticking down closer and closer until a few minutes before the movie ends at an unexpected moment. It indicates the terror and mayhem the characters have survived has come to an end, at least for the moment.

The ticking clock is difficult to ignore because of how it hangs over the fates of Dunkirk's characters. This is a movie in which every character is at risk of drowning or getting taken out by a few random potshots or even getting caught in friendly fire, as is the case with what amounts to the movie's main character, a lowly private named Tommy (Fionn Whitehead). He's not the prototypical lead for a war movie, more fragile and reedy than the square-built stars the genre is built upon. Yet he does make a lot of sense for this movie, his actions to survive the carnage around him indicative of the mindset of the soldiers at the time. It's difficult to fault a guy like Tommy for cheating his way to safety amid a seemingly hopeless situation, especially as the friends he meets in his encounters begin to die gruesome, PG-13 deaths. The clock ticks on though in a fittingly unnerving fashion as Tommy's chances of survival shrink accordingly. It is the advantage of having someone as average as Tommy be the center of attention; the fact that he's not particularly notable means he's just as likely to end up in the bottom of the sea or with a few bullets around him as the other soldiers.

Even as time ticks away and the fear and the body count rise, the story of Dunkirk qualifies as a feel-good story. In the hands of many directors and writers it would be just that, focusing on the strength and vigor and how indomitable the English spirit truly is. Writer/director Christopher Nolan indulges in that a little toward the end, but he never loses sight of the dangers the troops faced in the hours, days, minutes before the evacuation finished. The clock, courtesy of Hans Zimmer's score, ticks down, down, down as the many paths to safety and salvation are blown up in the faces of the broken soldiers. Hope is always around the corner in Dunkirk, but it becomes more and more difficult to see and harder and harder to believe in.

A lot happens in Dunkirk in a remarkably short amount of time. This is an amazingly lean World War II movie, with a run time of less than two hours and with the dialog is sparse and the bloodshed on screen is minimal. There are a lot of bodies though, the corpses of soldiers floating in the ocean off the coast of France not too far away from home or becoming engulfed in flame after a well-targeted German torpedo. The blood isn't necessary to convey the atrocities of the situation; showing the faces of the thousands of soldiers stuck on a beach surrounded by Germans is more than adequate to express the horrors of the situation. Nolan just doesn't require the bloat of a traditional war movie to tell his story effectively, doesn't require a traditional star studded cast (Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy, Kenneth Branagh, and, randomly enough, Harry Styles are the most famous names in this movie) to get the point across. Even the action sequences – excellently staged and wildly effective – are quick and efficient, with any elements of CGI blending seamlessly with the live action. Nolan doesn't need a lot to make a great war movie; engaging action and a ticking clock will more than suffice.

It's all horribly effective, a thriller/horror movie masking as a war movie to sneak up on the audience and keep them lost in the action. Nolan throws in a non-linear story to aid in that little trick of deception, leading viewers down one story path while jumping back in time to events that happen in another before all the players converge at the end. The result is a dizzying experience, with the ticking clock the only thing keeping the stories tethered for a long period of time. That the sounds of fate represent the closest thing to comfort viewers have while watching Dunkirk reflects how horrifying this movie is, as well as how effective Nolan is at manipulating viewers. They, like the soldiers, are never in control.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 106 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: People who like World War II movies and/or Christopher Nolan.

Take the whole family?: It's going to scare the heck out of kids, so stick around the recommended age rating.

Theater or Netflix?: Theater is a good option for this. The IMAX experience even proved to be a worthwhile addition to the viewing experience.

Is this a new shift for Christopher Nolan?: Not really. His last few movies have been big box office movies with star power and loaded with special effects, but his roots are in these small, atmospheric movies. Movies like Insomnia and Memento put their emphasis on mood and intensity, maintaining a certain level of confusion and allowing a sense of fatalism to guide the action. Dunkirk blends the big budget flicks with those smaller movies, putting it right on par with The Prestige.

Watch this as well?: Saving Private Ryan has less intensity but a greater amount of brutality than Dunkirk. Mixing the two provides a pretty solid look at the horrors of war.