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.

Fist Fight never lands a good punch

Ice Cube and Charlie Day in Fist Fight. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

I really don't understand what the filmmakers behind Fist Fight were going for with this movie. I mean, it is supposed to be a comedy and casts ringers like Charlie Day, Tracy Morgan, Jillian Bell and Kumail Nanjiani, along with complementary pieces Dean Norris and Christina Hendricks. But beyond the flailing attempts at comedy, the film lacks a clear message, relatable characters or anything worthy near a logical point. It seems like the movie might have something to say about education, but the folks behind the camera lack the talent and nuance to vocalize it thoroughly.

Fist Fight veers in several directions, bouncing from a story about a stressed out teacher (Charlie Day) trying to escape the titular match/assumed beating from a fellow educator played by Ice Cube to a movie about the sad state of public education to a last day of school flick that comes across as a discount Dazed and Confused knockoff. It tries to be all of these things and, fittingly enough, fails at all of them on some capacity, delivering a movie with a lackadaisical plot with an asinine conclusion. Even its criticisms of the education system are dinged by the savage and cruel actions of the protagonists (Day, Ice Cube and the rest of the staff), heavy hints at sexual abuse toward the students, and the hyper-reality the film lives in. The horrid actions of the students, whose shenanigans cover giving meth to a horse, lassoing teachers to said horse, and masturbating audibly in a public restroom, is either a typical lazy high school film or a parody of lazy high school film. The latter would be a more interesting concept if the film didn't try to ground itself with a story about teachers getting fired wantonly, using the students' outre actions as a sign for theoretically legitimate challenges and issues educators face. In other words, Fist Fight creates an exaggerated reality and uses that exaggerated reality as a root cause for real problems.

Perhaps a narrowly focused narrative – maybe one focused on, say, Day's slow acceptance of his doom at the fists of Ice Cube – would have resulted in better jokes from the writers.The film has many ideas for jokes, like the horse, the onanism and the bizarre behavior from the teachers, along with a hypothesis that swearing is funny in and of itself. Little of it works though because the filmmakers never take the time to develop any of the jokes. They just spit out a line or throw out an image with little context aside from the idea that what they have might be perceived as funny, but without taking the time to find a way to make it funny (let alone inventive or original). It's all wicked lazy and reflective of a general absence of curiosity over the craft they're attempting to master. Comedy is hard, but you have to at least put the effort in to make it work.

That extends to Fist Fight's cast as well, one that on paper is again more than qualified to at least bump this material up to tolerable. Nobody aside from Bell (who offers a peculiarly fascinating performance) appears to care that much about the material or making the junk in front of them work. Day, a person who is often very funny in a supporting role, is miscast as the film's lead, while the idea of Ice Cube being an intimidating on-screen presence went by the wayside after the release of Are We There Yet? That Norris, Nanjiani, Morgan and Hendricks are given so little to do that looking bored on screen is a viable option is a waste of their and the viewers' time.

What makes Fist Fight so frustratingly is it isn't a hopeless film. The pieces exist to build something adequate and at the least entertaining, something of value for people who schlep through a winter's worth of snow for a few laughs and maybe some pointed commentary. Yet the filmmakers seem unsure of how to use what they have to deliver something competent, or at least lack the motivation to do anything with it besides unleash 90 insipid minutes of cinema into the February malaise.

Review: One out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 96 minutes

Genre: Comedy

Ask Away

Target audience: People who like Charlie Day or consider Ice Cube to be an engaging comedic presence.

Take the whole family?: This film traffics in curses and obscene imagery, so perhaps keeping kids at home is for the best.

Theater or Netflix?: Neither is a good option.

What else is wrong about this film?: One of the main plot points is the school districts waiting for the end of the last day of school to inform the teachers if they'll be retained or not. Most states, including the one the film is set in, require districts to extend contracts for renewal well before the end of the school year (due in part to the need to get the budget prepared by the end of the fiscal year in June). In other words, even the process the film uses to fire teachers is malarkey.

Watch this instead?: There are many, many better comedies to watch than this, but I'm going to go outside the box a bit and recommend 24 Hours to Live from Hey Arnold! This episode also has a character waiting for a fist fight from a stronger opponent, albeit with a more interesting plot and a nifty resolution to the issue.