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.

Get Out delivers multitude of horrors

Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

It's pretty easy to see the objectives writer/director Jordan Peele wants to accomplish in his excellent feature debut, Get Out. He shows it in the first scene, where a random African-American man walks down a seemingly peaceful street at night, muttering to himself about being lost as a car ominously drives in the background. Peele, most renowned for his work with Keegan-Michael Key on Key and Peele, plays up the odd humor of the scenario before letting the horror swoop in, all the while playing with the audience's perception on horror conventions. A well-lit suburb at night is about as safe as a place can get, as long as you're white.

The horror Peele mines for Get Out is rooted in the black experience in an extremely white environment, which is the case when photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) spends the weekend with his white girlfriend Rose's (Allison Williams) family (parents Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener and a younger brother played by Caleb Landry Jones) somewhere in the woods. The whole experience is peculiar (as a friend of Chris played by LilRel Howry points out emphatically), but Peele makes it difficult for his protagonist to tell whether or not the situation is based on sinister motivations or the awkwardness from his hosts as indicated through their frequent dips into casual racism. The gap between the two is razor thin from an outside view, with clumsy good intentions and legitimate evil difficult to parse out. Using the slightly off concept is a standard horror trick built to disorient the protagonist and the audience, but Peele employs it as a way of seeing the world through his character's eyes, a clever trick to get one of his main points across.

Peele has many points to make with Get Out, and he uses uses horror as a vehicle for his social commentary about the complexities of racism. One of the most troubling points he makes comes from the fates of servants Walter and Georgina (Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel, respectively), the only two black characters Chris comes into regular contact with after leaving the city with Rose. Their behavior is remarkably discomfiting, exacerbating the overarching weirdness Chris absorbs, but the horror truly arrives when the reason for their odd behavior is revealed. It takes a second to think about it, but once that twist comes and the ramifications of it begin to permeate into the mind, the lack of respect held toward those characters becomes borderline heartbreaking. That’s an underlying theme for this film, in which the scares and fears are reinforced by tragedy.

Get Out is scary to think about, but it also offers its fair share of top notch horror. The film goes heavy on the psychological scares, showcasing the queer ambiance along with a few innovative ideas thrown in to ratchet up the anxiety. An impromptu therapy session between Chris and Keener's psychiatrist Missy results in some subtly bothersome imagery and the most menacing cup of tea ever depicted in film. It takes an innovative filmmaker to transform tea into a tool for evil, and it takes a damn good one to make it work. There is a battle though between serving the horror and throwing in a few laughs to lighten the proceedings and play more directly into Peele's background. It is a tough line to define given how easy it is for horror to devolve into comedy unintentionally, but he more often than not pulls off the tonal shifts with aplomb. He succeeds by having done some homework prior to filming, using some horror tropes (like the menacing groundskeeper) as a way of deriving laughs from the audience while still using them as a way of contributing to the atmosphere. It is funny to see the groundskeeper stare as Chris arrives with Rose, but the look he gives and his general reaction remain eerie regardless of how it’s played. The comedy feeds the horror, which later feeds the comedy that in turn feeds the horror, an ouroboros of emotional fluctuations.

There is a lot to unpack with Get Out and admittedly even more a person could sift through with additional viewings. It’s worth it for the intellectual challenge it offers, yet it does so without skimping on the horrors. Get Out is the ideal horror film, showing what a talented filmmaker can do with a proper understanding of the genre’s depths.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 103 minutes

Genre: Horror

Ask Away

Target audience: Definitely great for horror junkies.

Take the whole family?: It gets pretty gory right around the end, albeit not quite enough to necessarily warrant an R rating. Around age 13 is more than fine.  

Theater or Netflix?: A theater trip would be appropriate for people who like horror.

What else does this film do well?: One of the things Jordan Peele excels at is subtly breaking down horror conventions. There are a few moments where the audience is trained to expect something bad to happen at that moment, only for it to serve as a vital plot point. It is pretty interesting to watch the audience react to its non-reaction, and it becomes a moment worth appreciating once the importance of the scene comes into play.

Watch this as well?: Get Out owes a bit of debt to the Invasion of the Body Snatchers films, along with the original Stepford Wives. For a movie with a similar sense of atmosphere, check out the great House of the Devil.