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.

Plaza shines in thoughtfully odd Ingrid Goes West

Elizabeth Olsen and Aubrey Plaza in Ingrid Goes West. Image courtesy Neon Rated.

What makes Ingrid Goes West fun in a strange way is how it makes audiences feel and think as the credit rolls. It’s entirely fair to have an icky feeling when leaving the theater, perturbed by the oddness of Aubrey Plaza's eponymous social media stalker, her easy ability to manipulate herself into the life of the seemingly perfect Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen) troublesome in many ways. The movie is designed in part to cause the viewer to feel a little off from enjoying it, whether it is the awkward humor or the hints of sympathy directed toward Ingrid. This movie excels at being enjoyable awkward.

Ingrid Goes West is ostensibly a comedy about a stalker who inserts herself into a stranger's life out of a need for some love and affection. Along the way Ingrid disrupts the lives of Taylor's husband (Wyatt Russell), brother (Billy Magnussen) and a landlord who has a severe crush on her (a charmingly nerdy O'Shea Jackson Jr.). That this movie still classifies as a comedy and not a horror/thriller like Single White Female (a movie that gets a name drop in this one) is due to a solid script from writers David Branson Smith and Matt Spicer (Spicer also directs) and a killer lead performance by Plaza. Best known for as the dour April Ludgate, Plaza finds the right balance between subtly strange and completely off kilter, keeping what could be a caricature very human and pretty funny. She makes it funny and sad to watch Ingrid scroll through Instagram and like every post she sees, a meaningless gesture that is heartbreaking in the loneliness it projects.

Scenes like that make it easy to paint Ingrid Goes West as some sort of parable about the dangers of social media and how much the spread of otherwise useless personal information to a mass audience lessens the importance of personal connection. And it sort of is a warning of sorts, although it is less about how someone like Ingrid can sidle her way into someone's life and more about what social media allows people to do. Several post modern writers have made this point before, but the downside to social media is the emptiness it promotes. Taylor is defined largely by her social media presence, enough to replace any semblance of personality she had prior to becoming an Instagram star. Her intellectual strummings are gleaning by slight readings of important work, the image of being intelligent and thoughtful just as valuable as actually being so. Quoting Norman Mailer or Joan Didion means nothing if there's no understanding of why they said it and what that quote means on a personal level. So it makes sense for Taylor to feel repulsed by Ingrid as the film progresses. Ingrid is a facsimile of the Instagram starlet whose attempts at copying result in her becoming a slightly more real version of Taylor herself. Taylor pretends to read the texts she flaunts; Ingrid does so and finds meaning to it. That Ingrid is better at being Taylor than Taylor is a little horrifying on its own merits, as it exposes Taylor for being a shell of a free spirit. Even if Ingrid's obsessive nature hadn't been revealed, Smith and Spicer make it clear there is no way the relationship could last beyond a few fleeting moments.

Then again, a person can only achieve a certain level of fame if they haven't provided their audience at least a modicum of honesty to go with it. Despite being a failed attempt at simulacrum, Ingrid is at least honest about her emptiness and tries to find something to fill the void that is her life. She does show a few moments of honest sympathy, more than Taylor musters, and Ingrid Goes West concludes with the most honest moment of her life. The result is a sad and terrifying happy ending, a moment in which a character wins and it remains unclear what she'll do with her victory. What little growth Ingrid shows in the film isn't rooted in the firmest of soil, and the glow of joy on her face is disturbing and a testament to Plaza's performance; she sells the ambiguity of the moment perfectly.

All of this is a little heavy for a concept, but it goes to show there is a good amount of subtext worth diving into in Ingrid Goes West, a credit to Smith and Spicer for finding depth in a technology rooted in human emptiness. Smith and Spicer understand that the value of Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms resides within that emptiness itself, not just finding the best version of a person but revealing the ugliness underneath the facade. That the exploration of the shallowness is this entertaining and well made is a bonus.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 97 minutes

Genre: Comedy

Ask Away

Target audience: Viewers who want to see Aubrey Plaza go off the rails.

Take the whole family?: This isn't the hardest R film, but still keep the kids at home.

Theater or Netflix?: Not a vital theater experience but worth the trip if it’s playing near you.

What kind of funny is this movie?: While this is a comedy, it isn't quite a guffaw inducing movie. The humor is tied less to antics and more to a mix of awkward humor and outright nihilistic jokes in which the punchline is the action didn't really matter anyway. This is definitely one of those movies in which a personal view of the comedy will define the appreciation of the movie.

Watch this as well?: This is pretty comparable to The Talented Mr. Ripley with more comedy and slightly less homoerotic subtext to work from.