The best (and worst) from 2016

Image courtesy Cohen Media.

Looking through this list the one thing that strikes is the breadth of options to pick from. The top film is about five sisters struggling in Turkey, and the rest of the collection incorporates a punk band under siege, a pair of pretty great musicals with wildly different themes and presentations, and a profile of one of the saddest politicians in recent years. Depth and variety are great things to have when hitting up theaters, and 2016 brought a broad palate to theaters.

The films below are all ones reviewed from 2016. I kept the list to the top seven to focus on the films most worth a second look, which cut out a few rather good films. Movies missing the cut include The Neon Demon, Pete's Dragon, The Nice Guys, Rogue One, Hail, Caesar! and Everybody Wants Some! So below are the best films I reviewed this year, along with the absolute worst film I laid eyes on in 2016.

No. 1: Mustang

This one was actually nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2016 Academy Awards, meaning that the film was up for competition among 2015 nominees. I'm keeping it though because the stateside release came in 2016 and to recognize it as the best film I've watched in the last 12 months.

Mustang is a tender and melancholy look into the lives of five sisters being thrown into marriages with little to no choice and a lot of implied violence. There is a hint of fatalism and a lot of danger if things go wrong, but in the end the little victories are what matter in this film. Mustang lifts and drops viewers on such a frequent basis that the relatively positive ending feels like rapture.

Image courtesy A24.

No. 2: Green Room

Director Jeremy Saulnier's follow up to his terrific revenge film Blue Ruin shocks viewers with its sudden bursts of violence between lulls of peculiar black humor. It's tough to find a film this balanced and this effective at what it wants to do; keep the audience on edge and with little clue of what’s really going on.

Despite the oddity of the premise – a punk band led by Anton Yelchin stumbling into a Neo-Nazi murder in the middle of the woods – everything feels natural and logical, the acts of violence ramping up in a strangely grounded fashion. This is one of the better horror films in recent years too, featuring one of the scariest boogeymen to come along recently in Patrick Stewart's Neo-Nazi leader Darcy.

Image courtesy Lionsgate.

No. 3: La La Land

A probable front-runner for a ton of awards, La La Land keeps its soulful analysis of the divide between romance and ambition hidden just underneath a sunny, musical surface. The cheeriness does just enough to disguise the film's true theme – although those sometimes sneak in through the lyrics – and the result is a complex, enchanting musical.

Writer/director Damien Chazelle deserves credit for folding in the tenants of musicals of the past – the big numbers and those little flirty bits of dancing – into a modern setting and doing so in a smooth, logical fashion. That Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are both charming as all hell and showcase a rather engaging rapport just adds to La La Land's many charms.

Image courtesy IFC Films.

No. 4: Weiner

Somehow this film became even more noteworthy in the months after its release. The film didn't predict Anthony Weiner's role in the 2016 election, but it set the table for how the man could muck up enough to become entangled in that morass of awful.

What makes the film so engrossing is watching Anthony Weiner fall apart over the course of a few months and the tragedy of the self-inflicted crash. He is depicted in Weiner as a politician with his heart at least close to the right place, so his second fall from grace impacts a whole lot of people outside of himself and his family. The documentary ably captures his failings, his inability to handle his faults, and the fact that his personal foibles sink any chance of his message catching on.

Image courtesy Fox Searchlight.

No. 5: Jackie

Jackie is the film I hope proves to people that Natalie Portman is a terrific actress. She absolutely nails a difficult performance, being a woman who must show a pretty and calm face to the nation and still have enough verve to fulfill the legacy of her husband.

Even though Portman is the heart of Jackie, the film is strong enough independent of her performance to remain a worthwhile experience. It offers one of the more interesting glimpses into the John F. Kennedy legacy, playing around with the concept of Camelot while pointing out why that ideal was seized upon by the public. Kennedy's election came at a difficult time in American history, so a little romanticism worked to assuage the fears of the voters while pushing for vital changes.

Image courtesy Disney.

No. 6: Moana

This film and the next are pretty close to being toss ups, but I liked Moana a little bit more than the next one. For one thing, it has a great performance by the unfairly charismatic Dwayne Johnson, and that tends to push many films up a level or two.

Moana's real selling point though is the eponymous princess who takes decisive action to save her people even against the recommendations of her father. Even though the film sets things up to have her be Mad Max to Maui's Furiousa, it makes a quick and effective shift that is logical and important. Add that to some terrific vocal performances (particular Johnson and Auli’i Cravalho) and killer songs courtesy Lin-Manuel Miranda and the result is a wicked good animated film.

Image courtesy Disney.

No. 7: Zootopia

Like Moana, one of Zootopia's main selling points is a complex message delivered in a bright, often rather humorous fashion. This film addresses racial stereotypes and how easily those characteristics become ingrained in societal fabric, an important topic given how easy it is to ignore or miss such biases. The film doesn't offer any definitive answers, but it at least works as a gateway for understanding the issue and inspecting one's own biases.

The message wouldn't really work without the rest of Zootopia's charms, as it has so many jokes and clever references it is worth watching just on the surface level. Adding depth to it just makes for a more interesting and rewarding viewing experience.

Image courtesy Lionsgate.

Worst film: Norm of the North

The fun thing with this year's contenders for the worst film was the depth of the terrible. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice suffer from a terminal case of dourness and some tremendously asinine plot twists. Patriots Day is an insensitive, dumb film about a complicated moment Boston history. Dirty Grandpa has the great Robert De Niro at his nadir, while films like Sing and Zoolander 2 are obnoxious at best.

None of those films though fail on the same level as Norm of the North. This animated monstrosity is ugly to look at and is lacking narrative cohesion, talented voice actors (the awful Rob Schneider is the headliner), and any coherent themes. This film is a garbage dump of an animated flick that insults the intelligence of its young target. At least it seems to have drifted away from public eye in the last 12 months, fated to rest in the depths of online streaming services for some unlucky soul to stumble upon.

'Nice Guys' in name only

Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe star in "The Nice Guys." Image courtesy Warner Bros.

The cruelest part of “The Nice Guys” is, after almost two hours of blood, sex and death, all of the chaos on screen never actually means anything. It's director/co-writer Shane Black's greatest joke in a film loaded with great gallows humor and pain, that the borderline heroics of two schlubs in well over their heads results in no change to the world around them. Their success leads directly to failure and the loss of several lives of varying levels of innocence along the way.

It's a fitting coda to a story based in 1970s Los Angeles yet rooted in detective stories like “The Big Sleep,” in which the plot is as logical as an 8 year old's Hot Wheels track. Nothing is quite as it seems from the get go, starting with the chosen career paths of bruiser Jackson Healy (a very bulky Russell Crowe) and private eye Holland March (Ryan Gosling). The former, who proclaims himself to be something of a vagabond searching for meaning in life, has the fists of a fighter but the nose of a gumshoe, while the latter is an alcoholic loser whose source of income entails taking money from elderly women for easily solvable cases. What kind of shenanigans can ensue when these two wacky characters meet for the first time? Technically the first encounter entails a broken arm granted to Gosling's Holland by Crowe's Healy, but the second meeting serves as the start of a very dangerous business relationship complete with goons (Keith David, Matt Bomer and Beau Knapp), a steely government official (Kim Basinger) and her assistant (Yaya DaCosta), and a mysterious girl named Amelia (Margaret Qualley) at the center of all the mayhem.

It's a very old school approach to a film that very much lives in its setting, coupling the grittiness of the streets with the rise of porn as a legitimate force in the entertainment industry and the slowly but surely declining Detroit automakers. The combination results in a pitch perfect milieu for a good detective film, with the dirt and flash representing the conflict between the lifestyles lived by the investigators and the people they're involved with. “The Nice Guys” doesn't view those as mirror images; instead, they're effectively depicted as forces drawing money in theoretically sinful fashions. In Black's view, it's the porn industry that's noble, or at least the career with the potential to change the world, sharing the spirit for betterment possessed by the film’s twenty somethings. It's that sense of trying to do something that leads Holland and Jackson to enter themselves into the arrangement in the first place. Crowe's Jackson aspires to recapture the feeling he had when he broke up a robbery a few months prior; Gosling's Holland wants some semblance of happiness and to show his daughter Holly (Angourie Rice) he is at least moderately competent at his job.

But good intentions can lead to hellish places, especially with characters like these two who lack the qualifications to make their dreams come true. Jackson's moment in the sun is tainted, unwittingly to him, by an epic bout of vengeance he wrought, whilst Holland is too drunk and too much of a loser to follow his ambitions on his own accord. They might be the titular nice guys, but the title itself is something of a joke too; a label like “nice guy” means very little when its ascribed to people like Holland and Jackson. That's why the heart and soul of “The Nice Guys” belongs to Rice's Holly, who serves as the Penny to the Holland/Jackson Inspector Gadget. She's often the smartest person in the room, a very courageous character who fights with her wits and with a little luck on her side. Neither Jackson nor Holland could fulfill their spiritual quests without her presence; they advance somewhat as people because she's around to take care of them. The concept is a little reductive considering how often such roles are filled by women, yet it is effective in large part because of Rice's performance.

Then again, none of this is shown to matter at the end. Whatever personal improvements the eponymous nice guys make is curbed by a world actively acting against their best intentions. It's a cosmic joke, darker than the rest of the black comedy Black puts on display in the movie. Yet it is necessary though to serve as an exclamation mark for Black's ultimate point with “The Nice Guys”; one's advancement in life is never enough to change the world.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 116 minutes

Genre: Action Comedy

Ask Away

Target audience: Audiences down for some retro action and watching a burly Russell Crowe punch people.

Take the whole family?: It has the right mixture of violence, nudity and inappropriate language to deserve the “R” rating.

Theater or Netflix?: It's good enough to merit an excursion, but not vital to see on a big screen.

Do Crowe and Ryan Gosling work as comedic actors?: For two guys without extensive backgrounds in comedic acting, they do pretty well for themselves. Crowe works within his limitations for the most part – effectively punching and acting a little slow and very gruff – but Gosling exhibits a penchant for pulling off a pretty good pratfall.

Watch this as well?: Shane Black dipped into a similar detective story/blend of dark humor with his directorial debut “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” Along with Black's material are two films by acclaimed writer/director Martin McDonagh that are dark, violent and very often hilarious: “In Bruges” and “Seven Psychopaths.”