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.

Salesman a complex, captivating literary adaptation

Taraneh Alidoosti and Shahab Hosseini in The Salesman. Image courtesy Cohen Media.

Much of The Salesman’s excellence comes from its examination of the death of a relationship. The marriage between the generally genial Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and his otherwise independent wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) doesn't end with an enormous fight or a sudden implosion. Rather, the weaknesses of the marriage begin to seep through to the surface after one notable incident, revealing the reasons why their marriage was never as strong as the surface made it appear. That the entire situation results in tragedy only makes sense considering the film is an adaptation of Death of a Salesman, a play in which a man's flaws eventually overcome him.

Writer/director Asghar Farhadi blends a loose adaptation of the material with a literal retelling of it. Death of a Salesman is featured in The Salesman as a revival starring Emad and Rana, the actors periodically putting on the makeup and costumes to become lesser versions of themselves. The thematic presence of the show looms persistently even though the failure of Rana’s and Emad’s matrimony – an attack on the former by an unknown man at their apartment after a performance – comes from a different place than the pathetic torture Willy Loman puts himself through. Farhadi paints a rosy and progressive relationship between them, one fueled by common interests and familial potential. Farhadi cleverly obfuscates the possible causes for a destroyed marriage (although he again plays with the literal/figurative line by showing their first apartment crack from a construction accident) until the attack reveals the underlying issues with their wedding.

One of the complicated questions Farhadi poses in his wonderfully complex film is if the attack itself is the root cause of the unraveling or if it was the spur needed to end something that was never that great to begin with. The attack does change both Rana and Emad for the worst, with Rana losing her independence and becoming more docile and less effervescent. Alidoosti, who puts in a generally stellar performance, excels at showing the loss of her character's will and agency, revealing an empty shell of a person who is lost and confused after having her home violated. Her internal struggle hurts to watch, especially from a person as capable and fascinating as Rana. Emad, channeling his inner Willy Loman, is left impotent after being unable to prevent his wife's attack. It eats at him through the final two acts, his story evolving from a depiction of a decent and intelligent fellow to a man obsessed with discovering the man responsible for his shame. This aspect of The Salesman, tracing the root of the broken relationship, echoes a subplot in Death of a Salesman while adding trace elements of a detective film and a revenge thriller to the proceedings. It would appear the attack is the heart of the problem, but Farhadi is too good of a filmmaker to make it that simple. While it might be the impetus for it, Rana and Emad weren't able to overcome the worst versions of themselves. Farhadi makes it clear the problem lies in their inability to adapt and forgive, and for Emad to not let his perceived failings be what ultimately destroys the marriage.

Adding to the complexity of the situation is a running theme of Death of a Salesman Farhadi appropriates for his film about the simple and necessary values of a lie. Arthur Miller depicts the Loman family as a group on the precipice of falling apart, the lies its members tell the only thing keeping it together. The truth is the death knell for the Lomans, the factor that drives Willy Loman to suicide to avoid the shame he has wrought. Truth is equally dangerous in The Salesman, with Emad's quest for his wife's attacker the root cause for their demise. Farhadi makes that point clear once the attacker is revealed, in one of those rather smart twists that makes sense after the reveal, and the ramifications of his crime spreads beyond Rana, Emad and the attacker. Tragic figures like Loman and the characters in The Salesman can only live as long as the lie is in place; once the truth, whether it be a secret or a personality, comes to light, the stage lights go dark and all that remains is the remnants of an impossible fantasy.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

• Note: This film was distributed through Amazon Studios. I am employed full time at Amazon but I work in a different division of the company.

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 125 minutes

Genre: Drama

Ask Away

Target audience: Foreign film fans and people into good cinema.

Take the whole family?: The content is appropriate enough for young viewers but not interesting enough to keep them engaged for that long. Probably best for late teens and older.

Theater or Netflix?: Theater isn't vital unless you want to see it before the Academy Awards.

Academy Awards odds?: This film is up for Best Foreign Language Film and it is a favorite along with Toni Erdmann. One thing that could push this film over the top though is the controversial executive order signed by President Donald Trump banning travel from seven countries. That order has barred Iranian writer/director Asghar Farhadi from attending the ceremony, and a couple of tracker sites have pointed out voters might pick Farhadi's film in response to Trump's decision.

Watch this as well?: There is something a bit A Streetcar Named Desire about The Salesman. The latter film is much less mystical, but both share the underlying need for lies and fantasies to hold a marriage together. Also watch or read Death of a Salesman to have a bit of grounding for the adaptation.