So 2017 is over, which means it’s time to rank everything, leaving us a clean slate leading into the new year. As such, here is a ranked list of everything I’ve watched this year, organised from best to worst:
The Top Ten
1. My Life as a Courgette (French Version with Subtitles)
A French stop-motion film in which a child accidentally kills his alcoholic mother and is sent to a children’s home, wherein he gets into fights, makes friends, falls in love and mourns deeply. It’s a small, melancholic, wistful thing, and is truly, deeply beautiful. Not only the best cartoon of 2017, it’s the best film of 2017.
2. My Life as a Courgette (English Dub)
I loved the original language version of My Life is a Courgette so much, I ended up going to the same art house cinema the next day to watch the English version. The big bonus it has over the original is Nick Offerman who gives a more multifaceted performance than his French counterpart does. It does censor some of the riskier jokes though, somewhat lessening the raw honesty of the original script. That said, you can’t really go wrong with either version: both are masterpieces.
3. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
This is just balls-to-the-wall fun. A hedonistic space opera about the need to combine masculinity with emotion, told through racoons, baby trees, David Hasselhoff, ELO… It’s Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who done as a two-hour spectacle using more money than the BBC spends in a year. The best Marvel movie I’ve ever seen, and (with the exception of Thor: Ragnarok) quite frankly the only good one.
4. mother!
The love-it-or-hate-it film of the year, mostly because it’s an art film that got sold as a horror film, resulting in a certain amount of understandable buyer’s remorse from certain sections of the audience. Taken for what it is though, it’s a fascinating, unique and clever piece of work. I don’t wish to spoil anything about it; just know that it was great and you should give it a go with as open a mind as you can.
5. Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
Visually stunning, cleverly directed, character-driven drama with some surprisingly cutting political bits in the second act. You know it’s doing something right because the alt-right and the fanboys are furious about it.
6. Wonder Woman
The most important film of the year. As I’m a guy, I merely got an expertly crafted action flick with delightful characters, a fully fleshed-out world, fantastic writing and a killer soundtrack; it is so much more than that though, and I’m not the person you should listen to for an explanation why. The fact remains though: this film’s existence improves the world, which can’t be said for anything else on this list other than My Life as a Courgette.
7. It
Fucking terrifying; best horror film of the year, hands down. I spent the first third of the film in pure dread, watched the scenes in the Well House through squinted eyes, and found myself really engrossed in the non-scary scenes. Some of the images a bit cliché, it is essentially just two hours of jump scares, and I’m not sure that it’d be as effective on a TV screen with smaller speakers, but as a cinema experience, there was something about it that just got deep under my skin.
8. Thor: Ragnarok
A bright bit of fun whose satirical messages have been quite underrated by the online discussions about it so far. It’s a bit more limited than Guardians of the Galaxy (being a comedy first-and-foremost while GotG uses it’s comedy as the basis it builds outwards from) but it remains one of my favourite superhero films of the year and the second best Marvel movie ever.
9. Baby Driver
A kinetic rom-com/crime drama/car chase/musical, delivered with the usual Edgar Wright craft and aplomb. The script shines, the performances are great, the music is used masterfully, and the whole thing just flows together marvellously. Really fun popcorn flick.
10. A Bad Moms Christmas
I know, what’s this doing in my Top 10? Well turns out that A Bad Moms Christmas is just very funny, doesn’t drag at any point, revels in how much doing a gross-out comedy aimed at women is still an innovative thing, and manages to maintain a genuinely likeable heart even amongst the sex and the swearing. The script’s surprisingly tight and well structured, Kenny G makes a cameo, and it has the dialogue “That was moon ice! Ice from the moon!” What’s not to like?
The Good, the Flawed and the Average
11. The Handmaiden
A fascinating look into pornography and sexism, told through a lesbian love story set in WWII Japan. Some of the sex scenes are a bit overlong and explicit, becoming the exact type of sexualised imagery that the rest of the film’s a damning critique of, but this is ultimately one flaw in the middle of a brilliant, well-crafted satire.
12. The Red Turtle
A Studio-Ghibli co-production in which a man is shipwrecked on a desert island. He tries to escape on a series of rafts, but a red turtle keeps breaking them. In a fit of rage, he kills the turtle and feels remorse, up until the moment that the turtle then turns into a woman… and the plot continues from there. It’s a short, slow, meditative film which allows the audience the space to think around what they’re watching. I’m still not convinced that the final scene works, nor that it’s really as meaningful as it seems to think it is, but for the most part it’s alluring, captivating and resonant.
13. The Death of Stalin
A bleak drama detailing the machinations of terrible men set against a backdrop of awful atrocities. The fact that the main characters mistakenly believe themselves to be in a comedy is one of the main things that makes them so thoroughly detestable.
14. La La Land
Yes, it’s 100% nostalgic escapism made by artists about how hard it is to be them, but it looks beautiful, everything has been crafted with real love for its source material, and when it’s at its best (such as during the final scenes), it is truly sublime cinema.
15. Logan
Though it’s a bit too relentlessly dour for me to want to sit down to watch it again, the one time I did watch it got endless reactions out of me. The violence made me wince; plot twists felt like they mattered; and scenes got me emotionally. Between this, Wonder Woman and GotG2, superhero movies finally felt like they deserved to be popular again.
16. Captain Underpants: The Epic First Movie
I really like the animation style that this and Peanuts use to capture the look of a 2D drawing within a 3D space. Add to that some energetic editing, a zippy script and an immature anarchy that’s perfectly captured from the Captain Underpants books and you get a film that I think has been quite underrated.
17. Free Fire
Ben Weatley directs an all-star cast as they shoot the fuck out of each other in a warehouse after a drug deal goes wrong. It never quite manages to be as good as it’s plot description but it’s still damn fun, taking a simple conceit, thinking it through and delivering a solid hour and a half out of it.
18. The Party
A gorgeous-looking black comedy, following the new Shadow Minister for Health as she tries to host an ill-fated party of close friends to celebrate her recent appointment. It’s pretty funny script finds itself elevated by an absolutely stellar cast who collectively produce some of the best performances of 2017, leading to a punch line which is both the best and worst joke delivered in cinema this year.
19. Paddington 2
I’m not usually one for overly nice, hyperrealistic depictions of an utopian London built entirely out of landmarks and cliches. It’s hard to dislike the Paddington films though: the surprising amount of visual inventiveness in them makes it’s world really pop and there’s not an ounce of cynicism to be found anywhere. It is just really nice.
20. Alien: Covenant
The first two acts are fantastic with several staggeringly brilliant moments, plus the infamous flute scene. The writers then decide to give up on the third act, producing a rushed simulacrum of the original Alien movies before revealing a plot twist that makes no sense. If they’d have cut the third act and called it “Prometheus 2”, I’d have put the film above Logan.
21. Power Rangers
For a series that was about “Teenagers with Attitude”, the original Power Rangers series featured almost no attitude and it’s teens were much more like what adults wanted kids to think teens were like than they were like actual teens. Power Rangers, the 2017 film, plays with this by turning the adolescence up to 11. The result is basically Transformers mixed with The Breakfast Club, which is a fascinating aesthetic to go for. Add to that surprisingly good characters with strongly defined relationships and you get an interesting film out of it, albeit one which has surprisingly little time left to do Power Rangers stuff (the characters don’t actually morph until an hour and a half into the two hour long film). A mixed bag then, but a surprisingly likeable one.
22. The Lego Ninjago Movie
More compressed, focussed and thus emotionally effective than The Lego Batman Movie was, though I can see why most people preferred that one. It still has the same issue as Lego Batman in that it’s a complete selling-out of everything The Lego Movie stood for, but at least it replaces that with its own actually functional emotional core as opposed to just endless muddled allusions to random Lego properties.
23. Mindhorn
A surprisingly enjoyable British comedy with some good lines, characters and images. It’s in no way a classic but it’s not trying to be: rent it from Amazon, watch it late one weekend and you won’t be disappointed.
24. Despicable Me 3
Despicable Me 3 is more zippy and streamlined than it’s predecessors, but it keeps itself short by giving most of the cast almost nothing to do: the girls’ plots only take a few minutes each and add very little to the overall plot, while the Minions find themselves completely sidelined. There’s some attempt to make the film about mid-life crisises but it’s stretched. Luckily, it is beautiful and I did at least chuckle occasionally.
25. The Great Wall
Giant Green Bug Monsters attack the Great Wall of China; an army of acrobats in Power-Ranges-esque armour attack back. Matt Damon and William DeFoe are also there. It’s incredibly stupid, but in a way that’s incredibly fun. I started watching it expecting a straight-faced historical drama; it’s much better than that.
26. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
A big, bright, bold sci-fi film which is just a delight to look at. It never quite adds up to much though and the main male character’s really quite unlikable and badly performed. It’s a film that’s at its best when you’re just staring at it.
The Bottom Ten
27. The Lego Batman Movie
Fun enough, though it really loses itself in its last act when characters from other franchises start getting involved and the film starts resting on the type of traditional children’s film plotting that the last Lego Movie rejected wholesale. There’s a lot of things that the title The Lego Batman Movie promises, but I really don’t feel that any of those things were consistently delivered throughout the whole film.
28. Batman & Harley Quinn
A fair enough attempt to play with gender norms through the prism of Batman: The Animated Series. It is very much the work of people whose main interaction with feminism was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer though, resulting in a film which felt two decades out of date on its release day.
29. It Comes At Night
A family living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland takes in another family, causing tensions. This film’s notable in that, several months after watching it, I realised that I had entirely forgot the title of the thing: I could remember seeing it, but couldn’t for the life of me think what it was called. I think that sums it up: it’s good for what it is, but disappears as soon as it ends.
30. Fast and Furious 8
A collection of clichés tying together a series of set pieces, deeply hamstrung by the fact that the set pieces of Acts Two and Three are nowhere near as good as the set pieces of Act One. Fun fluff, but nothing more.
31. The Emoji Movie
A deeply unengaging film. There are good points to it. I liked how Jailbreak was an unrepentant and vocal feminist who got taken completely seriously by the plot. I like how it’s ideal version of masculinity is someone who can express their feelings. And there was the occasional genuine inventiveness to it: the idea that the Spotify app is a series of music streams which can be sailed down for transport purposes is surprisingly neat, for example. If this is as bad as animation gets right now, then animation is the strongest it’s been for decades. But it’s still not very good.
32. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
I enjoyed the film I think it was trying to be, but doing this required me to look past nearly everything that was actually on screen.
33. Justice League
A mess, plain and simple. I’m quite a fan of Zack Synder’s other DC films but this is one just did not work at all.
34. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
Enjoyable enough but very obviously made for long-term fans of the series, something which stopped it being too great a film for a PotC novice like me. Without knowledge of the other films, there’s just too many factions with too little to do and the final scenes fall completely flat. The film just about gets away with itself – just – but you do need the other four films to make it worthwhile.
35. A Dog’s Purpose
A dog mystically misunderstands his way through four separate lives, these lives featuring abusive fathers, depression, murder, kidnappers, forlorn lovers, poverty, abandonment, and loneliness. Way too violent and miserable for children, but no other audience would take its central conceit as seriously as the film needs it to. Who was this made for?
36. Beauty and the Beast
A miserable, vile piece of dreck: sexist, classist and pointless. I was furious while I watched it in the cinema and thinking about it still makes me angry now. It’s utterly indefensible and anyone who likes it is, in my opinion, wrong. I hate this film.
Notes:
- Films I really wanted to see but never managed to: The Killing of the Sacred Deer, Loving Vincent, Dunkirk, War for the Planet of the Apes, The Florida Project, Logan Lucky.
- Films I feel that I should probably watch but haven’t got around to yet: Get Out, Moonlight, Blade Runner 2049.
- Films I refused to watch as I knew I wouldn’t like them: Spiderman Homecoming (as I would spend the entire movie firmly on the Vulture’s side) and Victoria and Abdul (because there’s no way that film isn’t about how the horrors of imperialism were actually OK because Queen Victoria had one Indian friend).
- Special Mentions: I also saw a live screening of the Royal Ballet’s production of Alice in Wonderland in the cinema but didn’t put in the list itself because I ultimately couldn’t justify it as truly being a film. If I could’ve justified it, it would’ve gone after mother!
Conclusions:
2016 was bloody awful; barely any important films got released, very few of the ones that did were any good, and even the good ones had massive flaws that stopped me really loving them. 2017 was just awash with amazing films though. I’ve seen more new films in 2017 than I have during any other year of my life and I still wasn’t able to keep up with everything. And all the stuff that is getting made is so much more vibrant and interesting than the usual fare: you don’t usually get films like mother! and The Death of the Stalin having such a presence in the multiplex, and even the blockbusters are being made by idiosyncratic auteurs nowadays. I genuinely love all of the films in my Top 5, and My Life as a Courgette has instantly joined my list of favourite films ever made. More than that, you have to go really far down my list until you get to the point where I think that the films are genuinely not good; possibly as low as The Emoji Movie or Justice League. When they’ve been good, they’ve been astounding and when they’ve been bad, they’ve been alright. Movies: pretty much the only things that were good in 2017.
FNORD 