hail caesar

Coens Countdown

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Over the past couple of years, I’ve sought to plug some holes in my watching of certain directorial canons. Starting in the summer of 2022, I began the process of watching every Coen Brothers movie in chronological order. This worked pretty well until I got to The Big Lebowski, a movie that I, like many others, made a core part of their teenage personalities in their youth, and as such I skipped over in order to return at a later date. Now, having finally given No Country for Old Men a rewatch, I’m ready to put them in a non-definitive, completely personal ranking of my favorites. 

Honorable Mention: Crimewave, the 1985 Sam Raimi flop that Joel and Ethan co-wrote, is quite a bit of fun. Looney Tunes-esque in a similar vein to this year’s Hundreds of Beavers, the film follows a hapless nerd who stumbles upon one of his employers’ plot to kill the other, but gets distracted from doing anything about it by a quest to find his dream girl. It’s not great, but it’s worth the effort if you’re into it. Some of its narrative elements would be echoed in The Hudsucker Proxy, but I would say that, other than a stellar performance from Jennifer Jason Leigh and Proxy’s fun ending, rewatching this one would be my preference in most regards. 

Dishonorable Mention: When we talked about Heathers recently, Brandon mentioned that he had finally seen Drive-Away Dolls, and he felt that my review of the film had been far too kind to it. I concurred at the time and must further agree now, as my opinion of the film has only declined in the intervening months. In fact, the only new release I’ve disliked more this whole year so far is that NYT propaganda “documentary” that wholeheartedly and unabashedly committed to validating the Zionist entity. A little lesbian love story set at the turn of the millennium but with the trappings of seventies film sounds like a good time, and at times it does manage to be, but it’s incredibly uneven and while Geraldine Viswanathan is charming, Margaret Qualley is delivering a community theater caliber performance that you’ll either get used to or learn to live with before the end of the film. Do you still think police violence against citizens can be funny? Then this is the movie for you, and I mean that in the most derogatory way possible. 

18. The Ladykillers (2004) – This is, without a shadow of a doubt, the worst of the Coen Brothers’ filmography. This one isn’t even a subjective ranking; I would say that this is a widely agreed upon fact, and I’m not here to champion it as an underrated classic. There’s a distinct leap in quality between this and the next entry on this list; that one is second from the bottom but only because it is “merely” good, while this one is actually quite bad. This film, a remake of an earlier British Alec Guinness vehicle in which a group of thieves take up residency in an unsuspecting landlady’s home in order to gain access to a vault through her house, sucks. It’s racist, mean-spirited, and not funny. If every copy of this movie on earth were destroyed, the world would be a better place. 

17. I’m not going to win over many people with this placement, but I just didn’t love The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). It’s not a bad movie, not by a long shot, and I almost want to put it higher on the list purely by virtue of its sheer madcap energy and that bonkers It’s a Wonderful Life-inspired ending, complete with angels and all. I think about the joke wherein one of the characters is barely saved from falling to his death by the strength of his stitching all the time; there’s a brief flashback of his tailor offering him the extra-strength stitching option and him declining, then the tailor using the heavy-duty stuff anyway just out of appreciation for his client, then the film cuts back to him being saved. It’s the kind of joke that you used to get from The Simpsons, where there are actually four or five jokes packed into one tiny story beat. Don’t let this one’s placement on this list make you think it’s a bad movie; it’s quite good, and there’s an ocean of quality between The Ladykillers and this. Jennifer Jason Leigh is a delight here, doing a truly wonderful transatlantic accent and delivering her dialogue like she’s in His Girl Friday, where every syllable is a bullet, and her mouth is a machine gun. 

16. Generally considered to be one of the duo’s lesser outings, I still think that there’s a lot of fun to be had with Intolerable Cruelty (2003). It’s an imitation of the kind of madcap comedies that the duo were already affectionately ribbing in Proxy, but deliberately playing around with the fact that those films, which largely predate no-fault divorce options and had to skirt around the Hays Code. Instead of innocent trysts, the escalation of hostilities (and flirtation) between divorce law superstar George Clooney and predatory marry-and-dump gold-digger Catherine Zeta-Jones is a battle of wits and will while also being sweet and romantic to watch, as one never knows who’s pulling the wool over whose eyes at any given moment and who’s genuinely fallen for whom from minute to minute. It’s not stellar, but it’s still fun, and the most likely to come on TNT some afternoon when you’re visiting your parents, so be on the lookout. 

15. There’s something truly arresting about The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). A noir shot in black and white, the film stars Billy Bob Thornton as Ed Crane, a barber working in his brother-in-law’s shop. He suspects his wife (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with her boss (James Gandolfini), so when he gets the opportunity to invest money with a man named Tolliver (Jon Polite), he blackmails Gandolfini’s character and gets the money, only for the man to find and kill Toliver. When Gandolfini confronts Thornton, the two struggle and Gandolfini is killed, and McDormand is blamed, both for the death and the apparent embezzlement. And then things just keep getting worse. It’s a tragedy in slow motion, the kind of story that the Coens tell over and over again, in which some amount of money is stolen or embezzled, and the everyman characters that we have met, plagued by problems as small and simple as mere ennui or as vast and deadly as owed money to organized crime, make bad choices that just make things worse and worse. It’s in their work going back as far as their first film, Blood Simple, and has carried over into works directly (like the FX series Fargo) and indirectly (like this year’s Last Stop in Yuma County) inspired by them. It’s fun to see it played out here in simple period piece monochrome, a great throwback that’s better than it has any right to be. 

14. Speaking of Blood Simple (1984), in this first feature outing, the brothers knocked it out of the park. Featuring the debut of Frances McDormand, who would become a longtime collaborator of the pair (and Joel’s wife), the film follows the tragic affair between Abby (McDormand) and Ray (John Getz), who works for her husband Marty (Dan Hedaya). When Marty finds out, he hires a P.I. named Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill the two of them. Visser double-crosses them all, but in doing so, he leaves behind evidence that could implicate him in Marty’s death, but Ray believes Abby was the one behind the killing. There’s nothing but blood and trauma from that point on, and the bros hit the ground running with their iconic aesthetics and favorite narrative devices — killing over an amount of money ($10K) that’s pretty low considering the stakes of the violence involved, rear brake lights at night, and deathly dark fields lit solely by the moon, where a silhouette of a man digs a grave. It’s only so low because they would go on to do this many more times, perfecting it with each incarnation; while this one rises to greatness, it doesn’t surpass it. 

13. There was a time in my life when The Big Lebowski (1998) was my favorite movie. I had the poster in my dorm room, I almost wore out the DVD, I even recognized that the title of Phoebe Bridgers’ seminal album Stranger in the Alps was a reference to the edited-for-TV dialogue of the movie when it used to air on Comedy Central. (When John Goodman’s character is smashing a car with a golf club, he screams “This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass,” which made it to cable as “This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps,” perhaps the funniest dialogue replacement ever, right up there with TV Die Hard’s “Yippe-ki-yay, melon farmer.”) It’s probably the duo’s most famous movie, certainly the most quoted and the one that most people remember. Hell, while writing this, I needed to go to the store and get some rice for curry, and in the rice and beans aisle, not even an hour ago, I saw an elderly man wearing a “Lebowski 2024” shirt that read “This aggression will not stand, man.” It was a huge part of the cultural zeitgeist, and perhaps I simply watched it too many times in my youth, but I find very little about it to be as engaging as I once did. Julianne Moore is astonishing here, and I love her, and Jeff Bridges delivers a knockout performance as The Dude, but I just don’t have the strong feelings about this one that I used to. Maybe it was watching it go completely mainstream for too long, but it no longer has the place in my heart that it used to. It’s still wonderful, though, it just gets an outsized portion of critical attention within the brothers’ oeuvre. 

12. I love an anthology film, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) fires on all cylinders (or in every chamber, as the western-themed shorts may require) for me. The tales within range from the jaunty title segment, which features frequent Coen collaborator Tim Blake Nelson as the fastest draw in the west, a singing cowboy whose preternatural luck is bound to run out sometime since “you can’t be top dog forever,” to a thoughtful character study (“All Gold Canyon”) about a prospector who refuses to give up, to a couple of beautifully dreary stories about a group of people in a stagecoach that may be bound for eternity and a traveling entertainer who is willing to shortsightedly “trade” his longtime companion and friend for the next most interesting thing in order to suit the public’s changing tastes (“The Mortal Remains” and “Meal Ticket,” respectively). My favorite segment, however, is “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” a perfectly depressing story about a woman who loses her brother on a wagon train and has no choice but to continue on, finding love with a rustler who offers to marry her and start a farm out west when their destination is reached. Everything seems like it’ll turn out all right for her in the end, until she, well, gets rattled. I usually find westerns to be incredibly boring, something that Brandon and I share in common, so much so that I’ve never even gone back and watched all of the “cowboy” episodes of my favorite TV show, The Twilight Zone, but this one really worked for me, especially as some of these segments are “spooky” or mysterious in the vein of Zone while also featuring that trademark Coen wit. 

11. It’s reductivist, but I sometimes think that there are two kinds of Coen Brothers movies: No Country for Old Men movies and Burn After Reading (2008) movies. The former includes things like Miller’s Crossing and the aforementioned Blood Simple—engrossing variations on/experiments in noir filmmaking that are (mostly) non-comedic outings about the pervasiveness of evil, greed, and violence. The latter includes movies that are straightforward comedies, although admittedly zany, madcap ones, like Lebowski and Hail, Caesar!. Burn After Reading is such a fun little exercise in making a “small” movie after the epic scope of No Country, which premiered only the year before. No expensive night shooting in the desert, no costly period piece-accommodating locations and vehicles, and a full half hour shorter, this is a short, swiftly moving story of falling dominoes with—explicitly—no point. Dim-witted personal trainer Chad (Brad Pitt) and his colleague, the down-on-herself Linda (Frances McDormand) come into possession of the banal memoirs of an alcoholic former CIA analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovitch), as a result of his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton)’s copying of his files in preparation for divorce. Linda and Chad first try to blackmail Cox, thinking that they have happened upon state secrets, then attempt to sell the memoirs to the Russians when this fails, which brings them tangentially into contact with hound dog U.S. Marshal Harry (George Clooney). There’s still some (hilarious) violence, and some grue that’s probably not as funny to everyone as it is to me. When it’s over, you won’t have to question the nature of man or whether greed is the downfall of all mankind, you’ll just remember that George Clooney engineers and builds a sex machine that’s the size of a stationary bike; what more could you possibly ask for? 

10. One of the recurring motifs in a lot of the brothers’ body of work is that of the missing money, the ransom or loot that becomes the central motivating factor in every character’s choices. It’s in both their comedies (Hail, Caesar!, Ladykillers, Lebowski) and their noirs (No Country, Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn’t There). Most often, we see our central characters taken down by their greed, and their willingness to commit acts of savagery as they grow more and more desperate. In Miller’s Crossing (1990), this isn’t the tragic flaw of our lead, but of a supporting character, Bernie (John Turturro). See, Bernie’s the brother of Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), the moll of local crime boss Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) who’s also carrying on an affair with O’Bannon’s prime enforcer, Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne). Tom is our main character here, but it’s Bernie’s greed that has a far-reaching effect on everyone else around him. Despite the fact that Bernie is his lady’s brother, Leo orders Tom to kill him. When Bernie pleads for mercy, however, Tom shoots his gun into the ground and lets the other man go, like the huntsman sparing Snow White. Bernie can’t stay away for long, however, and when he comes back around and starts to stir up trouble, including trying to blackmail his would-be killer, it comes back to bite him. There are some moments of comic levity here (Leo O’Bannon’s shooting spree following an ill-advised attack on his home stands out, as does the scene where Jon Polito’s Caspar takes over the police and starts clearing house), but overall, this one stands out as one of the best Coen dramas, with a downer ending that rivals Inside Llewyn Davis’s, even if it can’t touch the darkness of No Country. 

9. I mentioned before when talking about Buster Scruggs that I am not a fan of westerns. Even the great spaghetti westerns of the past have a lot of bias to overcome in order for me to like them. But I was immediately won over by True Grit (2010), a remake of the 1969 John Wayne vehicle, this time with a grizzled, mush-mouthed Jeff Bridges in the Rooster Cogburn role. As in the original, a young girl hires Cogburn, a deputy U.S. Marshall, to help her track down her father’s killer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). At the same time, Chaney is being pursued by Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), for the murder of a state senator. If we’re following the noir/madcap dichotomy outlined above, then Buster Scruggs is their western variant on the latter and Grit is their western variant on the former, and it works. Brolin’s Chaney is a truly disturbing monster; he’s no Anton Chigurh, but he has no qualms about murdering a child for no reason other than spite. As the girl with true grit, Mattie Ross, Hailee Steinfeld gives a star-making performance, and it’s a treat to see. Bridges and Damon have great chemistry, as do Steinfeld and Bridges (look, it’s Jeff Bridges; everyone has chemistry with him), and there are powerhouse performances all around. A western for people who hate westerns. 

8. If there’s anything I usually hate more than I hate westerns, it’s a musical without Muppets (I love everything with Muppets in it, even and perhaps especially musicals). I’ve come around over the years from being a pure hater of the genre to having a few nontraditional ones that I really like (like London Road, Top Secret!, and Baahubali), and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) also has a place on that list (in fact, I love both Coen musicals, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves). Forsaking most of their normal collaborators, this one features a cast of mostly younger performers, some of whom were only a few years away from major star vehicles, and focuses on a kind of person that I think all of us have known at some point in our lives. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaacs) is a musician, a truly talented once-in-a-generation voice (literally and narratively), but one whose Shakespearian character flaw is his shortsightedness. Just like the people around him, the audience sympathizes with him because of the tragic loss of his musical partner, without whom he seems lost, while also bearing silent, frustrated witness as he throws away every opportunity that comes his way. He impulsively sleeps with his friend’s wife, who ends up pregnant (although it’s unclear if the child is his), he turns down a position as a member of a trio when offered the chance at a real, longterm, lucrative option, and he takes a quick payout of $200 for a session performance that, had he accepted royalties instead, would have set him up for life. He can’t even go back to the merchant marines since his license was in a box of his things that his sister kept, which he impulsively told her to toss out. The fact that the film both begins and ends with the same scene, in which Llewyn is beaten in an alley by a man with a grudge, means that if you started the movie again the moment that it ended, you’d be right back where you left off, in an endless loop of Llewyn Davis getting the shit kicked out of him, literally and figuratively. And it’s all set to a phenomenal folksy score, which includes a hauntingly beautiful cover of the “500 Miles” as sung by Isaacs, Carey Mulligan, and Justin Timberlake. Truly one of the greats. 

7. One of the duo’s most underrated films, Hail, Caesar! (2016) is a riot. I don’t know why people don’t love this one more, or why it doesn’t get more love. Was the country just not in a place where they wanted this in 2016? Did everyone think it was uncool to love a movie in which Channing Tatum dances with his clothes on? Did the “would that it were” scene not work for most people? This is a movie in which Tilda Swinton plays twin gossip columnists who work for rival newspapers. I’d watch a movie that was just that, and here it’s only one of a million hilarious gags. The film centers on a fictional version of real-life studio “fixer” Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), who covers up the various scandals that Capitol Pictures’ retained stars get into, like figuring out how an unmarried actress can arrange to adopt her own child via a series of legal loopholes, thereby keeping the child and her image. Hollywood leading man Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is kidnapped from the set of a Ben-Hur-esque epic by communists, and Mannix gets the ransom note. Elsewhere on the lot, young singing cowboy Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), whose specialties as an actor include lasso and guitar but do not include acting, has been cast in a comedy of manners (think Lady Windermere’s Fan), in which he is unable to deliver the arch, aristocratic lines required because of his drawl. In the midst of all this, Scarlett Johanson does a full synchronized swim routine, Channing Tatum does a full cheeky, kinda horny, Gene Kelly-style musical number, Ralph Fiennes tries to teach an ingénue hick to enunciate, and in case you forgot, identical gossip columnists who are both suspicious of Whitlock’s sudden disappearance. This movie is so much fun, and I really wish it had gotten the attention and love it deserved and the time, and still does. 

6. The film company that Mannix works for in Hail is, as noted above, Capitol Pictures, a fake studio created originally for Barton Fink (1991), another Hollywood-set period piece, albeit one that takes place ten years prior to Hail, in 1941. Experiencing some writer’s block while crafting Miller’s Crossing, the brothers wrote that into a side project, about screenwriter Barton Fink (John Turturro), who takes a job at Capitol, and the neighbor with whom he shares a wall at the rundown Hotel Earle, insurance salesman Charlie Meadows (John Goodman). It’s a very confessional movie, as Fink, despite declaring his affinity for and connection to the common man, seems to be only able to create heady works that most people find too pretentious to connect with. For years before seeing this one, I saw a clip in which it was discussed by some film folk and which featured a scene from near the end in which John Goodman stood, furious, in the middle of a hotel as it burned; the talking heads who were deliberating about the movie talked about its purgatorial feel, which I took to mean that there was a larger metaphysical narrative than there really is, although Fink is a man who cannot go home and who is trapped in a place that seems hellish to him, unable to get out of his contract until he completes his Faustian bargain, the terms of which he may never be able to satisfy. It’s all a great deal of anxious, tense fun, and this is one of my favorite performances from John Mahoney, who plays a Faulknerian archetype named Bill Mayhew, a former novelist who has been reduced to writing movies (derogatory), a perfect foil for Fink, who has been elevated from playwright to screenwriter (complimentary). 

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5. Among all of the películas de hermanos (I’m sick of typing “brothers,” sue me), there’s one that stands directly in the middle of their dichotomy with a solid foot in both. Fargo (1996) is a dark, mean movie about little people with meaningless lives doing harm to one another over petty, trivial things. A movie in which being able to commit cold blooded murder doesn’t mean you can’t also be sniveling or pathetic. But Fargo is also about gentleness, comfort, and quiet dignity. A car salesman (William H. Macy) who’s racked up a significant amount of debt meets with two small-time criminals (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to have them fake-kidnap his wife without her knowledge, so that his wealthy father-in-law will pay a ransom that they will divvy up amongst themselves. When an unsuspecting state trooper is killed by the more psychotic of the two kidnappers, rural police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) begins an investigation into his slaying. Gunderson, who had heretofore never dealt with a crime of this severity, is a sweet woman who one at first assumes will not be up to the challenge of dealing with a criminal element of such monstrous evil. Instead, her charming, folksy naivete and belief in fundamental and foundational good remains unshaken despite staring into the abyss even as her ideas about human nature and the ways that people can hurt one another over something so low and crass as money are expanded. Buscemi and Macy are amazing as two sides of the same coin: desperate, nebbish, powerless rodents who constantly bite off more than they can chew; Stormare’s performance is palpably evil, like you’re staring into a man possessed by nothing more than pure, primordial hatred. But McDormand is the star here, and it’s no wonder that this was the performance that made her both an Oscar winner and a household name. It’s the perfect synergy of the two different Janus heads of the Coen brand: both deeply nihilistic in its examination of man’s inhumanity while also terrifically funny in its occasional slapstick and madcap energy. You’ll never laugh harder at a woman experiencing a terrifying home invasion. 

4. There are parables inside of parables in A Serious Man (2009). Michael Stuhlbarg plays physics professor Larry Gopnik, whose life is in the process of falling apart. His son hasn’t even had his bar mitzvah yet, but he’s already smoking pot, and worse, buying it on credit. His daughter, from whom his son is stealing the money to support his habit, has a life full of hair washing and sock hops, and she’s not exercising a single brain cell more than is needed for those two activities. His brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), is homeless and staying with the family, while also working on a kabbalistic, “mathematical” map of the universe and all the probability thereof. One of his students refuses to accept his grade on the basis that it will cost him his scholarship, and when said student attempts to bribe him and Larry tries to return the money to the boy’s father, he’s told that the latter will sue the former for libel if he speaks out about the bribery attempt, or if he keeps the money without changing the grade, forcing him into an impossible situation. Perhaps worst of all, his wife demands that he provide her with a ghet, which will allow her to marry her lover, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). It’s the Book of Job, for modern (or mid-century modern, as the case may be) times. Despite having done nothing wrong (he doesn’t even covet his neighbor’s wife until much later in the film), Larry is subject to a plague of issues that disrupt his life and threaten to take away everything. Over the course of the film, he visits three different rabbis of increasing uselessness (the first merely tells him to work on changing his perspective on things while the last is clearly senile and quoting the lyrics to “Somebody to Love”); the second tells him a story about a dentist who discovers Hebrew inscription on the inside of a patient’s teeth, a parable that neither the character nor the film elucidates, and with which both we and Larry must now grapple. The film manages to keep Larry sympathetic without being pathetic, and when we laugh, we’re never laughing at him, even when he starts to make bad decisions further down the line. An overlooked classic in their canon, in my opinion. 

3. The summer that I was fourteen, I must have watched O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) thirty times. It was everywhere in my community; everybody’s mom had the soundtrack in the CD slot of her Ford Explorer, everybody’s dad was doing their impressions of George Clooney as Ulysses Everitt McGill, the Soggy Bottom Boys were all over the radio, and I had the movie on VHS, which I would start from the beginning again whenever it ended, sometimes twice a day. I know it backwards and forwards; I know it by heart. In grad school, I spit out a paper on its Odysseyan themes while drunk and in three hours, and my professor read from it to the class. I cannot see a can of pomade without thinking of “I’m a Dapper Dan man, dammit!”, and I think about the scene in which blind record producer Stephen Root is hoodwinked every time I hear the word “accompaniment.” This movie lives and breathes inside of me. I use the phrase “in the highways and in the hedges” in my own writing enough that I should pay royalties for it, and there are instructions in my final wishes to ensure that Alison Krauss is played at my funeral. “We thought you was a toad” is one of the finest lines in American cinema history to me. I don’t think I could love it more than I already do. McGill, along with Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) escape from a chain gang so that they can retrieve a treasure that McGill squirreled away on his family farm, on land that is set to be flooded to make a lake. McGill’s ultimate goal, however, is to reunite with his wife Penny (Holly Hunter)—get it?—and win her back. Along the way they run afoul of a one-eyed highwaymen (the cyclops), a group of Baptists (lotus eaters), a trio of mournfully singing women who drink them under the table and rob them (sirens), and also the KKK (your guess is as good as mine). And it’s a bluegrass/folk musical! One of the most beautiful movies in their oeuvre, O Brother is a top tier film in anyone’s canon. 

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2. What is there that’s left to say about No Country for Old Men (2007) that hasn’t already been said? It achieved a level of critical success that none of the Coens’ other movies could hope to accomplish, winning half of the eight Oscar nominations it received, three of the nine BAFTA categories in which it was nominated, three of five nominated Critics’ Choice awards, was nominated for the Palme d’Or, got an outstanding achievement award from the DGA, and was nominated for 110 film awards all in all, with a 63.6% success rate. And it is an outstanding achievement, as a novel adaptation, as a film in its own right, and as a star-making vehicle for Javier Bardem, whose portrayal of Anton Chigurh has catapulted the character to a level of household recognition as one of cinema’s ultimate, infamous villains alongside Darth Vader, Dracula, Hannibal Lector, Jack Torrance, and the Wicked Witch of the West. It’s eerie, and quiet, and is the ultimate distillation of the Coen abstract that evil is an unstoppable force, that nostalgia for a less brutal and dark time is a fallacy because humankind and its darkness are inextricable from one another and have been since we crawled up out of the murk, but although we are fallible, warmth and light are still within reach. Tommy Lee Jones was born to play this role, grizzled sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who, like Marge Gunderson before him, gets caught up in a crime that’s outside of his frame of reference. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) comes upon the remains of a massacre while out hunting, stumbling across the scene of a drug deal gone wrong, wherein everyone is dead but one suffering man. Nearby, he finds a briefcase full of money, which he takes with him; hours later, in the night, his conscience gets the better of him, and he returns with water for the survivor, only to discover that not only is he too late, but he’s now been seen at the scene by dangerous men. Chigurh, and unrepentant sociopath, is tasked with tracking down the money, while Moss does everything in his power to stay one step ahead, with Bell on the trail of both of them. Moss is clever enough that there’s genuine suspense over whether he’ll manage to get the better of Chigurh, while Bell puzzles out the latter’s M.O. It’s tense, it’s beautiful, it’s truly one of the greats. 

1. There’s only one movie left that it could be, right? Fun fact: when I was a senior in high school, a DVD of Raising Arizona (1987) was a raffle prize for a fundraiser that one of the student organizations was holding. I bought a ticket solely for this reason, and I won that DVD because we were meant to be together. In only their second feature, Joel and Ethan crafted one of the greatest comedies of all time. Even if they never did anything after Arizona, there’s an Evil Dead-esque steadicam P.O.V. oner in this movie that comes up a driveway, across a yard, climbs a ladder, enters a window, and almost goes down a screaming woman’s throat that would solidify and cement them as filmmaking greats for all time. The story of eternally recidivist convenience store robber H.I. (Nicolas Cage) and his unlikely but perfect romantic match in police officer “Ed” (Holly Hunter), Raising Arizona follows their attempts to start a family despite Ed’s sterility preventing them from having a baby and H.I.’s criminal record preventing them from adopting. When wealthy unfinished furniture magnate Nathan Arizona idly jokes to the news media that his wife’s recent birthing of five quintuplets means that they almost have more kids than they can handle, the two end up kidnapping one of the babies to raise as their own. Assorted troubles arise in the form of H.I. losing his job after taking offense to his boss’s suggestion that the two of them “swing” with him and his wife, the breakout of H.I.’s friends (John Goodman and William Forsythe) from a nearby penitentiary and their subsequent extended stay at H.I. and Ed’s place, and the appearance of a seemingly demonic bounty hunter (even Chigurh doesn’t grenade bunny rabbits or cause flowers to burst into flames with his mere presence) who’s tracking the baby for the Arizonas. I won’t argue that No Country is a “better” movie, whatever that might mean to you, dear reader, but I could never rank it above Raising Arizona in my heart. It wouldn’t be honest; it wouldn’t be true. Cage, Hunter, and Goodman are a perfect trifecta of magic here, real lightning in a bottle stuff. I’m going to be thinking of this movie until my dying breath.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Swampflix Guide to the Oscars, 2017

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There are 47 feature films nominated for the 2017 Academy Awards. We here at Swampflix have reviewed little more than half of the films nominated (so far!), but we’re still happy to see so many movies we enjoyed listed among the nominees. The Academy rarely gets these things right when actually choosing the winners, but as a list this isn’t too shabby in terms of representing what 2016 had to offer to cinema. Listed below are the 25 Oscar-Nominated films from 2016 that we covered for the site, ranked from best to . . . least-best based on our star ratings. With each entry we’ve listed a blurb, a link to our corresponding review, and a mention of the awards the films were nominated for.

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1. 20th Century Women, nominated for Best Original Screenplay

“Although 20th Century Women is constructed on the foundation of small, intimate performances, it commands an all-encompassing scope that pulls back to cover topics as wide as punk culture solidarity, what it means to be a ‘good’ man in modern times, the shifts in status of the American woman in the decades since the Great Depression, the 1980s as a tipping point for consumer culture, the history of life on the planet Earth, and our insignificance as a species in the face of the immensity of the Universe. For me, this film was the transcendent, transformative cinematic experience people found in titles like Tree of Life & Boyhood that I never ‘got.’ Although it does succeed as an intimate, character-driven drama & an actors’ showcase, it means so much more than that to me on a downright spiritual level.”

2. Kubo and the Two Strings, nominated for Best Animated Feature Film, Best Visual Effects

“A lot of what makes Kubo and the Two Stings such an overwhelming triumph is its attention to detail in its visual & narrative craft. As with their past titles like Coraline & ParaNorman, Laika stands out here in terms of ambition with where the studio can push the limits of stop-motion animation as a medium. The film’s giant underwater eyeballs, Godzilla-sized Harryhausen skeleton, and stone-faced witches are just as terrifying as they are awe-inspiringly beautiful and I felt myself tearing up throughout the film just as often in response to its immense sense of visual craft as its dramatic implications of past trauma & familial loss. The film also allows for a darkness & danger sometimes missing in the modern kids’ picture, but balances out that sadness & terror with genuinely effective humor about memory loss & untapped talent.”

3. Hail, Caesar!, nominated for Best Production Design

“Hail, Caesar! is not performing well financially & the reviews are somewhat mixed so it’s obvious that not everyone’s going to be into it. However, it’s loaded with beautiful tributes to every Old Hollywood genre I can think of and it’s pretty damn hilarious in a subtle, quirky way that I think ranks up there with the very best of the Coens’ work, an accolade I wouldn’t use lightly. If you need a litmus test for whether or not you’ll enjoy the film yourself, Barton Fink might be a good place to start. If you hold Barton Fink in high regard, I encourage you to give Hail, Caesar! a chance. You might even end up falling in love with it just as much as I did & it’ll be well worth the effort to see its beautiful visual work projected on the silver screen either way.”

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4. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, nominated for Best Costume Design, Best Production Design

“The cast of Fantastic Beasts reminds me a lot of the cast of the Harry Potter films. Their camaraderie really comes across in their acting, and there’s just good vibes all around. The film’s director, David Yates, also directed the last four Harry Potter films, and he’s known for being a pleasure to work with. This is cinema that’s made with so much passion and love, and I cannot wait to see the next four!”

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5. Silence, nominated for Best Cinematography

“It’s going to take me a few years and more than a few viewings to fully grapple with Silence. My guess is that Scorsese isn’t fully done grappling with it himself. What’s clear to me is the film’s visual majesty and its unease with the virtue of spreading gospel into cultures where it’s violently, persistently rejected. What’s unclear is whether the ultimate destination of that unease is meant to be personal or universal, redemptive or vilifying, a sign of hope or a portrait of madness. Not all audiences are going to respond well to those unanswered questions. Indeed, most audiences won’t even bother taking the journey to get there. Personally, I found Silence to be complexly magnificent, a once-in-a-lifetime achievement of paradoxically loose & masterful filmmaking craft, whether or not I got a response when I prayed to Marty for answers on What It All Means and how that’s reflected in his most sacred text.”

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6. Zootopia, nominated for Best Animated Feature

“Zootopia is at its smartest when it vilifies a broken institution that has pitted the animals that populate its concrete jungle against one another instead of blaming the individuals influenced by that system for their problematic behavior. A lesser, more simplistic film would’ve introduced an intolerant, speciesist villain for the narrative to shame & punish. Zootopia instead points to various ways prejudice can take form even at the hands of the well-intentioned. It prompts the audience to examine their own thoughts & actions for ways they can uknowingly hurt the feelings or limit the opportunities of their fellow citizens by losing sight of the ideal that “Anyone can be anything.”

7. Hidden Figures, nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer)

“As with all historical films, it’s not wholly clear how precise Hidden Figures is in its details (I must admit that I haven’t read the book on which the film is based), but that’s largely irrelevant to the film’s message. Does it matter whether or not the real-life Al Harrison took a crowbar to the ‘Colored Ladies Room’ sign and declared that ‘Here at NASA, we all pee the same color,’ after learning that his best mathematician had to run a mile to the only such lavatory on the program’s campus every time she needed to relieve herself? Not really. What matters is showing young people (especially young girls) of color that although barriers exist, they can be surmounted. It also reminds the white audience that is, unfortunately, less likely to seek this film out that the barriers that lie in place for minorities to succeed do exist despite their perception of a lack of said barriers.”

8. Moonlight, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Barry Jenkins), Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali), Best Supporting Actress (Naomi Harris)

“In Moonlight, Jenkins somehow, miraculously finds a way to make a meditation on self-conflict, abuse, loneliness, addiction, and homophobic violence feel like a spiritual revelation, a cathartic release. So much of this hinges on visual abstraction. We sink into Chiron’s dreams. We share in his romantic gaze. Time & sound fall out of sync when life hits him like a ton of bricks, whether positively or negatively.”

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9. Arrival, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Denis Villeneuve), Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Sound Editing

“Arrival is a film about two species, human and alien, learning to communicate with one another by the gradual process of establishing common ground between their two disparate languages. Similarly, the film has to teach its audience how to understand what they’re watching and exactly what’s being communicated. It’s often said that movies are about the journey, not the destination, a (cliché) sentiment I’d typically tend to agree with, but so much of Arrival‘s value as a work of art hinges on its concluding half hour that its destination matters just as much, if not more than the effort it takes to get there. This is a story told through cyclical, circular, paradoxical logic, a structure that’s announced from scene one, but doesn’t become clear until minutes before the end credits and can’t be fully understood until at least a second viewing. Whether or not you’ll be interested in that proposition depends largely on your patience for that kind of non-traditional, non-linear payoff in your cinematic entertainment.”

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10. La La Land, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Damien Chazelle), Best Cinematography, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (Ryan Gosling), Best Actress (Emma Stone), Best Costume Design, Best Editing, Best Original Score, Best Original Songs (“Audition (The Fools Who Dream)”, “City of Stars”), Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing

“La La Land manipulates its audience from both ends. It opens with a big This Is For Musical Theater Die-Hards Only spectacle to appease people already on board with its genre and then slowly works in modern modes of the medium’s potential to win over stragglers & push strict traditionalists into new, unfamiliar territory. The ultimate destination is an exciting middle ground between nostalgia & innovation and by the film’s final moments I was eating out of its hand, despite starting the journey as a hostile skeptic.”

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11. I Am Not Your Negro, nominated for Best Documentary

“It seems inevitable that I Am Not Your Negro will be employed as a classroom tool to convey the political climate of the radicalized, Civil Rights-minded 1960s, but the form-defiant documentary is something much stranger than that future purpose would imply. Through Baldwin’s intimate, loosely structured essay, the film attempts to pinpoint the exact nature of the US’s inherent racism, particularly its roots in xenophobic Fear of the Other and in the ways it unintentionally expresses itself through pop culture media. These are not easily defined topics with clear, linear narratives and your appreciation of I Am Not Your Negro might largely depend upon how much you enjoy watching the film reach, not upon what it can firmly grasp.”

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12. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, nominated for Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing

“Rogue One frames the rest of the series in a much darker light. It brings a revived urgency and anxiety to the franchise, which I hope was probably there when Star Wars was first released in 1977. It manages to make the Death Star not just an impractical super weapon and the Empire a floundering bureaucracy that can’t teach its Stormtroopers how to aim. No, the Empire is a real frightening threat. Despite Disney’s CEO insisting that this is not a political movie, there’s quite a bit of war imagery and themes that are being presented in a time when the threat of fascism seems to loom. I mean, the movie itself is about a rebellion.”

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13. Star Trek Beyond, nominated for Best Makeup And Hairstyling

“Although this film is being billed as a return to Star Trek’s roots or a real ‘classic style’ Star Trek story, that’s not entirely true. Of course, given that the same thing was said about Insurrection back in 1998 (and, for better or worse, that’s a more or less true description of the film’s premise if nothing else), that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is still a film that takes characters from a fifty year old television series where most problems were solved within an hour and attempts to map them onto a contemporary action film structure, which works in some places and not in others. Other reviews of the film have also stated that Beyond is a more affectionate revisitation of the original series than the previous two films, which is also mostly true. The film does suffer from the fact that the opening sequence bears more than a passing resemblance to a scene in Galaxy Quest, which is a stark reminder of the kind of fun movie that can be made when someone loves Star Trek rather than simply sees it as a commercial venture. Overall, though, you’d be hard pressed not to get some enjoyment out of this film, Trekker or no.”

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14. The Jungle Book, nominated for Best Visual Effects

“The Jungle Book is a two-fold tale of revenge (one for Mowgli & one for the wicked tiger Shere Khan) as well as a classic coming of age story about a hero finding their place in the world, but those plot machinations are somewhat insignificant in comparison to the emotional core of Baloo’s close friendship with Mowgli (which develops a little quickly here; I’d like to have seen it given a little more room to breathe). So much of that impact rests on the all-too-capable shoulders of one Bill Murray, who delivers his best performance in years here (outside maybe his collaborations with Wes Anderson).”

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15. Captain Fantastic, nominated for Best Actor (Viggo Mortensen)

“Six kids wielding knives, late-night gravedigging, and skinning animals all sound like elements to a rather disturbing horror movie, but, surprisingly, all exist in Matt Ross’s latest comedy-drama, Captain Fantastic. Those with a slightly darker sense of humor will get a kick out of this film, but it really has something to offer everyone, such as family values, brief nudity, religious humor, and a heart-wrenching love story. I had no idea who Matt Ross was, and I was surprised to see that he directed less than a handful of movies because he did such a ‘fantastic’ job with this one.”

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16. The Lobster, nominated for Best Original Screenplay

“There’s a fierce, biting allegory to this premise that combines the most effective aspects of sci-fi short stories & absurdist stage play black humor to skewer the surreal, predatory nature of the modern romance landscape. It takes a certain sensibility to give into The Lobster‘s many outlandish conceits, but it’s easy to see how the film could top many best of the year lists for those able to lock onto its very peculiar, particular mode of operation, despite the sour word of mouth at the post-screening urinal. It’s basically 2016’s Anomalisa, with all the positives & negatives that comparison implies.”

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17. Jackie, nominated for Best Actress (Natalie Portman), Best Costume Design, Best Original Score

“As much as I admire Jackie‘s search for small character beats over broad dramatization, I think it could have benefited from the campy touch of a drag queen in the lead role. Jackie is delicately beautiful & caustically funny as is, but I’m convinced that with a drag queen in the lead (I’m thinking specifically of Jinkx Monsoon) it could have been an all-time classic.”

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18. Manchester by the Sea, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Kenneth Lonergan), Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (Casey Affleck), Best Supporting Actor (Lucas Hedges), Best Supporting Actress (Michelle Williams)

“What I was most impressed by in Manchester by the Sea wasn’t at all the heartbreaking drama Affleck skillfully conveys under the falsely calm surface of each scene. Rather, I was most struck by the way the film clashes a take-no-shit Boston bro attitude with devastating moments of emotional fragility to pull out something strikingly funny from the wreckage. The film works really well as a dramatic actors’ showcase, but it’s that act of black comedy alchemy that made it feel special to me.”

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19. Nocturnal Animals, nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Michael Shannon)

“Nocturnal Animals feels most alive when Ford drops the pretense of trying to make a point and instead lovingly shoots his beautiful sets & impeccable costumes without any semblance of making them narratively significant. His art curator framing device works best as an instruction manual on how best to appreciate what he’s trying to accomplish in the film, rather than a participation in its thematic goals. I have very little interest in the way Ford’s narratives clash fragile artsy types against the unhinged threat of dangerously macho hicks, but any abstracted moment where he carefully posed naked bodies before blinding red fabric voids on top of a classical music score had me drooling in my chair. I’m not convinced Nocturnal Animals has anything useful or novel to say about the frivolity of revenge or the human condition, but it often works marvelously as an art gallery in motion (when it’s not hung up on watching Amy Adams think & read herself through another lonely night).”

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20. Loving, nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Ruth Negga)

“Loving finds Nichols returning to the muted, sullen drama of Mud, this time with a historical bent. It isn’t my favorite mode for a director who’s proven that he can deliver much more striking, memorable work when he leaves behind the confines of grounded realism, but something Nichols does exceedingly well with these kinds of stories is provide a perfect stage for well-measured, deeply affecting performances. Actors Joel Edgerton & Ruth Negga are incredibly, heartachingly sincere in their portrayals of real-life trail-blazers Richard & Mildred Loving and Nichols is smart to take a backseat to their work here, a dedication to restraint I respect greatly, even if I prefer when it’s applied to a more ambitious kind of narrative.”

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21. Hell or High Water, nominated for Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Jeff Bridges), Best Film Editing

“I totally believe people when they say Hell or High Water is their favorite movie of the year so far, but I suspect these folks are just more finely tuned to the intricacies of its genre & tone than I am. For me, the film is formally a little flat, playing like what I’d imagine a modern Showtime drama version of Walker, Texas Ranger would look like, right down to the wince-worthy music cues. However, even as an outsider I did find myself entertained, especially by the film’s showy dialogue & muted performances.”

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22. Fences, nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Denzel Washington), Best Support Actress (Viola Davis)

“Pushing aside any concerns with Fences‘s uncinematic tone, strange sense of pacing, and iffy final moments of redemption for a despicably cruel character (that seems to go even further than the source material in their cautious forgiveness), there’s a lot worth praising in what Washington & his small cast of supporting players accomplish here. Besides the obvious merit of bringing a play he greatly respects to a much wider audience who would not have had the opportunity to see he & Davis perform on stage, Washington does the quintessential thing actors-turned-directors are often accused of: crafting a work as an actor’s showcase above all other concerns. I may have some reservations about Fences being suitable for a big screen adaptation on a tonal, almost spiritual level (although I do very much appreciate the play as a text), but there’s no denying the power of the performances Washington brings to the screen with the project. The film is very much worth a look just for that virtue alone.”

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23. Suicide Squad, nominated for Best Makeup And Hairstyling

“Instead of portraying one of the few enjoyable characters in its roster suffering repetitive abuse, Suicide Squad instead re-works her love affair with Mr. J as a Bonnie & Clyde/Mickey & Mallory type outlaws-against-the-world dynamic, one with a very strong BDSM undertone. Affording Harley Quinn sexual consent isn’t the only part of the studio-notes genius of the scenario, either. The film also cuts Leto’s competent-but-forgettable meth mouth Joker down to a bit role so that he’s an occasional element of chaos at best, never fully outwearing his welcome. Not only does this editing room decision soften Leto’s potential annoyance & Ayer’s inherent nastiness; it also allows Harley Quinn to be a wisecracking murderer on her own terms, one whose most pronounced relationship in the film (with Deadshot) is friendly instead of romantic. I know you’re supposed to root for an auteur’s vision & not for the big bad studio trying to homogenize their ‘art’, but Suicide Squad was much more enjoyable in its presumably compromised form than it would have been otherwise.”

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24. Doctor Strange, nominated for Best Visual Effects

“Dr. Strange is a feast for the eyes, but fails to nourish on any comedic, narrative, spiritual, philosophical, or emotional level. For a work that’s inspired over a year of think piece controversy and a few weeks of hyperbolic Best of the MCU praise, it mostly exists as a flashy, but disappointing hunk of Nothing Special.”

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25. Elle, nominated for Best Actress (Isabelle Huppert)

“Elle vaguely echoes ideas about what it’s like to mentally relive a trauma once it’s ‘behind you,’ having to encounter your abuser in public social settings without acknowledging the transgression, the ineffectiveness of reporting sexual assault to police, and the misogynistic & sexually repressed aspects of modern culture that lead to rape in the first place, but all of those concepts exist in the film as indistinct whispers. Mostly, the rape is treated like a cheap murder mystery, with all of the typical red herrings & idiotic jump scares you’d expect in a whodunit. It’s a paralyzing trauma that has little effect on the story outside the scenes where it’s coldly detailed onscreen and the real shame is that it sours what is otherwise an excellently performed black comedy & character study by leaving very little room for laughter, if any.”

-The Swampflix Crew

Swampflix’s Top Films of 2016

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1. The Witch – A cinematic masterpiece from the first frame to the last, The Witch at once acts like a newly-discovered Nathaniel Hawthorne short story, a “Hansel & Gretel” type fairy tale about the dangers of the wild, a slice of Satanic panic folklore, and an impressively well-researched historical account of witchcraft unmatched in its eerie beauty since at least as far back as 1922’s Häxan. Despite its historical nature and Puritan setting, this film will make your skin crawl with dread. Each captured moment is elegant and haunting, transporting the audience back to the 17th Century and tempting those along for the ride to question their sanity. The Witch is a true New England American Gothic piece. It sidesteps the mushy romances and familial dramas typically set in New England, one of the most beautiful areas of the country, in favor of a spine-chilling Satanic tale that features dense layers of historical & moral subtext, an amazing soundtrack of ominous ambient sounds, and a breakout star in its scene-stealing goat, the almighty Black Phillip. It’s not the usual terror-based entertainment you’d pull from more typical horror works about haunted houses or crazed killers who can’t be stopped, but even as a beautiful, slow-building art film & a mood piece it just might be the spookiest movie of 2016.

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2. 10 Cloverfield Lane – Far better than it has any right to be, this sequel in-name-only combines elements of horror, sci-fi, and the supernatural thriller to craft an intimate, difficult-to-categorize indictment of doomsday prepper culture. In a year that saw an excess of great confined-space thrillers (Green Room, Don’t Breathe, Emelie, Hush, The Shallows, The Invitation) 10 Cloverfield Lane stands above the rest by locking its audience in the basement with a small cast of fearful apocalypse survivors and a complexly monstrous John Goodman. Relentlessly & intoxicatingly tense, this Louisiana-set woman-in-captivity horror will rattle you in a way that its 2008 found footage predecessor never even approached. It will disturb you, surprise you, and confirm your deepest fears about “survival” nuts’ ugly thirst for post-apocalyptic power grabs, largely thanks to a career-altering performance from someone we formerly knew as the cool dad from Roseanne.

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3. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping – The pop music version of This Is Spinal Tap, Andy Samberg’s greatest achievement to date thoroughly skewers the totality of hedonistic excess & outsized hubris on the modern pop music landscape. In a larger sense, it also functions as an incisive & withering dissection of the dreamy pop culture star-making machine as the industrial complex that it really is. Popstar can be easily dismissed as a profoundly stupid film. In its smaller moments, it often delivers the quintessential mindless humor we all need to endure this increasingly shitty life & its throwaway consumer culture. There’s legitimate criticism lurking under its frivolously parodic mockumentary surface, though. Popstar smartly & lovingly dismantles the entirety of pop’s current state of ridiculousness, from EDM DJ laziness to Macklemore’s no-homo “activism” to the meaninglessness of hip-hop that apotheosizes empty materialism to the industry’s creepy fetishization of military action & nationalism. Do yourself a favor and at least download the song “Finest Girl (Bin Laden Song)” to sample the film’s well-calibrated sense of pointed, yet absurd satirical humor.

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4. The Boy – There’s really no pleasure quite like a campy horror movie about a haunted evil doll. Not every scary movie is (or ought to be) the next big thing in horror, and The Boy is fairly run of the mill in its light supernatural tomfoolery. That is, until a sharp left turn in its third act completely obliterates its more generic psychological/supernatural slowburn to delve into some utterly bonkers motherfuckery that should be a crowdpleaser among all schlock junkies looking for entertainment in pure novelty. The Boy delivers both the genuinely creepy chills and the over-the-top camp that we crave in our horror flicks, ultimately feeling like two memorable genre pictures for the price of one. In its own goofy way, it completely upends what we’ve come to expect from the modern PG-13 evil doll movie as a genre in recent years, offering a surprise breath of fresh air in its last minute deviation from the norm.

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5. Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday – Our favorite Netflix Original in a year that saw many, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday is essentially Pee-wee’s Big Adventure on a Big Top Pee-wee scale & budget, which is all that Pee-Wee Herman fans could really ask for in a direct-to-streaming release after a 30 year gap. Following a giant Rube Goldberg device of a plot, with each chain reaction proving to be just as kooky (or even kookier) than the last, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday’s most immediately endearing aspect might be the love story of the year: a steamy bromance between Pee-wee Herman and Joe Manganiello (who are both billed as playing themselves). Manganiello enters the scene as a living embodiment of a Tom of Finland drawing on a motorcycle and the queer subtext certainly doesn’t end there, eventually blossoming into a really sweet, very romantic story about two souls who just can’t get enough of each other. We can’t get enough of those two either. In fact, we’re ready for a sequel!

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6. Tale of Tales – In a world full of fairy tale media (Once Upon a Time, Disney Princess movies, live action remakes of Disney Princess movies, etc), it’s a curious thing that more keeps getting made, and that so much of it is adapted from the same tales we already know. Adapted instead from the more rarely-seen source of 17th century Italian fairy tales that fell into obscurity, Tale of Tales is narratively unique, visually striking, morbidly funny, brutally cold: everything you could ask for from a not-all-fairy-tales-are-for-children corrective. The film fearlessly alternates between the grotesque & the beautiful, the darkly funny & the cruelly tragic. Its cinematography as well as its set & costume design will make you wonder how something so delicately pretty can be so willing to get so spiritually ugly at the drop of a hat (or a sea beast’s heart). There is no Disney-brand fantasy to be found here, only black magic, witches, ogres, and giant insects, each waiting to stab you in the back with a harsh life lesson about the dangers & evils of self-absorption once you let your guard down in a dreamlike stupor.

7. Kubo and the Two Strings – The latest masterful offering from the stop-motion animation marvels Laika is pure, gorgeous art. The puppetry is incredible, an overwhelming triumph in Laika’s continued attention to detail in visual & narrative craft. At heart a story about the power of storytelling & the ways memory functions like potent magic, Kubo and the Two Stings finds inspiration in Japanese folklore & the rich cinematic past of samurai epics to craft an immense visual spectacle and to explore dramatic themes of past trauma & familial loss. This allows for a darkness & a danger sometimes missing in the modern kids’ picture, but what Laika most deserves bragging rights for is the mind-boggling way they pulled off this awe-inspiringly beautiful innovation in the moving image, the most basic aspect of filmmaking.

8. Hail, Caesar! – Would that it were so simple to sum up this movie’s charms. A smart, star-studded, intricately-plotted, politically & theologically thoughtful, genuinely hilarious, and strikingly gorgeous movie about The Movies, Hail, Caesar! might be one of the Coen Brothers’ strongest works to date. Much like with Barton Fink, the Coens look back to the Old Hollywood studio system in Hail, Caesar! as a gateway into discussing the nature of what they do for living as well as the nature of Nature at large. In the process, they perfectly capture Old Hollywood’s ghost. There’s the hyperbolic threat of Communism, ancient Hollywood scandals, endlessly moody directors, a musical number featuring a tap-dancing Channing Tatum and, behind it all, an unsung hero just trying to hold everything together off-camera. Hail, Caesar! is not only worthwhile for being loaded with its stunningly beautiful tributes to Old Hollywood, however; it’s also pretty damn hilarious in a subtle, quirky way that’s becoming a rare treat on the modern comedy landscape.

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9. Midnight Special – Focused more on mood than worldbuilding, Jeff Nichols’s sci-fi chase epic mirrors the best eras of genre cinema giants Steven Spieldberg & John Carpenter. Midnight Special is surprisingly accessible for an original sci-fi property, never getting wrapped up in the complex terminologies and detached-from-reality scenarios that often alienate audiences in the genre. This may be the Nichols’s most ambitious work to date in terms of scale, but he’s smart to keep the individual parts that carry the hefty, supernatural mystery of its narrative just as small & intimate as he has in past familial dramas like Mud & Shotgun Stories. You never lose sight that these are real people struggling with an unreal situation. And, if nothing else, a world-weary Michael Shannon’s studied command of his role as the father of a child with godlike, unexplainable powers is something truly special, a grounded, believable performance that everyone should witness at least once.

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10. Hunt for the Wilderpeople – The story of a young boy going on the lam in the New Zealand bush with his reluctantly adoptive uncle after a devastating tragedy, Hunt for the Wilderpeople very nearly tops Boy for Taika Waititi’s best feature to date, mixing small, endearing character beats with the large scale spectacle of a big budget action comedy. We all need a good laugh this year; we also need a good cry. Fortunately, Wilderpeople has both! It’s funny, cute, and even twee in a way that sometimes resembles a Wes Anderson movie, but there’s also a certain darkness to the film that doesn’t shy away from real life consequences or scathing political satire. Many people have rightly latched onto this adventure epic as one of the most consistently funny comedies of recent memory (with a surprisingly gruff comedic turn from Sam Neill registering as especially cherishable), but there’s so much more going on in the film than a mere assemblage of a long string of jokes.

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Honorable Mentions – Here are a few films we loved that just missed our collective Best Of list: The Handmaiden, Moonlight, Arrival, Shin Godzilla, Ghostbusters, and Keanu. They may not have made our Top Ten, but they’re each worthy of praise & attention in their own various ways.

Read Alli’s picks here.
Read Boomer’s picks here.
Read Brandon’s picks here & here.
Read Britnee’s picks here.

-The Swampflix Crew

Alli’s Top Films of 2016

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1. The Handmaiden – Park Chan-wook has a way of crafting gorgeous Victorian-inspired scenery and making it work even if the setting (in this case, The Japanese Occupation of Korea) doesn’t necessarily call for it. I say “Victorian-inspired” because of the film’s occasional frilly costuming and elaborate, lushly decorated sets, but The Handmaiden is definitely sexy enough to make any room full of self-respecting Victorians faint. It’s such a lovely erotic thriller. Like any of Park Chan-Wook’s other films, it also gets gritty and brutal, but despite the tension and brutality, it’s my favorite love story of the year.

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2. The Witch – The Witch follows in the footsteps of Häxan and presents a more historical account of witchcraft. Despite its historical nature and Puritan setting, the film will make your skin crawl with atmospheric dread. It is beautiful and dark; and, like with every great horror movie, its soundtrack is amazing, just teeming with ominous ambient sounds. Also, how many movies have a goat as the star??? Black Phillip is the king of everything.

3. Moonlight – Moonlight is a lovely deconstruction of the hazards of toxic masculinity, homophobia, and the war on drugs. I can’t begin to say how important this movie is. It comes at a time when tensions in our country are high, and people are actually fighting to be able to discriminate against other people. To have a film like this right now, showing us how damaging these attitudes are, is vital. It helps that Moonlight is so good. It has such a tender earnestness in how it approaches the subject, and the way it’s told in three parts gives it a poetic rhythm.

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4. Ghostbusters – This movie was so much funnier than I expected. I think I was predisposed to like it anyway, because it made a bunch of man-children angry, but all the jokes landed and it captures just enough of the original film’s spirit while also having its own liveliness.  The cast really picked up the torch and ran with it. In particular, it was really great to see a lighter side of Chris Hemsworth that isn’t just his culture-shocked Thor act. I’m so glad that this movie didn’t just function as another unnecessary reboot.

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5. Hunt for the Wilderpeople – I think we all need a good laugh this year, but we also need a good cry. Fortunately, Wilderpeople has both!  This is the story of a boy going on the lam in the New Zealand bush with his reluctantly adoptive uncle after a devastating tragedy. Though it’s funny and cute, even twee in a way that resembles a Wes Anderson movie, there’s a certain darkness to it. It doesn’t shy away from real life consequences or scathing political satire.

6. Kubo and the Two Strings – This movie is pure, gorgeous art. The puppetry is incredible. The first time the origami flittered and moved, I just teared up at how wonderful it looked. I’m not even sure how they pulled this stuff off. Laika has done it again, and they deserve all the bragging rights.

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7. Tale of Tales – In a world full of fairy tale related media (Once Upon a Time, Disney Princess movies, live action remakes of Disney Princess movies, etc), it’s a curious thing that more keeps getting made, and that so much of it is adapted from the same tales we already know. Adapted from a book of 17th century Italian fairy tales that fell into obscurity, Tale of Tales weaves together many stories which, while very old, feel very new. There is no Disney here. The stories told are everything fairy tales should be: strange, eerie, brutal, gory, and beautiful.

8. Hail, Caesar! – Would that it were so simple to sum up this movie’s charms. It’s such a fun parody of McCarthy-era Hollywood. There’s the hyperbolized threat of Communism, old Hollywood scandals, moody directors, a musical dance number with Channing Tatum tap dancing and singing about gams, and the one guy in the background who’s just trying to hold it all together. On top of all of that is the Coen Brothers’ ability to assemble an amazing cast. I think Hail, Caesar! might just be one of their strongest works.

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9. Shin Godzilla – It’s very difficult for a franchise this old and with so many titles to it to offer a new take on the tale, but Shin Godzilla really pulls it off. Instead of a story about a giant lizard terrorizing Tokyo, it’s a deconstruction of Japanese bureaucracy and foreign policy with a giant hideous monster destroying Tokyo in the background. It’s In the Loop meets Kaiju and just about as strange and wonderful as you’d expect from that combo.

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10. Pee-wee’s Big Holiday – If The Handmaiden was my favorite love story of the year, the bromance between Pee-wee Herman and Joe Manganiello might be my second favorite. Just like any Pee-wee movie, it’s just a giant Rube Goldberg device of a plot, with each chain reaction being just as kooky or even kookier than the last.

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11. Into the Inferno – Herzog and his vulcanologist friend Clive Oppenheimer nerd out about volcanoes for an hour and forty five minutes. It’s a dream come true.  Part anthropological exploration, part nature documentary, Into the Inferno is gorgeous and enlightening.

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12. Rogue One – How political can a Star Wars movie get while the producers vehemently deny it? Very. Rogue One is about the rebel group who smuggled the Death Star blueprints. Somehow, it manages to take a 40 year old franchise and frame it in such a newly dark light. Also, despite the all haters, I thought that CGI Peter Cushing was very impressive.

-Alli Hobbs

Brandon’s Top Films of 2016

/ swampflix / 13 Comments

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1. The Neon Demon -At once Nicolas Winding Refn’s most beautiful work to date and his most deliberately off-putting, The Neon Demon is consistently uncomfortable, but also intensely beautiful & surprisingly humorous. It’s exquisite trash, the coveted ground where high art meets uncivilized filth. Months later my eyeballs are still bleeding from its stark cinematography & my brain is still tearing itself in half trying to find somewhere to land on its thematic minefield of female exploitation, competition, narcissism, and mystic power. It’s tempting to reduce this achievement to descriptions like “the fashion world Suspiria” or “the day-glo Black Swan,” but the truth is that the work is 100% pure, uncut Refn. For better or for worse, this will be the title that solidifies him as an auteur provocateur, likening him to other technically-skilled button pushers like De Palma, Friedkin, Verhoeven, Von Trier, Ken Russell, and, why not, Russ Meyer. Like all the madmen provocation artists that have come before him, Refn stumbles while handling any semblance of nuance in the proudly taboo subjects he gleefully rattles like a curious toddler, but he makes the exercise so beautiful & so callously funny that it’s difficult to sour on the experience as a whole. Instead, you mull over provocations like The Neon Demon for days, months, years on end, wrestling with your own thoughts on what you’ve seen and how, exactly, you’re supposed to feel about it.

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2. Tale of Tales – It’s sometimes necessary to remind yourself of the immense wonder & dreamlike stupor a great movie can immerse you in and Tale of Tales does so only to stab you in the back with a harsh life lesson (or three) once you let your guard down. The film is crawling with witches, ogres, giant insects, and the like that all make magic feel just as real and as dangerous as it does in The Witch, albeit with a lavish depiction of wealth in its costume & set design the latter can’t match in its more muted imagery. It’s beautiful, morbidly funny, brutally cold, everything you could ask for from a not-all-fairy-tales-are-for-children corrective. Its three tales all stand separately strong & immaculate on their own, but also combine to teach its characters/victims (and, less harshly, its audience) about the dangers & evils of self-absorption. Tale of Tales fearlessly alternates between the grotesque & the beautiful, the darkly funny & the cruelly tragic. Its cinematography as well as its set & costume design will make you wonder how something so delicately pretty can be so willing to get so spiritually ugly at the drop of a hat (or a sea beast’s heart).

3. Hail, Caesar! – A smart, star-studded, intricately-plotted, politically & theologically thoughtful, genuinely hilarious, and strikingly gorgeous movie about The Movies. Much like with Barton Fink, the Coens look back to the Old Hollywood studio system in Hail, Caesar! as a gateway into discussing the nature of what they do for living as well as the nature of Nature at large. In the process, they perfectly capture Old Hollywood’s ghost. Every classic genre I can think of makes an appearance here: noir, Westerns, musicals, synchronized swimming pictures, religious epics, tuxedo’d leading man dramas, etc. Audiences sometimes forget that these types of films weren’t always physically degraded, so it’s shocking to see the beautiful costuming & set design achievements of the era recreated & blown up large in such striking clarity at a modern movie theater. Hail, Caesar! is not only worthwhile for being loaded with these beautiful tributes to Old Hollywood, however; it’s also pretty damn hilarious in a subtle, quirky way that I think ranks up there with the very best of the Coens’ comedic work, an accolade I wouldn’t use lightly.

4. Kubo and the Two Strings – Inspired by Japanese folklore & the rich cinematic past of samurai epics, the latest masterful offering from the stop-motion animation marvels Laika is at heart a story about the power of storytelling & the ways memory functions like potent magic. Kubo and the Two Stings is an overwhelming triumph in its attention to detail in visual & narrative craft. The film’s giant underwater eyeballs, Godzilla-sized Harryhausen skeleton, and stone-faced witches are just as terrifying as they are awe-inspiringly beautiful and I felt myself tearing up throughout the film just as often in response to its immense visual spectacle as its dramatic implications of past trauma & familial loss. The film allows for a darkness & danger sometimes missing in the modern kids’ picture, but balances out that sadness & terror with genuinely effective humor about memory loss & untapped talent. What’s really impressive, though, is its efficiency in storytelling. There isn’t a single image or element at play, from a woven bracelet to a paper lantern to an insectoid buffoon, that doesn’t come to full significance if you lend the film enough patience. Kubo and the Two Stings could’ve easily rested on the laurels of its visual spectacle, a result of infinite hours of painstakingly detailed labor in an animation studio, but it instead pours just as much care & specificity into its reverence for storytelling as a tradition.

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5. The Witch – A haunting, beautifully shot, impossibly well-researched witchcraft horror with an authenticity that’s unmatched in its genre going at least as far back as 1922’s Häxan. This movie has many virtues outside the simple question of whether or not it was scary, but yes, The Witch succeeds there as well. At times it can be downright terrifying. Depicting the unraveling of a small Puritan family at the edge of the New England wilderness in the 17th Century, The Witch makes it clear very early on that its supernatural threat is not only real, but it’s also really fucked up. It transports the audience to the era, making you feel as if fairy tales like “Hansel & Gretel” and folklore about wanton women dancing with the devil naked in the moonlight might actually be real threats, just waiting in the woods to pick your family apart & devour the pieces. It’s not the usual terror-based entertainment you’d pull from more typical horrors about haunted houses or crazed killers who can’t be stopped, but it is a significantly more rewarding film than strict genre fare can often be when it too closely plays by modern rules.

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6. The Fits – Writer-director Anna Rose Holmer’s debut feature isn’t a standard coming of age drama or a medical thriller or a supernatural horror, so much as a supernatural occurrence of divine transcendence. The Fits sidesteps strict genre classification by aiming more for a loosely menacing art house tone than a traditional A-B story structure. Though, even if The Fits were a more standard coming of age narrative about a young girl deciding between the rigidly gender-divided realms of dance & boxing at her local gym, Royalty Hightower’s stoic lead performance & the camera’s striking sense of symmetry would still make the exercise more than worthwhile. As is, it’s quietly bizarre, seemingly supernatural territory that’s bound to leave a lasting effect on you whether or not you’re on board with its ultimate destination, an act of strange majesty that’s sure to divide audiences in its swing-for-the-fences ambition.

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7. High-Rise – Adapted from a novel by J.G. Ballard, the madman who penned the source material for Cronenberg’s Crash, High-Rise is a modern reflection of 1970s anxieties about “luxury lifestyle” commodity & spiritually-erosive consumer culture as funneled through an aggressive, vague menace of existential dread. The film posits the modern consumer as a “bio robot,” a soulless machine who cannot function without their various devices of “convenience.” High-Rise’s never-ending consumerist party starts from a seemingly dangerous, chaotic place and gets even more wild & savage from there, expanding the scope of its hedonism & cruelty to a months’ long descent into the darkness of the human soul. I’ve seen plenty movie parties go out of bounds before, but this is the one that most convincingly sets fire to the path back to civilization in the process. It’s an entirely unique obliteration of the thin line that separates the modern consumer from the wild, bloodthirsty beast, a rare nightmare of a good time.

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8. Hunt for the Wilderpeople – Taika Waititi is on a wicked hot streak. His 2007 debut Eagle vs Shark wasn’t half bad as an off-center romantic comedy, but his last three films (Boy, What We Do in the Shadows, and now Hunt for the Wilderpeople) are pretty much perfect works. In its best moments, Wilderpeople very nearly tops Boy for Waititi’s best to date, mixing small, endearing character beats with the large scale spectacle of a big budget action comedy. Many people have rightly latched onto this adventure epic as one of the most consistently funny comedies of the year (with a surprisingly gruff comedic turn from Sam Neill registering as especially cherishable). One thing I haven’t heard enough of a fuss over yet, though, is how great the music is, from the novelty of the “Ricky’s Birthday” jingle to the legitimate action movie sounds of tracks like “Ricky Runs.” If it weren’t for The Neon Demon’s surreally intense synth submersions, it’d be an easy pick for soundtrack of the year for me.

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9. Midnight Special – Mirroring the best eras of sci-fi cinema giants Steven Spieldberg & John Carpenter, Midnight Special is massive enough in its imagination & awe-inspiring mystery to establish Jeff Nichols as one of the best young talents in the industry today. This may be the director’s most ambitious work to date in terms of scale, but he’s smart to keep the individual parts that carry the hefty, supernatural mystery of its narrative just as small & intimate as he has in past familial dramas like Mud & Shotgun Stories. An incredible work with a near-limitless scope, it’s one built on an intricately detailed foundation of grounded, believable worldbuilding & old-fashioned character work. Midnight Special may allow its ideas to outweigh its emotion in a general sense, but you never lose sight that these are real people struggling with an unreal situation.

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10. Nerve – This teeny bopper millennial version of The Running Man is the single most aggressively feminine action thriller I can ever remember seeing. Nerve uses its killer smart phone app technophobia premise to create something really fun & truly memorable without devolving into so-bad-it’s-good schlock. Although the film’s premise of teens competing for social media fame through a hideously self-described “game of truth or dare without the truth” obviously carries a lot of millennial-shaming baggage in its basic DNA, Nerve‘s secret weapon is in how it celebrates teen-specific adventurousness within that digital-age moralizing. The film manages to Trojan horse a surprisingly potent coming of age narrative inside a tawdry action thriller shell, presenting a fantasy world where technology actually makes people more adventurous instead of more insular.

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11. The Dressmaker – There’s so much to love about The Dressmaker, but its most admirable quality is its minute-to-minute unpredictability. The film has obvious fun with the general structure of a Western & plays with the campy tones of an absurdist comedy, but it zigs where you expect those genres’ tropes to zag and much of its third act is an anything-goes free-for-all where the only thing that’s certain is that Kate Winslet is a badass and you’d be a fool to vex her. At once a violent camp comedy and a heartfelt melodrama, the film plays like 90s-era John Waters remaking Strictly Ballroom as a revenge tale Western where lives are destroyed by pretty dresses instead of bullets. If I were ever going to fall in love with a movie that could even vaguely be considered a Western, this formula would be my personal ideal. It’s violent, it’s campy, it’s unpredictable, it’s commanded by the female gaze; The Dressmaker is everything I love about cinema at large crammed into the mold of a genre that usually puts me to sleep.

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12. The Nice Guys – If I had to assign The Nice Guys an exact genre I’d be tempted to classify it as “sleaze noir.” A miracle of Frankensteined movie science, the film’s general aesthetic lies somewhere between Lethal Weapon & Boogie Nights, an unlikely tonal mashup resulting from its cartoonishly violent detective work set against a 1970s California porn industry backdrop. Alternating between slapstick cruelty & genuinely devastating displays of brutality, The Nice Guys finds a dangerously fun & wicked mode of entertainment that I’m not sure Shane Black has ever topped before. It’s a solid, accessible base that even leaves room for more surreal inclusions like unicorns, mermaids, and gigantic insects among its more straightforward gags. Black understands exactly what genre toys he’s playing with, but retools them all to create his own distinct work with an incredibly strong, idiosyncratic comedic voice. This is a movie made by a passionate nerd who loves watching movies and that affection is immediately obvious in every scene. The call is coming from inside the audience.

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13. Zootopia – This animated Disney film isn’t exactly about racism or sexism or any other specific kind of institutionalized prejudice. Zootopia instead addresses all of these issues in a more vaguely-defined, all-purpose dichotomy (kind of the way The X-Men have been metaphorically worked into all kinds of social issue metaphors over the decades). Zootopia is at its smartest when it vilifies a broken institution that has pitted the talking animals that populate its CG concrete jungle against one another instead of blaming the individuals influenced by that system for their problematic behavior. A lesser, more simplistic film would’ve introduced an intolerant, speciesist villain for the narrative to shame & punish. Zootopia instead points to various ways prejudice can take form even at the hands of the well-intentioned. The attention to detail in its setting, the narrative stakes of its central mystery, and the overall theme of the ways institutionalized prejudice can corrupt & destroy our personal relationships all amount to a truly special, seemingly Important film.

14. Moonlight – Besides functioning as a queer narrative about how homosexual desire violently clashes with traditional ideas of black masculinity in the modern world, Moonlight also works as a coming of age & self-acceptance story for a single man who’s forced to navigate & survive that clash. A large part of what saves the film from dramatic banality is its basic structure as a triptych. We see our protagonist as a child, a teenager, and an adult man. Narrowing down Chiron’s life to these temporal snapshots allows us to dive deep into the character instead of casually empathizing from the surface. Director Barry Jenkins somehow, miraculously finds a way to make this meditation on self-conflict, abuse, loneliness, addiction, and homophobic violence feel like a spiritual revelation, a cathartic release. So much of this hinges on its visual abstraction. We sink into Chiron’s dreams. We share in his romantic gaze. Time & sound fall out of sync when life hits him like a ton of bricks, whether positively or negatively. What could have been a potentially middling, by the books queer drama avoids woe & despair mediocrity to instead find an ultimately life-affirming adoption of Under the Skin levels of visual & aural abstraction. It’s nothing short of mesmerizing.

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15. The Handmaiden – An erotic lesbian crime thriller with meticulous dedication to craft and a Tarantino-esque celebration of crime & revenge narratives, The Handmaiden is a gleefully tawdry art piece. Park Chan-Wook’s latest takes great delight in its own narrative cleverness, but also constructs a strong enough visual foundation for its flashy storytelling style to shine instead of annoy. A cherry blossom tree, an octopus, a coiled rope, an ink-stained tongue; The Handmaiden is first & foremost an achievement in intense costume & set design, which allows for plenty of room to accommodate its deliberately twisty crime story in which the audience is continually conned into believing half-truths depending on the minute-to-minute revelations of its various narrators, anxiously awaiting the next rug pull to knock us on our ass. If it were a little uglier or if its bigger reveals were held until its final moments, its tonal balancing act might have crumbled disastrously. Fortunately, it’s carefully calibrated to be too fun & too beautiful to resist.

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16. 10 Cloverfield Lane – A tense, horror-minded thriller about the monstrous spirit lurking within doomsday prepper culture, 10 Cloverfield Lane locks its audience in the basement with a small cast of fearful apocalypse survivors collectively suffering under the power dynamics of the cycles of abuse. It not only clouds the truth about what exact outside force is looming as a threat over its proceedings, but also introduces a complexly monstrous threat from within the characters’ ranks that is simultaneously abusive, protective, and difficult to understand. The film’s woman-in-captivity terror is far from unique, but the way its Stockholm syndrome familial bonds & doomsday prepper cultural context complicate that narrative allows it to crawl under your skin in a way that its 2008 found footage predecessor never even approached. 10 Cloverfield Lane shook me, surprised me, and confirmed my deepest fears about “survival” nuts’ ugly thirst for post-apocalyptic power grabs.

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17. Shin Godzilla – The latest entry in the longest-running film series of all time is very much reminiscent of its source material’s 1954 origins, a governmental procedural about Japan’s response to a seemingly unstoppable force of Nature ignited by nuclear fallout. Instead of recreating that exact scenario in a drab modern action movie context, however, Shin Godzilla completely shifts its genre towards kinetic political satire. The film barrels through its ambitious political topics with the quick pace absurdism of a modern comedy and the inventive framing & mixed medium experimentation of a modern indie monster movie. It’s an incredibly thoughtful, energetic work that will stick with you longer than any non-stop-Godzilla-action visual spectacle could. As always, there will be inevitable complaints that there isn’t enough Godzilla in this Godzilla movie, but when the human half of the story is as smartly funny & pointedly satirical as it is here, that line of griping rings as especially hollow. This is Godzilla done exactly right.

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18. Arrival – To convey its story about two species, human and alien, learning to communicate with one another by the gradual process of establishing common ground between their two disparate languages, Arrival similarly has to teach its audience how to understand what they’re watching and exactly what’s being communicated. This is a story told through cyclical, circular, paradoxical logic, a structure that’s announced from scene one, but doesn’t become clear until minutes before the end credits and can’t be fully understood until at least a second viewing. This rewiring of audience perception takes a little patience before it reaches a significant payoff and it’s one I expect is better appreciated when experienced rather than explained. Once you learn the film’s language, though, you start to understand that it was never a straightforward story to begin with, that it was always just as strange as the places it eventually takes you in its final act. Whether or not you’ll be interested in that proposition depends largely on your patience for that kind of non-traditional, non-linear payoff in your cinematic entertainment.

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19. Swiss Army Man –At once an unconventional love story, a road trip buddy comedy, and an indie pop musical about a farting corpse with a magical boner, Swiss Army Man is loaded with feel-good scatological bleakness & divine absurdity. The director duo Daniels first cut their teeth helming music videos and it shows in their reverence for this film’s Animal Collective-style soundtrack, which bleeds beautifully into the narrative with a significant sense of thematic purpose. A teary-eyed journey featuring a farting corpse & an unlikely budding romance, the Daniels’ long-form cinematic prank is genuinely fun & free-flowing from front to end, even when it’s fixated on morbid topics like how the human body relieves itself & becomes organic garbage the second it dies.

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20. Girl Asleep – Romantic awkwardness, papier-mâché costumes, animated album covers & photographs, piles of origami birds: Girl Asleep is sure to roll many an eye in its Etsy shop dreamscape. Personally, I can’t relate to anyone who would dismiss a film outright for being this intensely manicured in its visual palette, yet impressively loose in its blurred divide between reality & fantasy. Often, when movies choose to incorporate dreamscape surrealism into the personal growth crises of their protagonists, they’re careful to distinguish a barrier between the two realms. Girl Asleep waves off the necessity of those barriers with an infectiously flippant confidence. It allows its choreographed disco freakouts & Moonrise Kingdom costumes to bleed into its real world high school melodrama, filtering the nerve-racking expectations & pressures of “becoming a woman” through a handmade surrealist fantasy realm. The results are consistently endearing, surprising, and ambitiously unhinged.

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HM. Lemonade – Beyoncé has been going through a spiritual growth spurt in the last few years where she’s struggling to break away from her long-established persona of top-of-the-world pop idol to reveal a more creative, vulnerable persona underneath. Her recent “visual album” Lemonade feels like a culmination of this momentum, a grand personal statement that cuts through her usual “flawless” visage to expose a galaxy of emotional conflicts & spiritual second-guessings the world was previously not privy to. It’s at times a deeply uncomfortable experience, as if you’re reading someone’s diary entries or poetry as they stare you down. However, it can also be an empowering & triumphant one, particularly when it aims at giving a voice to the underserved POV of being a young black woman in modern America.

-Brandon Ledet