Cheeseblabbery: Boyhood

31 December 2016

Boyhood

Best-of time again, and again this year Tom Breen, Arnold Gorlick, and I will be sharing our lists on Tom's radio show on WNHH--Thursday, and streamable thereafter. My goal this year is to reduce my "uh"s by half.

But that's next year; while a few minutes are left in 2016, let's do this.

January was pretty much 2015 catch-up, though some goodies, especially The Revenant and Anomalisa.
In February, I liked the Coens' Hail Caesar! more than most did, Deadpool was smartass funny superhero stuff, the Scandinavian-seeming The Witch was the year's first entry in the horror renaissance, and one more 2015 Oscar straggler, Son of Saul.
Funny, a couple of weeks ago I was thinking the momentum of the aforementioned horror renaissance was slowing, but 10 Cloverfield Lane was a second already. The first new-to-America film that might end up on the list is Marguerite, which is infinitely better that Florence Foster Jenkins, the American telling of the same true story later in the year, even though that one had Meryl Streep going for it. The month also brought my first Manhattan trip, which included the trippy-in-every-way A Space Program.
Busy year for my favorite young filmmaker I'm not related to, Jeff Nichols, and Midnight Special is also one of two films (Arrival the other) this year that made me feel the awe and wonder that Close Encounters never has.
Hold my feet to the fire and ask the best film I saw in a thin May, I guess I'd claim Francophonia.
An absurd June contender: The Lobster, by Yorgos Lanthimos. And I guess this too, a documentary I've thought about more than all but a few features in this political clusterfuck of a year: Weiner. And the neo-screwball Maggie's Plan, on, what, my only trip this year to the Cine 1-2-3-4?
The brilliant and warmhearted New Zealand comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople came back to town late in the year; is it angling for Oscar? Technically, I don't think Kiwi is a foreign language. Jesus! I compared Café Society favorably in some respects to Annie Hall! And Captain Fantastic wowed me with fantastic acting from a bunch of kids. A fine July
Early August, The Land, a tough The Wire-esque look at part of a World Series city that Commissioner Manfred would prefer to have hidden. The anarchic yet serious in its theological probing Sausage Party probably made me laugh more than anything else this year.
There are still September movies I haven't blogged: I blame the ghastly The Light between Oceans for sapping my energy.
"Hard-edged gem" is how I described Chronic, the best of October, Tim Roth as a caregiver for the dying.
And then in early November came the painfully beautiful Moonlight, which set the bar for best of the year. The documentary Peter and the Farm is a tone poem about both the small farm and mental illness that almost sneaked in and out of town unnoticed. Nichols returns with the story of the interracial Virginia couple Richard and Mildred Loving.
OK, December: can anything beat Moonlight? Not Manchester by the Sea, but Kenneth Lonergan's surprisingly comic tragedy of guilt and regret gives it a good run. Oh, right: yet another fine, quirky horror film: The Eyes of My Mother. Penultimate Manhattan trip had two goodies: 13th, Ava DuVernay's documentary about the stubborn evolution of lynching by other means, and the real horror classic of the year, the originally creepy The Autopsy of Jane Doe. And finally, a great play and a pretty good movie, Fences.