10. Hounds of Love
Putting
a rugged twist on the serial-killer subgenre, Australian director Ben
Young's stellar debut concerns a young girl in 1987 Perth named Vicki
(Ashleigh Cumming) who, after another row with her mother about her
parents' separation. is lured back to the home of a couple (Emma Booth
and Stephen Curry) that, it turns out, has deviant plans for her. From
an opening POV pan across a schoolyard populated by nubile teenage girls
to the many shots in which Young's camera pulls back from closed
façades, Hounds of Love
conveys a chilling sense of unspeakable horrors being perpetrated just
out of everyday view—thus lending the proceedings a
faux-based-on-real-events grittiness and immediacy. As it slowly
elucidates the parent-child issues plaguing both its captors and their
captive, the film develops into a chilling portrait of male domination
and female liberation, all while providing, at every turn, an almost
unbearable amount of methodical, nail-biting suspense. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.
9. Alien: Covenant
Blending the body horror of his 1979 Alien, the gung-ho combat of James Cameron's 1986 sequel Aliens, and the philosophical grandiosity of his 2012 prequel Prometheus—not to mention the man-and-machine musings of his 1982 Blade Runner—Ridley Scott delivers a biblically scaled interstellar nightmare with Alien: Covenant.
Scott's latest spends its first hour setting up a familiar battle
between human colonists and angry xenomorphs, after the former decide to
investigate a mysterious distress signal from a nearby planet. Yet
after expertly going through the tried-and-true monster-movie motions,
the director then shifts gears by turning his prime attention to Michael
Fassbender's android David—who, it turns out, is an inhabitant of this
ancient world. Face-huggers, back-bursters, mecha-doppelgängers, and the
most narcissistic-homoerotic sequence in sci-fi history soon follow,
with the action immaculately designed for suspense, scares, and sly
sinister humor. At once a rousing blockbuster spectacle and an inventive
expansion of the franchise's core themes, it's the rare prequel to
truly justify its existence. Preorder on Amazon.
8. The Lost City of Z
Acclaimed American filmmaker James Gray (Two Lovers, The Immigrant) ventures for the first time outside New York City— and into the dark heart of the Amazon—with The Lost City of Z,
an adaptation of David Grann's 2009 non-fiction book of the same name.
Such a geographic relocation, however, does little to alter Gray's
fundamental artistic course, as his latest—about early 20th century
British explorer Percy Fawcett's (Charlie Hunnam) repeated efforts to
locate a lost South American civilization that he believed to be more
advanced than any previously discovered – boasts his usual classical
aesthetics and empathetic drama. Energized by a hint of Apocalypse Now's
into-the-wild madness, this entrancing period piece is at once a grand
adventure, a social critique about class and intolerance, and a nuanced
character study about an individual caught between his love for, and
desire to escape, his environment. Led by Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, and
Sienna Miller, it's also one of the finest-acted dramas of the year. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.
7. I Called Him Morgan
Lee Morgan was one of the mid-century jazz scene's brightest lights,
until his life was cut tragically short when his wife Helen fatally
gunned him down in a New York City nightclub on the snowy night of
February 18, 1972. Using copious archival footage, newly recorded
interviews with friends and collaborators, and, most illuminating of
all, a tape-recorded 1996 interview with Helen made one month before her
death, Kasper Collin's transfixing documentary I Called Him Morgan
recounts this sad real-life saga as two separate stories—Lee's and
Helen's—that eventually dovetailed, intertwined, and then combusted in
horrific fashion. Abandonment, drug abuse, and betrayal all factor into
this sorrowful equation, as Collin assuredly conveys the messy stew of
passion, need, ego, loneliness, and fury that eventually begat such a
calamity. In doing so, it recognizes the jazzy spirit of Lee and Helen's
doomed romance—and, also, the riffing-our-way-forward nature of life
itself. Rent/buy on Amazon.
6. The Blackcoat's Daughter
Director Osgood Perkins is the son of Norman Bates himself (actor
Anthony Perkins), but he proves to be a horror maestro in his own right
with The Blackcoat's Daughter,
a beguiling descent into dark, demonic places that's all the more
chilling for refusing to chart a simple straight-and-narrow course. In
upstate New York, Kat (Mad Men's
Kiernan Shipka) is left by her parents to spend winter break at her
boarding school alongside more popular Rose (Lucy Boynton); meanwhile,
Joan (Emma Roberts) endeavors to hitchhike her way to the school,
eventually nabbing a ride with a contentious couple (James Remark and
Lauren Holly). What these three girls have to do with each other is a
mystery to be unraveled. It's ultimately far less important than the
overarching air of loss—of parents, of virginity, of adolescence—and
grief that consumes them. It eventually becomes clear that all is not
right with this institute and its (Satan-admiring?) staff members. Yet
what lingers is the pervasive fear of abandonment, all of it
encapsulated by Roberts' final, unforgettable primal scream. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.
4. Lady Macbeth
Hell
hath no fury like a woman oppressed, as is shockingly born out by
William Oldroyd's phenomenal feature directing debut—an adaptation not
of the Bard but, rather, of Nikolai Leskov's 1865 novel Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.
In a breakout performance of coiled intensity and ruthless cunning,
Florence Pugh is Katherine, a young woman sold into marriage to an older
landowner (Cosmo Jarvis), whose nastiness is only surpassed by that of
his domineering father (Christopher Fairbank). That union is rife with
problems from the start, though despite the film's
Shakespeare-referencing title, the path it wends is an original and
horrifying one. Suggesting a period piece version of a film noir saga as
envisioned by Stanley Kubrick, this twisted feminist drama is rooted in
contentious racial- and gender-warfare issues, employing a meticulous
formalism to recount its cutthroat story about Katherine's at-any-cost
attempts to attain liberation. Like its protagonist, it's a film that's
placid and refined on the outside, ferocious and pitiless on the inside.
3. Okja
Bong Joon Ho's Okja
is many things at once: a rollicking kid's fable about the bond between
a young South Korean girl (Byun Hee-bong) and her genetically enhanced
super-pig (named Okja); a satiric critique of the corporate food
industry; a wacko comedy about transcending cultural boundaries; and a
fantastical adventure full of kidnappings and chases, buoyed by
over-the-top performances from Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal, and
culminating with a Times Square spectacular and a Holocaust-esque trip
to the slaughterhouse. Most of all, however, it's the year's most
exhilaratingly idiosyncratic work, indebted to the spirit of both Steven
Spielberg and Hayao Miyazaki, and energized by the distinctive
signature of its director. Vacillating between mirthful, madcap and
morose on a dime, Bong's latest—about Byun's heroine trying to reunite
with Okja after the animal is reclaimed by the conglomerate that created
her—is both all over the place and yet assuredly coherent. Whether
viewed on a big screen or via Netflix (its exclusive distributor), it's a
wondrous whatsit unlike anything you've quite seen before. Available to stream on Netflix.
2. John Wick: Chapter 2
Rarely has a film seemed less in need of a sequel than 2014's John Wick, a self-contained bit of action-cinema perfection. Nonetheless, John Wick: Chapter 2
manages to thrill through a constant barrage of masterful gun-fu
carnage, with bullets flying at a jaw-dropping rate courtesy of Keanu
Reeves' nattily dressed assassin. Director David Leitch's follow-up is a
symphonic orgy of frenzied firearm warfare, with violence here depicted
as a culinary art form performed by stylish Zen badasses with
philosophical souls. It's akin to a hybrid of Jean-Pierre Melville's
noir cool and Marvel's superhero fantasy, all underworld rules and
regulations and unbelievable feats of fearsome brutality, with Reeves
exuding male-model chicness and powder-keg explosiveness as the
epicenter of this murderous maelstrom. While the film's reason for once
again forcing Wick out of retirement isn't nearly as gripping as its
predecessor's vengeance-for-his-dead-dog motivation, the specifics of Chapter 2 wind up mattering little in the face of so much exhilarating death and destruction. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.
1. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
Suspenseful and hilarious, despondent and optimistic, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
is a masterful genre film, one that immerses itself in the small,
painful indignities of everyday life, and then casts the battle against
those wrongs as a serio-comic odyssey of sleuthing, heavy metal, and
nunchakus. After her house is burglarized, nurse Ruth (Melanie Lynsky)
partners with her rat-tailed martial-arts-loving neighbor Tony (Elijah
Wood) to recover her stolen belongings. Their ensuing black-comedy
adventure is grimy, bloody, and ridiculous, as director Macon Blair
(best known for his performances in Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin and Green Room)
pitches his material as an absurdist neo-noir saga about combatting
existential despair. Courtesy of a great Lynsky performance that's equal
parts miserable and furious, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore.
(which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance before premiering
exclusively on Netflix) finds humor and horror in the notion that
"everyone is an asshole"—and then locates hope in the closing-note idea
that, rather than worrying about them, life is best spent in the company
of those precious few who aren't. Available to stream on Netflix.
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