It’s time for the dreaded Top 10 list – an annual practice among film critics and cinephiles alike that produces fretful hand-wringing and obsessive film-watching – all in the hopes of finding the very “best” films of a given year. Of course, it’s impossible to deliver a list that’s perfect. There are too many films in the year, too many conflicting opinions, to create a list impervious to criticism. By nature of ranking, some beloved films must be deprioritized or bumped out altogether in the hopes of creating a more perfect representation of the films one loved the most.

As a result, some titles have been forgotten. Whit Stillman made his first nearly perfect film in a decade with the goofy and luxe Love & Friendship. Andrea Arnold delivered a deeply felt American epic studded with gobsmacking performances in American Honey. Anton Yelchin gave one of his last (and most flooring) appearances in Jeremy Saulnier’s vicious and gorgeous Green Room, and Pablo Larrain revolutionized the biopic with Jackie. And while all of these films (and more, I would be remiss to leave out Hell or High Water, Arrival, The Nice Guys, Hail, Caesar!, Krisha, and The Fits to name a few) deserve to be in the running for the “best” of the year, I humbly present my personal favorites: the best films of 2016.

10) Manchester by the Sea

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Image via Amazon Prime

Easily the two most punishing hours of cinema you’ll watch this year, Manchester by the Sea delivers crushing blows of ennui and existential dread amidst thoughtfully realized mundanity that ripple and pucker the narrative like muffled gasps in between sobs. But there’s a lot to like in Manchester – it’s as frequently funny as it is emotionally disruptive – and it’s easily Lonergan’s best since You Can Count on Me (and perhaps the best of his entire career). Much talk has been paid to Casey Affleck’s lead performance, a performance so gutting that it’s impossible to discount even in the midst of his questionable personal life, but it’s Lucas Hedges (who’s also become part of Wes Anderson’s film ensembles since Moonrise Kingdom) who might deliver the most triumphant performance. Uneasy to shake and disturbingly real, Manchester by the Sea is the sort of film that takes root in your mind upon first viewing, allowing its tendrils to slowly unfurl in the days and weeks after.

9) No Home Movie

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Image via Paradise Films

Chantal Akerman spent the better part of 40 years quietly producing cinematic masterpieces – and while her experimental narrative film Jeanne Dielmann still receives most of its cinephile lauding, it’s her avant-garde documentary News from Home that remains my personal favorite. No Home Movie, which premiered in the US just hours after her death, is a thoughtful combination of those two prior works, as a careful chronology of Akerman’s own relationship with her mother – a woman whose history as a survivor of Auschwitz seems to have prompted her to create a modern prison for herself: her own home. Akerman, who tragically passed away last year, documents her mother here, delivering an aching final bookend of her career with echoes of both her documentary work and Dielmann, that would be overwhelmingly sad if it weren’t for Akerman’s persistent affection and artful direction. It’s unfair that this film be her last, but it would be hard to find a more perfect ending to her cinematic journey.

 

8) Silence

Image via Paramount Pictures
Image via Paramount Pictures

Martin Scorsese’s latest is a bit of a thinker. Far less easily likable than masterful romps like The Aviator and The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence seems destined to be one of Scorsese’s less popular features, but it wears the passion of its filmmaker daringly on its sleeve. While frequently difficult to watch, it’s difficult not to marvel at Scorsese’s utter commitment to his subject matter, and despite its occasionally explosive violence, Silence reveals an underrated contemplative serenity at its core. You won’t leave the theater precisely sure of your feelings on what just transpired, but it’s absolutely no question that Scorsese has made you feel very deeply indeed.

7) Certain Women

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Image via IFC Films

If we’re being honest, any filmmaker who constructed a narrative in which Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern, are given freedom to play as they wish onscreen, would more than pique my interest. But in the hands of Kelly Reichardt, the hushed but confident voice behind Wendy and Lucy and River of Grass, Certain Women turns its already golden cast into a sumptuous exploration of American female identity, edged in the frost of regret and warmed by the gorgeous persistence of love. Weaving together three loosely tied narratives, Certain Women makes spectacle out of subtlety, and is fabulously anchored by the four lead performances of Dern, Williams, Stewart and astonishing newcomer Lily Gladstone, a painfully lonely charmer known simply as “The Rancher”. In an industry utterly stuffed with diverse and specific masculine narratives, Certain Women is a heartbreaking, feminine oasis.

6) The Invitation

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Image via Drafthouse Films

After the negative press parade that accompanied her collaboration with Diablo Cody for Jennifer’s Body, Karyn Kusama (who previously landed on audiences’ radars thanks to Girl Fight), took a break from film to pursue a smaller scale career in television. But it would be difficult to find a better argument for her comeback than The Invitation, her first feature film since 2008, and an edgy, subversive chamber piece with a roiling, violent center. Thanks to an incredibly limited theatrical release and a VOD treatment, The Invitation went unseen by many when it hit earlier this year, but short of Robert EggersThe Witch, the chiller is easily the best horror film of the year, as Kusama (aided by a sharp-witted script penned by her husband and his writing partner, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi) carefully weaves in the painful realities of grief with dark and shocking interpersonal violence. The film holds its cards, withholding hints of violence or foreboding musical cues until the last possible second, delivering a finale to keep even horror hounds with vicious appetites happy, with style and confidence to spare.

5) Toni Erdmann

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Image via Sony Pictures Classics

I must admit that despite Maren Ade’s 15+ years in the film industry, I had never seen any of the filmmaker’s output until her gloriously funny and humane Toni Erdmann. But Erdmann, a deeply hilarious exploration of the relationship between a harried, corporate woman and her eccentric (and very possibly insane) father who attempts to infiltrate her life as a life coach under the name “Toni Erdmann”, confidently heralds a sharply insightful and deeply relatable voice in Ade. To attempt to represent Erdmann to someone who has yet had the pleasure of watching it (so far its release schedule has been all but prohibitive to casual viewers) is to sell it short, as Ade’s latest is more hilarious, moving, devastating and entertaining with each narrative turn. It’s not often that an art film can go down just as easily as a light comedic romp, but Ade manages – for something as truly transcendent as it is deeply empathetic.

4) The Witch

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Image via A24

The Witch, a profoundly terrifying and luxurious period piece embedded in subversive gender representation, is the first feature from production designer Robert Eggers. But his careful, meticulous genre touch that elevates the feature from chilling oddity to absolute masterpiece (and guarantees that we’ve only begun to understand the young director’s burgeoning talent). Rare is a horror film that’s as gorgeous to look at as it is deeply morally complex also happens to easily be the most terrifying film of the year, but the film’s confident and spot-on realization of a time in American history rarely represented onscreen ensures that what unfolds over the course of the film’s lean runtime feels chillingly real. (Many shouts to Anya Taylor-Joy’s star-making performance here, too.) Light on the violence but heavy on the kinds of moments that will forever leave a mark on your movie-going soul, The Witch creeps in like a kind of cinematic sickness, and leaves with a haunting, dying wail.

 

3) Elle

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Image via Sony Picture Classics

Considering the star has faithfully turned in fantastic work multiple times a year since she began her career 45 years ago, it’s ambitious to call any of Isabelle Huppert’s performances “defining”. But with Elle, a curious and deliciously subversive pitch dark comedy from Paul Verhoeven, Huppert easily delivers her most complex, layered and masterful since Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. Never careful to offend and always roguishly perverse, Elle begins with the depiction of a horribly brutal rape (first framed as comedy thanks to a lingering close-up on the nonplussed face of her pet cat) and never fails to up its provocateur quotient even as the film begins to confront hard and sickening realities of modern day culture. It’s hard to know if Elle would work without Huppert’s virtuosic performance (though it is safe to say that Elle would not exist without her), it’s the film’s brilliant ease that we can thank the actress for, and its daring impenitence, Verhoeven.

2) La La Land

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Image via Lionsgate

Believe the hype. After the skilful musical tour de force of Whiplash, anticipation was high for Damien Chazelle’s song-filled follow up, but it’s with no ambivalence that I say La La Land is easily Chazelle’s best, most self-assured and deceptively deep. Easily cementing Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling as old souls with new rhythm and delivering on a score that ranges from rousing (at worst) and transcendent (at best), La La Land is pure cinematic magic from start to finish. To the critics: I can’t say if my reception of the film would be a few ticks cooler if the year had been even slightly less doom and gloom, but I can say that leaving the theater after La La Land is like leaving the theater in love – and it would be a far heavier crime to ignore that than to praise it.

1) Moonlight

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Image via A24

Almost a decade ago, a 29-year-old first-timer made a curious, black-and-white film called Medicine for Melancholy, a daring, thoughtful film that sensitively probed the burgeoning the inherent whiteness and classism of hipster culture in San Francisco. That first-timer was Barry Jenkins, a young man with a big voice but a shocking dearth of celluloid follow-ups. But with 2016 came Moonlight, a gorgeous, affecting, and wholly necessary film about a young queer black man that, despite its occasional darkness, is simply the warmest and most generous of the year. Collecting moments rather than subsisting on ideas, Moonlight is an unconventional spin on the coming of age format that gleams with masterful performances and the kind of raw sentimentality that allows every character in the film (no matter how troubled) their own right to personhood. It’s sharply written and even more sharply observed, but as soft-hearted as its deeply human, opaque protagonist. Everyone glows in Moonlight, even when their sky might be mottled with clouds.

Honorable mentions (in no particular order): Love & Friendship, American HoneyGreen RoomJackie, Hell or High Water, Arrival, The Nice Guys, Hail, Caesar!, The Handmaiden, Krisha, and The Fits.

For more of our Best of 2016 coverage, click here or on the links below.