Whenever I put together a top-ten list for a year in film, I attempt to find a common thread between the films. Not that all the films need to meet some certain themed criteria, but films released in a calendar year share not only that year’s distinction but most often the year prior when production begins, and as such they frequently capture a sentiment or unease of time that many of the world’s citizens feel at a certain time. These timely sentiments creep into blockbusters, too; frequently with casting or subtle dialogue.

The common thread that many will glean from 2017 would be the effects of Donald Trump’s first year as President—but that’s far too simplistic, in my opinion, because that prism serves to discount the millions of people who voted for him and for whom his election was the pinnacle (or summit?) of an uneased response to progress and a fear of the future becoming far, far different. While many 2017 films included swipes at Trump, authoritarianism, sexism, racism, and xenophobia (particularly a fear of refugees), the films that I chose for my top 10 best movies of the year all shared a theme of disruption. And to me, that best encapsulates the year, as an election awakened two sides, one that was asleep as social progress seemed to become a functioning mechanism that worked on its own and the other side that was awakened by the election, feeling like it could finally halt that very mechanism. As such, so many things that we take for granted every day—news, sports, social media, family bonds, respect for coworkers, etc.—were disrupted by the tugging and pulling conversation surrounding how we should progress as a society in relation to work, poverty, the environment, race, gender, and providing sanctuary to citizens in need. And within that disruption comes a reflection on how we got to where we are and what we can actually control about our own outcomes when it feels like so much of what we individually do is in a fight against numerous systems.

brawl-in-cell-block-99-vince-vaughn
Image via TIFF

That there, the disruption that creates reflection, was the most common device weaved through my top 10 films of the year. The films below include disruptions such as a prison sentence, a refusal to rely on social services, a romantic relationship that requires a relinquish of control to survive, a new form of racism that embodies the expression “they hate us cuz they ain’t us”, the ghostly effects of technological communication, three distinctly different romantic relationships with a visitor that changes an awareness of who love can be with, how 9/11 made college applications a little easier for a small window of time, and a discovery of a civilization that could dispel European societal superiority all together.

Now, I know that disruption and choices are not new to movies in 2017, it’s a device that’s pushed storytelling forever. However, the types of disruption are distinctly of this time and our response to how the filmmakers have decided to use various genres and different approaches to storytelling to propel the story forward are rooted within a space where many of us have felt disrupted every day by real news, fake news, unreal arguments, accusations of improprieties in years past, etc. that are all rooted in how we look at the world now in 2017.

As for me, 2017 was quite personally disruptive, as I moved across the country and then soon thereafter worked my final days at Collider. Over the past three years, I traveled to film festivals and sets for Collider that took me to Venice, Cape Town, Budapest, Telluride, London, and moved me to New York City and back to Los Angeles. I worked with many people who I greatly admire, as they continue to march on against all the movie websites that are dissolving, and covering the cinema landscape by giving the same level of importance to the Sundance Film Festival that they do to Star Wars and Marvel. I am very proud of the work I did for Collider in increasing their reach via social media, digital marketing, events, contests and improving as a writer, reviewer, and interviewer in their fold. I also appreciate them allow me to wrap up my own disruption by writing up one of the items I look forward to each year, the top 10 list.

Now, finally, that’s what you’re all here for! To scan to the bottom and see if it matches a certain amount of movies on your own list, but hopefully I can persuade you to see a film or two that you hadn’t already and disrupt your cinematic view in that way. That’s always what I’ve loved about top 10 lists, if you find one that shares a few similar titles to yours, you might also find some new movies that you’d not heard of on that list, from someone who obviously shares a similar taste.

Thanks for reading Collider and thanks for reading this list. Here are ten honorable mentions from quite a good year of cinema (in alphabetical order): After the Storm (directed by Hirokazu Koreeda), Baby Driver (directed by Edgar Wright), The Beguiled (directed by Sofia Coppola), Columbus (directed by Kogonada), Detroit (directed by Kathryn Bigelow), The Florida Project (directed by Sean Baker), Marjorie Prime (directed by Michael Almendreya), Person to Person (directed by Dustin Guy Defa), A Quiet Passion (directed by Terence Davies), and The Salesman (directed by Asghar Farhadi).

10) Brawl in Cell Block 99

brawl-in-cell-block-99-vince-vaughn
Image via RLJE Films

Brawl in Cell Block 99 is brutal. It’s so brutal that that word needs to be repeated. But the reason it works is because Vince Vaughn and writer-director S. Craig Zahler make it a character piece; they put in a lot of work to get through this journey into hell. And it definitely is hellish. I slinked down in my seat, and occasionally viewed Brawl between my fingers, knowing that an arm or leg or skull was about to break at any moment. Brawl concerns a sober ex-boxer and former tow-truck driver (Vaughn) who delivers drugs to better support his wife and their future family. When he’s sent to prison, a devilish offer is floated to him, get transported to a prison where more violent criminals are held and kill one of the particular inmates who’s in a rival cartel—or his wife and unborn child will be murdered.

As this is Zahler’s Inferno, each level of the prison system is shown as different levels of hell, with the initial placement in the first prison being purgatory. The acts of violence that must be committed to be sent down multiple levels within the maximum-security prison are indeed gruesome but everything is grounded in the best performance of Vaughn’s lifetime. Zahler spends half of the movie building up Vaughn’s code, with the only evidence of the level of violence he’s capable of being shown when Vaughn tears a car apart as opposed to attacking his wife after an argument, which in of itself reveals a personal code.

Brawl could easily have become the simple and common grindhouse regurgitation movie that hits VOD every week. But instead, Zahler’s film is actually akin to 70s grindhouse movies that were built around a character and their personal code that’s at conflict with a crueler world. For those who loved Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof because it actually understood the pacing of those types of 70s films (and those who didn’t like it, called it boring), they’ll love the careful pacing of the beginning of Brawl in Cell Block 99. That expert craftsmanship is also in the violence; which, again, is brutal. But it's not cheap because there's so much meaningful exposition about past wrongs, personal codes, and the small hypocrisies that we look the other way from to keep that code afloat even though it flies in the face of convictions.

Still, if face, arm and leg breaks and/or abortion talk are your deal breakers you're going to need a safe word in Brawl. Hell, I almost needed one myself. But I love how slowly it builds and that it recreates the prison system as levels of hell; essentially Vaughn was in purgatory but chose to venture to hell to save his own bloodline. Once Udo Kier delivers the video-game set-up for levels of carnage, all bets are off. And it’s always a plus sign to have a journey to the gates of hell being initiated by someone as darkly delightful and deft as Kier. The final level is a pure nightmare that might elicit bloody giggles of disbelief. It’s quite a brutal achievement.

9) Call Me by Your Name

call-me-by-your-name-armie-hammer-timothee-chalamet
Image via Sony Pictures Classics

"People who read are secretive," says a character in Call Me by Your Name as to the reason for her attraction to a young man who’s attracted to his father’s visiting pupil. Period gay romances are the most cinematic of romances because they involve tension in allowance and secrets between characters—but no secrets to the camera; it turns emerging love into heightened observations and heightened release and that's what beginnings of love really feels like. Luca Guadagnino captures that drunk in love feeling quite effectively. It's delicately in tune with the stomach pains, the time-killing masturbation, the goosebumps, and the leaps to kisses and embraces of a new romance.

The 1980’s Italian villa romance between Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer is immensely enhanced by the photography of the Thai virtuoso, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. The romantic vistas are drenched in sun, and wrapped in partial shadows. The camera is frequently aimed at the trees that keep the secrets of the two young men and is always aware of the distance between characters at all times. Call Me by Your Name features a perfectly choreographed admission of desire at the town fountain—the statue of a soldier standing between two people unable to explicitly say what they want.

What truly elevates Call Me by Your Name is Michael Stuhlbarg, as the father to Chalamet and the teacher to Hammer, who gets an all-timer monologue that provides extra layers to the story. In many instances, his scene could've become an audience hand-holder but Guadagnino, Stuhlbarg, and Mukdeeprom frequently capture the warmth of the professor father in small moments throughout the film, and, as such, his big speech holds right in the center; like a warm hug, that's stiff so as not to quiver. Speaking of stiff, I also appreciated the camera's attention to boner outlines. Ah, to be young and to desire everything. Call Me by Your Name elicits the obsessive qualities of young love.

8) Lady Bird

lady-bird-saoirse-ronan-laurie-metcalf-01
Image via A24

Greta Gerwig's directorial debut is, in a word, delightful. But what makes this coming-of-age film sing is less the twee moments and instead the honest focus of being let down by friends, parents, sex, New York City, economic systems, etc. Lady Bird unfolds into a tapestry of minor teen letdowns which can help you better understand your parents and how you’ve let them down. Meeting in the middle is the hardest thing for any young person and parent to learn.

Although there are many funny lines, to be expected from the co-writer of my favorite Noah Baumbach movies (Frances Ha, Mistress America), it’s Gerwig's direction of her actors that really shines. For instance, there's a moment in an alley when Lady Bird (a magnificent Saoirse Ronan) moves from selfish pain to relieving her ex-boyfriend's very real pain. Another example is when she loses her virginity; she critiques the sex position because it didn’t provide the care or guidance she thinks a first time should have.

Many of us, particularly the creative types, have had struggles with our hometown and desire to be elsewhere and a number of movies end with the kid arriving in New York as if it solved all their problems immediately. As someone who grew up in a state capital, similar to Gerwig/Lady Bird, that provided just enough almost-cool stuff to make you hungry for the very-cool stuff, Lady Bird perfectly constructs the delicate relationship between hometown and perceived destiny, by moving from "fuck this place" to acknowledging the neighborhood class barriers that more greatly construct that lashing out mentality. Gerwig smartly does not end the movie in New York City because interesting characters don’t solve their problems that easily. Your hometown won't immediately make fun of your Greatest Hits CD collection, after all.

Much like having a Greatest Hits collection, Gerwig is traveling backwards as a writer from Frances Ha (the great post-college now what?) to Mistress America (the college let down) to Lady Bird (the hometown escape). That trilogy of films is, dare I say, even better than Francois Truffaut’s collected Adventures of Antoine Doinel. Screw it, I will say that. Because I'd write each of their names on a cast because they all make me feel a little better while also hurting me in familiar ways. Kinda like hometowns, eh? Even Dave Matthews comes out well in this movie.

7) The Shape of Water

sally-hawkins-the-shape-of-water
Image via Fox Searchlight

Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water has a mute protagonist, a Cold War backdrop, and an aquatic creature that has spots on his skin that glows like a map of the universe. It’s also a love story. It’s perhaps his most ambitious film because combining those elements plus a narrative weave of non-verbal communication—or the faultiness of relying on words—is extremely difficult even before I tell you that the love story is between a woman and a creature. As such, it’s an immense achievement because The Shape of Water not only entertains as a sumptuous fairytale, but it reinforces a faith in humanity set in a time where tolerance of other races, nationalities, and non-“family values” love was volatile. Much like it feels like that time period of intolerance is percolating back to the surface now. This is del Toro’s Beauty and the Beast with the delicate time period touches and social consciousness of Far from Heaven.

Set in 1950’s Baltimore, The Shape of Water opens in a flooded apartment that rests above a movie theater. There are two apartments above the theater, one belonging to Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute woman who works as a janitor at a high-clearance research facility, the other belongs to her friend Giles (Richard Jenkins), a homosexual editorial painter who’s lost his standing at an advertising firm. The theater below is decorated almost like a cathedral, as old theaters were. Eventually this film reveals a creature and it’d be easy for del Toro to show 1950’s creature features in the theater but instead the glimpses we get into the theater show biblical epics.

This ends up being a nice touch by del Toro because cinema has always served as a refuge for the “freaks” of the world, even if entertainment hasn’t always included them. And every person who assists in breaking out the creature from the laboratory is in different ways someone who’s been marginalized by society. Whether it’s the less employable mute woman, her gay friend, her black co-worker, Zelda (Octavia Spencer), or the scientist spy, Dmitri (Michael Stuhlbarg), who goes against the orders of the Kremlin to destroy it before the American military can learn from it (because national wars impeding research of a creature we could learn from goes against science, which knows no borders or nationalities). Those impeding them are the military of the governments on each side, governments that also suppress homosexuality and allow businesses to enforce discrimination against people of color.

It’s this combination of characters—I’d actually watch a whole movie of Elisa and Giles as neighbors itself—combined with the extreme harsh acts done by governmental officials that makes The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro’s best film to date. Also, it helps that there are a few romantic moments that visually rival the dizzying heights of La La Land.

6) Get Out

get-out-daniel-kaluuya
Image via Universal Pictures

It might not seem like it now, since it was released 10 months ago (which feels like a lifetime in 2017), but Jordan Peele’s Get Out was the biggest cinematic surprise of 2017. Peele was one-half of the beloved sketch duo Key & Peele and he had directed a number of great skits for that TV show. But as any SNL alum can tell you, jumping into a feature film is a much harder task. And don’t let that Golden Globe nomination for Comedy fool you, as a “social thriller” Get Out was a directorial debut with brushstrokes of horror that landed just to the left of the comfort zone for the comedian. And Peele still knocked it out of the park. (Well, maybe it wasn’t entirely out of his comfort zone as Get Out does have a great cold open with Lakeith Stanfield.)

The story that follows is of an interracial couple (Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams, both fabulous) going home to meet the parents who’d gladly vote for Obama again but instead finding “the sunken place” where rich white folks are farming out a Being John Malkovich-type experience with black bodies. Although there’s a built-in physicality to the story—the procedures began soon after Bradley Whitford’s father lost to Jesse Owens in the US qualifying meets—Peele isn’t showing us that one race is superior to the other. He’s showing us that ideas of racial superiority are learned and passed down in families. Racism is not natural. And anyone who says that should get out, right now.

Now, many will say that Get Out isn’t scary. And yes, it doesn’t provide horror shocks or grotesquely inventive kills, but where it lacks in traditional scares it makes up for in some deeply horrific scripted-scenarios. For instance, what is produced from the leather seat that Kaluuya claws at when under hypnosis? Cotton. Here that substance that was tied to more than a century of enslavement, oppression, and future beliefs of superiority, is produced when entering a new type of enslavement in the sunken place. Yeah, that’s fuckin’ scary, y’all.

5) God’s Own Country

gods-own-country
Image via Samuel Goldwyn Films

God’s Own Country ain't the UK's Brokeback Mountain and it ain't Call Me by Your Name. There's no interest in including heterosexual sex scenes to even things out and make it more digestible for a hetero audience or show a gay man’s internal conflict. This lovely romance is more akin to An Officer and a Gentleman except on a struggling farm and, yeah, homosexual. It's as sweepingly romantic as the biggest hetero-romance triumphs, though, without the typical depressing ending of most acclaimed gay romance movies but instead a beautiful moment that typically ended all 80s romance movies.

The strife in God’s Own Country is less sexual identity, from what we're shown, but is instead friction from a dying breed of work and townships tied to that work. First-time filmmaker Francis Lee follows a deadbeat farmer’s son (Josh O’Connor), whose father hires a Romanian immigrant (Alec Secareanu) to work on the farm due to his father’s physical ailments, and the budding romance that forms with the helping hand when building a new fence for the sheep at a distance far removed from the main house. Sure, the parents (Ian Hart and Gemma Jones) probably struggle with the coupling, and we're shown their hesitative glances, but they are presented as the same hesitative glances that let's say Debra Winger got running out the door to meet the handsome Richard Gere sailor who's docked for a while before passing on in An Officer and a Gentleman. And it builds to a similar, triumphant picked-up-off-the-work-line moment that's set to a pop tune. The point is, this is a gay romance that's treated just as a romance, not outside forces of the time period or social status making it harder, though it easily could go there. But the movie is better for it not.

Because the movie is less about can they stay together and more about the personal growth from deadbeat to responsibility on the part of the son by letting love in, God’s Own Country works magnificently. I love the different forms of intimacy between lovers but also between a father and son and the camera catches that, particularly with two brushes of a finger in different situations. And how attraction grows by witnessing kindness. What is learned here is how to make love instead of fucking and how love leads to loving one's self and having the courage to not fuck up. Love is, wait for it, the wind beneath one's wings.

4) The Lost City of Z

lost-city-of-z-image
Image via Amazon Studios

It’s fitting that James Gray’s The Lost City of Z opened the same week as The Fate of the Furious, a film franchise that has reinvented itself to be about family dynamics in order to separate itself from the pack of bam-bam action films. (If they say “family” enough everyone will pick up on it, right?). Fitting because Gray (Two Lovers, The Immigrant) has made a career out of expertly navigating the difficulty of family expectations. And also, because one of the most celebrated American directors abroad has never been able to find a similar audience stateside, and although Lost City of Z had adventure components, it was left in the dust of the latest car movie.

The Lost City of Z has bloodlines running through it, though, but Gray plays it subtle. When a military man and adventurer, Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), takes a map survey job to divide Bolivia and Brazil so that there will be no war (but rubber keeps them profitable) he’s told that by taking this job he will be able to reclaim his surname, which has kept him back from past promotions due to his father’s reputation. It’s a line of dialogue that doesn’t give us information of what his father exactly did, but instead focuses on the knowing receipt of those words on the part of the son, who’s processing it. He knows his reputation has preceded him and he knows only he can undo it. But that’s not the only familial bond in Z. It’s also present in the pronouncement of staunch gender roles in an otherwise idyllic-seeming marriage between Percy and his wife, Nina (Sienna Miller).

In one breath he champions Nina’s discovery of a correspondence from more than a century ago that partially confirms a lost city he thought he’d discovered in the Amazon, but in the next he tells her she cannot join him on his next voyage because she needs to tend to their children. Years later, he takes his oldest son (Tom Holland) back to Brazil in an attempt to find what he’s labeled as “Z,” one of the earliest civilizations in the Americas. And in the Fast and Furious way of things, Fawcett also makes new “family” bonds with those whom he shares years on wooden rafts with (Robert Pattinson and Edward Ashley).

The Lost City of Z is an extremely well-paced film that spans decades but never feels like it’s rushing to its conclusion. Gray chooses to focus on Fawcett’s various bonds to his family, his discovery, and his fellow man and how those tethers get him through various stages of life interruptions, whether it’s World War I or floating the Amazon. In my eyes, this is the third masterpiece that Gray has made in a row.

3) Personal Shopper

personal-shopper-kristen-stewart-image
Image via Sundance Selects

Olivier Assayas’ last film, Clouds of Sils Maria, announced to the world that Kristen Stewart is a bonafide great actress who could hold her own against one of the all-time greats, Juliette Binoche. For his next provocative work, Stewart got to go it alone. Literally, as Stewart plays a young American woman who’s in Paris attempting to communicate with her recently deceased twin brothe; she works as a wardrobe assistant for a woman she never shares the room with, coldly dropping off her items when she’s away, and she’s also receiving text messages from a ghost.

Personal Shopper received snickers when it debuted at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival but it is perhaps the boldest movie that was released this year. Although it might be frustrating to view, the point is about how modern communication is extremely frustrating. The tools of communication—through text messages, through email, through notes left on tables while the other is away—gives us all the capability to be colder, ruder, and more distant from people we work for and the people we’re supposed to be closest with. Each unanswered text message marked as “read” being a dagger to our much more fragile hearts that are growing less used to waiting.

Emboldened by this secret messaging partner, Stewart begins to take some risks with her employer—occasionally wearing her clothes, sleeping overnight when she knows her boss is not going to return. It might seem like her sequin gown evenings and her ghost rousing evenings might not fit into the same movie, but Personal Shopper is about all types of ghosts: how many people are working remotely and distantly with ghosts, vanishing on communication unless it fills their need at a moment, and how our memories of people are stronger than our day to day connections. But Stewart’s crossing over into the skin of her boss is also an act of ghosting, as she’s careful not to leave a trace of herself.

Assayas and Stewart deftly weave these multiple threads of empty spiritual pursuits and create a patchwork of loneliness that’s appropriate, for indeed, Stewart’s Maureen is steeped in grief over not only her dead brother but her inability to connect with him like he swore she’d be able to do. Now I obviously can’t talk about the ending but I can say that I was initially disappointed by it and then came around to it. Pay attention to the questions that Maureen asks of the spirit and how the responses are the same to oppositional questions. If she had stopped after getting the answer she wanted, she could have moved on, but it also would’ve been false because she didn’t ask the right question. There are a few spooky moments in Personal Shopper but the spookiest thread is how we attempt to manipulate communication to get our desired result.

2) Good Time

good-time-image-rob-pattinson-1
Image via A24

What if Abel Ferrara made After Hours? The result would be the jittery, electro-infused New York nightmare Good Time. And that result is a pure cinematic thrill. Almost every scene in the Safdie Brothers’ film is a surprise. It’s a perfect mesh of 70s and 90s go-for-broke auterism from emerging indie artists. And bless Robert Pattinson for reaching out to Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie to inquire about working with the super-indie NYC duo.

Although it involves a bank robbery and a journey through the night to release a brother from jail, essentially Good Time is both a frantic journey of poor people trying to avoid the cold, impersonal hand of city services at all costs AND an indictment of white privilege because, on the street, even the poorest white person gets more benefit of the doubt than a working black individual. You should feel uncomfortable about the fates of Taliah Webster and Barkhad Abdi while Pattinson continues to move freely throughout the city after taking advantage of them. Dressed in his oversized Ecko jacket with his hood up after robbing a bank, Pattinson and his brother (Benny Safdie) are asked by police to stop (such an approach would be unlikely for a person of color), meanwhile they arrest Webster and Abdi on sight simply for being in the presence of a crime.

However, Good Time isn’t a statement film; it weaves gross injustice throughout a thrilling and darkly comic tale of urban poverty. And the Safdies direct the hell out of this. Good Time is controlled chaos, which is how New York City feels and it's easy to lose control.

All that poor people really want is to be treated like a human being, not a case file for social services, not just a ledger for a bail bond. But this isn't a stuffy Robert Bresson movie, Good Time is a flickering neon sign that starts to lose some letters from burning so brightly; a faded promise of a good time, set to a perfectly oppressive score by Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never). It's a modern economic carnival ride. It's pain and bliss. And Pattinson is sublime. Stick around through the end credits to hear Iggy Pop sing about petting an alligator because it’s just that type of a madcap ride.

1) Phantom Thread

m-night-shyamalan-new-movie-cast-vicky-krieps
Image via Focus Features

Phantom Thread marks the first time Paul Thomas Anderson has gone smaller in scope since he followed Magnolia with Punch-Drunk Love. After making three immense American identity epics—There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Inherent Vice—Anderson has made a self-contained, deceptively gothic, romance. But, whereas Punch-Drunk Love included flashy segues from artist Jeremy Blake and a colorfully comic villain in Philip Seymour Hoffman, Phantom Thread is told with the same level of chilly Stanley Kubrick technical mastery that his last three films have flexed. That technical wizardry provides a sense of unease throughout this 50's romance. Phantom Thread intoxicates and needles the viewer, not knowing where it is leading or why Anderson, who’s lately made such epic in scope films, chose to make it; until it hits with an emotional bag of hammers.

There's something painful about Phantom Thread and that's that Anderson’s weaving an identifiable crisscross desire to be both in a relationship and to be completely alone. That's what Thread is, it's an examination of power dynamics within a relationship that’s volatile because one creates and the other maintains. And I drink this milkshake up, baby. I drink it up.

The title of “phantom thread” concerns the ghastly exhaustion of sewists after completing an intricate dress on a tight deadline. For Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), that tight deadline is making original dresses for princesses on their wedding days, countesses going to exclusive galas, and the richest and most upper-crust women in all of England. His exhaustion after completing a dress puts him in an infantile state of recovery; needing to crawl into blankets and eat soup not unlike the desire to crawl back into the womb. His re-emergence at his estate necessitates new projects, new rigorousness, and, often, a new female companion to assist with the next cycle. If you wanted mother!’s creationist artist abuses without all the finger-wagging allegory and world-building, this is it. (And I don’t mean that as a dis to either film.)

Vicky Krieps is an impeccable find. She plays the one woman whom Reynolds romances and attempts to discard but won’t stand for it. She wins his longer affection by first feeding his ego, deeming a haughty drunk woman as not being worthy of wearing his beautiful dress. But she cannot keep his affection without feeling necessary in his life; to get that feeling she resorts to dastardly deeds that put him in the state where he needs her to dote on him because he’s incapable of caring for himself. The manner in which this is achieved—and then becomes cyclical—is downright delicious. It’s a storytelling masterstroke that will somehow warm the hearts of cynics and romantics alike. Each relationship is only truly known to the two people in it. And what they agree to do for balance would shock most but Anderson presents it as beautifully necessary. An artist and a lover need a constant reset button, so how do they do that together?

Of course, there are splendid technical elements weaved into Phantom Thread, such as Anderson's magnificent and uncredited photography (the car scenes recall A Clockwork Orange, although the race through the streets isn't leaving crime scenes, it's attempting to leave behind work and control and get to the country where some equality and balance can be achieved; it's Kubrick-styled racing to treat yo'self...). The design of the film, is also one of the grandest achievements of the year, with applause for Mark Bridges’ sumptuous dresses, Jonny Greenwood’s magnificent score, a regal New Year's party scene that recalls the glorious production design that befitted Luchiano Visconti’s massive Italian sets.

With Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson goes classical but there is arsenic in this lace. He keeps it from sweeping into lushness because Day-Lewis' Mr. Woodcock is unable to be swept. He's so rigid. And it takes a very brave woman to attempt to stitch her own threads into him and once again Anderson has found the perfect match for Day-Lewis' intensity in a fresh face, here Krieps, whose ability to blush on command and show soft teeth that still have bite. It’s the combination of all the filmmaking elements from performance, to design, to score, to direction, to secretive plotting that makes Phantom Thread the best movie of 2017. I mean, a vengeful and sleuthy gown removal is part of the plot! How magnificent is that?

I admired Phantom Thread while I watched it. I loved it when I digested it. I guess that's also how complicated relationships work as well. Also, it's darkly funny the more you think about it. I can't wait for seconds. How many things can you say that about from 2017?

For more of Collider's Best of 2017 content, peruse the links below: