We've now gone through our individual Top 10 lists (which you can find at the bottom of this article), and now it's time to compile them into Collider's Top 10 Films of 2016.
Here's how the voting worked: A #1 film got 10 points, a #2 film got 9 points, and so on. If a film appeared high on multiple lists, it's likely to be on this one. And when I look across the spectrum, it was a really great year for movies. 2016 gifted us with a terrific musical, creepy horror, and, more importantly, new voices that will be worth listening to in the years to come. I'm really proud of the diversity on display with this lineup, and I can't wait to see what 2017 has in store.
Check our Collider's Top 10 Films of 2016 below.
10) American Honey
9) Sunset Song
The early 20th century Scottish countryside is filmed with an idyllic, painterly eye in Terence Davies’ newest film. The green hills roll, the wheat sways, the lake is a proper blue, and the horse hoofs to town take us to schoolhouses and kind town folk. It’s what life is meant to be. For Chris (Agyness Deyn), however, that idyllic light is repeatedly snuffed out in her homestead. First by her overbearing father (Peter Mullan), who repeatedly and dangerously impregnates her mother and beats his oldest son for the most minor of transgressions, and then by the words of community leaders who would brand her husband (Kevin Guthrie) a traitor and a coward if he does not enlist for War.
There are many breathtaking shots in Sunset Song (lensed by Winter’s Bone’s Michael McDonough), but there is a higher purpose here than mere painterly pictures. Quietly, Song is perhaps the most humane and feminist film of 2016. Chris’ home, particularly her stairwell, is filmed in vacancy or just with Chris, repeatedly throughout Song, the perfect rays of morning light spreading out the promises of a new day—a new day in which she routinely assists in running the family farm. The darkness in the film comes from the taking hand of her father and the idyllic community and husband that turns on her due to notions of what a man should properly do. It’s a man’s world, here, but Chris can routinely pause and see the light that they no longer can because of horrors they’ve been forced to witness. The men take too much burden upon themselves when women like Chris can surely aid in shouldering those burdens with strength, grace and light. - Brian Formo
8) Toni Erdmann
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. - Aubrey Page
7) 13th
Ava DuVernay’s overwhelming, damning exploration of the experience of being black in America after the passing of the 13th amendment comes on like a confident prizefighter. Each cut introduces another body blow to the argument that we, as a society, are over racism, a ludicrous and dangerous lie that has continued to be peddled by Fox News, our next President, and other institutions in the name of national pride. Memories of experience, historical accounts, relevant archival footage, and well-researched statistics are delivered at a rhythmic pace, segueing from rapid-fire to pauses for reflection. The argument against the Selma filmmaker’s furious documentary is that a lot of this information was already out there, as if DuVernay main goal was to simply impart new facts and anecdotes. Like with all great documentaries, 13th’s power is in it’s pacing, it’s style, and it’s texture as much as in it’s bevy of horrific truths, and the movie more than confirms DuVernay as one of the most audacious and direct filmmakers of our day. - Chris Cabin
6) Silence
Silence has been Martin Scorsese’s passion project ever since he filmed The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988. It tells the story of three Jesuit priests in 17th century Japan. One (Liam Neeson) arrived at the height of Japan’s colonization and saw fellow priests and converted peasants tortured for not denouncing their Christian god. Eventually, he did denounce. Decades later, via a letter smuggled out by a Dutch trader, his students (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) venture to Japan to find him.
The mix of martyrdom and colonization is an immense conversation and Scorsese wisely decides to present both sides and eschew many emotional cues. Instead of utilizing a moving score, the soundtrack mostly enhances the sounds of nature, which is important to both the Christian god and the Buddhist pantheon, and puts the warring spiritualties on a similar plane of earthly existence. And the scenes of the Jesuits journeys by sea are filmed with a beautiful foggy immersion that heightens the ambiguity to the necessity of Garupe (Driver) and Rodrigues’ (Garfield) journey.
Ultimately, Silence is a patient film and it’s very much about how Rodrigues’ spiritual journey runs astride nations converging. Universal truths no longer exist in the convergence of cultures. There’s a sadness to that awareness, but faith does become much more personal. And Scorsese’s deeply personal film is one of the most profound movies of his career. - Brian Formo
5) The Witch
I saw The Witch back at TIFF 2015, and I still haven’t been able to shake it. Robert Eggers’ direction is simply stunning, and he has crafted the kind of period drama that most others only dream about when attempting the genre. Of course, because The Witch is a horror film, its period trappings get overlooked, and yet it’s precisely because of its period that the film takes on a unique tone. We get no shortage of horror films every year, but Eggers finds a niche and elevates it to high art. The period setting provides the flavor, but The Witch always delivers the scares. Eggers’ direction is so skilled that he eventually reaches the point of infinite possibilities where anything could happen and I wouldn’t have been taken out of the movie. That’s how powerful The Witch is, and that’s before you even start contemplating its fascinating subtext regarding the origins of evil. - Matt Goldberg
4) Elle
Paul Verhoeven is always full of surprises, but Elle might be his biggest surprise. Even though the there’s a rape revenge genre pic right there for the taking, the deliciously subversive Verhoeven does something far more interesting and makes a character drama instead. Don’t be fooled by the American marketing, though Michele (Isabelle Huppert) wants to find the man who broke into her house and brutally raped her, Elle is primarily about how this interesting woman reacts to trauma on a very personal level. We slowly learn that Michele, who is a video game programmer, had a previous traumatic experience, which has numbed her in certain ways. Verhoeven peels the layers of an onion and Michele refuses to cry.
To be perfectly honest, although Verhoeven is one of my favorite directors I was admittedly a little wary about seeing him venture into a film whose central plot point is a rape, but Elle is so completely unexpected. There is humor, there is a delightfully close female friendship, there’s true crime TV, there’s an end line that sounds like Verhoeven is angry at the Catholic church for their sex crime cover ups; there are so many levels of trauma here that’s handled in a manner unlike you’ve ever seen before.
Of course, the whole thing hinges on Huppert’s performance and it’s the best she’s ever given. Which is saying a lot. Huppert doesn’t attempt to normalize Michele’s behavior—she makes it character specific. She doesn’t aim to shock with her cold and detached reaction to something so brutal—she builds a character that makes that response believable. Because she responds so much differently than we’d expect from a movie character (or even a friend in our own lives), it’s imperative that we believe that Michele would actually respond as she does. And we do. The result is not only the most surprising film in Verhoeven’s filmography, but it’s also one of his absolute bests. - Brian Formo
3) Manchester by the Sea
2) La La Land
Despite the fact that I merely liked-not-loved Whiplash, I went into La La Land with sky-high expectations. I’m a sucker for old school Hollywood musicals—especially of the Astaire/Rogers variety—and the casting of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in this particular film seemed perfect. When I finally saw it, my expectations were not merely met, they were exceeded. Writer/director Damien Chazelle pulls off some sort of magic trick by blending that old Hollywood musical vibe with the crushing practicalities of reality, crafting a film in which a sunny musical number on a highway doesn’t detract from the emotional connection the audience builds to two wide-eyed hopefuls in the City of Stars.
As with the best musicals, the numbers in La La Land serve to heighten the emotions of our lead characters, from a straight-up Astaire/Rogers number that mimics the trepidatious flirtation between the two to a brutally earnest audition number. As he did with Whiplash, Chazelle put together a massive gut-punch of an ending here that left me crying and smiling at the same time. It’s a spectacular finale that drives home the theme of the film in jaw-dropping fashion—something of a mic drop from Chazelle at the end of this wondrous magic trick.
And that’s what La La Land feels like—magic. It’s a “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore” kind of throwback that also doesn’t ignore reality for the sake of make believe. Life can be marvelous and devastating in the same breath, and Chazelle toes this impossible line between fantastical musical and grounded relationship story with a masterful touch. - Adam Chitwood
1) Moonlight
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. - Aubrey Page
For more of COLLIDER’s Best of 2016 coverage, click here or on the links below.
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