I’ve seen a few writers get themselves worked up over
whether or not David Lynch’s return Twin
Peaks this year was a work of cinema or television after Cahiers du cinema and Sight & Sound polls placed it at
or near the top of their lists of the 2017’s best films. The years since Inland Empire had been filled with the
sort limp for-hire projects (commercials, music videos, the concert film Duran Duran: Unstaged) that suggested
Lynch was an artist content to coast on his legend, at least whenever he wasn’t
proselytizing about transcendental meditation. So I had initially dreaded his
returning to this material, fearing a lazy nostalgia fest that would score easy
points off winking “damn fine coffee” and cherry pie references. To my happy
surprise, Twin Peaks (aka Twin Peaks: The Return and Twin Peaks: Season 3) turned out to be
the work of the year, however you categorize it, easily dwarfing everything
else I saw in 2017, including the films listed below.
As far as what’s on my list this year, I included a few films
I caught at festivals that have yet to be released in the U.S., as well as
titles that had limited runs or went straight to streaming in 2017. 2016
festival titles Personal Shopper, A Quiet Passion, Despite The Night (which never opened in the U.S., but had a PAL
DVD release in August via Matchbox Films) and I, Olga Hepnarova were all on last year’s list, or I’d include them
this year.
In alphabetical order:
3FT Ball & Souls (Yoshio Kato)
Antiporno (Sion Sono)
Bad Genius (Nattawut Poonpiriya)
Blue Velvet Revisited (Harry Rag)
BPM (Beats Per Minute) (Robin Campillo)
Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino)
Columbus (Kogonada)
A Dark Song (Liam Gavin)
Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison)
Endless Poetry (Alejandro Jodorowsky)
Faces Places (Agnès Varda and JR)
Good Time (Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie)
Hagazussa: A Heathen's Curse (Lukas Feigelfeld)
Hounds Of Love (Ben Young)
The Killing Of A Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig)
Let The Corpses Tan (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani)
Let The Sunshine In (Clarie Denis)
Logan Lucky (Steven Soderbergh)
Loveless (Andrey Zvyagintsev)
The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected) (Noah Baumbach)
Most Beautiful Island (Ana Asensio)
Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello)
On The Beach At Night Alone (Hong Sang-soo)
Le Parc (Damien Manivel)
Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Piazza Vittorio (Abel Ferrara)
Rat Film (Theo Anthony)
Raw (Julia Ducournau)
Risk (Laura Poitras)
The Shape Of Water (Guillermo del Toro)
Staying Vertical (Alain Guiraudie)
The Square (Ruben Östlund)
Step (Amanda Lipitz)
Super Dark Times (Kevin Phillips)
Thoroughbreds (Cory Finley)
The Unknown Girl (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne)
The Untamed (Amat Escalante)
Violet (Bas Devos)
Zama (Lucrecia Martel)
