Sunday, December 31, 2017

2017 - 40 Favorites


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)



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