After Love
Painful drama of longterm relationship breakup and possession-division from Belgian director Joachim Lafosse, featuring Bérénice Bejo and Cédric Kahn as a couple no longer able to go through the motions.
What we said: It is about the very important but little discussed power of money to poison already difficult situations, by supercharging people with a sense of grievance, status and entitlement.
American Honey
Sex, drugs and magazine subscriptions in Andrea Arnold’s US road trip movie, with a star-making turn from debutant Sasha Lane alongside Shia LaBeouf and Riley Keogh.
What we said: Arnold’s ambition and reach are really exciting: the way she immerses you in the mood and the moment, letting her characters drift to the edge of chaos, capable of investing the least little thing with reportage poetry.
Anomalisa
Middle-age angst rendered in stop-motion animation from Charlie Kaufman, as a depressed self-help author holes up in a hotel during a sales convention and becomes fixated on a woman he meets in the bar.
What we said: It is really funny, and incidentally boasts one of the most extraordinarily real sex scenes in film history. It also scared me the way a top-notch horror or a sci-fi dystopia might.
Arabian Nights: Vols 1-3
A three-film epic from Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes, which uses the famous tale/cycle as a structuring device for Gomes’ anatomy of Portugal’s social and economic malaise.
What we said: An opaque compendium of stories – like the ones Scheherazade told to stave off her own death – all responding in indirect ways to the miseries forced on Portugal by austerity.
Arrival
Epic, emotional sci-fi tale, with Amy Adams as a linguist called in to help communicate with the mysterious aliens whose giant ships hover menacingly over Earth.
What we said: The movie skirts the edge of absurdity as anything like this must, but a forthright star performance from Amy Adams convinces you that something that could be silly is actually fascinating and deeply scary.
The Assassin
Taiwanese master director Hou Hsaio-hsien released his first feature since 2007, featuring Shu Qi as the eponymous killer in an elaborately stylised wuxia tale.
What we said: Its moments of sublime gorgeousness are captivating. There is such delicacy and artistry in The Assassin, as if the film is spun from some exquisite, evanescent tissue of precious material.
The BFG
A whizz-popping ride from Steven Spielberg, with Mark Rylance CGI’d to the last nose hair as Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant. Ruby Barnhill plays Sophie, the little girl who befriends the giant and recruits the Queen to help him take on his child-chewing contemporaries.
What we said: The movie asks us to marvel at how large the world is, and also how small. A colossal miniaturism.
A Bigger Splash
Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes star in Luca Guadagnino’s four-handed psychodrama based on Jacques Deray’s 1969 psychological thriller La Piscine, in which Swinton’s island idyll is invaded by Fiennes’ over-exuberant music promoter.
What we said: A terrifically assured switch to English-language film-making from Guadagnino … He is surely coming to rival Paolo Sorrentino as an Italian auteur on the world stage.
Captain America: Civil War
The third in Marvel’s Captain America series, with two sets of superheroes lining up to battle each other over whether the Avengers should retain their independence, or give up control.
What we said: Crazily surreal, engaging and funny in the best Marvel tradition, building to a whiplash-twist reveal that sports with the ever-present idea of duplicity and betrayal within the Avengers’ ranks themselves.
The Childhood of a Leader
The feature debut of 28-year-old actor-turned-director Brady Corbet, it’s the story of a privileged, petulant 10-year-old boy who is fated to end up a fascist dictator, loosely based on a 1939 story by Jean-Paul Sartre.
What we said: Steely, sinister and utterly gripping … the film exerts a lethal grip. It might be considered arch for a young first-timer to release a movie with this title, but Corbet has earned the right to be precocious. What an exciting debut.
Chronic
Cannes-award winning drama from Mexican director Michel Franco, with Tim Roth as a terminal-care nurse who steps in to help take care of patients in their final days.
What we said: Tim Roth stars, and gives what may well be the performance of his career – calm, studied, mysteriously impassive.
The Club
Chilean director Pablo Larraín takes on the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship once again in this dark and difficult film about a “retirement home” for priests apparently guilty of child abuse.
What we said: The Club is a startling and disturbing film in many ways – and replete with ideas … The flavour of fear and disillusionment is all but overwhelming.
Deadpool
Zinger-packed comic book adaptation from Marvel, featuring Ryan Reynolds as the pansexual superhero and mutant mercenary assassin taking on Ed Skrein’s Ajax.
What we said: A horribly violent, shriekingly self-aware and macabre Marvel super-antihero movie, and it’s the funniest Ryan Reynolds film since Van Wilder: Party Liaison.
Dheepan
Jacques Audiard-directed thriller about Tamil refugees struggling to adapt to life on a French housing estate, which won the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2015.
What we said: It’s bulging with giant confidence and packed with outbursts of that mysterious epiphanic grandeur, like moments of sunlight breaking through cloud-cover, with which Audiard endows apparently normal sequences and everyday details.
Doctor Strange
Benedict Cumberbatch plays the arrogant, egotistical superhero who finds himself charged with saving the world in a film that almost stands apart from the rest of the Marvel universe.
What we said: A tremendously engaging and likeable superhero ride, in which the classiest of casts show they know exactly where to take it seriously – and where to inject the fun.
Everybody Wants Some!!
Richard Linklater’s semi-sequel to his 1970s high-school comedy Dazed and Confused, here following a bunch of college students on baseball scholarships in the early 1980s.
What we said: A deceptively subtle comedy, and also a challengingly and almost provokingly unironic film intensifying and cartoonifying what it is like to be young and male, but quite without the obviously readable drama and poignancy of his earlier film Boyhood.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
First in a new series of Harry Potter spin-offs, with Eddie Redmayne as “magizoologist” Newt Scamander battling evil supernatural forces in New York.
What we said: It’s a very Rowling universe, dense with fun, but always taking its own jeopardy very seriously and effortlessly making you do the same.
Fire at Sea
Over 20 years 400,000 migrants from Africa and the Middle East have used the Sicilian island of Lampedusa as a gateway to Europe. Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary attempts to convey how their displacements affects both those searching for a better life and the locals who have lived with the influx for decades.
What we said: The film does not take a view; it does not demand action. It simply shows us the details, and I felt I learned more from this film than from the nightly TV news.
Francofonia
Russian master director Alexander Sokurov follows up his Hermitage meditation Russian Ark with this dreamlike installation film about France’s culture repository, the Louvre.
What we said: It is a sophisticated, complex film: a cine-prose poem or installation tableau, weaving newsreel footage with eerie floating images above Paris and dramatised fantasy scenes.
From Afar
A stylish drama from Venezuela’s Lorenzo Vigas about a lonely man (Alfredo Castro), his fascination with a young male prostitute and the relationship between the two.
What we said: It’s a movie that balances fiercely explicit moments with seductive indirections, off-camera crises and climaxes made all the more disturbing for appearing to happen behind the audience’s back … an intriguing, emotionally painful and brilliant film.
Ghostbusters
Who you gonna call? The police, apparently. Paul Feig’s all-female reboot of a slightly shonky 80s staple caused such a stir among the troglodytic that cast member Leslie Jones was subjected to hate speech on Twitter. The film soldiers on regardless. A fast, fun reimagining that leaves the haters in its wake.
What we said: It delivers a really funny and spectacular action comedy that pays tribute to the first film with in-jokes, twists and cameos, and yet produces a brand new work, as smart as paint.
Hail, Caesar!
Entertaining Hollywood satire from the Coen brothers, featuring Josh Brolin as a studio fixer attempting to establish the whereabouts of missing actor Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), star of the eponymous Roman epic.
What we said: It’s a crazy, if lugubrious, caper about the golden, post-war age of Tinseltown, like a Hollywood tale that PG Wodehouse might have written, but with that ominous deadpan, quirky-Coeny quality where the cheeriness would otherwise go.
The Hard Stop
Documentary on two childhood friends of Mark Duggan, the Tottenham man whose shooting by the police was thought to have sparked the London riots of 2011. One - Marcus Knox-Hooke – was jailed for 32 months for his part in the riots. The other - Kurtis Henville – is shown struggling to make any headway in the straight world after giving up a life of crime.
What we said: Another grim rotation in the cycle of violence and resentment. The film itself recites the litany of gloom: “Money, guns, drugs, power, respect.”
The Hateful Eight
Kurt Russell, Samuel L Jackson and Jennifer Jason Leigh star in Quentin Tarantino’s snowbound western, in which copious bloodletting results after a motley group of travellers are stranded at a roadhouse.
What we said: A Jacobean western that is also an American epic set mostly in just one room: intimate yet gigantic. It is horribly violent, exhilaratingly intelligent, discursive and sinewy – brutal and cerebral in this director’s signature ludic style.
High-Rise
Adaptation of JG Ballard’s celebrated fable of alienation and conflict in 1970s Britain, directed by Ben Wheatley and starring Tom Hiddleston as a doctor witnessing the breakdown of law and order.
What we said: I loved its gnomic refusal of normal storytelling and the way it approximates the distance of Ballard’s prose. It’s the social-surrealist film of the year.
I, Daniel Blake
Ken Loach’s immensely powerful, Newcastle-set parable about the flaws in the British benefits system, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year.
What we said: Loach avoids smart-alec stuff. This is nothing fancy, but conceived with candour, delicacy, and lack of prurience. Loach shows us that poverty is not God’s business but ours. We can understand it and do something about it.
The Jungle Book
A live-action 3D retelling of Kipling’s Mowgli tales, directed by Jon Favreau, and retaining much of the celebrated Disney cartoon’s infectious spirit.
What we said: A terrifically enjoyable piece of old-fashioned storytelling and a beautiful-looking film: spectacular, exciting, funny and fun.
The Light Between Oceans
Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender star in an impassioned melodrama about lighthouse keepers who find a baby in an open boat, and decide to raise the child as their own.
What we said: Unashamedly and even ruthlessly sentimental, this film tugs away at your heartstrings like it’s ringing in the new year. A new Richter scale may have to be devised to measure the mass audience lip-trembling.
Little Men
Ira Sachs’s thoughtful drama about two boys whose friendship is tested when their parents fall out over money.
What we said: Painful, complex, beautifully acted and inexpressibly sad, composed with scrupulous observational intelligence and care. It achieves a strangely literary quality, like an exceptionally powerful short story. Film-making this intelligent is such a treat.
Love & Friendship
Kate Becksinsale reunites with her Last Days of Disco director Whit Stillman for an unlikely adaptation of an early Jane Austen novella (which has filched its title from a different one).
What we said: A very satisfying archery contest of zingers … a film of surfaces and cynicism, in which the romanticism of the more famous stories is almost entirely absent.
Maggie’s Plan
Greta Gerwig comedy in which Maggie’s plan (to conceive a baby via sperm donated by an old school friend) is disrupted by a chance meeting with a unhappily married couple whose misery could be Maggie’s new masterpiece.
What we said: A witty, sharp comedy that moves along at an invigorating clip.
Miles Ahead
Don Cheadle directs and stars in a biopic of jazz legend Miles Davis, focusing on Davis’s burnout years in the late 1970s and his attempt to achieve a comeback.
What we said: This is a labour of requited love for Cheadle, a subject he clearly feels passionate about that responds to his touch.
The Neon Demon
Nicolas Winding Refn slips into something even more uncomfortable than the Thai boxing ring - the LA fashion world. Elle Fanning plays Jessie, a neophyte who seduces the scene with her vulnerability, before giving into corruption.
What we said: The flourishes of toxic menace are carried off with the style of a matador. For pure technique, Refn approaches the mastery of a PT Anderson or a Tarantino.
The Nice Guys
Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, as a private detective and a for-hire heavy respectively, team up to solve a gruesome, complex crime in the moral swamp of late 70s Los Angeles.
What we said: A comedy hardboiled noir, a plastic Black Dahlia with something of PT Anderson’s Boogie Nights, Altman’s version of The Long Goodbye and even some weird touches of Lynch.
Nocturnal Animals
Tom Ford directs an astute adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel Tony and Susan, about a woman disturbed by the manuscript of a novel sent to her by her former husband.
What we said: Nocturnal Animals delivers a double shot of horror and Nabokovian despair: it’s excessive, outrageous, a story within a story about the super-rich and super-poor.
Our Little Sister
Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda directs a quiet “family drama” about four sisters of varying ages who live together in a large house in the seaside town of Kamakura.
What we said: Superbly unforced and unassuming, finding delicate notes of affirmation and optimism and discreetly celebrating the beauty of nature and family love.
Paterson
Adam Driver plays a poetry-writing bus driver in Paterson, NJ, in the latest idiosyncratic fable from American auteur Jim Jarmusch.
What we said: I can’t remember when I last saw a movie whose adult characters had so much simple, unassuming goodness, goodness that breaks everything in the modern culture rulebook by going unironised and unpunished.
The Revenant
A hallucinatory epic of survival in the old west, about frontiersman Hugh Glass who survives bear attacks and the treachery of his fellow travellers, which won Oscars for its star Leonardo DiCaprio and director Alejandro González Iñárritu.
What we said: What is so distinctive about this Iñárritu picture is its unitary control and its fluency: no matter how extended, the film’s tense story is under the director’s complete control.
Room
An adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s kidnap-and-imprisonment novel, itself inspired by the Kampusch and Fritzl cases in Austria, for which Brie Larson won the best actress Oscar.
What we said: This is a disturbing and absorbing film, shrewdly acted, particularly by Larson. It lets the audience in; it does not just let the nightmare stun them into submission.
Sing Street
Irish director John Carney follows Once and Begin Again with another musician-oriented film, this time about Dublin schoolkids who form a band to escape their humdrum lives.
What we said: A wish-fulfilment comedy about idealism, aspiration and getting off with girls, riffing on that age-old truth that being in a band might just give you the cachet that will make up for a lack of money and looks.
Son of Saul
Stark and uncompromising account of existence inside a Nazi death camp from Hungarian director László Nemes, with Geza Röhrig as the Sonderkommando attempting to survive.
What we said: Its good faith and moral and intellectual seriousness are beyond doubt. And Röhrig’s performance is transfixing, without ever drifting into the realm of actorly pretence.
Spotlight
A hardhitting and impassioned Oscar-winning study of the Boston Globe’s campaign to expose clerical child abuse in the city, and the Catholic church’s ongoing cover-up.
What we said: There are a few journo cliches – but it has the sinew of a really good procedural, underpinned by genuine moral outrage.
Tale of Tales
Fantastical frippery from Gomorrah director Matteo Garrone, who picks through 16th-century Neopolitan poet Giambattista Basile’s folk stories for the choicest, weirdest fairy tales to fill his freaky portmanteau.
What we said: It is fantastically mad, rigorously imagined and visually tremendous: erotic, hilarious, internally consistent.
Things to Come
Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest, for which she won the Silver Bear at Berlin film festival. A philosophy teacher (Isabelle Huppert) is forced to rethink her life after her husband leaves her and reexamines her relationship with her favourite former student.
What we said: Stylish, elegant, measured and held together with a thread of exquisitely reticent sadness … a rigorously intelligent and desperately sad movie. Huppert is unimpeachably cast and what a brilliant and commanding presence she always is.
Victoria
Single-take thriller from German director Sebastian Schipper, following a Spanish girl who winds up helping out four men she meets in the street to pull off a robbery.
What we said: A gripping heist drama set on the streets of Berlin that plays out in real time in one continuous, 138-minute camera shot, carried along on a giant skittery wave of adrenaline and logistical daring.
Weiner
Former US congressman Anthony Weiner’s double sex scandal gets another airing, this time by two film-makers who were there as his political career imploded, getting even closer to the snap-happy Weiner than his online messaging buddies.
What we said: The car-crash mayoral candidacy of New York politician Anthony Weiner makes horribly compulsive viewing.
Wiener-Dog
Todd Solondz’s latest, made up of four interlinked episodes involving a dachshund, plus a very funny intermission scene. The movie focuses on a series of people who come into contact with the dog, including Greta Gerwig, Julie Delpy and Danny DeVito
What we said: A black comedy with the comedy removed, leaving just the black: a tarry, sticky, dense residue of bleakness and callousness. It’s as if Solondz is angrily reacting against suspicions that he is going soft: suspicions that he himself has created. It is a movie with a hard core of disillusionment.
Zootropolis (aka Zootopia)
Buddy-cop animation from Disney featuring Ginnifer Goodwin as a rabbit called Judy Hopps who moves to the big city and ends up solving a major crime despite her superiors’ doubts.
What we said: This deft comedy, set in a world in which all the different animal species have put aside their natural positions on the food chain to coexist in harmony, is the latest in a run of first-rate family films from Disney.
- In our critics’ opinion, these are the highest-rated films of 2016 so far. Are we right: are there glaring absences, or inexplicable inclusions? Bear in mind these are films released in the UK since January, so if you are in the US you might want to speak up for The Lobster or Sunset Song (released last year in the UK), or Brooklyn and 45 Years if you are in Australia.
