My Top Ten Movies of 2017

2017 has been on balance a rather grim year out in the real world, ending up on a sad note personally for me. So rather than dwell on that - back into a darkened room I go. Here’s my nobody-gives-a-damn top ten movies list of 2017 (UK releases what I saw - for anyone feeling pedantic).

10: Free Fire: Ben Wheatley’s absurdly funny, loud, brutal, crowd-pleasing 70s shoot-out-a-thon. I like Wheatley when he’s being difficult and obtuse (A Field In England), but I like him even more when he’s letting a deranged Sharlto Copley off the chain in a downtown Boston warehouse (actually Brighton, naturally – where they had to re-assure shoppers next door when the gunfire kicked off), with a couple of IRA nutters and an arsenal large enough to stage a military coup in a South American dictatorship. Barnstorming and hilarious.

9: Blade Runner 2049: Regular readers will be aware of my difficulties with Blade Runner 2049. I’ve seen it three times already and I’m still not sure that I like it. But I am sure that I admire it. Beautiful, thoughtful, precise, elegant filmmaking. Whether Blade Runner 2049 goes on to become a beloved classic (remember Blade Runner was largely considered a failure in its time) is something of which I’m far from certain. But I do feel that we got a movie made by smart, dedicated people who genuinely love and respect the original, and worked extremely hard to preserve the subtlety and mystery present in source, while expanding and taking the story in interesting new directions. It’s probably too long, it’s definitely too slow. But it does nothing to dishonour my all time favourite movie – and for me that alone is little short of miraculous.

8: The Death Of Stalin: It is probably equal parts a measure of the satirical genius of Armando Iannucci and a reflection of the absurd and ghastly political times that we are living through right now, that a true story about the death of a terrible dictator and all the nasty, duplicitous, backstabbing, murdering, cowardly, fearful and near-genocidal activities that swirled around this awful period in history contained more belly laughs than any other movie I saw this year – including Captain Underpants.

7: Paddington 2: …and in such dreary days (not to mention my personally downcast state of mind a few weeks ago) what a wonder that a small animated bear with a marmalade fixation could deliver such a perfectly judged and joyfully received reminder of how we can still find and bring out the best in each other – if that is what we look for. Had me crying by the end with joy and laughter - for the second time running. That’s just rude.

6: Moonlight: Possibly the most remarkable film of the year. A black-cast urban-set deprived-background, drug and dysfunctional family themed, coming of age boy-to-man drama comes with a whole heap of ghettoised stylistic and genre expectations - and Moonlight confounds every single one of them with filmmaking of utterly poetic and elegiac grace and brilliance. Such accomplished, original and tender work from only a second time director is extraordinary in itself. That Naomi Harris filmed her entire superb performance as the drug-addicted mother spanning nearly twenty years in just three days work due to visa restrictions is just one example of the incredible sure-footedness of Barry Jenkins’ direction, and the dedication to honest, deeply-felt storytelling of everyone involved.

5: Raw: Speaking of tough coming-of-age experiences. It’s also pretty tricky being a strict vegetarian teenager developing cannibalistic tendencies after a savage hazing in a veterinarian collage. This French-Belgian drama-horror is wonderfully dark, unsettling, touching, sensual and brutal. With a wry smile just perceptible among the grue.

4: Get Out: Blimey! Part horror, part social-satire, part Stepford-Wives-esque mystery chiller, part unsettling racial drama, part dark comedy - All original and gloriously accomplished entertainment from first-time feature writer / director Jordan Peele. Brilliant and refreshing.

3: The Handmaiden: Three hours of twisty, Korean whodunit, whosdoingit and whoswhodoingittowho period-set psychological drama might sound like it’s going to be hard work. It isn’t. It’s funny, it’s thrilling, it’s gorgeous… and it’s very very very very sexy. What more do you want?

2: Manchester By The Sea: One of the quietest, most understated, almost inertly introvertedly performed dramas I’ve seen. And one that punched me in the gut harder than almost any I can remember.

1: Dunkirk: Christopher Nolan’s habit of making my favourite film of the year is getting almost too predictable by this point. His brilliance with intricate, ingenious, precision-tooled plotting and gargantuan but lovingly honed visual prowess is deployed so seemingly effortlessly and with such regularity that it might become easy to overlook. But here he’s put all that interwoven multi-timeline brilliance, that painterly IMAX palette, that artistic care with massive commercial clout at the service of his most simple, direct and powerfully honest tale yet. Dunkirk dispenses with historic sweep, CliffsNotes audience hand-holding, revisionist political analysis, or indeed even the need for something as seemingly essential to any thrilling war movie – an actual present enemy – to reduce this powerful and honourable tale of one of the most audaciously heroic defeats in military history to one simple, driving, intense and universal experience: The desire to get home.

13 Assassins (Jûsan-nin no shikaku) (2010)

The prolific and protean Takashi Miike, having already amassed a vast and varied back-catalogue of contemporary thrillers, romance, comedy, gore, action, drama and musicals in less than two decades, sucks it up and takes on Kurosawa with this period samurai epic.

Japan, 1840s. It is an era of peace. A time of waning power and relevance of the samurai order, and the decaying final years of the ancient feudal Shogunate regime.

Lord Naritsugu, the preening and sadistic younger brother of the current shogun, carves out a swathe of terror and suffering, seemingly out of mere listless petulance. But with higher political office likely to come his way soon, and following the protest of ritual seppuku committed by a wronged clan leader; Sir Doi, a senior official in the current political order, covertly seeks out an experienced samurai to help rid the land of this cruel and dangerous presence.

From this set up, you can probably guess the rough structure of what follows. Our de-facto master samurai must assemble a small group of warriors to ensnare and take down the evil overlord, protected as he is by a small army of his own. This will involve the recruitment of some grizzled old fighters who have seen better days, some over-idealistic young students who have yet to fight a real battle, and of course, an unruly, somewhat comedic outsider who will be grudgingly admitted into the ranks against better judgement to make some unlikely but crucial contribution.

Whether it's Seven Samurai, The Dirty Dozen, or Ocean's Eleven, this is a movie in that grand tradition of the numbered, but outnumbered team of good guys taking on a big bad against the odds. What matters here is not that we can't see what's coming, but that this is a movie that takes such care and pleasure in the unfolding of the story.

Naritsugu is a truly appalling creation, grotesque in the casual disinterest he shows in the terrible violence he inflicts, like a child half-heartedly pulling wings of insects in boredom. He's a man out of time, no longer of use to a Japan at peace and soon to join the modern world. He only seems to engage with anything when the heat of battle is up, but even then, not to care over the win or loss that he and his men might achieve or suffer, but merely to have, briefly, any consequence at all.

The samurai , we gradually comprehend, are in a similar situation. The long unfolding of the first act explores the archaic ritual and routine of their antiquated order, the rich and complex intertwining of codes of honour, and conflicting loyalties, but also of nostalgic wistfulness for glory days long passed. It's a powerful and telling moment when the leader Shimada is shown (in an effort to sway his heart in horror and pity to the mission being proposed), a woman tortured to a gut-wrenching, nightmarish vision of Dantean hell, and rather than displaying anger or grief, his mouth twitches into a wry smile. He's just been shown a reason and purpose for his continued existence.

After that, it's men on a mission greatness. Plans, maps, subterfuge and misdirection, treks lost in the wilderness, and the "let's make our stand here" turn, with all the classic war movie / western / A-Team tension-ratcheting preparation that this entails. The third act battle is coming, and it's going to be something special.

A smartly constructed, character-rich adventure that segues into an object lesson in clear, dynamic battle staging that takes up at least a third of this lengthy movie and never bogs down or loses focus. Takeshi Miike, the enfant terrible of Japanese gore, and crazed seven-films-a-year auteur of chaotic zombie-musical-comedy spoofs has pooled all his considerable talents here to craft an altogether more mature work. And, if he hasn't quite equalled the perfection of Kurosawa's samurai masterpiece, he's come majestically close.

Rating: 5/5

City Of Life And Death (Nanjing! Nanjing!) (2009)

There are a rare few films that have found a way to tackle some of the greatest atrocities ever committed by and upon the human race with such searing, unflinching emotional honesty that they move beyond the categorisations of drama or war movie to something that can best be described as bearing witness. Come And See and Schindler's List belong to this exclusive group, and so too now must Lu Chuan's extraordinary and harrowing City Of Life And Death.

It is 1937 in Nanking, former Chinese capital and scene of what is about to unfold as one of the greatest war-crimes in history (a massacre verging on genocide and an event which continues to sour Sino-Japanese relations to this day), but writer/director Lu Chuan is not here to analyse wider military events or stratagems. We open with the briefest glimpse of the Japanese assault on the city walls, and then before the credits have even finished rolling his camera is already patrolling the post-conflict city streets; a blasted, ruined landscape. His film picks up where the likes of The Pianist or Saving Private Ryan leave off, in the midst of a destroyed world, with the invaders and the surviving remnants of the defeated population already pitched together in a dangerous and disorientating mix of sporadic resistance battles, vast wretched prisoner encampments and perilously tenuous civilian "safety" zones.

Events are told in a masterful intercutting of macro and micro drama. We are introduced to only a handful of identifiable characters. Amongst them a Chinese bureaucrat trying to use his position to save his family, a young boy caught up in the resistance fighting, a naive prostitute (euphemistically referred to as comfort girls), one of thousands shipped to the frontline with no idea of the horrors awaiting them, and a single Japanese soldier with some semblance of conscience amongst his savage comrades. Their desperate personal stories intertwine inside the maelstrom of chaos and horror surrounding them.

The stunning black-and-white photography veers from stark, handheld and up-close, to vast and impressionistic sweeps that depict the large-scale massacres as nightmarish visions of some biblical apocalypse. The combined effect renders the feel of the movie as both something close to a rediscovered contemporary document and personal witness testimony, the small-scale drama illuminating the large-scale atrocity that might be beyond comprehension otherwise.

At times heart-stopping in its intensity and tragic almost beyond expressing. City Of Life And Death is a profoundly moving depiction of inhumanity at its most grievous. It simply should be seen.

Rating: 5/5

War Horse (2011)

Spielberg. Animals. War. Lost Innocence. West Country Accents. Rescue. Reunion. Gob-Smacking Tracking Shot. God Light. God Light. God Light. God Light. HEARTWARMING. Hanky.

Rating: 4/5

Mongol (2007)

A powerful and moving dramatisation of the early years of Genghis Kahn's rise to power, this film looks beautiful in a very real earthy way that has been lacking from some digitally polished historical epics of late. The cast all give fine performances laced with naturalistic touches of humour and romance, and avoiding the grandstanding normally associated with biopics of great military leaders.

If Mongol has one small flaw, it is that things get a touch episodic at times as the film tries to cram in many pivotal moments in a twenty-year long nomadic odyssey. But overall this is a solid and gripping work that I certainly would like to see a sequel to as the real meat of the story is still to come.

Rating: 4/5