2017 was a busy year. I set a new record for both number of times I saw a movie in a theater (84) and total movies from 2017 that I saw (99). For fun, I've included a little graph of how those number have climbed in the eight years I've been doing this list. Of the times I went to the theater, I only saw a single move twice (The Last Jedi, of course). 1 time was a re-release (Suspiria). 2 times for Oscar Short collections. 5 movies were leftovers from 2016. That means I saw 77 different 2017 releases at a movie theater and 22 at home. Before you ask, I did finally get Movie Pass and I'm getting great value out of it.
2016 Edition (2017 Update)
2015 Edition
2014 Edition
2013 Edition
2012 Edition
2011 Edition
Top 10
1. The Big Sick
A lot of things needs to be considered for my favorite movie of the year. I value entertainment value as highly as artistic merit. It needs to be a movie I can imagine watching many times in the future. I need to have a genuine emotional response to it. I need to have a reaction to it that I didn't have for any other movie. While I had a tough time picking the best of 2017, The Big Sick ultimately checked the most boxes. It's funny. It's sweet. It's full of the kind of personal touches that rarely make their way through the many phases of a movie production. That makes sense, since this is based on the story of how co-writers Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon met. Nanjiani also stars in the film and gives the kind of performance that's so exceeds expectations, that I've already accepted that I'll never see him this good again. Ray Romano and Holly Hunter are perfectly cast. I can't argue that this is the most perfect movie of the year. Rather, it is the most personal, heartfelt, and honest, which is much better than perfect.
2. A Ghost Story
Every year, I reserve one spot in my top 10 for what I call my "most unshakable movie". That's the movie that stayed with me the longest. Normally, I can't justify putting that movie any higher than 9th or 10th because it's a flawed or bizarre film that I haven't come up with a proper defense for yet. This year, that film is A Ghost Story and it hit me so strongly that anything less than 2nd wouldn't do. There's almost no plot to the movie. Limited cast. Sparse dialogue. Small set. But, good god, this meditation of life, death, and change hit me hard. It's a haunting and beautiful little movie that I can't recommend strongly enough even if half the people who watch it will turn it off midway through the pie eating scene.
3. Free Fire
I also leave room in my list for a movie that I can't defend artistically that hit all my sweet spots. A good way to find that movie is to ask which movie I saw in a mostly empty theater and I was the one laughing the loudest and most often. In 2017, that would be Free Fire. The movie couldn't be simpler - a gunfight breaks out in a warehouse and everyone tries to get out alive and with the money. That really is it. Every character fits a familiar archetype. I can imagine every one of them saying "I'm getting to old for this shit". I just loved everything about it. The late 70s setting*. The comic violence. Even Sharlto Copley as the world's most annoying arms dealer.
*Given how The Nice Guys filled this spot last year, I think I just need to accept that the late 70s is my favorite era in movies. Maybe I need to give Inherent Vice another shot.
No Star Wars
movie can be fairly rated. They all come as a set. I'll watch any Star Wars
movie more than virtually anything else because it's part of the saga. So, I
don't know. 4th seems right to me. This installment has some of the most iconic
moments and imges in the series. That cast is assemble like the aim was specifically to please me. Sure,
the movie has problems, but it's one of only two movies that made me giggle
with anticipation this year, which has to count for something.
I'm kind of out of words about this movie. I'm going
to feel silly putting it this low when I look back on this in a couple years.
I'm not sure I had a more satisfying movie experience this year. Sean Baker
introduces the audience to this world, gives an obvious but perfect irony to hang over
it, lets us hang out with the characters for a
couple hours, then takes the story exactly where it needs to go. He mixes
a professional actor (Willem Defoe), a complete newcomer (Bria Vinaite), and
a child actor (Brooklynn Prince) and gets staggeringly good performances out of
all of them. This certainly exceeded my expectations more than any film this
year (and I went in with high expectations).
It's nice to finally love a Martin McDonagh movie
right off the bat. This is a pitch black, even nihilistic comedy that doesn't
hold back (even when it would've been so easy to). Frances McDormand, Woody
Harrelson, and Sam Rockwell have rarely, if ever, been better. There's no way
this could've had a satisfying ending, and I'm grateful for that.
7. Dunkirk
A lot of my top movies this year are more meditation
or mood piece than movie. The Florida Project and A Ghost Story certainly fit
that description. Dunkirk does too. Christopher Nolan's stripped down war movie
isn't about character. It's not even about plot. It's about a moment. This is
the kind of film that ignores the things I respond to the most in movies
(characters, story) and does everything else (directing, editing, sound,
cinematography) masterfully. It like he's built a sports car and removed all
the bells and whistles. All it does is drive because that's all it needs to do.
8. Lady Bird
Greta Gerwig gets it. It's as simple as that. If you
look at any coming of age movie, the place where it falls apart is when it tries
to be something more than that, like it's ashamed that it's "just a coming of age story". Lady
Bird doesn't do that. There's isn't anything I haven't seen before in the movie. It's just done better, with more care and more specificity, than anything
else. It's one of those crowd-pleasing movies that I'm pretty sure I could show
to anyone and they'd like it. Saoirse Ronan is on her way to being this
generation's Meryl Streep (if she's not there already).
This is only in my top 10 because I've seen The Room
many times, have laughed about it for years with friends, and have been fascinated
by Tommy Wiseau for just as long. The Disaster Artist is designed for a very specific subset of people to the point that I'm genuinely shocked that's it's done as
well in the box office and with critics as it has. For that specific subset of
people, the film is close to a masterpiece. James Franco gets Tommy Wiseau right. It's
an overused phrase, but it really feels like he's been training his entire
career for this role. This is the movie that made me laugh the most at in 2017.
10. Wind River
Hell or High Water is good in a way that I almost
can't explain. A year later, the screenwriter of that movie comes out with a
new film that he wrote and directed. I wasn't sure what to expect. Well, Wind
River is no Hell or High Water, but it isn't far behind. It does share the
same quality of being good in a way that's tough to explain though. It's a pretty
typical murder investigation, but it uses the Wyoming Indian Reservation
setting along with restrained performances from Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth
Olsen so damn well. One of my favorite questions to ask when determining my
favorite movies is "how long would I like to explore this world?".
Wind River makes Wyoming look like a different planet and I want to know
everything about it.
Next 10
Speaking of worlds I'd like to explore. This movie
was over 2.5 hours and I would've been fine if it was twice as long. The story
and performances were fine, but I wanted to bathe in that atmosphere. Director
Denis Villeneuve and D.P. Roger Deakins (and many others) don't just recreate
the iconic world of the 1982 movie. They make it their own.
Like many films on the list in this vicinity, I
assume that as soon as I watch this again, I'll hate myself for letting it fall
this far down the list. The conflict was perhaps a little more forced than in
Dawn. Otherwise all the things that made that 2014 movie great made this one
great as well. Andy Serkis has almost singleh andedly legitimized
motion-capture performance*. After Tim Burton's 2001 Planet of the Apes, who
would've ever predicted that Fox would be able to revitalize the series so
fully?
*Obviously, a team of visual effects artisans
deserve credit as well.
Pixar deserves all the praise people give them. This
movie is funny, inventive, and sincere. Pixar has made a name for themselves out
of making that look effortless.
It's so nice to see Spider-Man in the MCU. He fits
that "comedy first, action second, story third" ethos perfectly. This
movie was all fun and didn't add unneeded stakes. Tom Holland is already my
favorite Peter Parker, and, for the record, I was always a big fan of Tobey
Maguire in the role.
Sofia Coppola directed the crap out of this movie.
This is another movie that I would've been happy to soak up the atmosphere for
as long that they wanted to make it.
I just love Taika Waititi's sense of humor. Does it
have to be more complex than that?
You could argue that this is a neo-Western that just
happens to be an X-Men movie. That's an interesting approach that paid off.
This confirms two of my suspicions: 1) Jake
Gyllenhaal should be a perennial Oscar contender. 2) Tatiana Maslany is an
exceptional talent who should be a household name.
This movie wasn't at all what I expected it would
be. I love that it uses a high concept
to tell an oddly dark and human story.
Gary Oldman.
...
Oh, did you need more than that? Why?
Everything In Between
You'll notice a trend with these next few movies.
Most of them are movies that I liked a lot but couldn't match the overall enthusiasm other people had for them. Wonder Woman is a great example. Gal Gadot
is everything I could hope for in a superhero. I don't think Patty Jenkins does
anything exceptional as director, but I am ecstatic if her success means more female directors -- cough. Michelle MacLaren. cough -- will/could be given a chance
at big budget movies. It's by far the best of the DC movies (post-Christopher
Nolan), not coincidentally because it's least concerned with trying to mimic
Marvel's formula.
I think more could be learned about this than virtually any other movie from 2017. Obviously, it's a clever satire on race.
If you look closer, it's a savvy mix of humor, horror, suspense, and social
commentary. Most first time filmmakers have a dozen ideas they want to fit in
their film when there's only room for two or three. Jordan Peele manages to fit
all his ideas in and still make a good movie. The only reason I don't have it
higher is that the specific brands of humor, horror, or suspense are not my preference.
Jokes? Check. Music? Check. Anna Kendrick, Anna
Camp, Hailee Steinfeld, and Brittany Snow? Check. I don't care if the story is
nonsense. I had fun.
Edgar Wright had an idea and saw it through. A
friend of mine described the movie as "all dessert". I couldn't
describe it better.
Perhaps, it tried too hard to make a live-action
replica of the animated classic. I'd be a lot more bothered by that if they
didn't do such a good job recreating it.
Dustin Hoffman is marvelously insufferable and Ben
Stiller and Adam Sandler resist all of their urges to go broad.
It was way too expensive and kind of a mess, but
it's an earnest, expensive mess, kind of like John Carter. I respect that.
I didn't need another John Wick, but as long as
there's a bunch of slick, tightly choreographed fights, I'm fine with getting
more.
Emma Stone and Steve Carell recreate one of the
craziest pop culture spectacles of the 20th century. The movie tries to pack in
a little too much. I'd rather it have too much than too little.
Foul mouthed nuns played by Alison Brie, Aubrey
Plaza, and Kate Micucci. That's all I really need. The humor didn't work quite
as well as I'd hoped. Still, it was plenty funny.
The movie as a whole is a mixed bag but Michael Keaton
gives a wonderfully complex performance.
This is one hell of a Roman Catholic deep dive. I'm
not sure what the point of it all was, but it's packed with great performances.
It calls attention to how it compares to Ocean's
Eleven far too much for me to not be aware of how it falls short. What a cast
though.
I still don't know how this movies series exists.
It's animated anarchy and I love it.
Charlize Theron is a total badass. That extended
scene when she fights her was through an entire fucking building deserves more
praise than it has received up to this point.
It was funny. I just wish it didn't undercut every
single one of its serious moments.
There's only so high that I can rank a movie about a
love story when I didn't care for the love story.
I wish I could stop thinking about what the Kevin
Spacey version would've looked like. Not that I want to see the Spacey version
more. I just know it's there.
I'm not sure how this made $300 million. It was good
and I love seeing kids swear. That's all I need.
Putting Domhnall Gleeson and Margot Robbie in a movie is a
cheat code to get me to see any movie.
It was kind of an unearned hagiography, don't you
think?
Stylishly made. Superbly cast. That said, I spent
the whole movie aware that I was watching someone do an Agatha Christie story
with a big budget. Branagh didn't really make it his own.
I had an awful experience when I saw the movie that
I have trouble separating from the movie itself.
That was an intense documentary. I don't think the
documentary was as good as the story it was trying to tell, if that makes any
sense.
Tom Cruise is a goddamn movie star and I'll happily
watch him be a goddamn movie star for two hours.
I always have a hard time ranking documentaries. The
exact style didn't work for me, but it did a wonderful job saying what it
wanted to say.
I'm not sure I needed to two hours of Darren
Aronofsky visualizes his one of his therapy sessions.
No one shoots a bunch of people having
conversations like Richard Linklater.
This is what happens when the story becomes bigger
than the documentarian is ready for.
I appreciate the attempt the make a movie completely
by reading between the lines.
I wasn't blown away by it. I do want to see more
Iranian cinema now, so I suppose that makes it a success.
This confidently examines some of the most familiar
topics in American cinema: racism and WWII.
This kind of team up just isn't as fun when I'm
still being introduced to so many characters and when it turns out that
Superman could've done it all by himself.
I was uncomfortable from start to finish. That was
the point. That doesn't mean I had to like it.
They over-cast and under-wrote this dark comedy.
I get it, Warner Brothers and Legendary. You want to
make a giant monster extended universe. By my Free Fire logic -- this movie has
Brie Larson and is set in the 70s -- I really should like this movie a lot more.
I've already seen Alien and every permutation of
that "twist" ending. I don't care how well the movie was cast. I need
more.
A lot of what I've liked about this series is that
everyone involved seems surprised and humbled by the unpredictable success of
the franchise. This is the first time that it felt like Vin Diesel and company
were phoning it in.
I sure like Anna Kendrick. Otherwise, this listless
not-quite-RomCom would be a lot lower.
It's a competently-made textbook Sundance dramedy.
It's hard to get excited about that.
I love the effort of the musical numbers. It's a
shame those were surrounded by so much flimsy story.
Maybe I'm just mad that I didn't know how it ended going in.
Regardless, has any movie not directed by Peter Berg looked more like a Peter
Berg movie?
It's a shame that a movie that required so much preparation by the actors beforehand didn't have a meatier story to justify the effort.
The joke is all in the pitch. I'm surprised the
movie is doing as well as it is. I guess this is further proof that Dwayne
Johnson is a legitimate star.
I saw Prometheus. I know that something about this
movie is different, but I can't prove it. I'm not sure how many times they can
recycle this same story structure.
I certainly like the idea of this -- a female-driven
horror anthology -- more than the final product. One or two of the shorts were
fine.
Either I'm remembering the first movie more fondly
than it deserves or this took a big dip in quality. I like the world this
series is creates. Bringing back Colin Firth is about the laziest move they
could've made.
This relies on an oddball sense of humor that I
don't have. Otherwise, it's fine.
It's not as heavy with the cannibalism as I
expected. It made up for it with a lot of other ugly imagery.
You see, Marvel. This is what Scarlett Johansson
gets stuck with since you won't give Black Widow her own movie. Johansson has
somehow become one of the best badasses around, and that's being wasted on
mediocre efforts like Ghost in the Shell and Lucy.
Oprah is as good and Rose Byrne is underutilized.
So much effort went into building this not-quite-MadMax world that they forgot to include an engaging story.
I don't know how many more ways I can say that
making Captain Jack the outright lead of these movies misses what made Curse of
the Black Pearl an exceptional movie. Oh well. They aren't making these movies
for U.S. audiences at this point anyways.
They might as well have made a movie about a girl
who gets pregnant the first time she has sex then dies in labor.
The hope was that Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler's
inherent ability to be funny could carry the movie. Don't get me wrong. It had
some laughs. They just weren't good enough laughs to justify the otherwise thin
story.
Mostly, it gets this ranking because I don't need
another zombie story in my life.
It didn't deliver the goods. I didn't sign on for
teen drama. Luckily, now that all that's taken care of, future installments can
focus on the more important things like seeing people in costumes fight
monsters.
I can only rate a feature-length episode of Dateline
so highly. The investigation is actually incredibly interesting and disturbing.
It's all presented like a new report though.
I'll admit that Yorgos Lanthimos knows what he's
doing. I just don't like what he's doing at all.
I didn't find this very funny. With a broad comedy,
there's not much else to fall back on if I'm not laughing.
Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron still need to be paired
with comedians. No amount of effort can make up for that [yet].
I appreciate that this Bernie Madoff movie attempts
to play Devils Advocate, but it loses track of the point it's trying to make by
the end.
I spent far too much of the movie trying to poke
holes in it to enjoy it. No amount of James McAvoy acting the shit out of it
can get around that.
I can't be the only one distracted by how clearly
Britt Roberson is a lot older than Asa Butterfield, who already looks young for
his age. Like, I can kind of ignore it when it's people in their 30s and 40s.
It's a lot harder when they are supposed to be teenagers.
Honestly, the only reason this overly busy bore of a
movie isn't lower is because I like the cast so much.
This isn't even a bad movie. I was just checked out
within minutes and could not get pulled back in.
A killer premise that's undone by too much filler.
The more I think about this movie, the more I'm
annoyed by the unearned emotions it got out of me. A dying dog is a cheap trick
and they use it to spice up and otherwise dull movie. I have issues with that.
Bottom 10
*For the record, most of that was just me taking out my real-time
irritation with myself for not realizing how long it would take to say
something about every one of these movie.
After Porn Ends 2
I watched it, so I had to include it on the list.
I'm more indifferent about it than anything. It's just some interviews and some
generic editing. It's a lazy documentary and little else.
Goldie Hawn hasn't worked in a decade and a half and
it shows. That doesn't leave Amy Schumer much to play off, and she's not good
enough to overcome that. Everything else snowballs badly from there.
This is sort of an inverse-Goldie Locks problem. It
either didn't go far enough or went too far. The middle-ground it settled on
didn't work. The result is a generic Sundance movie with a touch of nihilism.
It's clear why the Coen Brothers opted not to direct
this. George Clooney simply can't do what the Coens do (because no one can).
The script felt incomplete (in the same way most latter-day Woody Allen scripts do), which left nowhere for the performances or direction to go.
Wow. The fact that this is only 6th to last is a testament to how bad the movies below it are. I thoroughly disliked the
experience of watching this movie. It was like pushing two magnets together. You know, the hard way.
Here's an idea. Come up with a good movie then
start building an extended universe around it. This was an awful movie that
then spent a large chunk of middle on a detour to introduce potential
spin-offs. Did no one learn anything from The Amazing Spider-Man 2?
I think my biggest pet peeve is social satire that
thinks it's making a new point. 99 times out of 100, whatever point you are
making is something that's been said for decades only with a slightly different
application. What bothers me even more than that is when the point isn't even
being made properly. That's The Circle in a nutshell. Additionally, shame on
them for finding a way to make a movie with Tom Hanks, Emma Stone, and John
Boyega that I hate this much.
I mentioned earlier how Hell or High Water (and by
extension, Wind River) was a movie that's great without me being able to point
out exactly how. The inverse is true about The Snowman. There's nothing in the
description of it that properly explains what doesn't work. It's an over-complicated, overly-contrived
bore of a story that somehow isn't able to take advantage or anything that
makes Michael Fassbender one of the best actors in the world.
I've attempted to be a long time Transformers (and
Michael Bay) defender. I still stand by the first movie as great popcorn fun
and the third as a solid action movie. The Last Knight is just abysmal though.
When I see a movie in theaters, as soon as the trailers begin, I turn my phone
off. I rarely turn it on before the end of the movie. I don't like the
distraction for myself or anyone else in the theater. The sign of a really bad
movie is that I'll turn my phone on to see how much time is left. I did that
for Downsizing around the two hour mark. I did the same for The Snowman maybe
90 minutes in. I did it for The Last Knight in the first 30 minutes. I think
I'm done attempting to defend Michael Bay.
At least I didn't pay any money to see it and I
didn't watch it sober. I don't think a movie needs millions and millions of
dollars to be good. I do think certain visions need a good budget though. This
Sci-Fi Horror anthology needed a lot more money than it had. I appreciate the ambition, but this looked so damn cheap. That then amplified how not clever the
stories were (often 10 minute versions of other Sci-Fi movies).
I can't speak positively about any part of this movie. I'd probably tear into
it even more, but I blocked too much of it out.
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