The Listing Begins

On Friday, John Waters, as tradition demands, officially launched this year’s list-making season with his 2017 top ten for Artforum. He’s included work by filmmakers as varied as Bertrand Bonello, Woody Allen, and Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein, and coming in at #1 is Baby Driver: “The best movie of the year is a popcorn thriller, an art film, and a gearhead classic that grossed over $100 million. It deserved to! Watching the star turn of Ansel Elgort was like seeing John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever for the first time.”

As Zack Sharf notes at IndieWire, Baby Driver director Edgar Wright’s quite the list-maker himself. “This year alone, the filmmaker released a list of his 100 favorite horror films and provided an update to his list of his forty favorite films ever. The end of the year is naturally a time Wright loves most, and he’s published his official list of the fifty top songs of 2017, with an accompanying Spotify playlist where fans can stream every entry.”

Cléo, the journal of film and feminism, presents a list of “films from the year that stayed with us, and made these most dire of times more bearable. Plus, we’ve written haikus for each, because we thought you hadn’t seen enough shit as it is.”

At Letterboxd, Michael Sicinski’s put together a simple list of “Top Commercial Releases of 2017.” Topping the ten is Hong Sangsoo’s On the Beach at Night Alone.

Glenn Kenny’s tweeted his list of “10 Best US-Released Films, 2017.” #1: Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper.

At IndieWire, Eric Kohn’s list runs to seventeen titles. His #1 is “the year’s most exciting wakeup call,” Jordan Peele’s Get Out.Anne Thompson goes for twelve films. #1: “With his English-language masterwork The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro builds, brick by brick, an immersive fantasy world inspired by the ’60s melodramas of Douglas Sirk and the horror classic The Creature from the Black Lagoon that could only come from his prodigious imagination.”

And then there are other sorts of lists, such as Tracy Letts’s top ten Criterion releases with insightful and often quite funny notes on each selection.

Variety’s named its “10 Directors to Watch for 2018”:

  • Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (Gangsta)
  • Augustine Frizzell (Never Goin’ Back)
  • Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird)
  • Joseph Kahn (Bodied)
  • Xavier Legrand (Custody)
  • Carlos López Estrada (Blindspotting)
  • Anthony Maras (The Palace)
  • Samuel Maoz (Foxtrot)
  • Claire McCarthy (Ophelia)
  • Chloé Zhao (The Rider)

Pamela Hutchinson’s opened the Silent London Poll: “Remember also that I want to hear about home video releases and books as well as screenings and festivals. And modern silents, too—the world didn’t end in 1927.”

The New York Times has selected its ten best books of 2017 and the Los Angeles Times lists its picks for best fiction and nonfiction.

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