Lists: Offenses, Moments, and More

Before we take another look back at the best (and today, the worst) of 2017, let’s note that, for Grasshopper Film, Radu Jude (Aferim!,Scarred Hearts) has listed, in chronological order, his eleven favorite films of the past ten years. Two of them actually are 2017 films, though, one of them being J.P. Sniadecki and Joshua Bonnetta’s El mar la mar—hence, the image above.

Reverse Shot has posted its annual “11 Offenses” column in which contributors argue their cases against movies others have championed. This year we find:

• Julien Allen on Stephen Frears’s Victoria & Abdul
• Nick Davis on Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
• Michael Koresky on Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water and Bill Condon’s Beauty and the Beast
• Chloe Lizotte on James Franco’s The Disaster Artist
• Violet Lucca on Louis CK’s I Love You, Daddy
• Aliza Ma on Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman
• Adam Nayman on Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River
• Nicolas Rapold on Matthew Heineman’s City of Ghosts
• Jeff Reichert on Theo Anthony’s Rat Film
• Chris Wisniewski on Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver

In what’s become a welcome annual tradition, Cinephiliacs host Peter Labuza is looking back on the past year with Keith Uhlich. The approach this year is a bit different. In the first of a two-part conversation—and you should know ahead of time that this episode alone runs nearly two and a half hours—they each talk about their five “Moments Out of Time,” borrowing the name of feature begun by Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy in Movietone News back in 1971, revived throughout the 1990s in Film Comment, and which currently appears at Parallax View.

Speaking of which. Current contributors to Parallax View—Sean Axmaker, David Coursen, Robert C. Cumbow, Jim Emerson, John Hartl, Robert Horton, Richard T. Jameson, Moira Macdonald, Kathleen Murphy, Bruce Reid, Amie Simon, and Andrew Wright—have posted lists of their favorite films of 2017, alongside lists from filmmakers and programmers: Beth Barrett (artistic director of the Seattle International Film Festival), Megan Griffiths (director, Eden,Lucky Them,The Night Stalker), Jennifer Roth (executive producer, The Wrestler,Black Swan,Laggies,Mudbound), and Rick Stevenson (director, Magic in the Water,Expiration Date,The Millennials).

Wormwood tops Dennis Cozzalio’s list at Trailers from Hell: “In every way possible, the heightening and summation of everything Errol Morris has achieved as an investigative documentarian, this is a complex, unsettling, frightening, totally mesmerizing experience.”

The feminist film journal Another Gaze has tweeted its lists of the “Top Ten Narrative Features by Women in 2017” and top five documentaries directed by women and non-binary people.

Darcy Paquet looks back on the best of Korean cinema in 2017: “Although 2016 featured a gold mine of masterful big-budget releases (The Wailing,The Handmaiden,Train to Busan,The Age of Shadows), in 2017 we were back to a familiar pattern: independent directors, struggling to shoot their films on tiny budgets, completely outclassing the lineups of the major studios.” He’s put two films by Hong Sangsoo, On the Beach at Night Alone and The Day After, in the #1 slot “to save room for other films.”

At ScreenAnarchy, Jaime Grijalba Gomez writes about the “10 Best Chilean Films of 2017.” #1: Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento The Wandering Soap Opera, actually shot in 1990 but only finally realized this year, when it saw its world premiere at the Locarno Festival. It “still manages to be a fresh and innovative film, speaking about us and the moment we live, specially in its relation to our media consumption, TV, and political moment.”

The Houston Film Critics Society has voted up the winners of its awards, and Joe Leydon’s got the results:

Picture: Lady Bird
Director: Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
Actor: James Franco, The Disaster Artist
Actress: Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water
Supporting Actor: Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Supporting Actress: Allison Janney, I, Tonya
Screenplay: Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
Cinematography: Roger Deakins, Blade Runner 2049
Animated Film: Coco
Original Score: Alexandre Desplat, The Shape of Water
Best Original Song: “Remember Me,” Coco
Foreign Language Film: Thelma
Documentary Feature: Jane
Visual Effects: Blade Runner 2049
Poster: The Shape of Water
Texas Independent Film Award: A Ghost Story

And ICYMI, here are the Golden Globe winners and the BAFTA nominations.

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