Individual contributions

Sight & Sound editors’ votes and comments

Nick James

Editor

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Elle Paul Verhoeven

Fire at Sea Gianfranco Rosi

Embrace of the Serpent Ciro Guerra

Paterson Jim Jarmusch

A rotten year, but not for cinema. That films as imaginative as that spare portrait of an awkward young black girl, The Fits, or Barry Jenkins’s moody depiction of a black gay outsider, Moonlight, or Natalie Portman’s searing portrayal of JFK’s first lady, Jackie, don’t make my five indicates how strong it was. Also of note was Manchester by the Sea, a blue-collar high tragedy with wrenching performances that weigh the balance so carefully between the push and pull of guilt and responsibility that the film is emotionally exhausting.

Fire at Sea found a fresh way of viewing the immigrants risking their lives in lethal boats on the Mediterranean. Paterson was just the most soulful, quiet local neighbourhood pleasure at Cannes and Toni Erdmann the most outlandishly unforeseen comedy of manners. Elle is a watershed film, the most involving psychological thriller in years, and Embrace of the Serpent felt like a rethinking of so much adventure cinema from the last half century. Cinema did the seductive part of its function well, taking us out of ourselves, and how we needed that.

Kieron Corless

Deputy Editor

A great year for cinema, and I still haven’t seen Albert Serra’s new film. In no particular order:

Cemetery of Splendour Apichatpong Weerasethakul

A trip into the Thai subconscious and a disfigured, decaying body politic, couched in an atmosphere of tranquil unrest. It comes off like some mesmerising, serenely disruptive sci-fi.

Mimosas Oliver Laxe

The breakout film from the Galician scene is a shamanistic ride into the Moroccan mountains and desert, and more than fulfils the promise of You Are All Captains. It’s beautiful, strange, unclassifiable; Laxe will surely be one of the great directors of the next few decades.

Son of Joseph (Le Fils de Joseph) Eugène Green

A meditation on fatherhood and family filtered through the Bible and Baroque civilisation, with satirical detours into up-its-own Parisian literary culture. Another brilliant one-off from the sublime Eugène Green.

Elle Paul Verhoeven

Isabelle Huppert’s is the performance of the year, and possibly a career best. Improbably, Paul Verhoeven just gets better and better, here channelling the spirit of Fritz Lang into a contemporary allegory on unredeemable male monsters and their overcoming.

Staying Vertical (Rester Vertical) Alain Guiraudie

Wilder and freer than the more classical Stranger by the Lake, the film literally reinvents itself from scene to scene, and yet somehow feels all of a piece. Brilliantly, blackly comic.

Special mention to Slack Bay: a brilliantly achieved creation of a unique universe, melding different types of comedy – black, grotesque, farce, burlesque, comic-book, expressionist – in service of a savage social satire.

James Bell

Features Editor

Paterson Jim Jarmusch

Embrace of the Serpent Ciro Guerra

Elle Paul Verhoeven

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Love & Friendship Whit Stillman

Nick Bradshaw

Web Editor

Cameraperson Kirsten Johnston

Tempestad Tatiana Huezo

Kings of Nowhere Betzabé García

Depth Two Ognjen Glavonic

Dawson City: Frozen Time Bill Morrison



Top films from Europe Toni Erdmann 48 votes

Elle 33 votes

American Honey 20 votes

I, Daniel Blake 17 votes

Things to Come (L’Avenir) 15 votes

The Death of Louis XIV 13 votes

Personal Shopper 12 votes

Sieranevada 12 votes

Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) 11 votes

Julieta 11 votes

Nocturama 11 votes

Love & Friendship 9 votes

Victoria 8 votes

Evolution 7 votes

The Ornithologist 6 votes

Raw 6 votes

Baden Baden 5 votes

The Dreamed Path 5 votes

The Neon Demon 5 votes

A Quiet Passion 5 votes

HyperNormalisation 4 votes

No Home Movie 4 votes

Son of Saul 4 votes ↑ Back to contents

Isabel Stevens

Production Editor

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Baden Baden Rachel Lang

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

Elle Paul Verhoeven

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

International critics and curators’ votes and comments

Jason Anderson

Critic (Cinema-scope) and programmer (TIFF), Canada

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

The Witch Robert Eggers

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki Juho Kuosmanen

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Geoff Andrew

Programmer-at-large (BFI Southbank), UK

Sieranevada Cristi Puiu

Paterson Jim Jarmusch

A Quiet Passion Terence Davies

Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) Gianfranco Rosi

Things to Come Mia Hansen-Løve

I found it unusually difficult to choose just five top films, not because 2016 was an especially strong year (it wasn’t!) but because, excepting a few genuinely innovative standout works, it had given us a large number of strong but not quite top-grade films. Finally, after my first three choices (which absolutely had to be in), I reluctantly left out 20 or 30 movies which are probably, in their own way, as strong as my fourth and fifth choices.

Fire at Sea could have been replaced by I, Daniel Blake, The Unknown Girl, Toni Erdmann, Hissein Habré: A Chadian Tragedy or various other films dealing powerfully with the politics of our troubled world. Things to Come could have been replaced by Elle (Huppert is surely the greatest actress of our age).

And I felt especially bad about not being able to include fine new works by Radu Jude, Whit Stillman, Bertrand Tavernier, Asli Ozge and José Luis Guerín, not to mention a second film – Gimme Danger – by Jim Jarmusch. Since an allocation of ten wouldn’t have been enough, five was excruciatingly insufficient.

The highlight of my year was probably the London Film Festival’s Archive Gala screening of Arthur Robison’s The Informer – a meticulous BFI restoration of one of the best British films made at the end of the silent era, with a truly superb live performance of an unusually audacious, subtle, detailed and evocative new score for sextet by virtuoso violist and composer Garth Knox. Both cinematically and musically, it was a marvellous evening.

Sadly, however, the year’s most memorable event was the shocking, perhaps wholly avoidable death of Abbas Kiarostami, for me and many others the greatest artist working in film over the last few decades. What a terrible loss to cinema.

Corrina Antrobus

Programmer (Bechdel Test Fest), UK

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Mustang Deniz Gamze Ergüven

American Honey Andrea Arnold

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

The Handmaiden Park Chan-wook

It’s been a bleak year. Political tensions have ruptured the faith of liberals and strengthened toxic extremist views. Never before has the tonic of cinema been so necessary. This list of elongated movies (many nudging the three-hour notch) has a silky thread of exquisite indulgence; interesting to notice that many of my choices are road movies featuring an reckless escape plan. With their far-flung narratives and acute, complex character portraits they provide respite from the social unrest.

Aside from haute escapism, they offer solace to those weary of the straight white male norm. Certain Women in particular deeply understands the labour and expectations of women, and Moonlight softly confronts the pressures on black gay men. All are a feathered lash at the patriarchy, daring us to hope and reminding us to look to art in times of turmoil.

Michael Atkinson

Critic, USA

Cemetery of Splendour Apichatpong Weerasethakul

The Lobster Yorgos Lanthimos

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Evolution Lucile Hadzihalilovic

The Academy of Muses José Luis Guerín

As always, the early delivery of this list leaves many candidates unscreened; that, plus filing it the morning after the US entered its initial stages as a fascist nation does not cast a happy glow on the proceedings. Insofar as the context of my choices matter, here are my runners-up, in order: Fireworks Wednesday, Cameraperson, Moonlight, The Witch, High-Rise, Dheepan, Aferim! and Mountains May Depart.

Miriam Bale

Critic, USA

Elle Paul Verhoeven

Personal Shopper Olivier Assayas

The Love Witch Anna Biller

Lemonade Beyoncé Knowles Carter & Kahlil Joseph with Jonas Åkerlund, Melina Matsoukas, Dikayl Rimmasch, Mark Romanek, Tod Tourso

The Dreamed Path Angela Schanelec

Erika Balsom

Senior lecturer in Film Studies, King’s College London, UK

The Death of Louis XIV Albert Serra

The Illinois Parables Deborah Stratman

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Elle Paul Verhoeven

General Report II: The New Abduction of Europe Pere Portabella

As always, I feel like I missed so much this year – but at the same time I saw many films I loved. Beyond my top five features, favourite shorts include Laida Lertxundi’s Vivir para Vivir, Guillermo Moncayo’s The Event Horizon, Corin Sworn and Charlotte Prodger’s HDHB, Kathryn Elkin’s Why La Bamba and Kevin Jerome Everson’s Ears, Nose and Throat.

My top moving-image exhibitions include Philippe Parreno at HangarBicocca, The Inoperative Community at Raven Row, Jean-Paul Kelly at Delfina Foundation, Amar Kanwar at Frac des Pays de la Loire and Clemens von Wedemeyer at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein.

My historical discovery of the year is Jean Matthee’s superlative Neon Queen (1985). Other repertory favourites include the Pere Portabella retrospective at Rotterdam, the restoration of Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983), the pairing of Song of Ceylon (1934) with Harun Farocki’s 1975 made-for-TV essay Über Song of Ceylon von Basil Wright at the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, the AV Festival’s programme Tracing the Anabasis of the Japanese Red Army and Malcolm Le Grice’s performance of Horror Film (1971) at the BFI.

The live performance of Marcos Bertoni’s Cocô Preto (2003) – part of Federico Windhausen’s excellent El Pueblo theme programme at Oberhausen – is maybe the most fun I’ve ever had in a cinema.

Nikki Baughan

Critic, UK

The Girl with All the Gifts Colm McCarthy

Arrival Denis Villeneuve

Under the Shadow Babak Anvari

The Keeping Room Daniel Barber

American Honey Andrea Arnold

It has been a pleasingly strong year for female-led narratives. It’s no coincidence that my favourite films of 2016 have all featured strong, multi-faceted female protagonists with fascinating stories to tell across multiple genres, from science fiction to horror and drama. Whether these women hold the fate of humanity in their hands or are fighting for individual survival, are coolly competent or deeply flawed, they have all been treated with respect, intelligence and empathy by the filmmakers who created them, and the performers who brought them to life. And that makes for some of the year’s most original, powerful and inspiring cinema.

Anne Billson

Critic, Belgium

The Blackcoat’s Daughter (aka February) Oz Perkins

Hail, Caesar! Ethan Coen & Joel Coen

Hell or High Water David Mackenzie

Love & Friendship Whit Stillman

Our Little Sister Koreeda Hirokazu

Among the films that might have made my cut had we been allowed ten picks: De Palma, The Invitation, Julieta, The Shallows and Train to Busan. I also loved Julia Ducournau’s Raw and Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper, but left them out because they haven’t yet gone on wide release.

It was a lousy year for blockbusters, most of which I have already forgotten, but a great one for low(er) budget genre: I enjoyed the hell out of the likes of 10 Cloverfield Lane, The Conjuring 2, Ouija: Origin of Evil, The Purge: Election Year, Lights Out and Don’t Breathe.

Among the other highlights of my cinema-going year was a season of Ozu films at Flagey Cinematek in Brussels: calm, humane and exquisitely crafted – just the thing to offset the horrors of 2016 and remind one of the better, more civilised world that does still exist, even if it’s only on the screen. If anyone needs me, I’ll be drinking Kirin in the Luna Bar.

Daniel Bird

Writer, filmmaker and programmer, UK

Elle Paul Verhoeven

Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present Tyler Hubby

Embrace of the Serpent Ciro Guerra

Psychonauts, the Forgotten Children Rivero Pedro, Vãzquez Alberto

Personal Shopper Olivier Assayas

Anton Bitel

Critic, UK

Remainder Omer Fast

Embers Claire Carré

Aloys Tobias Nölle

A Dark Song Liam Gavin

The Ghoul Gareth Tunley

If the five films selected here as my favourites for this year have a common theme, it is the obsessive yet vain effort to take back something irrecoverable (faded memories, a misspent life, the dead) – and three of them (Remainder, Aloys, The Ghoul) focus on alienated white adult males lost to a deluded sense of fantasy and nostalgia. In other words, these are all titles well-suited – however coincidentally – to the year that has brought us Brexit and Trump. After all, the air is currently buzzing with the backward-looking ideology that prefers to reconstruct an ill-remembered, idealised past than to face the realities of the present – and patriarchy, feeling vulnerable to progress, has proven all too eager to claw back its former ‘glory’ days. At least Embers holds out the hope for maintaining humanity during an (amnesi-)apocalypse, while A Dark Song locates, in its protagonist’s most despairing and vindictive drives, her better feelings.

Ela Bittencourt

Film critic and curator, Brazil, Poland and USA

All the Cities of the North Dane Komljen

A great surprise in Locarno: indefinable. Tony Pipolo, writing for Artforum, likened it to the work of Aleksandr Sokurov, yet there is a welcome coolness in Komljen’s gaze, in his avid interest in materials and forms, which recalls some of the recent video art, particularly video focused on architecture.

In this sense, Komljen’s work brings him closer to Alia Farid – a Kuwaiti visual artist whose video, a commentary on brutalist architecture of the 1950s and 60s, I saw at this year’s Bienal in São Paulo – than to most narrative filmmakers. (Thematically, Komljen’s earlier short, All Still Orbit, directed with James Lattimer, shared some affinity with the video work of Brazilian artist Ana Vaz, particularly her short 16mm film, A Idade da Pedra; both studied at Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains, France.) Yet Komljen’s gift for storytelling, while unconventional, also shows his appreciation of literature.

Dawson City: Frozen Time Bill Morrison

For its passionate excavation of archival footage and hypnotic delivery.

Aquarius Kleber Mendonça Filho

For its social portent and the breadth of its characters, an intricate, laser-like vision of where Brazil is today, in its latest, neoconservative reincarnation.

La Noche Edgardo Castro

For its restless and exuberant sex-driven energy, which seemed to scare off some young viewers at FicValdivia yet held some of us in a perpetual trance.

Bleak Street Arturo Ripstein

Roger Koza describes Bleak Street better than I can: “Arturo Ripstein’s films are an anomaly in our current film culture. Who could be interested in characters whose fate is never on their side? …Ripstein, whose dark worlds shun humour, always dispenses a certain amount of kindness to his characters. He respects and likes them, and as he films them, he is with them till their very last breath.”

Read our Hail, Caesar! review Top films from North America Moonlight 34 votes

Certain Women 25 votes

American Honey 20 votes

Manchester by the Sea 16 votes

Paterson 14 votes

Cameraperson 10 votes

La La Land 10 votes

Everybody Wants Some!! 7 votes

Hell or High Water 7 votes

O.J.: Made in America 7 votes

Lemonade 6 votes

Nocturnal Animals 6 votes

Dawson City: Frozen Time 5 votes

Hail, Caesar! 5 votes

The Illinois Parables 5 votes

Knight of Cups 5 votes

The Love Witch 5 votes

The Neon Demon 5 votes

Anomalisa 4 votes

Doctor Strange 4 votes

The Fits 4 votes

The Witch 4 votes ↑ Back to contents

Chris Boeckmann

Programmer (True/False Film Fest), USA

Being 17 André Téchiné

Lemonade Beyoncé Knowles Carter & Kahlil Joseph with Jonas Åkerlund, Melina Matsoukas, Dikayl Rimmasch, Mark Romanek, Tod Tourso

Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) Gianfranco Rosi

Nocturama Bertrand Bonello

Starless Dreams Mehrdad Oskouei

Lucy Bolton

Senior lecturer in Film Studies, UK

The Shallows Jaume Collet-Serra

Losing Ground Kathleen Collins

Queen of Katwe Mira Nair

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

Ingrid Bergman In Her Own Words Stig Bjorkman

The highlights of this year for me were being introduced to the uniquely magnificent Losing Ground as part of the ‘Woman with a Movie Camera’ season at the BFI (now available on DVD); seeing Ingrid Bergman’s home movies and learning so much more about this strong, talented woman; and the first top-notch shark movie for many a year.

Peter Bradshaw

Critic (the Guardian), UK

Nocturnal Animals Tom Ford

The Childhood of a Leader Brady Corbet

I, Daniel Blake Ken Loach

Divines Houda Benyamina

American Honey Andrea Arnold

Catherine Bray

Critic/producer, UK

Elle Paul Verhoeven

Raw Julia Ducournau

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Tenemos la carne Emiliano Rocha Minter

The Greasy Strangler Jim Hosking

It’s been a strong year for the outré. All of my five choices here at least flirt with grotesquery (in the case of The Greasy Strangler, it’s the film’s main mode of expression) and contain provocations ranging from the playful (Toni Erdmann and Elle) to the jaw-dropping (Tenemos la Carne and Elle), to the visceral (Raw and Elle). My personal taste leans in the direction of horror and comedy, so it’s been incredibly stimulating to see elements of those genres take such fully realised and adventurous flight in these five films, which go beyond the rote tropes that can inhibit the potential for creative storytelling.

Nicole Brenez

Professor/curator, France

Blanche Marc Hurtado

Bangkok Joyride Ing K

Welcome to Madagascar Franssou Prenant

I Will Pay for Your Story Lech Kowalski

Hinterlands Scott Barley

Sophie Brown

Programmer/film journalist, UK

No Home Movie Chantal Akerman

For its raw power. Traces of Chantal Akerman’s earlier films surface – News From Home, Les Rendez-vous d’Anna and Jeanne Dielman – as intimate moments unfold with her mother in this bold and vulnerable piece of work.

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

For its beautiful 16mm cinematography and Kelly Reichardt’s storytelling force. Among the narratives of loneliness, ambition and frustration, Reichardt articulates a familiar experience: the suspicion, bafflement or plain disregard met by women who don’t conform to typical notions of femininity, as held by certain men.

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

For its rich layers and hypnotic sensuousness. Based on a deeply personal play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Barry Jenkins’ film is a brilliant exploration of the relationships that have a profound impact on protagonist Chiron’s destiny.

Raw Julia Ducournau

For the riotous way it examines the dynamics of sisterhood and pressures of female identity, with violent helpings of humour and horror. Trouble Every Day meets Ginger Snaps, this is an energetic tale of cannibalistic desire.

Heart of a Dog Laurie Anderson

Because Laurie Anderson’s voice transforms words. This intimate journey through Anderson’s poetic, empathetic consciousness is both a critical reflection on modern existence, and an ode to her loves.

Other excellent films of the year: Mustang by Deniz Gamze Ergüven; Fire at Sea by Gianfranco Rosi; Behemoth by Zhao Liang.

Michelle Carey

Artistic director, Melbourne International Film Festival, Australia

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Lemonade Beyoncé Knowles Carter & Kahlil Joseph with Jonas Åkerlund, Melina Matsoukas, Dikayl Rimmasch, Mark Romanek, Tod Tourso

Nocturama Bertrand Bonello

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Paterson Jim Jarmusch

Tom Charity

Programmer, VIFF Vancity Theatre; freelance writer, Canada

Cameraperson Kirsten Johnson

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Staying Vertical (Rester Vertical) Alain Guiraudie

The Ornithologist João Pedro Rodrigues

Hell or High Water David Mackenzie

I grew up on and still love classical Hollywood cinema, hence the inclusion of Hell or High Water, a totemic conflation of western and crime movie tropes that also managed to be more on the pulse than most of the pundits and politicians in this catastrophic US election year.

But I now appreciate movies that mess with your expectations. I know people have trouble with The Ornithologist and Staying Vertical, but for me these were the two most exciting – because unpredictable – films I saw this year. Both were were genuine cinematic adventures that threw out the rule book and seemed almost to have been carved out of nothing, nothing but the camera, the landscape, the people in the middle and the possibilities that arise. (And I have to mention that transition in Staying Vertical, the ellipsis of nine months, which really deserves to be taught in film school.)

Toni Erdmann is another film that takes genre and drags it, kicking and screaming, somewhere else. Its ‘flaws’, or rather, foibles, are what gives it some kick. Seeing that in a packed 1,600-seat house at the Vancouver International Film Festival was a highlight of the year, no question.

And finally Cameraperson… Kirsten Johnson discovers a profound, personal and political nonfiction cinema in discarded and unwanted images, odds and ends, widows and orphans. If I had to shoot one movie into space to sum up this crazy, chaotic, hurting world in 2016 it would be this one.

Ian Christie

Professor of film and media history at Birkbeck College, UK

I, Daniel Blake Ken Loach

Julieta Pedro Almodóvar

The Assassin Hsiao-Hsien Hou

Doctor Strange Scott Derrickson

The Revenant Alejandro González Iñárritu

Far away from what gets released in UK cinemas, there’s a growing sector of films that are only ever seen online, often described as ‘video essays’. I’ve been particularly impressed by the series of witty and very personal essays on subjects ranging from the actress Debra Paget to Sergei Eisenstein by one-time New York independent Mark Rappaport, now based in Paris and more productive than ever. Also by the video essays of Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López, and by Catherine Grant’s own work in this genre and her continuing advocacy of it as a new field of creative criticism.





Read our Doctor Strange review

Michel Ciment

Editor, Positif, France

Graduation (Baccalauréat) Cristian Mungiu

Manchester by the Sea Kenneth Lonergan

The Revenant Alejandro González Iñárritu

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

A Woman’s Life Stéphane Brizé

Ashley Clark

Critic/programmer, UK/US

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

An Ecstatic Experience Ja’Tovia Gary

The Airport John Akomfrah

Everybody Wants Some!! Richard Linklater

Peggy and Fred in Hell Leslie Thornton

Amid an endlessly jarring year – from the deaths of Bowie and Prince to the surreal, life-changing happenings of Brexit and Trumptopia – I’ve been cheered by encouraging developments in black aesthetic and storytelling modes, from the weird and truly brilliant TV show Atlanta to Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight. Not to mention a long-overdue resurgence for the superb, criminally overlooked filmmakers of the LA Rebellion: restorations of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (a clear, acknowledged influence on Beyoncé’s visual extravaganzas), Haile Gerima’s searing Ashes and Embers, and Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger, a woozy fable with a vicious kick.

Roger Clarke

Writer and critic, UK

The Witch Robert Eggers

Evolution Lucile Hadzihalilovic

Life After Life Zhang Hanyi

The Neon Demon Nicolas Winding Refn

The Wailing Hong-jin Na

Honourable mentions to Childhood of a Leader, The Bacchus Lady, The Death of Louis XIV and The Untamed.

Read Voices of the undead: Robert Eggers on The Witch

Anna Coatman

Writer and editor, UK

I, Daniel Blake Ken Loach

Lemonade Beyoncé Knowles Carter & Kahlil Joseph with Jonas Åkerlund, Melina Matsoukas, Dikayl Rimmasch, Mark Romanek, Tod Tourso

The Hard Stop George Amponsah

Vertigo Sea John Akomfrah

American Honey Andrea Arnold

Robbie Collin

Chief film critic, the Telegraph, UK

American Honey Andrea Arnold

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Your Name Makoto Shinkai

The Bad Batch Ana Lily Amirpour

Lemonade Beyoncé Knowles Carter & Kahlil Joseph with Jonas Åkerlund, Melina Matsoukas, Dikayl Rimmasch, Mark Romanek, Tod Tourso

This was a good year for films, but a bad one for reviewing them – at least for beat critics like me, who spent seven months of it wading through the longest and stupidest summer season in recent memory. (Thank God for Spielberg and Disney.)

It’s hard to be too mad, though, because on any reasonable list of 2016’s calamities, you’d have to read a while before reaching Suicide Squad and Independence Day: Resurgence. I’m grateful to the five films above – plus many others, not least of all Toni Erdmann, Julieta, The Neon Demon, Paterson and Arrival – for temporarily removing me from yet somehow also helping to make sense of the past 12 months in ways the news media and my own head have been seemingly incapable of doing. Whether cinema’s dying or not, we – I – need it more than ever.

Oh: and Grimsby was tremendous, you philistines.

Philip Concannon

Freelance film critic, UK

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

Dawson City: Frozen Time Bill Morrison

Elle Paul Verhoeven

Our Little Sister (Umimachi Diary) Hirokazu Koreeda

Sieranevada Cristi Puiu

“If a single movie were enough to silence reports of the death of cinema, it would be this one,” claims one of the review quotes in the US trailer for Toni Erdmann, but it was hardly the only film capable of refuting that ridiculous claim this year. Mainstream American filmmaking might be in dire straits, but the range and diversity of work beyond the multiplex was incredibly exciting to discover. Aside from the films I’ve selected, consider Aquarius, Divines, The Fits, Further Beyond, Moonlight, A Quiet Passion, Staying Vertical, Things to Come and Voyage of Time, to name just a few. These films are very much alive.

Mark Cousins

Filmmaker/critic, UK

Cemetery of Splendour Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Room Lenny Abrahamson

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

Deadpool Tim Miller

Mustang Deniz Gamze Ergüven

It was a great year for films about escape. Room, These Women, Mustang and Cemetery of Splendour are all beautiful elopements. The patron saint of imprisonment in cinema, Robert Bresson, would hopefully have loved them. Deadpool made me laugh more than any film this year. It was as insolent and saucy as Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep.

Making films in 2016 helped quench my ongoing thirst for cinema. I was so busy working that I missed Arabian Nights, Son of Saul and Fire at Sea, but I’ll see them some Tuesday afternoon in 2019.

As usual, older films were Obi-Wan Kenobi guides again this year. The reissue of Godard’s Le Mépris taught us how to do a daring soundtrack. I saw, again, Agnès Varda’s Vagabond, which is like I, Daniel Blake directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Surely it’s one of the best films ever made? And I rewatched Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, beautifully restored and audible like never before. It’s like seeing a new Tintoretto painting, and as dynamic and irrepressible as, well, Deadpool.

And how’s this for a magic moment: I watched Chimes at Midnight in Welles’s daughter’s house, then she made me leftovers frittata. As Justice Shallow says in the first line of the film, “Jesus, the days that we have seen.”

Also, a quick word about Sight & Sound: it has introduced me to lots of films again this year, so thanks.

Noah Cowan

Executive director, San Francisco Film Society, USA

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Elle Paul Verhoeven

Manchester by the Sea Kenneth Lonergan

The Fits Anna Rose Holmer

Things to Come (L’Avenir) Mia Hansen-Løve

David Cox

Programmer (Film4 Channel), UK

A Quiet Passion Terence Davies

The Conjuring 2 James Wan

Heal the Living Katell Quillevere

Things to Come (L’Avenir) Mia Hansen-Løve

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Read our first-look review of A Quiet Passion Top British films American Honey 20 votes

I, Daniel Blake 17 votes

Love & Friendship 9 votes

A Quiet Passion 5 votes

HyperNormalisation 4 votes

Further Beyond 3 votes

The Girl with All the Gifts 3 votes

The Levelling 3 votes

Notes on Blindness 3 votes ↑ Back to contents

Jordan Cronk

Critic and programmer, USA

The Death of Louis XIV Albert Serra

Nocturama Bertrand Bonello

The Ornithologist João Pedro Rodrigues

Sieranevada Cristi Puiu

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

These five films came immediately to mind, and while I admire a great many others, nothing seriously threatened to disrupt this initial quintet. Nonetheless, herewith, some honorable mentions: Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt); The Dreamed Path (Angela Schanelec); Elle (Paul Verhoeven); The Human Surge (Eduardo Williams); Kékszakállú (Gastón Solnicki); Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, 2015); A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (Lav Diaz); Paterson (Jim Jarmusch); A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies); Scarred Hearts (Radu Jude); Sixty Six (Lewis Klahr, 2015); Staying Vertical (Alain Guiraudie); Where the Chocolate Mountains (Pat O’Neill, 2015).

Nick Davis

Associate professor, English, gender, and film, Northwestern University, USA

Things to Come (L’Avenir) Mia Hansen-Løve

Aquarius Kleber Mendonça Filho

Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) Gianfranco Rosi

Raising Bertie Margaret Byrne

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how were the movies? Raising Bertie, the lowest-visibility title on this list, is an expertly made and politically urgent documentary about three black male teens trying to flourish in rural North Carolina, one of many economically devastated regions of my quickly spiralling country. Think Hoop Dreams without the hoops, or the city blocks. It pairs interestingly with Moonlight, or with Fire at Sea, or with my sixth choice, Craig Atkinson’s Do Not Resist, a stunning chronicle of police militarisation in the USA.

Other titles that came close, even with much left to view this year, included Tomcat (Händl Klaus), Starless Dreams (Mehrdad Oskouei), 24 Weeks (Anne Zohra Berrached), Elle (Paul Verhoeven), The Salesman (Asghar Farhadi) and Neruda (Pablo Larraín).

Maria Delgado

Professor of Theatre & Screen Arts, Queen Mary University of London, UK

Neruda Pablo Larraín

Julieta Pedro Almodóvar

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Jackie Pablo Larraín

The Fury of a Patient Man (Tarde para la ira) Raúl Arévalo

What a year it’s been for Pablo Larraín. In less than 12 months he has produced two extraordinary films that reinvent the biopic in ambitiously different ways.

Neruda is an epic symphonic work, a jazz-like riff on the Chilean icon and Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda’s two years on the run in the late 1940s. This is a Nerudian film more than a film about Neruda, with the poet pursued obsessively by his nemesis, the wonderfully named detective Oscar Peluchonneau – a career-defining performance by Gael García Bernal. Neruda is baroque and brash, a carnivalesque contemplation of the forging of the Neruda brand – the romantic poet with a political conscience – realised with a rhythm as dazzling and inventive as Neruda’s imagination.

Jackie opts for a different tone, returning to the more intimate character of last year’s sinewy The Club. Like Neruda, this is an anti-biopic, a consideration of how myth and memory intersect in the aftermath of testing historical circumstances – here Jackie Kennedy’s coping with the aftermath of her husband’s assassination. Larraín’s camera stays close to the First Lady, offering the viewer a portrait into her state of mind that is often gruelling to watch. Like Neruda, Jackie is a bold, poetic contemplation of identity formation, and it points to Larrain as the most exciting political filmmaker of his generation.

Almodóvar too inspired me with his haunting Julieta – a contemplation of mortality and guilt as harrowing as any Greek tragedy. Actor Raúl Arévalo made of the year’s best debuts with his 70s style urban western The Fury of a Patient Man and Toni Erdmann was strange and beguiling – a gloriously meandering tale of father-daughter miscommunication, embarrassment and exasperation realised across the broader canvas of corporate culture.

Stephane Delorme

Chief editor, Cahiers du cinéma, France

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Elle Paul Verhoeven

The Neon Demon Nicolas Winding Refn

Julieta Pedro Almodóvar

Les Bois dont les rêves sont faits Claire Simon

Read our The Neon Demon review

Jemma Desai

LFF strand advisor / British Council film programme manager, UK

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

All This Panic Jenny Gage & Tom Betterton

American Honey Andrea Arnold

Raw Julia Ducournau

Under the Shadow Babak Anvari

Helen Dewitt

Head of cinemas, BFI Southbank, UK

Napoleon Abel Gance with a little help from Kevin Brownlow and Carl Davis

American Honey Andrea Arnold

I, Daniel Blake Ken Loach

Embrace of the Serpent Ciro Guerra

Son of Saul László Nemes

A tragic year in world affairs has seen the release and re-release of some important and impressive films that speak to our times. Napoleon, one of the greatest films ever made, about the will to power and world domination; Son of Saul, about the greatest evil a people can do to another; Embrace of the Serpent, the disappearing world and with it unique nature, visions and knowledge; I, Daniel Blake, a picture of the heartless nation that the UK has become and the lamentable stories of some of those who fall victim to it. Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, though, is about survival and self-actualisation, as well as joy in small kindnesses and delight in the natural world. Some much-needed hope for Christmas.

Mar Diestro-Dopido

Film critic/researcher Sight & Sound, UK

Julieta Pedro Almodóvar

The Club Pablo Larraín

Victoria Sebastian Schipper

The Witch Robert Eggers

Elle Paul Verhoeven

Three really special mentions: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour, Eugène Green’s The Son of Joseph and Oliver Laxe’s Mimosas.

My most cinematic moment of the year has to be a restoration of the 1922 version of Nosferatu accompanied by its original score played by the regional Symphonic Orchestra of the city I was born in, during the local film festival of Seminci. Haunting.

Rachel Dwyer

Professor of Indian cultures and cinema, SOAS, University of London, UK

Aligarh Hansal Mehta

Masaan Neeraj Ghaywan

Kapoor and Sons Shakun Batra

Pyaasa Guru Dutt

Fan Maneesh Sharma

I wrote a column on the songs of Pyaasa as it’s the Hindi film I keep rewatching. It remains an extraordinary film.

This year I haven’t seen as many, or enjoyed as many, Hindi movies as usual, and haven’t seen one to top last year’s favourite, Bajrangi Bhaijaan. There are still some major releases lined up so I remain hopeful.

Masaan and Aligarh are not mainstream ‘Bollywood’ films, while Fan and Kapoor and Sons were in some ways more interesting than successful. The former tries to explore ideas of stardom, in particular that of Shah Rukh Khan, while the latter had some good moments, but was more notable for presenting Pakistani star Fawad Khan as a gay character.

Geoff Dyer

Writer, USA

American Honey Andrea Arnold

O.J.: Made in America Ezra Edelman

The Handmaiden Park Chan-wook

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

HyperNormalisation Adam Curtis

Gareth Evans

Film curator, Whitechapel Gallery, London; film producer; writer; curator; presenter, UK

Further Beyond Joe Lawlor, Christine Molloy

As always I have missed many titles clearly deemed worthy of attention. Of those chosen, Further Beyond is simply one of the best films I have seen in an age. Not only a masterclass in filmmaking, it is a brilliantly structured, witty, affecting and often profound work about the importance of stories in constructing our sense of belonging in the world. Given the year’s events, this could not be more pressing a concern. We just need the right stories.

The Pearl Button Patricio Guzman

Guzman’s importance goes without saying. And I like that the Chilean connection continues from my first choice. Once he has completed this trilogy with his investigation of the mountains, their histories and memories, it will clearly be one of the most important series works of this century.

Innocence of Memories Grant Gee

I have a vested interest in Grant Gee’s onward progress but his latest collaboration with Orhan Pamuk reveals ever more beguilingly how he has created his own space – that of cinematic ‘inhabitation’ of the literary. Few films are more seductively layered and labyrinthine.

Victoria Sebastian Schipper

Victoria is literally an incredible achievement. How they pulled it off remains a delirious mystery.

To the Wolf Christina Koutsospyrou, Aran Hughes

I am a late viewer of To the Wolf but this duo (to remind us of the collaborative creativity behind all these titles) astound with this, their first film of any kind. Its premiere at Berlin says it all. They’re motivated by empathy, by the need for a common humanity, not by any sense of career or professional progression. Austerity as biting poetry. The right stories again. Watch them closely. They are joining the ranks of those who are working the edges and limits with insight and troubling beauty for evidence of all our possible futures.

Michael Ewins

Freelance critic, UK

Reluctantly Queer Akosua Adoma Owusu

Heaven Knows What Ben Safdie & Joshua Safdie

No Home Movie Chantal Akerman

Ears, Nose and Throat Kevin Jerome Everson

Nocturama Bertrand Bonello

Reflecting on these selections, I realise that they’re all deeply interior films about the compartmentalisation of emotions and selves. In Reluctantly Queer, a young Ghanian man is torn between his sexual and racial identity, and the different forms of acceptance or rejection he faces in native and adopted homes; Heaven Knows What sees ex-heroin addict Arielle Holmes playing a fictionalised version of herself in a hypnotically textured portrait of homeless junkies in New York; for No Home Movie, the late Chantal Akerman filmed her mother at home during her dying days, and the pair discussed topics of diaspora, heritage, and the impermanence of memory; in Ears, Nose and Throat, Shadeena Brooks testifies to the devastating event she witnessed on 9 March 2010, when a young black man was murdered outside her home in Ohio; finally, Nocturama follows a band of young terrorists who commit atrocities across Paris before holing up in a shopping mall after dark.

Each film uses its metaphorical weight to leverage an emotion that reverberates far beyond its duration, and folds back into the reality from which they sprung. Somehow, from tales of spiritual and physical confinement, these filmmakers located a freedom of expression and a means to refine their cinematic language. I couldn’t list five films better than these even if you asked me to. These are the five films which have defined my year in cinema, and expanded my feeling for it as a still young, restless and reaching medium.

The Ferroni Brigade

Writers/programmers/teachers, Austria/Germany

Elle Paul Verhoeven

My Beloved Bodyguard Sammo Hung

The Purge: Election Year James DeMonaco

Seishun 100-Kilo Hirano Katsuyuki

The Mobfathers Herman Yau

Lizzie Francke

Senior production and development executive, BFI Film Fund, UK

Aquarius Kleber Mendonça Filho

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Raw Julia Ducournau

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Elle Paul Verhoeven

While I could have listed international films which I paid to see in cinemas with audiences this year – Embrace of the Serpent, The Invitation and Hunt for the Wilderpeople were particular favourites – recent events have put me in a projecting forward frame of mind as I think about the point of film in these dark times. The selection here is of films I have seen on the festival circuit which hopefully a wider audience will be able to see in the next few months. (I’m abstaining from British films here because of my job.) All but the Verhoeven are by filmmakers at early stages of their careers, but all can be connected by an extraordinary subjectivity that invites you to step into the shoes of the protagonists and walk or run – or, in the case of Elle, follow a complex, wrong-footing dance.

Jean-Michel Frodon

Critic (Slate.fr)/professor (Sciences Po Paris, St Andrews), France

Elle Paul Verhoeven

Paterson Jim Jarmusch

Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) Gianfranco Rosi

Sieranevada Cristi Puiu

Personal Shopper Olivier Assayas

2016 has been a pretty difficult year for cinema. Of course, this list of titles, if not limited to five, should also accept at least Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come, Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama, Benoit Jacquot’s Never Ever, the Dardennes’ The Unknown Girl, Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV, Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation, Brillante Mendoza’s Ma’ Rosa, Jeff Nichols’s Midnight Special, Kaufman and Johnson’s Anomalisa and Sharunas Bartas’s Peace to Us in Our Dreams.

But, having been darkened by the cruel losses of Abbas Kiarostami and Michael Cimino, this year is also marked by significant weakness. Very little from the English-speaking world and from Latin America, hardly more from Asia (but with Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hong Sangsoo, the previous year was flamboyant).

And also there has often been the feeling that many of the best films are now more and more mariginalised – for instance in Venice where you had to dig in sidebars to find gems like Road to Mandalay by Midi Z, Drum by Keywan Karimi or One More Time With Feeling, Andrew Dominik’s wonderful documentary about Nick Cave. Not to mention one of my favourites, Olmo and the Seagull by Petra Costa and Lea Glob, which went totally unnoticed. Which means what happens is less a loss of creativity than an issue of unequal access to visibility. In this respect, it seems that the internet and social media are as much a problem as a solution.

Graham Fuller

Critic, US/UK

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

Nocturnal Animals Tom Ford

Julieta Pedro Almodóvar

Elle Paul Verhoeven

The Unknown Girl (La Fille inconnue) Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

It came to my attention more forcibly than ever in 2016 that the quality of the mise en scènes in big-budget Hollywood filmmaking has declined so precipitously over the last 20 years that the majority of epics, adventure films and movies set in exotic or alternative worlds look so artificial, thanks to CGI and concomitant disingenuous storytelling, that they signal within seconds if they will permit the suspension of disbelief. Many don’t. That was less true of, say, the 1930s and 1940s when audience credulity was more easily won. Every year a receptive critic should be able to find a few commercial films as persuasive and enriching as more personal work, but it has become nearly impossible to do so. Against that, Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk took an exciting step forward because, by using its speed-sharpened images to render precisely the PTSD-afflicted protagonist’s disorientation, it put technology in the service of emotions.

Charles Gant

Film editor, Heat magazine, UK

Manchester by the Sea Kenneth Lonergan

La La Land Damien Chazelle

Nocturnal Animals Tom Ford

Victoria Sebastian Schipper

Little Men Ira Sachs

I’m a little embarrassed that my top three choices happen to coincide so neatly with films tipped and positioned for awards consideration, but there it is. In any other year, I’d be rooting for Manchester by the Sea or La La Land or Nocturnal Animals to take the top prize, so I guess I should just be thankful for an embarrassment of riches this Oscar season. As for Victoria, the single-shot wonder took me on a journey that made me believe in a narrative conceit of potential enormous implausibility, and I was happy for that giddy ride. Little Men I found very wise and even-handed about the complications of modern life, and also – more importantly – a total delight.

Ryan Gilbey

Critic, New Statesman, UK

Further Beyond Joe Lawlor & Christine Molloy

The Little MenLobster Ira Sachs

Ghostbusters Paul Feig

Love & Friendship Whit Stillman

Embrace of the Serpent Ciro Guerra

Jane Giles

Head of BFI Content, UK

American Honey Andrea Arnold

Embrace of the Serpent Ciro Guerra

Evolution Lucile Hadzihalilovic

Julieta Pedro Almodóvar

The Witch Robert Eggers

I’ve followed my usual criteria of choosing only films released during the calendar year, and what struck me again was how many films are on release to what feels like no great gain. Do we really need so many subject-driven documentaries on cinema screens occupying much-needed slots for holdovers, word-of-mouth slow burns or great rep programming, and taking up review space?

I don’t think that 2016 was a great year for film – or anything else, for that matter – but here are the ones I most enjoyed, A-Z. I’m happy that my list includes two female directors, an old favourite back on form, a (mostly) B&W subtitled film and a healthy dose of horror.

My two favourite film events of the year both happened in the first week of November: John Carpenter playing his scores live at the Troxy and Carl Davis conducting the BFI’s digital restoration of Napoleon live at the Royal Festival Hall.

Suzy Gillett

Curator, UK

The Revolution Won’t Be Televised Rama Thiaw

Baden Baden Rachel Lang

The Incident Jane Linfoot

The Fits Anna Rose Holmer

Tezen Shirley Bruno

These were the films I saw in 2016 that made my heart beat faster (in a good way) than any of the others I saw. These films made me come away from the cinema with my head buzzing, offering the cinefile’s favourite sensation of having seen a film that gives you food for thought for days afterwards. Craft and hard graft. Yep. Ambitious texturing and layering. Yep. Editing ellipsis to create story. Yep. Gripping to the last frame. Totally.

Oh yeah they were also all made by women, first feature or first mid length film. But first they are great films.

So here they are the top films for me in 2016. Easy.

Leo Goldsmith

Film Editor, the Brooklyn Rail, USA

The Human Surge Eduardo Williams

The Illinois Parables Deborah Stratman

Oleg and the Rare Arts Andres Duque

The Dreamed Path Angela Schanelac

INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place./it flies. falls./] Adam & Zack Khalil



Top films from Latin America Aquarius 8 votes

Embrace of the Serpent 7 votes

Neruda 6 votes

The Human Surge 4 votes ↑ Back to contents

Catherine Grant

University of Sussex academic, audiovisual essayist and curator, UK

The Illinois Parables Deborah Stratman

Correspondências Rita Azevedo Gomez

327 Cuadernos Andrés Di Tella

Le Moulin Huang Ya-li

Boat People Sarah Wood

My preferred films from 2016 are all great essay films (of one kind or another). These days I’m not remotely systematic when it comes to contemporary film viewing generally. But I do keep a relatively close cinephile eye on new essay film production, perhaps especially as someone interested in the essayistic forms of audiovisual expression increasingly being produced in and around academia. I particularly loved The Illinois Parables, a brilliantly made work by experimental documentarian Deborah Stratman, who is also Associate Professor in the School of Art & Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It’s one of the most evocative, engaging and politically substantial history films I have seen.

Robert Greene

Filmmaker, USA

Cameraperson Kirsten Johnson

Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) Gianfranco Rosi

HyperNormalisation Adam Curtis

Under the Sun Vitaly Mansky

Starless Dreams Mehrdad Oskouei

Robert Hanks

Reviewer, UK

The Measure of a Man Stéphane Brizé

American Honey Andrea Arnold

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Love & Friendship Whit Stillman

Doctor Strange Scott Derrickson

Part of the point of going to the cinema for me is, generally, to put politics and the world aside; but the three films of this year that made the biggest impression just made me think about politics more. The Measure of a Man and American Honey were both pictures of people struggling to find meaning and take some control over their own destiny in a world where jobs have become meaningless and degrading. The European milieu and Vincent Lindon’s brilliant portrait of middle-aged manhood discarded and scrabbling for dignity made The Measure of a Man more affecting (ie, terrifying) for me; but the retreat into sensuality of the youngsters in American Honey and the sheer strangeness of Arnold’s America haunt me. Toni Erdmann was a more intimate and hopeful film, and very funny, but glancingly withering about the aridity of life in a globalised corporate world.

Love & Friendship was a beautifully turned romp, which might have looked more impressive if an accident of timing didn’t have me comparing it to the newly restored Barry Lyndon – easily the best thing Kubrick ever made, and perhaps the best evocation of a distant past yet put on film. And Scott Derrickson’s Doctor Strange overcame a dull script with smart casting and a visual flair to match Steve Ditko’s original psychedelic drawings.

My cinematic highlight wasn’t a new thing at all, though, but a screening in January of the gorgeously restored Penda’s Fen, Alan Clarke and David Rudkin’s 1974 TV play which evokes Englishness as something hybrid, generous, mystical: it turned out to be a useful antidote to the blunter and far less appealing versions of Englishness that came to dominate the news later in the year.

Simran Hans

Freelance writer, UK

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Nocturama Bertrand Bonello

American Honey Andrea Arnold

Manchester by the Sea Kenneth Lonergan

Personal Shopper Olivier Assayas

For better or worse, all of the films I have chosen really go for broke. They are heroic in their ambition, sprawling, sometimes messy, and unmistakably alive. (The same could be said other films I liked, including Elle, The Handmaiden and Chi-Raq). I remember feeling spellbound by Personal Shopper’s atonal weirdness, bruised by the brunt of Manchester by the Sea’s sheer emotional force, energised by American Honey’s living, breathing ecstatic romanticism, viscerally chilled by Nocturama’s sleek complicity (the only film I’ve seen twice this year). These are the films that have lodged themselves in both my brain and heart.

Most special though is Moonlight, whose every beautiful frame pulsates with longing and raw desire. I felt swathed by its tenderness, and thankful for its soft and truthful images of black masculinity, an antidote in this violent and volatile world.

Also: I feel lucky to enjoy the bounty of regular repertory cinema goings-on here in London. This year’s revival house highlights include first watches of the following, in a big screen setting (and often from their original 35mm or VHS formats): Gummo; Celine and Julie Go Boating; Losing Ground; Heartburn; Videodrome; Something Wild; Fat Girl.

Brandon Harris

Writer (the New Yorker, N+1, the New Republic, the New Inquiry), USA

HyperNormalisation Adam Curtis

Free in Deed Jake Mahaffy

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Barry Vikram Gandhi

Paterson Jim Jarmusch

Molly Haskell

Author/critic, USA

20th Century Women Mike Mills

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

A Quiet Passion Terence Davies

Hell or High Water David Mackenzie

Things to Come Mia Hansen-Løve

I’ve restricted my five to 2016, and there are a lot I haven’t yet seen. Revelations from the past were two silent films by Frank Borzage: Back Pay and The Pride of Palomar (both 1922). They make you understand once again why those who’d known only silent cinema resisted the coming of sound.

Tim Hayes

Freelance writer and critic, UK

Little Sister Zach Clark

The Invitation Karyn Kusama

Flag Without a Country Bahman Ghobadi

Queen of Earth Alex Ross Perry

The Neon Demon Nicolas Winding Refn

Three of these used VOD as their route to a UK audience, either with a momentary theatrical release or doing without that gesture. Should this alter how critics process them? Perhaps. The position and impact of art is criticism’s business, but the opaqueness of streaming revenues and viewing figures leaves the matter of these films’ success vague in economic and cultural terms alike. Faced with terra incognita, critics’ exploratory outlook matters. Saying that a film is in cinemas, when we really mean it’s in two cinemas for a single day, is either a safety-blanket privileging of the cinema experience or a flat parroting of the marketing message; but either way, pointing people towards places where the art isn’t looks a lot like voluntary redundancy. All grist for a rebalancing of our cultural journalism remit, perhaps via conceding that ceaseless personal curation isn’t the same thing.

Sandra Hebron

Head of Screen Arts, National Film and Television School, UK

Aquarius Kleber Mendonça Filho

The Death of Louis XIV Albert Serra

I, Daniel Blake Ken Loach

Paterson Jim Jarmusch

Things to Come (L’Avenir) Mia Hansen-Løve

I’ve listed titles alphabetically, rather than rank them. My selection is very much a ‘so far’ list, as I have lots of highly regarded films still to see, but that’s not to diminish how highly I value the ones I’ve chosen.

Alongside these, I’d like to mention two events, each involving a work that wasn’t exactly new, but new to me in so far as I’ve never managed to see either of them presented before. First, Malcolm Le Grice’s Horror Film screened as part of a season of his work at BFI Southbank, a thrill to see this, and moving too, given the passage and impact of time since it was first made – impossible not to reflect on this.

Secondly, the digital presentation of Kevin Brownlow’s most recent restoration of Napoleon at the Royal Festival Hall, where the anticipation and excitement in the room was palpable, and where my (knee-jerk, groundless) resistance was systematically dismantled by this absurdly ambitious, tricksy, funny, experimental wonder.

J. Hoberman

Critic, USA

O.J.: Made in America Ezra Edelman

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Kaili Blues Bi Gan

The Death of Louis XIV Albert Serra

Neruda Pablo Larraín

Joanna Hogg

Filmmaker/curator, UK

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

Personal Shopper Olivier Assayas

La La Land Damien Chazelle

But Elsewhere Is Always Better Vivian Ostrovsky

Alexander Horwath

Director, Austrian Film Museum, Austria

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Neruda Pablo Larraín

The Woman Who Left Lav Diaz

Elle Paul Verhoeven

The Dreamed Ones Ruth Beckermann

Strangely, the title of one film on my list seems to encapsulate all five: The Dreamed Ones. It speaks about the ways in which some great filmmakers have become acutely sensitive to a central condition of life today: a sort of pulsating unreality in which the forces of fantasy, imaginative (and often stressful) self-design and ‘self-improvement’, apocalyptic fears and a deep social unease (or social-networked unease) all condense toward the only form of reality we have at our disposal. The ‘we’ in question being mainly the Western liberal bourgeoisie, but also, to a degree, that of our unfortunate victims and brethren in less ‘enlightened’ circumstances. In this group of films, Pablo Larraín’s poet/activist Neruda and the police inspector on his trail, as well as Ruth Beckermann’s poets in love (Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan), figure as the historical, circa 1948, avatars of our own present condition.

Pamela Hutchinson

Freelance writer, UK

I, Daniel Blake Ken Loach

Cameraperson Kirsten Johnson

La La Land Damien Chazelle

American Honey Andrea Arnold

Things to Come (L’Avenir) Mia Hansen-Løve

In a tumultuous year for current affairs at home and abroad, it was bittersweet to experience moments when films from the past resonated with contemporary troubles. Jay Weissberg’s triumphant first year as director of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival began with a screening of À Propos de Nice in remembrance of the victims of the Bastille Day terror attack. The deepest poignancy was that similar tributes could have been paid to so many more places. And at the Royal Festival Hall in November, an intertitle in Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) divided and galvanised the mostly British crowd: the thunderous response to the idea that “Europe will become a single people” drowned out the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Napoleon’s digital reincarnation was undoubtedly the archive film event of the year, followed by a new box set of films by African-American cinema pioneers. As a silent film advocate, I am intrigued to hear reports that Hollywood blockbusters are cutting back on dialogue. The execs over there should look to Studio Ghibli’s The Red Turtle as an example of how to make a modern, and excellent, film without speech at all.

Eric Hynes

Associate Curator of Film, Museum of the Moving Image, USA

Cameraperson Kirsten Johnson

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Manchester by the Sea Kenneth Lonergan

Elle Paul Verhoeven

O.J.: Made in America Ezra Edelman

Pasquale Iannone

Film academic and critic UK

Julieta Pedro Almodóvar

Victoria Sebastian Schipper

Son of Saul László Nemes

A Bigger Splash Luca Guadagnino

Knight of Cups Terrence Malick

Bubbling under were: Hell or High Water (Mackenzie), Suburra (Sollima), American Honey (Arnold), The Measure of a Man (Brizé), One More Time With Feeling (Dominik), Bleak Street (Ripstein), Mavis! (Edwards).





Wendy Ide

Critic, UK

Manchester by the Sea Kenneth Lonergan

Notes on Blindness Pete Middleton, James Spinney

Your Name Makoto Shinkai

Evolution Lucile Hadzihalilovic

Neruda Pablo Larraín

Read our Your Name review

Juliet Jacques

Writer, UK

The Exquisite Corpus Peter Tscherkassky

Ascent Fiona Tan

Dawson City: Frozen Time Bill Morrison

The Ornithologist João Pedro Rodrigues

Confessions to the Mirror Sarah Pucill

None of these are straightforward feature films – the nearest is The Ornithologist, which follows a fairly linear narrative but feels like a 21st century take on Surrealism, with its visceral, oblique vision of religion and sexuality. The few features that I did see disappointed me (Julieta and particularly High-Rise) and Son of Saul was the only that I considered.

So we have a couple of highly inventive, beautiful documentaries; Sarah Pucill’s second adaptation of Claude Cahun’s writings, capturing the fragmented poetry of its source; and Tscherkassky’s Exquisite Corpus, which (like Morrison’s) is a film about film, using archive material. I don’t know if I can conclude from this that conventional narrative is, at this point, one of the least interesting approaches, or if it’s just one of the least interesting to me.

Read about Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time in Experimenta 2016: Explosions at the end of the line

David Jenkins

Editor, Little White Lies, UK

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

Happy Hour Hamaguchi Ryusuke

Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey Terrence Malick

Everybody Wants Some!! Richard Linklater

Toni Erdmann was not only my favourite film by a comfortable margin, but it also goes some way in reaffirming (sick buckets at the ready) ‘cinema’ as a ‘communal experience’. Maybe this is reflective of my own lack of valuable life experience, but the Cannes press screening where it was first unveiled felt more like a raucous Southern Baptist sermon than a conventional trip to the pictures. As much as you can have a vague sensory insight into the feelings of those in the close vicinity, the room felt alive with emotion. The studios would do well to look at this movie to understand how you cultivate a sense of awe. Discovering films like this is what makes it (the job, festivals, criticism, life) all worthwhile.

Additionally, that fifth spot is wholly interchangeable with Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta, Clint Eastwood’s Sully, Claude Barras’s My Life as a Courgette, Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV, Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge and Pablo Larrain’s Jackie.

Documentary plaudits go to Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s Further Beyond.

And the award for the movie that completely defies binary categorisations of good and bad, the one I have absolutely no idea of whether I loved or loathed, but have pretty much thought about it every day since seeing it, is Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama.

Kent Jones

Writer/filmmaker/festival director, USA

In no particular order:

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

The 13th Ava DuVernay

Silence Martin Scorsese

The Lost City of Z James Gray

Paterson Jim Jarmusch

Alan Jones

Director of Film4 FrightFest, UK

La La Land Damien Chazelle

Manchester by the Sea Kenneth Lonergan

Under the Shadow Babak Anvari

Nocturnal Animals Tom Ford

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Philip Kemp

Freelance reviewer/film historian, UK

Son of Saul Laszlo Nemes

Love & Friendship Whit Stillman

I, Daniel Blake Ken Loach

Tale of Tales Matteo Garrone

Theo and Hugo Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau

An excellent year for Blu-ray/DVD re-releases, not least for two classic trilogies: Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy from Criterion – a huge improvement over the old Artificial Eye release – and Kobayashi’s towering wartime trilogy The Human Condition from Arrow.

Glenn Kenny

Film critic, USA

The Fits Anna Rose Holmer

The Love Witch Anna Biller

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Paterson Jim Jarmusch

Robert Koehler

Film critic, USA

All the Cities of the North Dane Komljen

Kekszakallu Gaston Solnicki

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Nocturama Bertrand Bonello

The Ornithologist João Pedro Rodrigues

If I had additional slots, I would add in no particular order: Aquarius; Manchester by the Sea; Moonlight; Things to Come; Hell or High Water; and the most physically powerful and disturbing movie I saw this year whose French title – Gorge Coeur Ventre – is more to the point than its deceptively placid English one, Still Life. This one was a debut by the French filmmaker, Maud Alpi, but the most audacious debut was yet another discovery at Locarno, somewhat overlooked in the Signs of Life section and my pick for the year’s most original work: Dane Komljen’s All the Cities of the North. I can’t think of any precedent for what Komljen does here, and what he does exactly beggars description. “A desire to imagine a new order of things,” is what Komljen, the supremely gifted Yugoslav-born, Berlin-based film artist, says of his characters, but it really speaks to what this movie does. It suggests an entirely fresh path for cinema.

kogonada

Filmmaker/essayist, US

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

Little Men Ira Sachs

Paterson Jim Jarmusch

Manchester by the Sea Kenneth Lonergan

In light of the coming Trump presidency, here are five American films that suggest a growing sensibility and taste for the quiet, the reflective, the complex, the spare, the humane. More than ever these kind of films matter.

Ehsan Khoshbakht

Critic and curator, UK/Iran

Sieranevada Cristi Puiu

Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) Gianfranco Rosi

Sweet Dreams Marco Bellocchio

Nocturama Bertrand Bonello

The Brick and the Mirror Ebrahim Golestan

I have smuggled on to the list one film revived from the past: The Brick and the Mirror (1965), which is by far the most stylistically daring film I have revisited (and occasionally presented and screened) in 2016. Golestan’s bleak masterpiece, arguably the best of Iranian pre-revolutionary cinema, captures an atmosphere of political anxiety and paranoia and transforms it into a timeless image of any society governed and manipulated on the basis of fear of the other – more or less a mirror held in front of us at this troubled moment in the 21st century.

But this also reminded me of the fact that in a year that was cinematically (and otherwise) not so great, it was revivals and retrospectives which made life more pleasant. Life-changing retrospectives included the exhilarating Deutschland 1966 (Berlinale) and the glorious, all-35mm Universal Pictures: The Laemmle Junior Years (Il Cinema Ritrovato). The latter featured the most poignant piece of social realist cinema of the depression era, Laughter in Hell (Edward L. Cahn, 1933), which remains for me the unsurpassed discovery of the year.

Eric Kohn

Chief film critic/deputy editor, USA

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Jackie Pablo Larraín

Weiner Josh Kriegman & Elyse Steinberg

Everybody Wants Some!! Richard Linklater

Swiss Army Man Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

Michael Koresky

Editorial director, Film Society of Lincoln Center; editor, Reverse Shot, USA

Aquarius Kleber Mendonça Filho

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Cemetery of Splendour Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Cameraperson Kirsten Johnson

No Home Movie Chantal Akerman

Edward Lawrenson

Journalist, UK

Aquarius Kleber Mendonça Filho

Scarred Hearts Radu Jude

Ascent Fiona Tan

Further Beyond Joe Lawlor, Christine Molloy

The Dreamed Path Angela Schanelec

Read our Cemetery of Splendour review Top films from Asia Cemetery of Splendour 5 votes

Under the Shadow 5 votes

The Woman Who Left (Ang Babaeng Humayo) 5 votes

The Handmaiden 4 votes

Your Name 4 votes

Kaili Blues 3 votes

Our Little Sister (Umimachi Diary) 3 votes ↑ Back to contents

Kevin B. Lee

Critic and video essayist, USA

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

Elle Paul Verhoeven

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Kaili Blues Bi Gan

O.J.: Made in America Ezra Edelman

What are movies good for? I ask myself this question more and more frequently, never more so than today, 9 November 2016. The world feels like it is becoming more unspooled, reactionary and irrational. Many of the movies I’ve seen this year amount to inadequate escapist gestures or simplified distillations of a reality far more darkly compelling than what I typically see on screen. I chose these five films because they did the most to encompass this darkness and irrationality. In doing so, they serve as the clarifying lens I seek more than ever in cinema.

Danny Leigh

Writer/journalist/broadcaster, UK

American Honey Andrea Arnold

Creed Ryan Coogler

Embrace of the Serpent Ciro Guerra

Evolution Lucile Hadzihalilovic

Nocturama Bertrand Bonello

I decided to draw a thick line in permanent marker excluding some extraordinary films I’ve seen this year but which are coming out theatrically in Britain next year, and would otherwise have made this list: The Fits, Elle, Personal Shopper, Moonlight. (I had premonitions of most of next year’s poll being exactly the same as most of this one, which troubled me.)

Dennis Lim

Director of programming (Film Society of Lincoln Center), USA

Nocturama Bertrand Bonello

The Human Surge Eduardo Williams

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

The Death of Louis XIV Albert Serra

Elle Paul Verhoeven

Plus five shorts:

Sarah Winchester, Opéra Fantôme (Bertrand Bonello)

Cilaos (Camilo Restrepo)

Foyer (Ismaïl Bahri)

Indefinite Pitch (James N. Kienitz Wilkins)

A Brief History of Princess X (Gabriel Abrantes)

Dana Linssen

Editor in chief, de Filmkrant/critic NRC Handelsblad, The Netherlands

Shadow World Johan Grimonprez

My Life as a Courgette Claude Barras

Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) Gianfranco Rosi

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Sausage Party Greg Tiernan & Conrad Vernon

Once again a year in which some of the most exciting cinematic things and some other reveries of the mediated world happened outside the black boxes that were once known as cinemas:

Fever Room: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s cine-theatre performance that turned the spectator into a screen and saw Plato’s shadows laughing in the distance (at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels) Subtle Beast: episode two of HBO’s The Night Of, directed by Steven Zaillian, with Igor Martinovic as director of photography, offering neverending explorations in a shallow depth of field HyperNormalisation directed by Adam Curtis (on BBC iPlayer) Into the Inferno (on Netflix): if the world didn’t exist Werner Herzog would have to invent it Atomic: Mark Cousins and Mogwai (at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam) – it did get loud! Master of Light: the Robby Müller Exhibition at EYE in Amsterdam, in which the exhibition space became one big installation piece, and it worked Pokémon GO!

Guy Lodge

Film critic, Variety and the Observer, UK

American Honey Andrea Arnold

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

Heal the Living Katell Quillévéré

Things to Come (L’Avenir) Mia Hansen-Løve

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

I didn’t start my list with the specific intention of including only female filmmakers. Happily, it simply took shape that way. But to retrospectively apply motivation to a coincidence, it feels only appropriate to celebrate the collective artistry of a demographic still inexplicably marginalised in the industry – and, as we face the reality of the Trump era, in any number of other arenas too.

Arnold’s film perhaps most expressly gives vibrant voice to the socially disenfranchised, yet in magnifying and caressing the everyday plight of a middle-aged woman most storytellers would relegate to the sidelines, Hansen-Løve’s exquisite starting-over study – my favourite film of 2016, though I’m not inclined to rank any further – feels just as pointed and gracefully subversive.

I’d also like to note just how many films that so nearly made my cut – from Pablo Larraín’s elegantly shattered political biopic Jackie to Paul Verhoeven’s fearlessly ill-mannered Elle to Disney’s conceptually dizzying Zootopia – were, regardless of their director’s gender, built on and around strong female characters: strong not in the generically impervious sense, but conflicted and complicated in their strengths and weaknesses alike. At every one of 2016’s major competitive festivals, it seemed the Best Actress conversation was longer and richer than the Best Actor one. And over in the multiplexes, few are advocating for Sharon Maguire’s Bridget Jones’s Baby to be on many lists like this one, but it has elbowed past the superhero spectaculars to stand as the UK’s highest grosser of the year. Across the cinematic spectrum, then, stories by, about and for women can no longer be regarded as a specialised genre.

Tim Lucas

Editor, Video Watchdog, USA

Bone Tomahawk S. Craig Zahler

The first edge-of-my-seat western I’d seen since the 1970s – literate, harrowing, masterfully melding puckish humour and scalding horror; a film, like Deliverance, that one leaves feeling like a survivor.

The BFG Steven Spielberg

Spielberg’s The BFG may be the funniest, spookiest, most exquisitely crafted children’s film since The Wizard of Oz. Even its farting scenes are witty.

Florence Foster Jenkins Stephen Frears

The most profound surprise of the year, for me – another Meryl Streep parade float, perhaps, but a moving testimony to the ideas that art is both privilege and spiritual duty, and that beauty really is subjective. But the prize in the package is a heartbreaking, career-best performance by Hugh Grant.

Cosmos Andrzej Zulawski

Zulawski’s swansong is a uniquely manic adaptation of Witold Gombrowicz’s novel, which I feel was a piss-take of Robbe-Grillet and other practitioners of the nouveau roman. Zulawski flips the book’s literary sport to poke fun at the obsessive fervor of his own work. The confidential quality of the end credits moved me to tears.

Doctor Strange Scott Derrickson

Doctor Strange proves that Steve Ditko is the genius behind Marvel’s most humanistic properties. Unlike other Marvel Universe origin stories, this has the feel of a bildungsroman, in which the battles are either incidental or rungs in a ladder to the hero’s development. A roundly satisfying, entertaining fantasy without a gun in sight.

But any round-up of the year’s best must mention the Black Mirror episode San Junipero, directed by Owen Harris from a script by Charlie Brooker: beautifully, densely layered, moving storytelling, and a masterpiece of its medium.

Violet Lucca

Digital Editor, Film Comment, USA

The Prison in 12 Landscapes Brett Story

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Love & Friendship Whit Stillman

The Fits Anna Rose Holmer

Factory Complex Im Heung-soon

2016 has been roundly terrible. Even Vine, one of the greatest sources of creative expression for young (black) talent, didn’t survive.

Nevertheless, there have been two new shows by Jon Glaser: Neon Joe, Werewolf Hunter and Jon Glaser Loves Gear. Both contain his pitch-perfect fusion of egomaniacal male energy and alt comedy. (In JGLG, like Delocated, we ask: was this man a nice guy who turned into something awful by virtue of being the star of a reality show, or was he just suppressing these impulses his entire life up until this point?) To quote Beckett: I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

In the meantime, I’m nominating this girl for Best Actress:

Charlie Lyne

Filmmaker/critic, UK

Rather than highlighting the year’s most complete cinematic achievements, I’ve chosen to pinpoint those which – regardless of their overall merits – connected with me most vividly at one point or another:

Cameraperson Kirsten Johnson

My favourite film of the year contained many such moments, not least its lightning-in-a-bottle opening title sequence, in which the entirety of human existence seemed effortlessly distilled into a single sneeze.

Christine Antonio Campos

Two sights in Christine epitomised that film’s examination of the precarious ties that bind us to this world: the anguish on Rebecca Hall’s face mid-argument, and the loneliness of Maria Dizzia’s final singalong in the face of death.

Fraud Dean Fleischer-Camp

No film this year was more formally enlivening than Fraud. Once its central characters began to set fire to their own house, I had absolutely no idea what I was watching.

Parents Christian Tafdrup

Much of Parents left me cold, but its anarchic take on the dehumanisation of familial relationships came brilliantly to life during a handful of scenes set (tellingly) in stairwells.

Elle Paul Verhoeven

Finally, the moment Laurent Lafitte pulled Isabelle Huppert from a totalled car in Elle, Paul Verhoeven declared himself ready to answer the questions laid out in his most unfairly maligned film, the enduringly provocative Hollow Man.

Geoffrey Macnab

Critic, UK

American Honey Andrea Arnold

Nocturnal Animals Tom Ford

Julieta Pedro Almodóvar

Hail, Caesar! Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

Ethel and Ernest Roger Mainwood

Derek Malcolm

Critic, UK

The Woman Who Left Lav Diaz

Graduation Cristian Mungiu

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Nocturnal Animals Tom Ford

Paterson Jim Jarmusch

The more I think about it the more I admire the surprise winner of the Golden Lion at Venice. The Woman Who Left is a film that lives in the memory as a moral, political and cultural statement as well as a fine piece of filmmaking.

Graduation is yet another extraordinary parable from Romania, Toni Erdmann, though over-praised and overlong, is still one of Germany’s most original films of recent years, Nocturnal Animals is a stylistically excellent moral tale from Tom Ford and Paterson shows that Jim Jarmusch, in lighter mood, has a refreshing charm and a dog to die for among the leading members of the cast.

Not a great year but it will do…

Andrew Male

Senior associate editor, UK

Hell or High Water David Mackenzie

A Bigger Splash Luca Guadagnino

The Nice Guys Shane Black

Anomalisa Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson

Bone Tomahawk S. Craig Zahler

Given that I’m out of the industry loop, these are all films I want to see with my Cineworld Unlimited card at the local multiplex. Otherwise, I’m sure there would be more subtitles, and long passages of meaningful silence in my list. Apologies.

Ian Mantgani

Filmmaker, writer, UK

Knight of Cups Terrence Malick

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

Dog Eat Dog Paul Schrader

Elle Paul Verhoeven

Lemonade Beyoncé Knowles Carter & Kahlil Joseph with Jonas Åkerlund, Melina Matsoukas, Dikayl Rimmasch, Mark Romanek, Tod Tourso

In addition to Knight of Cups, there was another great Malick (Voyage of Time), and there were more great chronicles of scattered memories, such as Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson and Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie.

Certain Women was the most absorbing drama of the year; direct in its humanity, lingering in its possible interpretations.

Dog Eat Dog and Elle were the most flagrant, entertaining films of the year. Both Elle and Things to Come proved that all you need to make a great film are Isabelle Huppert and a cat.

Does Lemonade deserve to be on this list? I’m not sure, but I can’t deny its energising rush, its lightning effect on the culture, its blur of the lines between cinema, music video and album, and how explosively it digested the influence of black cultural history.

As always, I wish I’d seen more, but of what I did see, any of these films could easily have been on my main list: Field Niggas, Dugma: The Button, Embrace of the Serpent, Moonlight, Homo Sapiens, The Love Witch, The Neon Demon, Trump: The Art of the Deal, Hail Caesar!

Giovanni Marchini Camia

Critic, Italy

The Dreamed Path Angela Schanelec

Paterson Jim Jarmusch

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Elle Paul Verhoeven

The Human Surge Eduardo Williams

Miguel Marias

Critic/teacher, Spain

The Son of Joseph Eugène Green

Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad Robert Guédiguian

The Sea of Trees Gus Van Sant

Malgré la nuit Philippe Grandrieux

Meurtrière Philippe Grandrieux

Nico Marzano

Programmer, ICA London, UK

2016 felt like a solid year, especially since my hope at the beginning of each year is to be inundated by films that are both able to inspire and to take a risk or and to challenge mainstream cinematic languages.

The Student Kirill Serebrennikov

The best film I saw in Cannes this year. Kirill Serebrennikov’s film creates theatre within cinema, while touching boldly on many of the issues of contemporary Russia.

Behemoth Zhao Liang

Another essential viewing for 2016. Beyond his striking and visceral visual accomplishments, director Zhao Liang tackles the dynamics of exploitation, triggering much-needed wider discussions about sustainability.

Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) Gianfranco Rosi

Fire at Sea went on to win the Golden Bear at the recent Berlinale and rightly so. Rosi accounts for the tales of migrants by choosing an unconventional point of view, which carries no rhetorical element while acting as a tremendous call for action.

Dark Night Tim Sutton

Dark Night (Tim Sutton) is a terrific, unconventional look into US violence.

Heartstone Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson

This outstanding Icelandic debut feature film is a coming-of- age/family drama work that excels in its narrative arch, acting and cinematography.

Also to note for 2016 is The Red Spider (Marcin Koszałka), an impressive story of a young man fascinated by the impulse of evil. Curumim (Marcos Prado) is a shocking documentary about champion paraglider and drug dealer Marco ‘Curumim’ Archer. In the Last Days of the City (Tamer El Said) beautifully captures the mood of a city, Cairo, and of its people during such a troubled historical period for Egypt.

Demetrios Matheou

Film critic, UK

Manchester by the Sea Kenneth Lonergan

Personal Shopper Olivier Assayas

La La Land Damien Chazelle

Original Bliss Sven Taddicken

Neruda Pablo Larraín

Aside from my first, an extraordinarily sensitive and well-played film about unspeakable grief, I seem to have plumped for the mysterious, enigmatic and romantic – qualities particularly enticing in a year when trans-Atlantic voting and the banality of self-interest makes reality all the more unappealing. The others: a highly contemporary ghost story cum murder mystery; a joyously nostalgic musical; an audaciously wry love story between characters overcoming abuse and sexual addiction; a Borgesian cat and mouse. In very different ways, each of these is exhilarating. Of course Larraín’s Neruda is rooted in reality, its pleasures tinged by the presage of horror. It also resonates with a bitter accident of a line: “The millionaire is always smarter than the law of the nation.”

Sophie Mayer

Writer/activist, UK

By the Time it Gets Dark Anocha Suwichakornpong

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

Cameraperson Kirsten Johnson

The Levelling Hope Dickson Leach

On Call Alice Diop

Daughters of the Dust. Born in Flames. Losing Ground. Regrouping. These (in reverse chronological order) are the feminist films from the vault screened in restored prints this year, to great excitement from audiences, and their titles tell a haunting and necessary story. A phoenix-like re-emergence, a re-collection of what was (feared) lost, a restatement of purpose: that commitment to finding untold stories, and telling them in new ways, is present in the new films I’ve chosen (and in more I could have chosen). Four classics that demand viewing and re-vewing, five new films that – seemingly quiet, compellingly careful – rigorously investigate the ethics of viewing, building rage to dynamic (sonic and dramatic) climaxes. Uprisings personal and political are connected by filmmakers who are speaking out on and off-screen. All five speak on the edge of our hearing, calling us to listen: to histories wilfully erased and voices strenuously denied. May these films not meet the fate of the recent classics recently recovered, but keep them company in continued circulation – or at least UK distribution.

Neil McGlone

Film advisor & researcher, UK

Manchester by the Sea Kenneth Lonergan

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

I, Daniel Blake Ken Loach

The Levelling Hope Dickson Leach

Tower Keith Maitland

TV highlights:

The People v OJ Simpson (FX)

HyperNormalisation (Adam Curtis, BBC)

The Night Of (HBO)

Daniela Michel

Director, Morelia International Film Festival, Mexico

Elle Paul Verhoeven

A Journey Through French Cinema Bertrand Tavernier

Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) Gianfranco Rosi

I, Daniel Blake Ken Loach

Graduation Cristian Mungiu

Henry K. Miller

Film historian, UK

Elle Paul Verhoeven

Personal Shopper Olivier Assayas

Our Stars Mark Rappaport

The Love Witch Anna Biller

Homo Sapiens Nikolaus Geyrhalter

Read about The Love Witch in ‘Not really horror’ highlights: the best of FrightFest 2016

Luke Moody

Director of film programming, Sheffield Doc/Fest, UK

Komunia Anna Zamecka

Best of Luck with the Wall Josh Begley

Tempestad Tatiana Huezo

You Have No Idea How Much I Love You Paweł Łoziński

The Human Surge Eduardo Williams

I’m quite weary of the annual headlines pronouncing a golden age of documentary, but this year was definitely an age of confidence in the nonfiction scene. Over the past five years, faith from both funders and festivals (emerging and established alike) to support and show formally inventive documentary cinema has bolstered the confidence of filmmakers to explore the way we experience realities.

This year has seen a wave of formally rigorous films, both short and long, finding audiences globally. The likes of Behemoth, Cameraperson, The Illinois Parables and The Prison in Twelve Landscapes have broken into the main programmes of festivals that only a few years ago would have overlooked or sidelined them. Theatrical distribution for these films remains difficult, but I’m hoping more adept and artisanal services emerge to take risks serving a broadened nonfiction audience both theatrically and digitally.

My selection of five films is more of a cake slice than a ‘best of 2016’. It shows the dense abundance of reality that we occupy as a narrative source, from data to diaries, and the pictorial and temporal frames through which these layered sources can be represented on screen.

Kim Morgan

Writer/programmer, USA

The Lobster Yorgos Lanthimos

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

The Handmaiden Park Chan-wook

Hail, Caesar! Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Green Room Jeremy Saulnier

Read our first-look The Handmaiden review

Kate Muir

Chief film critic, the Times, UK

Manchester by the Sea Kenneth Lonergan

Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) Gianfranco Rosi

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

American Honey Andrea Arnold

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Lisa Mullen

Freelance, UK

Kubo and the Two Strings Travis Knight

Rams Grimur Hakonarson

Victoria Sebastian Schipper

Mapplethorpe Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato

Tallulah Sian Hader

Marco Muller

Director, International Film Festival and Awards Macao S.A.R. Macao, China

Kaili Blues Bi Gan

Midnight Special Jeff Nichols

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Personal Shopper Olivier Assayas

Julieta Pedro Almodóvar

Nasreen Munni Kabir

Documentary filmmaker/author, UK

I, Daniel Blake Ken Loach

Aligarh Hansal Mehta

The Childhood of a Leader Brady Corbet

The Revenant Alejandro González Iñárritu

Elle Paul Verhoeven

I would have liked to have seen La La Land for 2016, but it won’t be released til December in India, where I currently am.

Lynda Myles

Independent producer/head of fiction directing, National Film and Television School, UK

American Honey Andrea Arnold

Hell or High Water David Mackenzie

Under the Shadow Babak Anvari

Things to Come (L’Avenir) Mia Hansen-Løve

Mimosas Oliver Laxe

In terms of television drama, the highlight was Richard Price and Steven Zaillian’s The Night Of, with brilliant writing and stunning performances by Riz Ahmed and John Turturro.

Adam Nayman

Contributing editor, Cinema Scope, Canada

Sieranevada Cristi Puiu

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Dusty Stacks of Mom Jodie Mack

The Death of Louis XIV Albert Serra

Elle Paul Verhoeven

In four of the five films I’ve chosen above, literal and figurative father figures are either decayed, dead or dying; the fifth is a hymn to maternal endurance. Themes of inheritance seem appropriate for a year in which major political outcomes in the UK and the US saw nations – and the family units that make them up – divided bitterly along generational lines.

At first glance, Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada is merely a skilful, funny variation on a familiar kind of movie: one where parents and children get together and bicker over dinner. But at its core, Sieranevda is a film analysing what it means to grow up believing in living-room myths and legends, and the discomfiting mix of terror, disappointment and guilt at realising that being an adult means propagating them at the risk of losing face.

The heroines of Toni Erdmann and Elle, meanwhile, bridle hard against their daddy issues, and choosing between Sandra Huller’s serious comic genius and Isabelle Huppert’s hilariously hard-edged brilliance is impossible (although the Cannes jury solved the problem by somehow citing neither).

The most lasting image of the year for me, though, is Jean-Pierre Léaud as Louis XIV, an icon playing an icon, sitting paralytically on death’s doorstep in neither bravery nor cowardice but rather a simple, weary understanding as the men around him seek to delay and obfuscate. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and in the end, all too stupidly human as well: a thought that gives little comfort to those thrown into despair by the election of a new, prematurely ghoulish and desiccated American Sun King. With this in mind, there was no more terrifyingly funny line in 2016 cinema than Albert Serra’s capper: “We’ll try to do better next time.”

Christina Newland

Journalist, UK

Mustang Deniz Gamze Ergüven

Mustang had to be at number one for me this year. It depicts the turmoil of a world that forces young girls to feel guilty merely for existing within their growing bodies – and the terrible psychic wounds that patriarchal communities inflict on their young. Ergüven has a visual preoccupation with the sisters at play and at rest in a tangle of limbs and hair; sisterhood as this physical extension of one another. It’s a beautifully rendered, subtle film about the confusion and heartbreak of girlhood in oppressive circumstances.

Chi-raq Spike Lee

Chi-raq is a riotously over-the-top borderline masterpiece – not the film Chicago wanted, but the one it needed. Just a chaotic, wonderfully bizarre gambit – some kind of hybrid of sex comedy, musical, and Greek tragedy, with searing contemporary relevance. Samuel L. Jackson’s narration – and John Cusack’s hair-raising pulpit monologue – have to be seen to be believed.

Creed Ryan Coogler

Propulsive, thrilling, emotionally engaging sports drama. A star is born in Michael B Jordan. A Hollywood sequel/de facto remake done perfectly, seeing Sly Stallone bow out gracefully and poignantly.

La La Land Damien Chazelle

Gushing, romantic, open-hearted fantasy the likes of which we rarely get in contemporary cinema.

Queen of Earth Alex Ross Perry

A throwback to the ‘hysterical-women-trapped-in-confined-spaces’ sub-genre – from Repulsion to Persona. Queen of Earth is pure feminine psychodrama, with a ‘big’ woman-on-the-edge performance from a stellar Elisabeth Moss.

Honourable mentions: in television, Orange is the New Black and Louis C. K.’s web-series Horace + Pete. On film, Lemonade!

Kim Newman

Writer, UK

Love & Friendship Whit Stillman

The Childhood of a Leader Brady Corbet

The Love Witch Anna Biller

Under the Shadow Babak Anvari

Evolution Lucile Hadzihalilovic

…looking at my choices, I see I was especially impressed this year by films by and about women.





Ben Nicholson

Film critic, UK

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

The Illinois Parables Deborah Stratman

Aquarius Kleber Mendonça Filho

Cameraperson Kirsten Johnson

Personal Shopper Olivier Assayas

Spectres of one kind or another seem to haunt my list this year as well as the films that were circling it until the final cut. In some instances they manifest around places: the buried state histories of Deborah Stratman’s demanding and hypnotic The Illinois Parables; the challenge to our shared remembrance of the Holocaust via our interactions with concentration camps in Sergei Loznitsa’s Austerlitz; the stark beauty and underlying terror of abandoned civilisation in Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Homo Sapiens; the tactile physical memory of a beachfront apartment block in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius; the recovered celluloid that re-animated a Gold Rush boomtown in Bill Morrison’s found footage documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time.

In other cases the phantoms are more personal: the enduring moments, constructed from re-edited outtakes, of a life behind the lens in Kirsten Johnson’s exceptional, thought-provoking Cameraperson; the uncanny cold sweat of Olivier Assayas’ 21st century ghost story-cum-millennial identity crisis, Personal Shopper; the all-but-forgotten Christine Chubbuck who was the subject of Robert Greene’s vital, knotty hybrid-doc Kate Plays Christine and Antonio Campos’ riveting fiction, Christine.

In a strong year, the standout cinematic experiences were the full 332 minutes of Kevin Brownlow’s painstaking restoration of Abel Gance’s glorious Napoleon with Carl Davis’ rousing score performed live by the Philharmonic Orchestra, and the wonderful restoration of an all-time favourite in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran. Besides the peerless Moonlight, other new releases worthy of mention include: Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, in which masculine perversions are overthrown by gender revolution; Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, the quotidian struggles of four Montana women; Maren Ade’s much-beloved shaggy-dad-tale, Toni Erdmann; Pablo Larrain’s noirish literary farce, Neruda; and, to bring it back full circle, the ghost of glamorous, romantic Hollywood musicals, Damien Chazelle’s heart-melting La La Land.

Read The Illinois Parables: Deborah Stratman on her histories of the land Top films by female directors Toni Erdmann 48 votes

Certain Women 25 votes

American Honey 20 votes

Things to Come (L’Avenir) 15 votes

Cameraperson 10 votes

Evolution 7 votes

Raw 6 votes

Baden Baden 5 votes

The Dreamed Path 5 votes

The Illinois Parables 5 votes

The Love Witch 5 votes ↑ Back to contents

Michal Oleszczyk

Critic and artistic director, Gdynia Film Festival, Poland

Sieranevada Cristi Puiu

The Last Family Jan P. Matuszynski

Bone Tomahawk S. Craig Zahler

Knight of Cups Terrence Malick

10 Cloverfield Lane Dan Trachtenberg

Ania Ostrowska

Film editor, The F-Word (www.thefword.org.uk), UK

Cameraperson Kirsten Johnson

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

Sonita Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami

Baden Baden Rachel Lang

Sworn Virgin Laura Bispuri

Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson blew my mind when I saw it at this year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest, or rather it expanded my mind to look beyond the obvious focus on the documentarian’s ethical conduct or the role of cameraperson in documentary filmmaking (Johnson’s term of choice, which she prefers to cinematographer). At the risk of uttering a total cliché, I see this film as being about the human condition (here, I said it: see it if you haven’t yet).

Another documentary on my list, Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami’s Sonita, pushes more traditional boundaries of documentary filmmaker’s intervention into her subjects’ lives, but pushes them really far. Unsurprisingly, both films were recognised in Sheffield, winning Grand Jury (Cameraperson) and Youth Jury (Sonita) awards.

Three fiction filmmakers I have chosen tell their stories of certain women in ways which are masterfully accomplished (Reichardt), quietly transgressive (Bispuri) and bittersweet hilarious (Lang).

Hoping that Sight & Sound poll will be incorporating new categories in the future, I cast my early vote on the best virtual reality experience I’ve lived through this year: Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness, an immersive VR project accompanying an excellent documentary, Notes on Blindness by Peter Middleton and James Spinney, with Jo-Jo Ellison as one of the producers.

Michael Pattison

Critic, UK

The Illinois Parables Deborah Stratman

Sarah Winchester, Ghost Opera Bertrand Bonello

Scarred Hearts Radu Jude

Answer Print Mónica Savirón

Protect Yourself Patrick Brian Smith

“IT’S NOW TIME TO TURN OFF THE GOVERNMENT”

– Graz graffito, 12 March 2016

Andrea Picard

Film curator, TIFF, Canada

Sieranevada Cristi Puiu

The Death of Louis XIV Albert Serra

The Dreamed Path Angela Schanelec

Nocturama Bertrand Bonello

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

Nina Power

Senior lecturer, UK

American Honey Andrea Arnold

John Powers

Critic, Vogue, USA

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

The Handmaiden Park Chan-wook

20th Century Women Mike Mills

O.J.: Made in America Ezra Edelman

James Quandt

Curator/critic, Canada

From the Branches Drops the Withered Blossom Paul Meyer

Sieranevada Cristi Puiu

The Death of Louis XIV Albert Serra

The Ornithologist João Pedro Rodrigues

Ma’ Rosa Brillante Mendoza

The film event of the year was the complete retrospective of the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Rachael Rakes

Programmer at large, Film Society Lincoln Center, USA

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

A Magical Substance Flows into Me Jumana Manna

Oleg and the Rare Arts Andres Duque

O Futebol Sergio Oksman

Naman Ramachandran

Critic, UK/India

The Neon Demon Nicolas Winding Refn

I, Daniel Blake Ken Loach

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Your Name Makoto Shinkai

A Billion Colour Story Padmakumar Narasimhamurthy

Despite it being an annus horribilis due to some unexpected world events, it has been an extraordinary year for cinema with a wide range of highlights. Beginning with the visually astonishing The Neon Demon; to the sheer difficulty of watching I, Daniel Blake in post-Brexit UK; to the warm and humorous character study that is Toni Erdmann; rounded off with the sheer humanism of Your Name and A Billion Colour Story, it feels like we’ve seen it all this year. The icing on the cake was of course travelling the world, beginning with Sundance, with a film that I wrote and executive produced, Brahman Naman, and getting photobombed by Werner Herzog in the process. I’d happily live this year again, minus the aforementioned world events and the deaths of some of my childhood icons.

Kiva Reardon

Founding editor, cléo journal, Canada

Moonlight Barry Jenkins

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Divines Houda Benyamina

I Am Not Your Negro Raoul Peck

Hello Destroyer Kevan Funk

I never know how to summarise a year, and especially not this one, which has felt so utterly filled with hate and sadness. All I can say is that these films – which range from moving humanist drama (Moonlight), to comedy (Toni Erdmann), to inspirational first features (Divines, Hello Destroyer), to resonant documentary (I Am Not Your Negro) – didn’t just move me, but forced me to engage with the world in a deeper way. They were not an escape from reality, but a foray into engaging with it. Ultimately, this is the best thing that art can do.

Kong Rithdee

Critic (the Bangkok Post), Thailand

Mimosas Oliver Laxe

A parable about a human quest through the landscape of God and the devil, with a Sufi prophet/Moroccan Don Quixote as guide. What’s most remarkable is how time and space are flipped in and out, as only cinema and Arab raconteurs can.

The Ornithologist João Pedro Rodrigues

A fevered reverie, beginning as a National Geographic showreel and morphing with rugged elegance into a fable of erotic transcendence. The canonisation of a saint as a sexual pilgrimage through the haunted Portuguese woods.

The Woman Who Left Lav Diaz

President Duterte or not, senseless deaths on the street or not, Lav Diaz never tries to catch a rabbit – he always goes for the dragon in its lair. The theme is big: humanity, guilt, crime, punishment, injustice, despair – the Filipino despair, or maybe the Southeast Asian despair, drenched in sweat and blood of the common man. In this film what moves us even more is the possibility of mercy, compassion, even grace, struggling to blossom like a flower in hell.

Toni Erdmann Maren Ade

Funny, touching, crazy, clever, it is also an honest, brutal study of family, sexism, and how work and the passion for professionalism affects our humanity.

Elle Paul Verhoeven

A gloriously disturbing black comedy about rape. Verhoeven and Huppert walk on a razor blade and it’s so electrifying and maddening to see them flirt with the danger of immorality and cinematic convention, and emerge unscathed.





Vadim Rizov

Managing editor, Filmmaker Magazine, USA

Everybody Wants Some!! Richard Linklater

Manchester by the Sea Kenneth Lonergan

Certain Women Kelly Reichardt

Yourself and Yours Hong Sang-soo

Things to Come (L’Avenir) Mia Hansen-Løve

This is a list of subjective absolute favorites based on the date of their world premiere. That means that there are certain films I don’t love as much that I nonetheless esteem quite highly and which need advocacy.

One is Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama, a real work of art whose uncomfortable political conclusions have made it harder to see than necessary – speaking from a provincial American perspective, it has not played NYC officially, and US distribution has yet to be acquired. This is cowardice and de facto censorship.

Another is Eduardo Williams’ truly radical and new The Human Surge, another undistributable film in the most honorable sense.

Though it premiered in 2015, Roberto Minervini’s The Other Side (which appears to have only had theatrical runs starting in 2016) is both startlingly formally accomplished and a rarely insightful film on angry, economically dispossessed white Americans at the nexus of severe drug abuse, racism and anti-government paranoia – it’s essential, explanatory viewing for the vile Trump era.

My favorite short of the year is Ismaïl Bahri’s Foyer, which brings the open-minded wonder of Kiarostami’s Where Is The Friend’s Home to an avant-garde project that, visually, is pure colours. It’s an ideal potential intro to the a-g.

Adam Roberts

Curator/filmmaker, UK

The Death of Louis XIV Albert Serra

But Elsewhere is Always Better Vivian Ostrovsky

The Airport John Akomfrah

Sieranevada Christi Puiu

Madame de… Max Ophüls

All lists are provisional, but this one includes variety at least. The Albert Serra film shown at the London Film Festival was an incredible delight, an unexpected and inventive response to constraint, and a chance for actors to show what they could do with not much at all, and what t