163 Critics Decide The ‘Best Films Of 2016’

The BFI has collated the best movies of 2016, according to 163 critics they tasked with reaching their consensus. Below is the top ten list.  The synopsis for each was chosen by the BFI.

1. Toni Erdmann
Maren Ade’s winning daughter-father comedy Toni Erdmann contains some of the sharpest moments of audience blindsiding I’ve ever encountered.
Apart from being a comedy and a very human delight, Maren Ade’s film is also an intensely angry political statement about the way that capitalism disempowers, dehumanises and alienates.

2. Moonlight
A film about the complexity of black masculinity and the very human hunger for connection. It is about the fragility that lies beneath a man’s swagger. Thrilling and sensuous.

3. Elle
Trust Verhoeven to venture where most wouldn’t dare: a psychological rape-revenge fantasy thriller with jump-out-of-your-skin attack moments orchestated to a pounding score, and laced with comedy throughout. What should be problematic is here more complicated and intelligent than it first appears: rape is never a joke and Isabelle Huppert’s Michèle LeBlanc never a victim.

4. Certain Women
Kelly 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.
5. American Honey
As much spectacle as a Hollywood musical. Within a collage of soaring music, soft light and writhing bodies, this brilliant film draws the outline of a bleak economic landscape.
6. Daniel Blake
Ken Loach’s film is perhaps the most important film of the year in relation to the situation in a post-Brexit Britain. The fact that it has connected so powerfully with audiences is a tonic for the soul.
7. Manchester By The Sea
A blue collar high tragedy with wrenching performances that weigh the balance so carefully between the push and pull between guilt and responsibility that the film is emotionally exhausting.
8. Things To Come
Wry, humane and thoughtful… the film treats its destabilising cluster of crises with extraordinary restraint. It presents the hard, complex business of surviving life in a disarmingly simple way.
9. Paterson
A quietly utopian film, and a balm to watch. Its minimal narrative and attractively downbeat setting hark back to the Jim Jarmusch of the 80s and 90s.
10. The Death Of Louis The XIV
Albert Serra has made a film somewhat in the contained, stately, solemn manner of Straub-Huillet. Extremely beautiful and even moving, in a rigorously detached way.

The full list (packed with similar movies) can be found here.  Noticing a pattern, fellas?