It has been a year, hasn’t it? My word. Setting aside all the other things one could think to talk about as 2016 winds up, let’s stick with movies: it has been an excellent year for very, very good films, and not a terribly interesting year for absolute masterpieces (I don’t think I’ve ever gotten this deep into the calendar with so few new 10s – only one for an actual 2016 U.S. release, in fact). I don’t imagine the last five weekends are going to seriously change that, but we can hold out hope. If nothing else, the summer popcorn movie I’ve been most excited about all year is in the offing, regardless of the annoying fact that summer is quiet emphatically over.
2.12.2016
Gotta love that early December shitty horror release slot: “Aaron Eckhart pays Lin Shaye’s Inisidious character” is the closest I’ve been able to come to figuring out Incarnate, the weekend’s only new wide release.
If you want horror to ring in the holiday season, a much better bet will be the limited theatrical platform/VOD release of The Eyes of My Mother, which I’m just over the moon for. More to come on Friday.
As far as limited releases go, a couple of international heavy-hitters get a pair: Pablo Larraín’s biopic Jackie, and Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come, with Isabelle Huppert; and sometimes, really, the only thing you need is Huppert being Hupperty.
9.12.2016
Once again, we have but a solitary wide release, and I cannot imagine who would give any portion of a shit about it: Office Christmas Party, with a lot of reasonably talented comic performers doing the whole R-rated comedy thing for the directors who made The Switch.
In much, much, much happier news, the platform release of the Emma Stone/Ryan Gosling musical La La Land starts on this day. I can vouch that it is as good as you hope it is, especially if you love Jacques Demy. And if you do not, I cannot help you.
16.12.2016
Alright, here it is: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Notwithstanding its pile-up of a title, I am sort of blissfully free of my characteristic cynicism about this one. Ever since the first rumors kicked around that “caper movie about finding the Death Star plans” was one of Lucasfilm’s mooted Star Wars spin-offs, it’s been the film in the series, mainline or otherwise, that I’ve been most excited for. Nor have any of the trailers done anything to dent my enthusiasm, though they haven’t, in honesty, been quite up to the insta-iconic trailers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I may have spent 32 minutes on Sunday night yelling “fuck you” at Fandango until it stopped crashing and sold me a ticket.
And for some reason, you can watch Will Smith talk to the anthropomorphic personifications of Love, Time, and Death in Collateral Beauty.
In limited release, Pablo Larraín’s second biopic of the month: Neruda. I have tried and failed at two different film festivals to see this one, so I’m glad to finally make that up.
21.12.2016
Illumination is quickly becoming my bête noire, and their animals-singing-pop-songs epic Sing looks almost as appealing as having a car door slam in my face. I will not speak of it any more until I absolutely have to.
A mere five days after that other sci-fi movie, here comes Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in Passengers, a thriller about accidentally waking up from cryo-sleep on a cross-galactic voyage. And in my affection for genre fare that sounds like it was first conceived of in the 1950s, I might even be excited for it, if only Morten “Imitation Game” Tyldum. Also, the newest attempt to make something not-awful out of a video game movie is Assassin’s Creed, which has gone so far as to wrangle Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard to add a veneer of artistic respectability. It does not appear that it will be sufficient.
In limited release, the year’s unlikeliest double-feature: from the ultra-American masculinist Peter Berg comes a Boston Marathon bombing procedural with the heavy-handed title Patriot Day, while the glossy camp/melodrama master Pedro Almodóvar has a story about motherhood called Julieta. I would like you all to guess which I am more excited for.
23.12.2016
How utterly baffling that the run-up to Christmas includes a magical realist children’s fable, A Monster Calls, and it’s not getting anything bigger than a platform release (the wide release happens in January?). Instead, the solitary Friday wide release – for the third of four weekends! – is Why Him?, which has the distinct appearance of being a less-funny Meet the Parents with Bryan Cranston as the dad and James Franco as the son.
Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese’s long, long-brewing Silence finally sees the light of day, and the idea of that director working with Liam Neeson gets me excited enough to be on pins and needles even if the rest of the project seems a little stuffy. The Palme d’Or winner I, Daniel Blake may also be coming out for its qualifying run, or it may be getting nudged into 2017. My sources do not agree.
25.12.2016
Christmas Day! And, clearly conceding the family audiences to Rogue One and Sing, there’s not a solitary holiday weekend-type movie on the docket. The biggest release is Fences, which is insanely the first of August Wilson’s plays to be adapted as a theatrical film, and with pretty much exactly the dream cast of dream casts, in the form of Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. Washington also directs, which is the enormous question mark here: he’s made two films before this, and they’re neither of them movies that exactly set the world on fire. On the other hand, he’s never worked with such thoroughly field-tested material before.
The huge cluster of limited releases, some of which will be expanding in January, some which are doomed to a life in art house purgatory, mostly centers on Oscar bait, though not all of the same kind. We have the Crowd-Pleasing Dramedy About Social Issues Oscar film in Hidden Figures, about an African-American woman working as a NASA mathematician in the 1960s; this same umbrella perhaps also covers 20th Century Women, the latest attempt to win Annette Bening her damned Oscar already. For the Grim, Manly Crime Drama Oscar film, we must turn to Live by Night, a Dennis Lehane adaptation directed by Ben Affleck in his brief window between Batmans. And then for the Film Too Goddamned God for Oscar film, we have one of the year’s many wonderful Palme d’Or losers, Maren Ade’s gargantuan comedy Toni Erdmann – I’ve seen it, and it’s one of the absolute best films of the year.
30.12.2016
And another Palme also-ran that everybody liked more than I, Daniel Blake rounds things off: Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson. And once I hear “Jarmusch”, I stop needing reasons, so I actually can’t tell you anything else about it. I think it’s about a bus driver. It is, at any rate, fun to have the last movie of the year be one I’m so eager to see.