What are your favorite movies of 2017?

Top 20:

1. Logan
2. Get Out
3. Blade Runner 2049
4. It
5. Wonder Woman
6. Baby Driver
7. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
8. Split
9. Gerald’s Game
10. Mother!
11. Thor: Ragnarok
12. Coco
13. Dunkirk
14. The Disaster Artist
15. The Babysitter
16. John Wick: Chapter 2
17. Happy Death Day
18. The Lego Batman Movie
19. Spider-Man: Homecoming
20. Alien: Covenant

Top 10 so far, still loads to see

Logan
Brawl in Cell Block 99
Get Out
Shot Caller
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Blade Runner 2049
Spider-Man: Homecoming
Atomic Blonde
Baby Driver
John Wick: Chapter 2

Alpha order

Aus dem Nichts (In The Fade) / Fatih Akin
Battle Of The Sexes / Valerie Faris & Jonathan Dayton
The Children Act / Richard Eyre
The Death Of Stalin / Armando Iannucci
La Douleur (Memoir Of War) / Emmanuel Finkiel
I, Tonya / Craig Gillespie
Molly’s Game / Aaron Sorkin
My Cousin Rachel / Roger Michell
The Party / Sally Potter
The Post / Steven Spielberg
Roman J. Israel, Esq. / Dan Gilroy
Thoroughbreds / Cory Finley
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri / Martin McDonagh

HM (no order)

The Wife / Björn Runge
Beatriz at Dinner / Miguel Arteta
Revenge / Coralie Fargeat
Sandome No Satsujin (The Third Murder) / Hirokazu Koreeda
The Foreigner / Martin Campbell
All The Money In The World / Ridley Scott
Atomic Blonde / David Leitch
Aknyeo (The Villainess) / Byung-gil Jung
John Wick: Chapter 2 / Chad Stahelski


Worst

Journey’s End / Saul Dibb
Call Me By Your Name / Luca Guadagnino
Zhan lang II (Wolf Warrior II) / Jing Wu
Logan / James Mangold
The Beguiled / Sofia Coppola
Lady Bird / Greta Gerwig (one of the most acclaimed of the year just didn't do it for me)

TOP FILMS

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

The Lost City of Z

Wonder Woman

Baby Driver

Thor: Ragnarok

Kong: Skull Island

Get Out

Dunkirk

I, Tonya

Blade Runner 2049

The Disaster Artist

The Big Sick

Only the Brave

All the Money in the World

Detroit

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

The Greatest Showman

Coco

John Wick: Chapter 2 

Table 19

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Wind River

It: Chapter One

Spider-Man: Homecoming

The Belko Experiment

Marshall

The Zookeeper's Wife

Lady MacBeth

The Shape of Water

American Made

BOTTOM FILMS

Kings

Collide

The Dark Tower

The Snowman

Life

Rough Night

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

All Eyez on Me

Railroad Tigers

Paris Can Wait

The Mummy

Song to Song

Tulip Fever

Kingsman: the Golden Circle

Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House

The Circle

Phantom Thread

Logan

The Hitman's Bodyguard

1)Shot Caller - 7.5-8/10
2)American Made - 6-6.5/10

Looking back, there was a lot of good stuff in 2017. Here’s some comments (in no particular order) I posted on another forum about some of the films that would make up the top 10:

Angels Wear White (Vivian Qu, 2017) follows parallel storylines of two young girls whose lives are intertwined. Wen is a barely teenaged schoolgirl, her absent father a caretaker at a seaside carnival, and her mother an alcoholic who spends the nights out on the town. One evening, Wen and her school friend end up tipsy in a budget motel room, and are assaulted by the middle-aged man who had brought them there. Mia is the only employee on duty that night, and she uses her phone to record the security camera footage of the man forcing his way into the girls’ room. The police get involved, but as Wen’s life begins to further fall apart in the aftermath, it becomes apparent that Mia has her own difficulties which will prevent her from handing over the evidence that would convict the perpetrator. This is a really intelligent drama with a touch of thriller elements, which presents complex characters facing a range of moral dilemmas that have no easy answers. The performances of Vicky Chen and Zhou Meijun were exceptional, and the film is served very well by choosing to cast two actresses who are close in age to the characters they play (Chen, who plays the receptionist, was apparently only 14 when the film was first released). And the ambiguous, possibly metaphorical ending was great.


Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (Mouly Surya, 2017) is set on the Indonesian island of Sumba, near Timor Leste – unlike the tropical beaches or urban congestion of the Indonesia we’re used to seeing, the undulating grasslands are a sparsely populated expanse of rural poverty, the people blending their more recently acquired Christianity with ancient animist ritual. Marlina is a widow, living in a two-room outpost with the body of her recently deceased husband, when she is visited by a gang of thugs who are intent on robbing and raping her. She sets off the next morning to catch a local bus, with the machete and severed head of the leader slung over her shoulder, to go to the police station and report the crime. The whole film is very intentionally styled on spaghetti westerns, and Sergio Leone in particular – the cinematography, capturing the wide, expansive landscapes, and the musical scoring, are nothing short of sensational. Marsha Timothy is great as the simultaneously laid-back and fricken-pissed-with-world-and-that-includes-you Marlina, and the relationship she builds with her ditsy, 10-month-pregnant travelling companion was in turns hilarious and touching. I absolutely loved this.


Wrath of Silence (Xin Yukun, 2017) A young boy disappears while tending to the family’s sheep in 2004 north-eastern China, and the father engages in a desperate search that leads to an empire-building mining tycoon. The beginning of the film is almost like looking at a disassembled jigsaw puzzle, as fragments of the father’s backstory are thrown down, but it serves the film well in painting a picture of a rural community that has been torn apart by the ‘economic progress’ that is driven by the greed and corruption of mining companies owned by a new breed of venture capitalists. There’s an almost split-personality feel to the film, mixing up a gritty western vibe to the father’s search with gangster elements that come close to bordering on parody, but for me it actually worked well, creating an uneasy sense of never quite knowing where things were headed. I’m not sure that I like this one quite as much as Xin’s first film Coffin in the Mountain, but it’s definitely another really good example of the independent cinema coming out of China.


The Looming Storm (Dong Yue, 2017) begins with a brief scene that boldly announces a film of politically cynical intent, so bold that I wondered whether what would follow would backpedal hell fast in the face of the censorship board. In 1997, a steelworks security guard/wannabe detective finds himself hot on the heels of a serial killer. He is encouraged both by a jaded old detective who is way past the enthusiasm and optimism of his young acolyte and by his own young protégé, and finds comfort in a platonic friendship with a prostitute dreaming of becoming a hairdresser in Hong Kong. The film sets itself up in firm genre territory, but as things progress, the entropy of the setting, in terms of both the physical and the social environment, takes centre stage – first time director Dong doesn't feel the need to keep the film within the genre conventions of which it begun, but had the guts to allow the primary storyline to decompose along with the society in which it was set.


The Bad Genius (Nattawut Poonpiriya, 2017) of the title is Lynn, an intellectually gifted, athletic, attractive and nauseatingly accomplished all-rounder. As she becomes aware of layers of corruption that play out in the education system, her response is muted disdain and enthusiastic “hell yeah, I want a slice of this pie”. And so she embarks on a campaign of organised exam cheating for cash to help out her rich sycophantic friends – small level at first, but with ever increasing stakes as more and more students join in on the scams. There’s a number of set pieces that are genuinely nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat stuff … it takes a special type of skill to manufacture something so exciting out of a bunch of kids doing a multiple choice exam. But even more impressive is getting the audience to cheer on a bunch of characters who are cynical, arrogant, egotistical, vacuous, and mostly spoilt little brats. It’s been described as The Breakfast Club meets Mission Impossible, but if I was to compare it with another film, I think it’s got more in common with The Big Short. The film successfully celebrates its anti-heroes as they navigate an economy too big for them to control but not so big that it can’t be financially exploited, yet it never seems dark in spirit.


The Villainess (Yung Byung-gil, 2017) is a pretty awesome updating of Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita, with a good dose of Park Chan-wook’s vengeance trilogy (particularly Sympathy for Mr Vengeance) thrown in for good measure. Kim Ok-bin is the eponymous heroine of the film’s ironic title, an angry young woman who is taken into police custody after getting mightily pissed-off and laying waste to 30-odd thugs in a drug lab. From there, she is forced into training as a Government assassin, all the while being covertly observed by the moisturised Sung Joon, who has been earmarked as her secret handler on the outside, and will earn a promotion if he manages to form a romantic relationship with her. Hey, just because this is a brutal, ballistic action thriller doesn’t mean it can’t be a rom-com too, right? Layers of backstory come through like waves – our heroine was a child when unknown assailants killed her father, sold into a brothel, rescued by a gangster who trains her to kill, her husband brutally murdered on their honeymoon, and the past is all connected to the future. I read some criticisms of a convoluted plot, but I actually didn’t find the film at all confusing to follow at the time – it wasn’t until afterwards, when I thought things through, that I realised I didn’t have a frickin’ clue what it was all about. There was a gemstone, there was a hard drive, things got stolen, people wanted things back, everyone’s spying on everyone else - who was what to whom and why made less sense the more I thought about it. But still, I didn’t feel cheated at all (not like I did with, say, the ridiculously plotted The Man From Nowhere) – in a way, that’s almost the point of the film so it made perfect sense that the big picture plot details make little sense. And at any rate, a film like this stands or falls on the action sequences, and I think this one delivers in spades.


Rounding out my top 10, I’ll go with:

The Florida Project

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

You Were Never Really Here

Baby Driver

My top 20

1. Lady Bird
2. Logan
3. War for the Planet of the Apes
4. Blade Runner 2049
5. It
6. Molly's Game
7. Wonder Woman
8. Lady Macbeth
9. Atomic Blonde
10. Gifted
11. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
12. Get Out
13. Spider-Man: Homecoming
14. Split
15. Thor: Ragnarok
16. Baby Driver
17. Annabelle: Creation
18. John Wick: Chapter 2
19. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2
20. Wind River

1. Blade Runner 2049
2. Wind River
3. Dunkirk
4. Logan
5. War for the Planet of the Apes