I’d like to punch him in the face. —Donald Trump, referring to a protester at his Las Vegas rally, February 22, 2016
My favorite movie of the year, Embrace of the Serpent, came out of nowhere and apparently went back. If you ever track it down, prepare yourself for a tale that will make you think hard about your relationship to the planet. The same goes for Seasons, a French documentary that chronicles the history of the forest across the last 20,000 years. Neither of these movies stands any chance of getting near the Oscar for best picture, the race for which is currently shaping up as a contest between Moonlight and La La Land, starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. One can easily see these as binary choices—the story of a gay black man coming of age during the 80s crack epidemic versus a dreamy, 50s-inspired vision of Los Angeles populated by white retro-hipsters. Given the year that generated these movies, I predict a violent clash on the floor of the Dolby Theatre, with numerous fatalities. That Ryan Gosling! I’d like to punch him in the face.*
5 London Road Critics are hailing Damien Chazelle’s La La Land as a rebirth of the American movie musical, and a beguiling piece of screen magic it is. But the story it tells—a star-crossed romance between an actress and a jazz musician in Los Angeles—never really lives up to the numbers surrounding it. Give me London Road, a modestly scaled but more biting musical from BBC Films about an English backwater town trying to recover after a local man is charged with the serial murder of five street hookers. Writer Alecky Blythe interviewed real-life residents, reporters, and prostitutes as the story was unfolding, and their words, taken verbatim, supply the lyrics for a series of arias, delivered to arresting effect.
10 Weiner Disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner gave directors Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg extraordinary access as he campaigned for mayor of New York in 2013. Unexpectedly, they captured excruciating scenes between him and his wife, Huma Abedin—a close aide to Hillary Clinton—as news broke that Weiner had continued with the compulsive sexting that ended his congressional career. Released to theaters in May and to Showtime two weeks before the presidential election, this study of unchecked ambition and sorry self-deception helped to set up James Comey’s announcement that the FBI had linked Weiner’s laptop to Clinton’s private e-mail server. Can any other movie of 2016 have been more consequential?
