The year 2017 was tumultuous and harrowing for a lot of people for any number of all legitimate reasons. Politically, professionally, personally – all around me I saw the living embodiment of the Internet meme “the struggle is real”. Daily life took on the comic tragedy of being a kid and eating a hot dog on white bread because there were no buns. Jordan Peele’s frighteningly prescient directorial debut Get Out birthed the term “the sunken place” into our culture, which adequately sums up the state of disbelief, confusion, and uncertainty many of us felt at one point or another during the year. But in the darkened auditoriums of theaters both big and small, faces were illuminated by moving pictures, and people, silently suffering, were transfixed and transported.
Below you’ll find my fifty favorite films of 2017. The 2015 and 2016 editions are also available for your perusal.
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50. Band Aid (Lister-Jones)
49. The Devil's Candy (Byrne)
48. Hounds of Love (Young)
47. Colossal (Muschietti)
46. Jungle (McLean)
45. Manifesto (Rosefeldt)
44. Ingrid Goes West (Muschietti)
38. It Comes at Night (Shults)
37. Phantom Thread (Anderson)
36. Last Flag Flying (Linklater)
35. The Unknown Girl (Dardenne, Dardenne)
34. Dawson City: Frozen Time (Morrison)
33. Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Johnson)
35. The Unknown Girl (Dardenne, Dardenne)
34. Dawson City: Frozen Time (Morrison)
33. Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Johnson)
29. The Shape of Water (del Toro)
28. The Transfiguration (O'Shea)
27. Mudbound (Rees)
26. The Square (Östlund)
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21. The Meyerorwitz Stories (New and Selected) (Baumbach)
20. Get Out (Peele)
19. Dayveon (Abbasi)
16. Creep 2 (Brice)
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5. Columbus (Kogonada)
4. Rodney King (Lee)
1. A Ghost Story (Lowery)
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