Brian's Top Films of 2017

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)

43. Strong Island (Ford)

42. Little Boxes (Meyer)

41. Woodshock (Mulleavy, Mulleavy)

40. I Am Not Your Negro (Peck)

39. Buster's Mal Heart (Smith)

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)

32. Raw (Ducournau)

31. Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve)

30. The Big Sick (Showalter)

29. The Shape of Water (del Toro)

28. The Transfiguration (O'Shea)

27. Mudbound (Rees)

26. The Square (Östlund)

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25. Brigsby Bear (McCary)

24. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Lanthimos)

23. The Human Surge (Williams)

22. Lady Bird (Gerwig)

21. The Meyerorwitz Stories (New and Selected) (Baumbach)

20. Get Out (Peele)

19. Dayveon (Abbasi)

18. All These Sleepless Nights (Marczak)

17. Call Me By Your Name (Guadagnino)

16. Creep 2 (Brice)

15. mother! (Aronofsky)

14. Lost City of Z (James Grey)

13. The Florida Project (Baker)

12. After the Storm (Koreeda)

11. Personal Shopper (Assayas)

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10. Faces Places (Varda, JR)

9. Super Dark Times (Phillips)

8. Coco (Unkrich, Molina)

7. Nocturama (Bonello)

6. Donald Cried (Avedisian)

5. Columbus (Kogonada)

4. Rodney King (Lee)

3. Song to Song (Malick)

2. Good Time (Safdie, Safdie)

1. A Ghost Story (Lowery)

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Thanks for indulging me and checking out my list. If you’d like to comment, critique, compliment, or criticize drop a comment right here on this blog post, or, hit us up on the RtW Facebook or Twitter. May your 2018 cinematic journey be fun and fruitful.