I've not seen that many films this year but I think my favourites would be, in a very rough order (I think my first two are technically from 2015, but that's only because of the festival circuit. They definitely had cinematic releases this year):
High Rise - Visually brilliant and well acted adaptation of the novel. Full of images I can't shake, even several months after I last watched it.
Tale of Tales - Also visually brilliant. Stunning use of colour, great music. A refreshingly gruesome set of fairy-tales
Everybody Wants Some!! - really enjoyable film. Not quite as poignant as Dazed and Confused, but a refreshingly earnest film.
Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected World - It's Werner Herzog. Very powerful despite a slightly old-mannish willingness to accept certain narratives without question. That Said, the film is fairly up front about being more interested in the way people react to technology than the technology itself, so maybe a bit of ambivalence about the reality of electromagnetic sensitivity is fair enough. It has some of Herzog's strongest imagery since the 70s, I think
Hail, Caesar!: I'm a big Coen Brothers fan anyway, so I was bound to like this. With that said, I think it has weaknesses. There are some "problematic" plot elements that aren't really grasped that firmly, for example. I suspect that might be a deliberate choice though, so need to watch again. I've also generally liked the vein of total bleakness the Coen's were mining between A Serious Man and Inside Llewin Davis, and this felt slight in comparison to some of those. With all that said, there's a lot of joy in it, and some brilliant scenes. Ralph Feinnes' uptight director is brilliant, and the gag gets a fantastic payoff in the edit room scene. Even a slight Coen Brothers film is generally a quality product.
I've seen other films, but none that I felt were that great, so it's a short list. I was tempted to put the new Independence Day on here but I'd just be being contrary. It was a bad year for Superhero films; I somehow saw all of them except Suicide Squad and the only one I even came close to enjoying was X-Men, and even that hasn't held up to reflection.
Conversely, there are a lot of films I really want to see, that I think I might really enjoy, but haven't been able to:
Moonlight, Hell or High Water, Nocturnal Animals, The Nice Guys, The VVitch, The Neon Demon, The Light Between Oceans, Arrival, Evolution...
Least enjoyed film of the year: It was Deadpool (fite me) until about a week ago when I watched Batman v Superman: DoJ, which seemed to be not as bad as all that for 20 minutes, then took a hard nosedive into utter shitness. It was like a film trying to emulate all the worst aspects of Marvel films, and then adding a layer of incompetence to all the technical elements and script-writing.
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