Top recommendations:
- Manchester by the Sea: MUST SEE. Don’t miss Casey Affleck’s career-topping performance in the emotionally authentic drama .
- Elle: MUST SEE (but increasingly hard to find in theaters). A perverse wowzer with the year’s top performance by Isabelle Huppert. Manchester by the Sea is #2 and Elle is #4 on my Best Movies of 2016.
- Lion: an emotionally affecting crowd pleaser.
- Loving: The love story that spawned a historic Supreme Court decision.
- Mascots: the latest mockumentary from Christopher Guest (Best in Show) and it’s very funny. Mascots is streaming on Netflix Instant.
Also in theaters or on video:
- Despite a delicious performance by one of my faves, Michael Shannon, I’m not recommending Nocturnal Animals.
- Arrival with Amy Adams, is real thinking person’s sci-fi. Every viewer will be transfixed by the first 80% of Arrival. How you feel about the finale depends on whether you buy into the disconnected-from-linear-time aspect or you just get confused, like I did.
- The remarkably sensitive and realistic indie drama Moonlight is at once a coming of age tale, an exploration of addicted parenting and a story of gay awakening. It’s almost universally praised, but I thought that the last act petered out.
My DVD/Stream of the Week picks are, for the rest of 2016, this year’s best films that are already available on video: Hell or High Water, Eye in the Sky, Chevalier, Weiner, Take Me to the River and Green Room.
On December 21, Turner Classic Movies is presenting kind of a Hall of Fame for film noir: Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep. Those are all justifiably famous and undisputed members of the noir canon, but TCM is also showing a lesser noir, Born to Kill, with a bloodcurdling villain played by Lawrence Tierney (who was pretty bloodcurdling in real life, too).
Another fun noir shows up on TCM on December 19: Phantom Lady, with Elisha Cook, Jr.’s orgasmic drumming scene – how did they get THAT by the censors?
