The ten best films of 2017, according to this idiot

They say that in 2017, web-based film commentary has been reduced to little more than highly subjective listicles that mean nothing to anyone but the writer, whose over-inflated sense of ego drives them to continually vomit their opinions onto the internet regardless of a total lack of insight and a steadily dwindling readership. I don't know if this is true because I've been far too busy ranking the films of Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese to take any notice of what anyone else is doing, but it seems unlikely. Anyway never mind that, here are my ten favourite films of the year!

THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE
Thank Christ there are filmmakers out there who actually like Batman enough to celebrate him and all his iterations no matter how ridiculous. The LEGO Batman Movie had love for the caped crusader coming out of its tiny, pointy ears, but that's not all - it dared to prod the Dark Knight's obvious psychological issues in a way that's somehow sensitive and fun at the same time. And not only did it feature a superhero team-up to beat Justice League, but also a supervillain team-up to beat Suicide Squad. All that said, I am deeply disappointed that Batman doesn't pay his taxes. That's not cool, kids!

SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING
The MCU's wackiest year yet peaked with this welcome return to a Spidey who looked and acted like a teenage nerd so excited about his superpowers that he could barely contain his own web fluid. After three forgettable Spider-outings, Kevin Feige's guiding hand steered ol' webhead back on track, not just restoring audience faith in Spidey but enhancing the MCU to boot: Peter Parker's father / son relationship with Tony Stark looks set to pay off in spades when the latter finally fires his last repulsor. Now if only Marvel could free themselves of the need to crowbar twenty minutes of tedious superhero-versus-supervillain punch-ups into the final acts of their terrific character-based comedies, they'd be streets ahead of DC by now. What's that? Oh.

THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER
Like a 21st century Euro-Kubrick, Yorgos Lanthimos turned out this gleefully horrifying companion piece to 2015's The Lobster with clinical black humour and an eye for unforgettably, hilariously grim imagery. Like real life but with the absurdity curtains pulled right back, Sacred Deer forced you to view humanity through a different lens; you might not have liked what you found there but at least you had an excruciatingly awkward and uncomfortable time while you looked.

STAR WARS EPISODE VIII: THE LAST JEDI
Maybe it's the case that the more you love a movie franchise the more glaring its issues are. Overlong and bloated with unnecessary scenes, jokes and beats lifted from the original trilogy, The Last Jedi pushed its luck pretty hard. But for every terrible, overly-CG, Episode I-esque chase on alien horseback, there was a galaxy of new and wondrous moments searing themselves into Star Wars lore: an unexpected and shiver-inducing team-up; an iconic hero revealed to be less the infallible legend and more the wry old hermit; a dozen unforgettable images as instantly quintessential as anything in the series since 1977. Hope remains.

GET OUT
Deeply biting, genuinely thought-provoking and thankfully not-too-gory horror aimed precisely at liberal white folk who are a) possibly a little too comfortable in the belief they're not racist, and b) sick of jump scares and torture porn (hello). The writing here was sublime (there were so many clues in the first half that a rewatch was essential), and even if the last reel was a bit silly and rushed it didn't matter. In a world of socio-political message-movies that yell into an echo chamber, Get Out actually had something vital to say to the majority of its audience.

SILENCE
Martin Scorsese's most personal passion project since The Last Temptation Of Christ was uncommercial enough to keep audiences away in droves (in fairness, punters' choice in January was a 160-minute meditation on faith, or Ryan Gosling tap-dancing with Emma Stone), making back less than half its scraped-together budget. But Marty is long past crowd-pleasing, and Silence was the kind of film whose stature will only grow over time until it's rightly hailed as the late-period auteurist masterpiece it is. Essential Scorsese and soul-enriching cinema, but Jesus Christ on a cracker I am totally ready for The Irishman.

DUNKIRK
The story of a cursed soldier who manages to sink four of the five boats on which he tries to escape from a perfectly pleasant seaside town, Dunkirk was an assault on the eyes and ears (especially in IMAX) as well as the marbles, deliberately disorientating you with its director's trademark timefuckery. Visually breathtaking (not least when it took to the skies in horizon-spanning megavision) and aurally stressful, this tale of heroism, survival and sacrifice boasted 2017's most effective combination of action and music, to the point where it could just as well be described as Hans Zimmer's best album of 2017 featuring an ace video by Christopher Nolan.

PADDINGTON 2
Episode 2 of what is now looking like a fifteen-star trilogy (and there's no reason why they need to stop at three) repeated its predecessor's perfect alchemy of silent comedy and sharply-observed British humour, adding an entire hacking enquiry's worth of HRH Hugh Grant to push it into the stratosphere. Inexplicably hilarious while simultaneously heartbreaking, Paddington 2 provided the year's most thorough emotional workout: this and La La Land probably delivered my happiest moments of 2017, proving that cinema's capacity to make you feel absolutely fucking great isn't dead just yet, despite all the efforts of the DC Cinematic Universe.

A GHOST STORY
Buried away in blockbuster season was this tiny, tender, thought-provoking beauty about life, death, love and the infinite. Its epic themes boxed up in a vignetted 4:3 frame, A Ghost Story provided big ideas on a small scale, as well as welcome relief from the empty noise that characterised most of this summer in the cinema. Also where else were you going to watch Rooney Mara eat a pie for five minutes? In The Lost City Of Z? I don't think so.

LA LA LAND
It is still unfathomable to me that there was a backlash to La La Land, but what are you gonna do? People are idiots. Regardless of how you feel it turned out, there was so much love poured into this film that it spilled out of the edges: love for movies, love for musicals, love for golden age Hollywood, love for dreams and dreamers, love for art and artists, love for love itself. I haven't been as happy to see a fictional couple fall in love or so sad to see them break apart since Han and Leia. I fell in love with La La Land at first sight and we're still going strong over a year later; check back in five years to see if we had to break up because it held me back from becoming a professional miseryguts.

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The usual disclaimer: if you're reading this more than 24 hours since I wrote it, I've probably changed my mind. Up-to-date version, including everything else I saw from 2017, here.

Dunkirk

To coincide with the release of Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan curated a season of films at the BFI which influenced his WWII carnival of trauma. "Our season explores the mechanics and uses of suspense to modulate an audience's response to narrative," Nolan explained, and while he might have sounded like some kind of emotion-curious automaton, that declaration of intent - alongside the films he chose - reveals much about Dunkirk's provenance and objectives. Speed's 'Die Hard in a lift / on a bus / on a train' mission statement, for example, can be transposed to Dunkirk's 'Die Hard on the beach / in the sea / in the air' approach; the visual storytelling of silent classics Greed and Sunrise is a key tool in Nolan's dialogue-light, action-heavy movie, and the impact of the climactic plane crash in Hitchcock's tremendous Foreign Correspondent is also blindingly apparent - although for different reasons, Nolan could just as easily have picked Hitch's Lifeboat.

But despite the umbilical connections to all these cinematic progenitors, Dunkirk is first and foremost very much its own thing: a unique, bold, experimental film which - while probably not quite Nolan's greatest achievement - could only have been made by someone with his clout and ambition. And given that, for me, Christopher Nolan's ambition often outstrips his storytelling abilities (unpopular opinion: Inception, The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar are all loaded with promise but trip over their own narrative shoelaces), it's a welcome relief that this time he's crafted more of an experience than a story. Virtually ditching characterisation and traditional notions of narrative, Dunkirk is less a movie than an ordeal. And I mean that, for the most part, in a good way.

Opening with the title in that familiar Univers Bold font and the sound of the director's own pocket watch ticking away with relentless urgency, Dunkirk is immediately and obviously a Christopher Nolan film. Tick-tick-tick mutates violently into a deafening rat-a-tat as a troop of British soldiers ambling through the deserted streets of Dunkirk are fired on by unseen German snipers, and there's no safety net in the casting to let you know who will or won't survive the attack: all these young men are anonymously similar. Most of the lead characters don't even get named - only in the end credits do we find out that one of our protagonists is wryly named Tommy, for whom ze var is most definitely not over.

That opening scene sets the tone for the next hundred minutes: tension, disorientation, a hidden enemy and extremely loud noises are very much the order of the day. A disparate bunch of unknowns spend the next week desperately trying to get the fuck out of France and back home in one piece while Nolan amusingly forces Big Names to stay in one place and do very little: Spitfire pilot Tom Hardy barely leaves the confines of his cockpit-set close-up, Cillian Murphy shivers with PTSD, Mark Rylance is stuck at the wheel of his fishing boat and Ken Branagh stands on a pier looking stoic. Even Michael Caine is relegated to a voice cameo.

The lack of complex characters might draw criticism from some, but it's a deliberate choice. Dunkirk is about the experience of survival, and Nolan strips away everything that might get in the way of us feeling on edge for the duration of the film. There are no moments of Spielbergian melodrama, no chances to get to know anyone's tragic backstory and certainly no attempts to show that hey, those guys trying to kill our boys are just flipsides of the same coin, man. We never cut to bloated generals pushing model planes around a map in Whitehall and we never see a single German face. Nolan isn't interested in war as a complex investigation of humanity, where the best and worst aspects of mankind can be found in the unlikeliest of places; for his soldiers, war is an endless, merciless death machine to be escaped from as quickly as possible, whatever the cost.

It's odd, then, that Dunkirk remains a bloodless affair. Nolan's decision to focus on suspense rather than the flying limbs and guts of, say, Saving Private Ryan's visceral opening and closing scenes lend it an incongruous air of false safety at odds with the thick seam of authenticity running through the rest of the film. It's a minor quibble, but the odd splash of claret could have upped the stakes even further. Instead, in an effort to heighten the tension, Nolan allows Hans Zimmer the freedom to carpet bomb the film with his most ludicrous, histrionic and distracting score yet. Barely a scene goes by without screaming strings or electronically enhanced horns blasting out at comically overblown volume, wilfully overlooking the dramatic effect that a well-placed moment of silence or two can bring.

Fortunately, Nolan's eye for a shot more or less makes up for his cloth ears. There are images in Dunkirk of such aching wonder - especially if witnessed on the appropriately majestic scale of an IMAX screen - that blow the mind. Dogfights between the RAF and the Luftwaffe are reminiscent of George Lucas' best X-wing moments (ironically, since Lucas shoved footage of WWII films into Star Wars before aerial sequences were finished), the beaches of Dunkirk stretch off into infinite bleakness and the scale of everything is brain-boggling. Tiny figures of men dot the vast expanses of sand, ridiculously tiddly fishing boats pootle across miles of unforgiving English Channel to aid the rescue, and even those Spitfires and Messerschmitts find themselves almost lost against the beauty of a clear, bright sky. The idea that all this is somehow cosmically futile is expressed with elegant awe.

Nolan lays all this out in typically tangled fashion, cutting between the week-long experience of the stranded soldiers, the day-long mission of the "little ships" that stepped in when the Navy was found lacking, and the hour-long airborne skirmish with a deliberate disregard for temporal sense. It's a technique that boosts the tension, but on a first viewing it's also unnecessarily confusing for too long, distracting attention from the story while your brain tries to hop between timelines. And while I'm nitpicking, I have no idea what the mechanics of Dunkirk's ostensibly climactic moment were: Nolan spends most of the film avoiding cliché, but then inserts a late flourish of heroic action which is unexpectedly directorially bungled.

Nevertheless, Dunkirk is quite an achievement even by Christopher Nolan's standards. It's a commendably original, ruthlessly effective sensory assault that pushes mainstream cinema further than anything else has for a long time, and that's not to be underestimated. It's also subtly patriotic without being jingoistic, especially in its treatment of the ordinary folks back home who risked their lives sailing their rickety tugboats across the Channel to pick up complete strangers in dire need. The Dunkirk spirit soaks through every frame, and it's a timely reminder that if we're so desperate to get away from Europe then we're going to need every drop of it.