The Top 10 Films of 2017

As the year draws to a close,  it seems as if every magazine and newspaper is replete with 'best/worst X of 2017' lists on every facet of pop culture and lifestyle. In a year of singular villainy, we've even felt the need to call out the 'best people', if only to remind ourselves of the few bright sparks in an otherwise lacking moral landscape. I, for one, love a good list and naturally the only lists I really care about have been this year's 'best movie' lists. But I have to admit that as I was reflecting on the year I actually found 2017 to be a year of slim pickings, box office bombs and critical nose-dives.

Movie of the Week: I Am Not Your Negro

I Am Not Your Negro can be best described as a manifesto for James Baldwin’s revolutionary brand of thought on American constructions of race, racism, and whiteness. Through the prism of archival footage, Baldwin’s own speeches, interviews, letters and essays (brilliantly narrated by Samuel L. Jackson) director Raoul Peck brings to life Baldwin’s blisteringly incisive insight as America’s foremost social critic, together with his cool rage as a black man living in the deep shadow of inequality and injustice.

Liberty, guilt and morality in The Battle of Algiers

Watching Michael Haneke’s Hidden / Cache (2005), a film that deftly probes the guilt of France’s bloody colonial past, I was reminded of the power of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece The Battle of Algiers.  The film portrays the brutal real-life struggle for liberty between the French colonial government and the indigenous Algerian National Liberation Front (FNL) that raged in the capital city of French Algeria between 1954 and 1962 when Algeria won independence.

Seduction, sensationalism and the Femme Fatale in American Film Noir

Film Noir is often regarded as a quintessentially American genre defined by enduring Hollywood classics such as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Murder My Sweet  and Double Indemnity and the glamorous stars they created. Characterised by sharp, unembellished dialogue and punctuated with slang and sexual innuendo, the genre eschewed the constraints of respectable literary sources and instead took inspiration from the disreputable popular crime fiction of the day.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Delusion and Distortion in 1920s Germany

The 1920 silent horror classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, embodies many of the artistic achievements of the golden age of German Expressionist cinema. At the heart of this short-lived movement was a sense of the importance of conveying emotion and subjective psychological states rather than objective reality. Influenced by psychology, the earliest filmmakers used the new medium of cinema as a visual expression of the mind, designed to mirror the discontinuity and disorder of the individual thought process. It is this rejection of psychological realism that lends the films of this period such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu (1922) and The Golem (1920) a surreal, dreamlike quality. In the 1920s, distortion, asymmetry and non-linear narratives became the hallmark of German Expressionist cinema.

Movie of the Week: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Directorial debuts can be hit-and-miss but Benh Zeitlin’s spellbinding Beasts of the Southern Wild demonstrates a natural flair and originality rare amongst even the most established of directors. Beasts of the Southern Wild unfolds like a fairytale, in which the heroine Hushpuppy (played by the outstanding Quvenzhané Wallis), a six-year-old girl living with her father in an impoverished Cajun community known as the ‘Bathtub’, faces danger, tragedy and a treacherous journey of self-discovery.