13. All This Panic
Female teenagerdom is presented in all its raw, messy, complicated glory by
All This Panic,
a documentary from Jenny Gage that depicts the ups and downs of a
collection of New York City girls over the course of three years. While
the most compelling personality in this sterling non-fiction film is
lanky Lena—whose plight involves drinking to excess with friends, coping
with divorced parents who are equally incapable of maintaining a stable
residence, and trying to make it through college despite little
financial aid from mom and dad—Gage splits her time between a variety of
fascinating subjects, her gaze intimate and empathetic throughout. In
the figure of Ginger, who opts to stay at home and find her own way
while her best friend Lena heads off to school, it also locates how the
path toward adulthood can be a rocky one paved with confusion, fear,
sexual anxieties, social uncertainties, and ecstatic joy.
Rent/Buy on Amazon and iTunes.
12. The Lure
La La Land's
award-season triumphs may have heralded the return of the Hollywood
musical, but in terms of ingenuity, flair and sheer eye-popping
weirdness, it can't hold a candle to
The Lure.
Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska's wackadoo import is a familiar
tale of a young couple torn between individual dreams and professional
desires, the twist being that these protagonists (Marta Mazurek and
Michalina Olszanska) are mermaid cannibals sashaying through the seedy
cabaret underbelly of 1980s Warsaw. Like the dreamy love child of
Amèlie's Jean-Pierre Jeunet and
The Fly's
David Cronenberg—except with quite a bit more singing and dancing from
its fantastical femme fatales—Smoczynska's knockout debut charts its
aquatic fairy tale creatures as they make a name for themselves as a pop
duo known as "The Lure," along the way falling in love and chomping on
unsuspecting (male and female) victims. A bisexual
Little Mermaid-by-way-of-vampire horrorshow scored to original New Wave-y tunes, it really is like nothing you've ever seen before.
Rent/Buy on Amazon and iTunes.
11. Icaros: A Vision
A journey into the deep, dark regions of the Amazonian wild, Leonor Caraballo and Matteo Norzi's Icaros: A Vision follows an American beset by a cancer to the Peruvian jungle in search of ayahuasca—a
psychedelic plant that, along with medicinal chants known as "icaros,"
are used by locals to remedy mind, body and spirit. In the care of
Shipibo shamans, she and other patients venture freely between lucid and
hallucinatory states, and so too does the film, which proceeds in an
oblique, waking-dream fashion. Shot on location at a community retreat
(and, briefly, at a hotel that was featured in Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo),
this unique effort is an equally optimistic and despairing look at the
ongoing clash of global cultures. And it's one bolstered by its constant
synthesis of disparate forces—man and nature, the modern and the
ancient, the West and the East, the physical and the ethereal, and,
ultimately, the real and unreal.
The
year is young, but it's never too early to start celebrating the finest
movies offered up by both the multiplex and the art house. After only
four months, moviegoers have been gifted with a bounty of great
blockbusters, indies and documentaries, proving that filmmakers are
continuing to find new ways—both big and small—to entertain, excite and
enlighten. No doubt there are numerous gems to come in the months ahead,
given that by the holidays, we'll have the latest works from acclaimed
directors like Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese, and Steven
Spielberg (to name just three). For now, however, these are our current
picks for the best films of 2017.
Comments
Post a Comment