Your favourite films of 2016

Alex Heib, Max Lewis-Clarke and Meryl Anil

1. Arrival Intelligent sci-fi films are rare, with ones involving aliens rarer still. Arrival uses these foreign beings to examine how language shapes our view of the world, how it can be the source of conflict but also how it can be the solution. This year, miscommunication has divided our world, which is why Arrival is not just important, it’s necessary.

2. Paterson Paterson is much more a poem than it is a film. It doesn’t have a captivating plot or complex character development; it follows a bus driver/poet around in a quiet city for a week. It doesn’t ask grand questions about life, instead it fills itself with gentle musings about how we see the world around us. It’s cinematic people watching, it’s contemplative, but above all, it’s enchanting.

3. Toni Erdmann Toni Erdmann is both an outlandish comedy and heart-breaking tragedy. What’s truly impressive is that these two elements form a duality; it doesn’t switch from one to another, both comedy and tragedy coexist throughout. This harmony is used to explore deep, existential thoughts, ones that remain long after the film has finished.

4. The Little Prince In a world that promotes a fast ascent into adulthood, full of its toils and pressures, The Little Prince reminds us that becoming an adult doesn’t have to mean giving up your dreams and imagination. A gorgeous animation mixed with delicate stop motion, The Little Prince is a delight both for the eyes and the soul.

5. A Monster Calls Making a great film that centres around death is always difficult, but by focusing instead on how people deal with grief, A Monster Calls tells a story we can all learn something from. Heavy, emotional scenes are balanced by animated stories that use vibrant watercolours to create a visually stunning film with an incredible amount of depth.

6. The Forbiden Room Guy Maddin’s audacious new film spins German expressionism, Pythonesque comedy and a good dose of dream logic into a labyrinthine maze of eccentric short films, nested inside one another like a giant Russian doll. It’s an exhausting watch but it’s endlessly inventive with a cathartic finale revealing that it is a film born of a deep and ecstatic love for cinema itself.

7. Son Of Saul For the majority of László Nemes’ intense debut feature, the camera is fixed on the face of Saul, a Jewish prisoner and member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, forced to dispose of bodies from the gas chambers among other duties. His surroundings are slightly out of focus, but the horrors of the camp aren’t hidden. This is a powerful film, that takes a while to shake off but a much needed watch.

8. Kubo and the Two Strings The art of telling a simple story exceptionally well has been lost in recent years, but Kubo is here to prove that it can still be done. The hero’s story, complete with loveable sidekicks and horrifying villains, is told using stop-motion animation on a larger scale than ever before and the result is staggering beauty.

9. A Bigger Splash With Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes and more on a gorgeous Italian island, Luca Guadagnino couldn’t go wrong with A Bigger Splash, a sexy, mysterious relationship study. The film looks fantastic, whilst the performances are studies in contrast: restraint and release; menace and embrace; heat and frost. Eventually tension builds and the temperature is pushed up and up until it has no option but to boil over.

10. Anomalisa Anomalisa isn’t an easy watch, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. For ninety minutes, it lets you see life from the perspective of an exceedingly isolated man, one who sees everyone as the same, all speaking the same voice. At the risk of being too alienating, it doesn’t let up; it perseveres through the pain to leave you with compassion for those too lost to ask for help.

Fred Fyles

1. Our Little Sister
2. Julieta
3. Evolution
4. Embrace of theSerpent
5. Paterson
6. Youth
7. Son of Saul
8. Anomalisa
9. The Witch
10. Weiner-Dog Given all the horror that has been going on in 2016, cinema can provide an escape from the real world, a cathartic outlet for all our emotions, or a means of interrogating what we think about the world. This year of film varied, from the dark settings of The Witch and Son of Saul, to the magnificent escapism of Youth and Paterson, to the beguiling strangeness of Embrace of the Serpent and Evolution. Julieta marked a return to form for Almodóvar, his best film since Volver, while Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa and Todd Solondz’s Weiner-Dog asked us how much we are able to empathise with horrible protagonists.

Our Little Sister, the 10th film from Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda, takes the top spot for its pure escapism: centring around three sisters living in Kamakura, who decide to take in their younger half-sister following their father’s funeral, Our Little Sister follows the sisters throughout the course of a year. The drama is, relatively, drama-free; there are no critical denouements, no betrayals – instead all we have are a group of people, sharing their lives with each other, chatting, and eating. My god, the eating. Our Little Sister reveals the intimate links between food and love, between cooking and the seasons, creating a feast for the palate and the senses. It’s a film that is completely generous, which gives itself over completely to the audience, allowing us to bask in its gentle warmth.

Tom Stephens

1. American Honey
2. The Big Short
3. I, Daniel Blake
4. The Nice Guys
5. Midnight Special
6. Nocturnal Animals
7. One More Time With
8. Feeling
9. Creed
10. Hail, Caesar!
11. The Hateful Eight If there’s one thing that can be said in favour of 2016, probably one of the all-round worst years most people reading this have lived through, it’s that it didn’t let us down in the movie department. It took a while to get through the early-year slump left in the wake of the UK releases of Oscar contenders like The Hateful Eight and the hilarious, terrifying, gloriously madcap ride of The Big Short, and there were only a few great flicks that kept movie lovers sustained throughout the year (a couple of these came in the form of heartfelt, spellbinding old-school sci-fi Midnight Special, and the perfectly-pitched buddy cop comedy The Nice Guys that showcased Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, and writer-director Shane Black all at their high-octane best).

But the tail-end of the year saw the releases of a slew of stone-cold gems and instant classics; the abstract yet tear-jerking Nick Cave documentary One More Time With Feeling; the heartbreaking and perfectly-acted Ken Loach welfare drama I, Daniel Blake; and best of all, the breathtaking, beautifully epic yet desperately intimate American Honey. Picking between The Big Short and American Honey for the year’s best film was extremely difficult as both are utterly essential for very different reasons: The Big Short grippingly tells an important story about the recent stock market crash and warns how easy it would be for it to happen again, but American Honey is a true moviegoing experience. As three of the most absorbing and refreshing hours I have ever spent in a cinema, it would be simply unfair not to call it my top film of the year.

Jenny Shelley

1. La La Land
2. Zootopia
3. American Honey
4. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
5. Arrival
6. Deadpool
7. I, Daniel Blake
8. The Jungle Book
9. Finding Dory
10. Hail, Caesar! This year was, for better or worse, a big year for the movie industry. It was the year that Leonardo DiCaprio won his Oscar for The Revenant; his dreams will, finally, no longer be haunted by shadowy golden figures dancing tauntingly close. Sadly, this was overshadowed by the many losses of many movie greats: legends like Gene Wilder, Kenny Baker, Alan Rickman, and David Bowie (remember Labyrinth?) – as well as newer faces such as Anton Yelchin – will sadly never again grace our screens. They will be missed.

The films that were released over the past year had the usual mix of mediocrity, a few diamonds, and some absolute stinkers. I’m sorry, you will NEVER convince me that Sausage Party is a philosophical look at existential crises – it was awful. And don’t even get me started on Trolls. So, as this year has been bad enough, we will focus on the good. Here’s the roundup of 10 of the best films of 2016. There are a few warm, cuddly films to remedy this stinker of a year such as Zootopia and Finding Dory. There are a few true originals (this was a very sequel-y/revival-y year) with the most interesting being Arrival and the most entertaining being La La Land. I would recommend any of these films but please think of the setting: don’t watch Deadpool with your family, don’t watch Arrival in the dark, and don’t watch Fantastic Beasts with muggles. You’ve been warned.

Steve Bohnel

It’s been a rough year to be an American – the political system and U.S. election has divided our country in a way worse than I have ever seen.

That’s why of all of this year’s films I watched this year, Sully was my favorite. Consider the following fact the movie illustrates: a pilot landed a jet plane, with both engines burnt out, on the Hudson River, and everyone survived.

Director Clint Eastwood’s depiction of the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ is a moving piece that demonstrates one of the most miraculous rescues of the 21st century. His ability to incorporate everyone, from first responders on the river to air traffic control, shows the amount of work it required to ensure the lives of all 155 lives on board were secured. Tom Hanks is his usual self, with an impressive performance as Chelsea Sullenberger, the pilot who landed the aircraft. The rest of the cast delivers solid performances during a 96-minute film that is well-paced.

True to the events of January 15th, 2009, the film is mostly accurate, although tensions between the NTSB and Sullenberger were understandably drummed up for the big screen. That being said, this film is a reason to escape and remember there is good in the world – given this past year, that’s a much-needed change of pace.

Lawrence Good

1. American Honey
2. Little Men
3. Hail, Caesar!
4. Tale of Tales
5. Come Together This has been a good year for soulful films exploring the challenges faced in all walks of life. American Honey, from British director Andrea Arnold, brilliantly evokes the lives and struggles of itinerant American magazine sellers of all things. Arnold’s greatest triumph is in showing how what begins as a promising escape from poverty morphs into an unrelenting trap, leaving its victims stuck in a rootless existence. The loss of home and livelihood is also examined, albeit very differently, in Ira Sach’s Little Men. Juxtaposing the increasingly fraught relationship between an landlord and tenant with the burgeoning friendship between their sons, the film explores the harsh collision between youthful naiveté and financial reality, showing the painfully human impacts of gentrification.

Not all the year’s films were so melancholic, and Hail, Caesar! was the Coen brother’s wry and amusing take on Hollywood’s golden age through the eyes of “fixer” Eddie Mannix. A hodgepodge of pastiche, the film lovingly mocks the pictures of the era. A film that uses, rather than celebrate, the fantasy of cinema, Tale of Tales brings interwoven fairy tales to life with a wonderful cast including the redoubtable Toby Jones. Yet when all is said and done it’s almost Christmas, and Wes Anderson’s short Come Together is the most heart-warming thing you’ll see these holidays, besides the Muppet Christmas Carol.