05 Best Movies of 2017

5. Columbus
As strikingly unique as the Indiana buildings its characters visit, Columbus is a boy-meets-girl tale that cares less for romance than for the unlikely, intrinsic ties that bind seemingly disparate souls. Arriving in Columbus to tend to his ailing, and estranged, architect father, Jin (John Cho) falls into a friendship with younger Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), who’s set aside personal dreams in order to stay home and care for her recovering-addict mother (Michelle Forbes). While admiring Haley’s favorite local architectural landmarks, the duo engage in conversations about family, obligation, and ambition in the process locating the beauty—and power—of those deeper ideas, and feelings, lurking beneath familiar surfaces. The feature debut of director Kogonada, it’s a work of astounding formal beauty and precision, one that sees universality even in difference, and which—courtesy of the charming rapport shared by the fantastic Cho and Richardson—is infused with a pitch-perfect air of both melancholy and hope. To borrow a description used by one of its characters, it’s asymmetrical and yet balanced.

4. Marjorie Prime

The year’s most moving film, Michael Almereyda’s adaptation of Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated play takes a Twilight Zone-ish concept into surprisingly profound, poignant territory. At a seaside home, Marjorie (Lois Smith) spends her final days conversing with a holographic projection that resembles her late husband Walter (Jon Hamm), all as her daughter Tess (Geena Davis) and son-in-law Jon (Tim Robbins) cope with her failing health and their own personal and marital issues. In Marjorie and Walter’s conversations—the latter’s personality shaped by information given to it by its human owners/programmers—as well as later chats between other people and holograms, Marjorie Prime plumbs not only complex familial dynamics but also the thorny intricacies of memory: how we prioritize, shape, erase, and warp them to fit more comforting conceptions of ourselves and our lives. It’s a superb, subtle portrait of conscious and unconscious (self-) deception, perpetrated so we might grapple with the pain, disappointment and tragedy of existence—and how, as a result, we create a dialogue that gives birth to a living, breathing new future.

3. Dunkirk
Christopher Nolan dispenses with the exposition in favor of immersive aesthetics with Dunkirk, a dramatic account of the WWII evacuation of Dunkirk, France's beaches in 1941. Fractured between three interwoven time frames and perspectives (land, sea and air), and shot almost entirely in 70mm IMAX—which stands as the ideal format in which to see this overwhelmingly experiential work—Nolan's wartime tale cares little for character detail or contextual background. Instead, it thrusts viewers into the chaos engulfing a variety of infantrymen (including Fionn Whitehead and Harry Styles), commanders (primarily, Kenneth Branagh), fighter pilots (led by Tom Hardy), and civilian boatman (notably, Mark Rylance), all of whose sacrifice, selfishness, cowardice, and heroism is thrown into sharp relief by Nolan's grand set pieces. Through its towering scale, superb staging, and inventive structure, Dunkirk melds the micro and the macro with a formal daring that's breathtaking, along the way underscoring the unrivaled power of experiencing a truly epic film on a big screen.

2. Lady Macbeth
Hell hath no fury like a woman oppressed, as is shockingly born out by William Oldroyd's phenomenal feature directing debut—an adaptation not of the Bard but, rather, of Nikolai Leskov's 1865 novel Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. In a breakout performance of coiled intensity and ruthless cunning, Florence Pugh is Katherine, a young woman sold into marriage to an older landowner (Paul Hilton), whose nastiness is only surpassed by that of his domineering father (Christopher Fairbank). That union is rife with problems from the start, though despite the film's Shakespeare-referencing title, the path it wends is an original and horrifying one. Suggesting a period piece version of a film noir saga as envisioned by Stanley Kubrick, this twisted feminist drama is rooted in contentious racial- and gender-warfare issues, employing a meticulous formalism to recount its cutthroat story about Katherine's at-any-cost attempts to attain liberation. Like its protagonist, it's a film that's placid and refined on the outside, ferocious and pitiless on the inside.rm

1. Wormwood
Errol Morris’s Wormwood is a groundbreaking hybrid of non-fictional and fictional storytelling modes—although no matter how you classify it, it’s the year’s towering cinematic achievement. The filmmaker’s second release of the year (after the charming The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography) recounts the tangled saga of Frank Olson, a government biochemist whose mysterious 1953 death out a New York City hotel room window was first deemed a suicide, then the byproduct of a CIA mind-control program, and then something more sinister still. With Olson’s sleuthing son Eric as his guide, Morris immerses himself in this thorny true-crime case, using dramatized sequences—starring a phenomenal Peter Sarsgaard, Molly Parker, Tim Blake Nelson, and Bob Balaban—for his 1953-set sequences, and documentary interviews and material for the rest. Wormwood is assembled as a hallucinatory, psychologically penetrating collage and plays like a pulse-pounding thriller, a damning indictment of institutional malfeasance, and a chilling portrait of both self-destructive obsession and the elusiveness of truth. Simultaneously released as both a 241-minute theatrical movie and a six-part Netflix mini-series, it’s a masterpiece that breathes new life into the documentary form, and further confirms Morris’ peerless greatness. Consequently, it’s our pick for the best film of 2017.