Reviews

Because I am not a paid critic and don't have to see films I don't want to see, on lucky years I often avoid the clunkers completely. I wasn't so lucky this time -- but, on the other hand, now I legitimately do have a film to proclaim proudly as having all the criteria necessary for a "worst film of the year".

It's Alex Ross Perry's "Her Smell", a title that actually could fittingly describe the entire movie. It stars the usually responsible fine actress Elisabeth Moss (of TV's "Mad Men" and "The Handmaid's Tale") who actually co-produced this narcissistic imbecilic ego-trip that shows a self-destructive punk rocker during a recording session from Hell curse, vomit, bleed and spew vitriol at her friends for 2/3 of its 136 minutes, and a final 1/3 failing to atone for the rest. Moss does her own singing (though the songs suck), but nothing saves this amateur mess from becoming an ordeal for its viewers, each of which must certainly regret to have even attempted to sit through it.

To all Moss fans: you can spare yourself the embarrassment of seeing a fine actress make a fool of herself by rewatching instead her other fine movies and shows. It is hoped Moss will continue her climb in the future to legitimate acclaim so the memory of this deep and dank humiliation can slip sullenly and silently into the forgetful land of the irretrievable stinker.

This episode is all built around one gag: The kids give him a hat to show their appreciation which he really doesn't like, and they keep ambushing him all around town to check that he is still wearing the hat. This one gag is carried on to such ridiculous extent that it almost reaches the Samuel Beckett level. Silly, but Ozzie's understated performance makes it work.

Joe Wright's "Darkest Hour" poses a problem for me. The subject is interesting and important, but the film, following Winston Churchill's early days as Prime Minister of Britain during World War II, never rises above the average. Worse: one could also say that -- in the fictitious sequence, about 2/3rds of the way through, when Churchill rides the tube to talk person-to-person with average British citizens riding the train -- it comes to life precisely at the same moment it sinks into cliché, and credulity is strained past the breaking point. Ultimately, Oldman playing Churchill is the only thing that makes this movie experience worthwhile. (But Joe Wright has seen better days -- especially in his 2007 masterpiece, "Atonement", the extraordinary film that incidentally introduced 12-year-old Saoirse Ronan to the world.) Not much better than a BBC-TV movie of the week.

The Ridley Scott film, "All the Money in the World" is a terrific film telling the 1973 real-life abduction of the 16-year-old-son of the richest man in the world, J. Paul Getty.

Its strong points are its excellent scripting, production design, acting and Ridley Scott's effective direction. It's a nearly perfect thriller factually based saving totally gratuitous scenes of the security man advising Getty's wife, poorly played by Mark Wahlberg as if he were the film's main star, scenes that bog the film down in talky, contrived plot padding. He is an irritating wrong note in an otherwise superb movie that I highly recommend. My guess is that Wahlberg, being one of the producers of the film, created this unfortunate infirmity by insisting his part be expanded to make his character assume an ersatz importance. But, by all means, check out this excellent movie anyway.

"Last Men in Aleppo", is a shattering Danish/Syrian documentary about the Syrian Civil War that should leave you in anger and tears after viewing it.

Beginning as a film editor, Syrian writer/director Firas Fayvad previously had made documentaries for television, his most famous being "On the Other Side", the making of which resulted in Fayyad's arrest and torture for nine months between 2011 and 2012. But even that has not achieved the level of international fame "Last Men in Aleppo" has brought him, for it documents the efforts of the White Helmets, an organization consisting of ordinary citizens whose purpose is to save civilians (especially children) who are buried under the rubble from continuous bombings by the Soviet Union unabashedly targeting apartment buildings, hospitals and non-military establishments.

What is so shocking about this film is the way it plants the viewer in the middle of the violence as it is happening, and from the point of view of the heroic rescuers. There are deliberate lulls in the film in which we live in the houses with the families of the White Helmets, but that just makes the inhuman tragedy even more shocking when the violence comes. This is a film impossible to forget once seen.

Steve James is a very famous documentarian who was robbed when his master work "Hoop Dreams" was inexplicably ignored by the Oscars in the Best Documentary Feature category in 1994. His later films included "Stevie", "The Interrupters" and the moving record of Roger Ebert's last days, "Life Itself". And now finally the film that brought James his first nomination for Best Documentary Feature.

"Abacus: Small Enough to Jail" is an excellent documentary that centers on the Abacus Federal Savings Bank, a family-owned community bank in Manhattan's Chinatown which became the only bank to actually face criminal charges following the 2007 mortgage crisis - and only because it was deemed not 'too big to fail', an incredible injustice by the U.S. Justice Department merely looking for a scapegoat. But the film is not primarily socio-political; it is, in fact, a 'David vs. Goliath' story of the court battle of the Asian family's defense for their honor against the gigantic U.S. government, and, without shying away from showing the family's internal squabbles and moments of weakness, the film documents the difficult daily sacrifices necessary for them to stand up for their principles.

Perhaps some will find this too much a 'standard' documentary, but I feel the story and characters interesting enough not to necessitate a stylistic 'hyping up', and, as is, the film perfectly captures its time and place while keeping us on the edge of our seats until the final verdict. Critic Matt Zoller praised the director for "finding the universal within the specific", and for the film creating a portrait of Chinatown as a thriving community that "defines itself in relation to...American culture... but never entirely comfortable or accepted." It is also an inspiring film of an immigrant family who struggles to survive through a conflict that they know is virtually impossible over which to prevail - but still they find they cannot submit to what they see as an injustice they did not come to America for. This is a film I truly loved. Don't miss it.

"Strong Island" is one of the worst documentary features I have come across in many years. Yance Ford, a transgender, has credentials: He worked as a series producer at PBS for ten years; he was named one of Filmmaker magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film; he was also the recipient of a Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellowship. And he produced and directed this movie which is about as personal a film anyone could ever make, a film investigating the 1992 murder of his brother, William Ford. Or, at least, that's what it was purported to be about.

Amateurishly edited, and without coming to anything remotely resembling a point, the film has close-ups of family members slowly speaking in annoying monotone, rambling on in various digressions: references to racism that seemed haphazard; discussing what they like to eat; the difficulty in coming to terms with sexuality; how their family loves each other - anything it seems except the murder investigation. It is completely without focus, mostly boring, and consequently hard to sit through. Even worse: The filming seems so contrived, and the interviewees so obviously 'trying to act,' that it sometimes seems like a mockumentary instead of a documentary. It's bad, there's no other way to say it.

I try to ask myself how a talented filmmaker could make a documentary so sophomoric and continuously uninteresting, and I come up with nothing. But I don't blame Yance Ford because I assume he tried to do something different and merely fell on his butt. What I DON'T understand is how the Academy of Arts and Sciences could seriously nominate a stinker like this for Best Documentary Feature. Weren't there better documentaries around? Even your iPhone home movie is bound to be better than "Strong Island"!

"The Boss Baby" is a thoroughly annoying animated film recommended for only the most indiscriminate animated lovers. Directed by Washington State animator McGrath who had previously directed the three "Madagascar" films, this displays decent animation but has a plot and characters that grate on viewers like a buzz saw grinding on sheets of metal. I swear, I never wanted to punch a baby before, but watching this film's main character -- a repulsive infant in diapers sneering and barking out orders like a midget nazi -- made me really think about it.

Astonishingly, this was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, something that motivated me to tell others around me that should this obnoxious cartoon embezzle this award Oscar night, the only type of response it would deserve is for babies to unite in a huge synchronized dump.

Andrey Zvyagintsev is inarguably one of the finest of the living Russian directors, having previously made four features utilizing stunning if sparse visuals, each one emphasizing strong human relationships while dealing with significant socio-political themes. Born in Siberia in 1964, he started acting as an extra in TV and film before a friend offered him a job directing a television series. Finally, nearing 40, he received an offer to direct "The Return", a film I still consider one of the finest modern Russian films ever made, and it won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival.

Already winner of the Jury Prize at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, "Loveless" is Zvyagintsev's latest, and it's a cautionary tale that paints an unbearably sad portrait of a 12-year-old boy unloved by his selfish parents going through an angry divorce, and the desperate search to find the boy after he becomes missing. Ingeniously, the child is barely shown in the film at all - although one single shot of the weeping boy hiding behind the parents' bedroom door is so memorably shattering it permeates the entire film after it. The director wisely centered the story on the parents' savage, hateful entanglements, also showing each's relationship with their new lover that the viewers know is no better than the one from which they're being estranged.

Framed with Zvyagintsev's characteristic landscape shots of snow-capped trees and icy rivers, this beautiful if painful film is a must-see even though the director refuses to satisfy any expectations of a conventional audience. You won't leave the theater smiling, but you'll be deep in thought, contemplating what you've seen.

I absolutely adored the Hungarian nominee, "On Body and Soul", directed by Ildikó Enyedi, the daughter of a famous geographer and economist. Born in Budapest, Enyedi began directing shorts in 1979 and then went on to make a number of award-winning films including "My Twentieth Century", "Tamas and Juli", and "Simon the Magician". Although Enyedi is over sixty, "On Body and Soul" is only her seventh feature (and her first in more than 18 years), but it's become a worldwide hit, critically and commercially.

The story is about two socially reserved workers in a slaughterhouse (an elderly manager who has a disabled arm and an attractive quality-control autistic woman) who have nothing in common except timidity until a minor theft in their company causes them to find out they are having the same dream every night of being deer in a forest. It is a complete joy to watch these two sensitive people slowly advance towards an investigation into why they seemingly share this strange bond, especially due to the perfect casting of the main actors and the handling of the story by the director who wisely managed to avoid any pitfall of cloyingness and sentimentality. With luminous cinematography, this is one of 2017's special cinematic gems.

Steven Spielberg's otherwise honorable "The Post", the story of the Washington Post's struggle to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971, suffers from a rather polite, academic film treatment that lacks the rough edge the story deserved (check out "All the President's Men" again!). It needed more adrenaline.

Moreover, a miscast Tom Hanks seemed to be playing 'Tom Hanks' rather than Ben Bradlee -- although Meryl Streep's nuanced and brilliant performance as Katharine Graham made the film really worth seeing.

Although this is the kind of film non-cineastes mistake for great, "The Post" shows Spielberg directing on autopilot. Still recommended for being a record of an important moment in the political history of America.

Guillermo del Toro is today's master of fantasy, having been a childhood lover of monsters growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, before making some of the finest films of recent years -- from the ghostly horror of "The Devil's Backbone" in 2001 to his gothic horror/romance, "Crimson Peak" in 2015. Indubitably, however, his greatest film is "Pan's Labyrinth", the 2006 film many of us consider the finest fantasy film ever made. Now he's broken new ground with "The Shape of Water", one of 2017's most beautiful films.

Set in Baltimore in the year 1962 at the height of the Cold War, the plot follows a mute janitor at a secret government laboratory who forms a bond with a captured amphibian of the "Creature of the Black Lagoon" variety. Her name is Elisa, and Sally Hawkins plays her with an artistry that seems to reach back to the silent days of Chaplin and Keaton. Michael Shannon, with devoted viciousness, plays the right-wing Colonel Strickland, someone more interested in dissecting the creature for exploitation purposes than he is concerned over the space race with the Soviets. There are also elements of religious allegory ("We're created in the Lord's image. You don't think that's what the Lord looks like, do you?").

Del Toro saw "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" on TV at 7 years old and it changed his life. Wishing a different ending for it in which the Gill Man and co-star Julie Adams would consummate their romance and live 'happily ever after', he wrote various scripts of a remake through the years that Universal studio executives wound up rejecting. "The Shape of Water" is the result of del Toro's dream, and now today, with more permissive filmmaking allowable, he's able to deal with the previously verboten issue between fish and human. The resulting film is a worthy accomplishment not only for its production design (embodying various shades of green) and its special effects, but also for attaining the level of a genuine adult fairy tale that deals with issues of trust, tolerance, and love in the human condition -- but most of all what it's like to be an outsider (whether a lonely mute woman, gay man, overweight black woman, or an amphibious sea creature). "This is a healing movie for me," del Toro states; one likes to think it would be for viewers as well.

Rarely do I see a clear 'winner' of 'the worst film of the year' because I manage to avoid so many beforehand. However 2017 brought us a film worthy of that 'honor': It's the new "Mummy" rehash with Tom Cruise -- the most incompetent, mindless, brain-numbingly god-awful pretense of a movie experience I have seen in a decade or more. Directed as if he didn't even know what his own film was about, Alex Kurtzman has set a new standard of pointless action nonsense, attaining not a single minute of interest as frenzied drug-induced creatures dart into the camera like jack-in-the-box zombies while a bored-silly Sofia Boutella plays a third-rate Cleopatra turned goth. All the filmmakers connected with this turkey should be permanently sealed in a mummy case, or just have to sit through this film even once, a worse punishment.

Here is a true story: as the end credits of this smelleroo began to crawl up the screen, I actually stood up, faced the audience, and shouted out in anger, "This is by far the biggest piece of (expletive) I have seen in a movie theater in years!" No one dissented and a few applauded. Do you know how bad a film has to be for me, usually a somewhat gentle soul, to resort to something like this in public?

I could go on and on about how rotten this celluloid piece of baloney was, but why? This would just waste your time and mine. But maybe the saddest thing about this moronic "Mummy" was Russell Crowe posturing some silly Jekyll and Hyde caricature without an ounce of sincerity or credibility, evincing an embarrassed expression on his face as if he didn't want to be recognized. Considering his beyond-awful performance here (as well as his Javert in the elephantine stinker of 2012, "Les Miserables"), this once great actor seems to have made a decision to gut his entire career. What's next on Crowe's filmography: an amateur nudie flick? But take it from me; this stinker gives new meaning to the Curse of the Pharaohs. Avoid this bomb as you would the flu.

Of all the films in 2017, the biggest disappointment to me was Christopher Nolan's over-packaged and over-publicized "Dunkirk", a film with aspirations of grandeur that ended up delivering a narrative mishmash that completely lacked emotional involvement.

My guess is that the film, displaying choppy editing and confusing transitions, might have been the compromised result of its filmmakers changing their minds while frantically trying to mold it into something cohesive. Watching it, at times I didn't even know where I was supposed to be, and at one point I turned to a friend who had accompanied me and asked, "why is it night here?" without realizing until later we had been seemingly in the hold of a ship. Moreover, it seemed an attempt was made to cover the narrative weakness by having actor Kenneth Branaugh stand around and deliver hackneyed lines (written by director Nolan himself) to take the place of dramatic action, scenes that seemed phoned in from another movie. But a more surprising weakness was the failure of the flying scenes to work up much excitement. Why its aviation scenes were so timidly done and so lacking in intensity, even in 70mm, astounds me still.

Finally, when the end credits came up on "Dunkirk", due to its need for more 'fleshing out' and clarity of focus, I felt I had experienced merely the outline of a movie instead of a completed one. And a war film that seemed to fail at the very simple things that even average war films used to achieve with ease.

Neither a conventional ghost story nor a horror film, "A Ghost Story" was shot on a very low budget as a secret project by a young Dallas-born writer/cinematographer/editor/director David Lowery before becoming a surprise hit at various film festivals.

Telling the story of a recently deceased musician who returns to his suburban home to try to reconnect with his grieving wife, the film is not even remotely scary, but actually is a heartbreaking romance described by one critic as "a singular exploration of legacy, love, loss and the enormity of existence." Rooney Mara plays the young widow (with a penchant for eating an entire pie), and Casey Affleck, fresh from his Oscar winning role in last year's "Manchester by the Sea", plays the ghost, and this minimalist short feature, with little dialogue and even less physical action, manages to move viewers in ways that are totally unexpected.

There are no elaborate effects for the ghost - in fact, he is portrayed merely as a sheet with holes for eyes - but the film has real emotional power through its subtlety and deep portrayal of loneliness. Lowery achieves with simple means what so many more famous directors with large budgets try and fail at.

Doug Liman's entertaining "American Made" tells the somewhat true story of Barry Seal, a former TWA pilot, who, during the 1980's, was 'coerced' into flying spy missions for the CIA before becoming a drug smuggler for a Colombian drug cartel. Then, to avoid prison, he becomes an informant for the DEA, and winds up slipping further and further into a complex web of nefarious enterprises that makes it virtually impossible for him to get out of.

Playing Seal with a flippant sarcasm, Tom Cruise displays the multi-leveled range of a superior character actor, but what really makes this film work is Liman's tightrope-balancing act between outrageous humor and the serious, even dangerous, reality of Seal's situation. In fact, the film brings to mind the best of Martin Scorsese's work, e.g., "Goodfellas", or, more precisely, Scorsese's less accomplished "Wolf of Wall Street". Particularly notable is the film's digital photography that employs an exaggerated sun-drenched color saturation to the point of comic-book surrealism.

Although taking liberty with the facts (Seal did not crash-land into a suburban neighborhood), this is a cinematic ride that ranks with the best action thrillers of recent years. And how it eventually leads into the Iran-Contra criminal escapades of the Reagan Administration in 1986 should provide an eye-opening history lesson to viewers who may not know much about that shady era in American history. (Interesting trivia: Cruise actually does his own flying in the film.) A first-rate entertainment, and Liman's career best.

Iconoclastic Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has followed up last year's dark comic gem, "The Lobster", with another audacious film that bears his twisted mark on every frame: "The Killing of a Sacred Deer", its title drawn from a line in the Greek play, Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides.

Its story begins rather conventionally before veering off into the bizarre: A skilled cardiac surgeon seemingly befriends a strange teenage boy and introduces him to his family. The boy named Martin seems to have some form of a neurological disorder, and gradually we discover his connection to the surgeon and the threat he brings to the entire family. Colin Farrell plays the surgeon, Nicole Kidman his wife, but it is Barry Keoghan who takes center stage to the drama, playing the intruding boy with a perceptible mental unbalance that grows more sinister as the film goes on.

Relying more on the tenants of psychological horror than the societal satire and the Kafkaesque fable of "The Lobster", "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" is a masterpiece of the absurd, its every frame showing the influence of Stanley Kubrick at his most pristine with its pure cold visuals and precise razor-sharp cutting. It won best screenplay at Cannes, but it is Lanthimos' perfect compositions and subdued anger that reaches out of the screen and shakes the viewers' sensibilities that defines it. Disturbing on different levels and perhaps inevitably unpleasant to some, it is a film that will rivet you to your seat until its provocative conclusion, one that could have you thinking about it for days after.

My favorite film of 2008 was "In Bruges", the directing debut of Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, and now McDonagh furthers his art with his third film, "Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri", a sort of dark comic crime film that is really a complex character study of a disgruntled mother upset at a town's failure to solve the murder of her teenage daughter to the point she rents three billboards outside the town to call attention to the unsolved murder. Frances McDormand plays the grieving divorced mother, Mildred Hayes, in a performance that might even surpass her Oscar-winning role in the Coen Brothers' 1996 "Fargo". She's cynical, angry at the core, street-smart while flawed, and her inner journey is rightly the film's main focus. But she isn't the only character sketch that fascinates in this film. Two other characters display important moral arcs: the town sheriff Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson, surprisingly the most likeable) and, most significantly, Officer Dixon (a career best performance by Sam Rockwell that seems the film's most memorable).

The movie's brilliant wit and marvelous interactive dialogue is matched by McDonagh's handling of the actors and control of the visual style, while keeping the humanity of the characters at the forefront as he deftly manages to circumvent the clichés always found in these kind of movies. Highly recommended as a remarkably composed portrait of small town America, it sends viewers out of the theater to contemplate moral questions concerning justice, revenge, anger and forgiveness. It is one of the year's most entertaining movies.

Going further in the unconventional department, "mother!" is many viewers' cup of hemlock, and without question 2017's most revolutionary, and perhaps offensive, film. Unfortunately I cannot say much without spoiling the whole thing so I need to skirt around its plot and, even more carefully, its meaning. Perhaps one might label it a psychological horror film but that is so inadequate since, as its 'meaning' becomes clear (if the viewer ever does figure it out), it truly becomes something else.

Directed at high intensity by the formidable Darren Aronofsky (whose previous best was probably 2008's "The Wrestler", though "mother!" more resembles his earlier nightmare, "Requiem of a Dream"), its basic plot follows a young nameless woman (Jennifer Lawrence) who seems to have a tranquil life with her husband (also unnamed, played by Javier Bardem) until their country home is disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious couple (Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer). They are also unnamed. The film proceeds slowly at first - almost exclusively from the woman's point of view - gathering pitch until all hell breaks out, and we are truly in the world of Hieronymus Bosch, although 'earthly delights' will not be forthcoming. I loved every minute of this nightmare, god help me, but most of all when the pieces began to come together after my second viewing, something which some viewers might feel t'would constitute a medieval torture far worse than being drawn and quartered. Without being able to detail it any further, I want to emphasize how important this film is as a work of art and how, if strong stomach permits, you really need to give it multiple viewings.

Praised around the world by many critics, it was also booed at its premiere at the 74th Venice Film Festival (along with a strong standing ovation). Although misanthrope critic Rex Reed gave the film 'zero stars', many acclaimed it, most notably filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who ecstatically raved, "Only a true, passionate filmmaker could have made this picture, which I'm still experiencing weeks after I saw it." Brilliant in every way, and a masterpiece of surrealism, Dadaism, radicalism and Lewis Carroll-ism. And if you see it and manage to unlock its levels of meaning and the impact of it starts to seep into your consciousness, you might need to lie down on your local psychiatrist's couch.

Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, "The Square" is a Swedish satirical drama about a curator of a Stockholm art museum who gets into controversial and bizarre happenstances over the promotion of a new art piece called The Square that boasts itself as some sort of sanctuary representing trust and equality. Directed by the idiosyncratic Ruben Östlund (who gave us "Force Majeure" in 2014), this time he pulls out all the stops to produce an unconventional, disturbing, even rebellious episodic homage to human foibles and the chaos of existence, almost as if Bunuel had made "La Dolce Vita".

Denigrated for its inconsistency and lack of cohesiveness, it actually should be praised for those very qualities as bringing together its incongruous parts somewhat serves as its raison d'être as well as its charm. Episodes are built around comical if disturbing events such as the curator's losing his cell phone and his subsequent attempt to retrieve it that balloons into a huge chaotic melee with racist and class-centered overtones. Others center on a deliberately uncomfortable sex scene with a peevish, vengeful publicist (played by Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss) who cohabits with a chimpanzee in her apartment; the art exhibit's advertising agency's promotion which draws the ire of religious organizations and turns into a nightmare; a hilariously embarrassing scene of a man with Tourette's syndrome arbitrarily interrupting an academic lecture; and - most outlandish of all - the culminating sequence in which an American actor imitating an ape totally decimates a formal banquet with lewd behavior, a scene that employed 300 extras and builds to a chaos reminiscent of Nathanael West's Day of the Locust.

A biting example of audacious cinema, its only wrong note is the scene near the end when the curator records a video apology on his smart phone expressing some interpretation (better to leave possible meanings unstated), but those who go with the film, experiencing its various sequences without looking for meaning, will find a marvelously entertaining experience that has few forerunners in cinema history beyond the esoteric absurdist films of fellow Swede Roy Andersson (e.g., his 2000 satire "Songs from the Second Floor") and modernist works by Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier. One of the most original and brilliant films of 2017, but one that, I must admit, won't be everyone's cup of tea.

Perfection in cinematic form is rarely achieved, even in the greatest of films, but one that comes close is Paul Thomas Anderson's "Phantom Thread", the story of a fictional renowned fashion designer in London in the mid-1950s who finds his muse in the body of a clumsy, lower class immigrant girl (who might have been a Jewish refugee from the Nazis). Daniel Day-Lewis plays the obdurate couturier Reynolds Woodcock; Vicky Krieps, the muse Alma; and Lesley Manville, Reynolds' sister and manager Cyril - the three characters comprise the trio of 'instruments' of P.T. Anderson's cinematic chamber film in which every composition, every camera movement, every character nuance is marked by his superior directorial control.

The acting of the three stars is incomparable, each perfectly matched to play off each other - sometimes in harmony, sometimes in extreme dissonance - and this may be the finest performance of Day-Lewis's career, even considering his "Lincoln' of 2012. But it is Anderson who controls the film with utter mastery, his camera lovingly focusing on close-ups of colored threads guided through lace and thick fabrics, gliding sensuously over luxurious dresses, traveling through the many ornate rooms of the House of Woodcock. Anderson not only directed, he co-wrote the script over several years with Daniel Day-Lewis, and even served as his own cameraman (uncredited). Actually a precise cinematic allegory of the romantic relationship paradigm, the film often echoes Hitchcock ("Vertigo", "Rebecca", even "Psycho") in its portrayal of an obsessive love that serves as a direct metaphor for the forming of a romantic bond with another, yet it also reaches into the rich baroque luxuriousness of Max Ophüls. How much does one have to give up in a relationship? How does one balance a personal creative calling with another's needs? Do we always "hurt the one we love?" Clichés are both encompassed and transcended in "Phantom Thread", one of the most intimate, insightful and stylish films of recent years.

P.T. Anderson himself operates uncompromisingly here, using every filmmaking technique on a creatively heightened level, and in the service of his own personal art. Even Jonny Greenwood's opulent score with its twisting piano chords and rapidly-moving strings conveying hallucinatory neuroticism with ghostly melancholy occasionally runs simpatico with the characters, but sometimes intriguingly counter to the image, conveying relationship disharmony, becoming an emotional synthesis for the moment. In future years there is no doubt this film's reputation will tower. This is the film Anderson has been working towards his whole career, and, so far, his masterpiece.

It was the long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott's 1982 science fiction classic, "Blade Runner" that grabbed me unlike any other film in 2017. As I accumulated four theatrical sojourns watching "Blade Runner 2049" I found a deeper and richer experience with each viewing, one that, to me, even surpassed the original as serious art. The reason for this was undoubtedly due to Scott entrusting the renowned Canadian director, Denis Villeneuve (who had made "Incendies", "Prisoners", "Sicario" and the previous year's "Arrival") when making his version to honor the original film's world and philosophical themes while laying claim to his own poetic vision and personal style.

Taking place 30 years after Deckard and Rachael had emerged from the elevator to leave the smog and overpopulation of 2019 Los Angeles, this new film follows a recent model replicant (with a normal human lifespan) called 'K' (played perfectly by an appropriately imperturbable Ryan Gosling) as he investigates a growing uprising when he unearths the remains of a once-pregnant replicant, something that leads him not only into mysterious territory in which he discovers the now reclusive Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford in one of his most nuanced performances), but also leads him through a journey into his own identity. Darker and more sparse than the original, "Blade Runner 2049" dives into a more nihilistic milieu where the earth's digital and technological systems have been wiped out from an ecological disaster known as the Blackout, and the air and water have become toxic, plants and animals have gone extinct, and there has been mass migration to urban centers with the rich moving to off-world colonies. Even sunlight is only visible through thick layers of smog and clouds, and various cities like San Diego have become large garbage disposal areas. Villeneuve, now at the peak of his directorial powers, moves us inexorably throughout this elaborately-detailed world for a full 164 minutes, something for which the film's cynical detractors have criticized, but I praise him for having the courage to allow its story to develop in a carefully measured fashion, taking the time to allow its willing and patient viewers to be engulfed into its world view. I liken it to turning over one's self to the listening of a Wagner opera like "Parsifal" in which time seems to stop as one is encompassed completely by another place, another time -- and after its long viewing I seemed to awaken as if having submitted to a dream, emerging somewhat reborn and more enlightened with knowledge of the human experience. And that is what this and the original film are really about. Underneath its marvelously detailed science fiction trappings with its state-of-the-art production design and special effects (often eschewing CGI for authentically-constructed sets and realistic miniatures), and heightened to a level of unmatched beauty by the cinematography of Roger Deakins, the film is really a thoughtful meditation on what makes us human.

Paris-born François Ozon is a filmmaker who has made a number of radical films in the French "New Wave" movement (a few shocking, some even salacious), probably the most popular being "Swimming Pool" in 2003. During the last few years this challenging filmmaker has begun to display a maturing without shedding his 'edge', reaching his artistic zenith in "In the House", one of 2012's finest films, but now "Frantz" may be his chef-d'oeuvre. Made just as Ozon was approaching 50, it displays not just maturity of the artist but a refinement, perhaps even a mellowing. Of course, the source material may have had something to do with it as it is loosely based on the 1932 Ernst Lubitsch Hollywood film, "Broken Lullaby". Set in a small town in Germany just after the end of World War I, the story deals with a young German woman (sensitively played by Paula Beer) who's fiancé had been killed in the war and the remorse felt by the French soldier (Pierre Niney) who killed him, but Ozon's visual style, patterned after Edouard Manet's painting, Le Suicidé, displays a sublime beauty of texture immeasurably aided by Ozon's decision to combine pristine black and white cinematography with muted color sequences. The result is a bittersweet love story conveying deep sorrow in every scene that provides an emotional experience that is almost an anomaly for the usually cynical Ozon. Praised throughout the world, especially for its cinematography by Pascal Marti, this is a film worth seeking out, even if somewhat conservative for such a celebrated French enfant terriblé.

One of 2017's most charming films is Sean Baker's "The Florida Project" which tells of a rambunctious six-year-old little girl named Moonee who lives with her single mom in a seedy budget motel on the outskirts of Disney World. Her rebellious mother exists partly on welfare, partly on selling stolen goods and, when necessary, on casual prostitution, and although her love for her daughter is sincere and unyielding, she is unwittingly unfit.

Willem Dafoe is superb in the role of the conscientious if caring motel manage of the sleazy Magic Castile motel, but even more amazing is Brooklynn Prince as the precocious child, the film's most astonishing acting discovery. Particularly praiseworthy is how the film is told from the children's viewpoints and its parallel point of view of the mother's -- and no matter how indigent, deficient and even precarious Mooney's daily life remains, the film's main emphasis is the joy she and her mischievous friends have in living their carefree lives just being children, as they carouse the area raising hell with the motel's inhabitants. This beguiling film, wonderfully meandering in its story telling, is a glorious tribute to childhood. It also serves as an important societal examination of single parenting in our desperate and sometimes hopeless American life.