12/25/2023 0 Comments Good recent movies![]() Writer-director Greta Gerwig made the film as an act of love, not just toward her hometown of Sacramento but also toward girlhood, and toward the feeling of always being on the outside of wherever real life is happening. Lady Bird is a masterful, exquisite coming-of-age comedy starring the great Saoirse Ronan as Christine - or “Lady Bird,” as she’s re-christened herself - and it’s as funny, smart, and filled with yearning as its heroine. ![]() For many who saw it (including me), it felt like a movie made not just for but about me. Lady Bird topped my list almost instantly, and only rose in my estimation on repeated viewings. It makes a case for having faith in the public institutions where ordinary people work - away from the limelight, without trying to score political points - in order to make our communities truly better.Įx Libris will air on PBS in the fall and then be available to cardholders in many library systems across the country via Kanopy. The result is almost hypnotic and, perhaps surprisingly, deeply moving. Wiseman works in the observational mode, which means his films contain no captions, dates, or talking-head interviews: We just see what his camera captured, which in this case includes community meetings, benefit dinners, after-school programs, readings with authors and scholars (including Richard Dawkins and Ta-Nehisi Coates), and NYPL patrons going about their business in the library’s branches all over the city. Ex Libris is his mesmerizing look at the New York Public Library and the many functions it fills, which go far beyond housing books. 9) Columbusįrederick Wiseman is one of the towering giants of nonfiction film, a keen observer of American institutions - ranging from prisons to dance companies to welfare offices - for the past half-century. A Quiet Passion is a portrait, both visual and narrative, of the kind of saint most modern people can understand: one who is certain of her uncertainty, and yearning to walk the path on which her passion and longing meet.Ī Quiet Passion is currently streaming on Amazon Prime and available to digitally rent or purchase on iTunes, Vudu, Amazon, YouTube, and Google Play. Cynthia Nixon plays Emily Dickinson, whose poetry and life is a perfect match for the signature style of director Terence Davies: rich in detail, deeply enigmatic, and weighed down with a kind of sparkling, joy-tinged sorrow. Time slips away in the film almost imperceptibly, and the narrative arc doesn’t yield easily to the viewer. It’s a perplexing and challenging film, crafted without the traditional guardrails that guide most biographical movies - dates, times, major accomplishments, and so on. 21) Star Wars: The Last JediĪ Quiet Passion is technically a biographical film about Emily Dickinson, but it transcends its genre to become something more like poetry. Here are my top 21 films of 2017 and how to watch them at home, with 14 honorable mentions. And it is a keen reminder to me of all the 2017 conversations I’ve had around and at the movies - and the ways I will never be the same. Some of the films on my list have commonalities - ghosts, meditations on memory and interpersonal connection, and women who refuse to behave - but mostly they underscore just how vibrant cinema remains as an art form, even in the midst of massive cultural shifts in the industry and beyond. That’s the feeling I get constructing my list of the best films of 2017, a year that overflowed with great films in every genre, from horror and romantic comedy to documentary and arthouse drama. I think I have.” She meant what most movie critics realize at some point: that reading your past reviews and revisiting the lists of films you liked most during the year reveals not just something about a particular year in cinema, but something about you as well. In the introduction to her review anthology For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies, the legendary film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs.
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