My favourite films of 2017: #40-31

Will Poulter played a racist cop in Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit

Living in the UK and coming up with a favourite movies of the year list is always tricky because our theatrical release schedule is slightly out of sync with that of a great many other countries, especially the USA. This means the likes of Moonlight, La La Land, and Manchester By The Sea were all last year's films in other territories, but were not released in the UK until 2017. I realise including them here may seem odd to some, not to mention a little behind the curve, but sometimes you have to play the hand you're dealt. The vagaries of UK release schedules also mean I won't be including the likes of The Shape Of Water, Downsizing, or BPM (Beats Per Minute) here because, even though I've seen them, they aren't opening in this country until 2018.

Although none of them made the final 40, in a slight change to previous years, new films released on Netflix and Amazon Prime, as well as those that went straight to Blu-ray or DVD, were also eligible for inclusion here.

I've seen a bum-numbing 238 new films over the last 12 months - everything from Blade Runner 2049 on a massive IMAX screen on Leicester Square to a little-known French oddity like Ava, hidden away on streaming service MUBI. Of all those films, these are the ones that emerged as my favourites, movies I suspect will stay with me for many years to come. The top 10 is ridiculously strong this year with any one of the top five or six titles good enough to have been my #1...

40. Colossal
Director: Nacho Vigalondo  UK release date: 19 May
Alcoholic Gloria (Anne Hathaway) realises she is psychically linked to a monster rampaging through South Korea in this odd and highly original indie flick. Cut through the Kaiju hijinks, though, and Vigalondo's film is really about the affect self-destructive behaviour can have on those around you. Jason Sudeikis provides the toxic masculinity to give things an extra kick.

39. My Life As A Courgette
Director: Claude Barras  UK release date: 2 June
Beautifully-realised animation from France about a young boy - the titular Courgette - sent to a children's home after the death of his alcoholic mother. Barras's film (with a screenplay by Girlhood's Céline Schiamma) handles some incredibly heavy issues with sensitivity, warmth and winning humour. Lovely.

38. Frantz
Director: François Ozon  UK release date: 12 May
Haunting post-WWI drama from prolific French director Ozon (The New Girlfriend). A young German woman (Paula Beer), still in mourning for her dead fiancé, meets a mysterious Frenchman (Adrien Rivoire) at his grave. He has a devastating secret and the way Ozon handles that revelation and its consequences is never less than utterly compelling.

37. David Lynch: The Art Life

Directors: Jon Nguyen, Rick Barfnes, & Olivia Neergaard-Holm  UK release date: 14 July
The extraordinary return of Twin Peaks may have grabbed most of the Lynch-related headlines in 2017, but this intimate documentary goes right back to the start, providing as it does a unique window into the director's family history and the evolution of his relationship with the visual arts (painting and installation as well as film). Fascinating and illuminating.

36. The Death Of Stalin
Director: Armando Iannucci  UK release date: 20 October
Foul-mouthed humour and the horror of Stalinist Russia make oddly agreeable bedfellows in Iannucci's follow-up to In The Loop. When the Russian dictator pops his clogs, his fractious band of lieutenants, including Steve Buscemi's Nikita Khrushchev and Jeffrey Tambor's Georgy Malenkov, scheme to replace him as supreme leader. Bleak but bloody funny.

35. Beach Rats

Director: Eliza Hittman  UK release date: 24 November
In what will surely be a star-making role, Brit Harris Dickinson plays Frankie, a troubled Brooklyn teen experimenting with drugs and hooking up with older men on the Net, as he struggles to come to terms with his sexuality. Hittman's film has similarities with Moonlight in its frank exploration of masculinity, but is absorbing enough to succeed on its own terms.

34. Suntan
Director: Argyris Papadimitropoulos  UK release date: 28 April
Unsettling drama about an emotionally disturbed doctor (the excellent Makis Papadimitriou) on a small Greek island falling in love with a beautiful young tourist initially happy to play along with his obsession. An odd but satisfying mix of pitch-black humour with deluded middle-aged men in its sights, and sheer, unadulterated creepiness. 

33. Happy End
Director: Michael Haneke  UK release date: 1 December
If the humour here were any blacker, they'd send miners underground to dig it up to burn as fuel. This time the German filmmaker focuses on the innumerable travails of the Calais-based Laurent family, a fractious, bourgeois bunch whose self-inflicted woes he picks apart with forensic glee. Veteran Jean-Louis Trintignant is superb as the suicidal patriarch. 

32. Detroit

Director: Kathryn Bigelow  UK release date: 25 August
Set amidst the chaos of 1967's Detroit riots, Bigelow's problematic but pulsating drama concentrates on a notorious incident in which racist police officers terrorised guests at a motel, after reports of gunfire on the premises. John Boyega and Will Poulter are both superb but the film belongs to Algee Smith's affecting turn as R&B singer Larry Reed.

31. Prevenge
Director: Alice Lowe  UK release date: 10 February
Director/writer/star Lowe makes the tricky art of comedy-horror look easy in her filmmaking debut, famously shot when she was seven months' pregnant. She plays Ruth, newly widowed and bearing a child that exhorts her to take bloody revenge on those responsible for her partner's death. As funny as it is joyously grisly. 

**Up next: #30-21**

My 25 favourite films of 2017 so far: Part Two #10-1

After yesterday's appetiser, here's the main course - my top 10 favourite films of the year so far. To be considered, movies had to have been released into UK cinemas between 1 January and 30 June 2017. Releases exclusive to VOD, Blu-ray and DVD did not qualify for inclusion.

10. Prevenge
Director: Alice Lowe UK release date: 10 February
Director/writer/star Lowe makes the tricky art of comedy-horror look easy in her filmmaking debut, shot when she was seven months' pregnant. She plays Ruth, newly widowed and bearing a child that exhorts her to take bloody revenge on those responsible for her partner's death. Yes, it's funny (Lowe earned her comedy chops on the likes of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, so how could it not be?) but Prevenge is also joyously grisly, at times channelling the likes of Rosemary's Baby and Andrzej Zulawski's deranged Possession to great effect. I can't wait to see what she does next. 

9. I Am Not Your Negro
Director: Raoul Peck UK release date: 7 April

Narrated by Samuel L Jackson, Peck's fascinating documentary about black novelist, playwright, poet and activist James Baldwin focusses mainly on an unfinished book - Remember This House - which was to feature his memories of three great black American leaders: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, as well as ruminations on US history. Baldwin - a startlingly brilliant orator and formidable intellect - knew all three men well and stood by horrified as one by one they met violent ends during the 1960s. As a result there's a mixture of anger and sadness in Peck's film, feelings perfectly articulated in Baldwin's oratory, particularly lines such as: "The story of the negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story." Bringing Baldwin's writing bang up to date, Peck shows us how that story hasn't got any prettier.

8. Personal Shopper

Director: Olivier Assayas UK release date: 17 March
Kristin Stewart reunites with Clouds Of Sils Maria director Assayas for this strange and horror-inflected meditation on grief and loneliness. Stewart is an American living in Paris and working as a general dog's body for a ghastly celebrity model. She is also a medium, desperate to make contact with the spirit of her dead twin brother, who has passed away following a heart attack (she shares his condition). A lengthy scene in which Stewart goes to London and back again on Eurostar, all the while exchanging texts with a mysterious person or entity, is Assayas at his most playful and audacious. 

7. La La Land

Director: Damien Chazelle UK release date: 13 January

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone can't sing or dance like Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds but this musical love letter to old Hollywood, romance and jazz is utterly charming. Gosling's a struggling pianist, Stone an unloved actress, but the pair's passion for each other acts as rocket fuel for their ambition and self-belief, much improving their career fortunes even as the relationship founders. Yes, it's corny and whilst Gosling and Stone certainly have chemistry, their actual relationship is oddly chaste. That said, the song and dance numbers are mostly terrific (especially the opener, Another Day Of Sun), and Chazelle serves up a bravura ending a million miles from the saccharine-fest I was expecting.

6. Get Out
Director: Jordan Peele UK release date: 17 March

Anyone who only knows US comedian Peele from his part in last year's limp cat comedy, Keanu, is likely to be knocked out of their seat by this whip-smart combination of horror and satire that has its sights firmly trained on the notion that, since Obama, America is a post-racial society. British actor Daniel Kaluuya is in a mixed race relationship with his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) and one weekend she takes him to meet her moneyed, progressive parents at their remote country estate. They're initially friendly but clearly uncomfortable in his presence and that soon gives way to something far more sinister. Peele (previously best known in the US for the Key & Peele sketch show) puts liberal white America under the microscope and really doesn't like what he sees there.

5. Raw
Director: Julia Ducournau UK release date: 7 April

"Visceral" is a word thrown around by film critics to describe any bit of old tat with some violence in it these days. It's a word that has lost its power through repetition but one that nevertheless fits this extraordinary French cannibal film like a bloodied glove. A teenage vegetarian (Garance Marillier) is made to eat a rabbit heart as part of her initiation at a veterinary college and soon develops a taste for meat, including the human variety. Ducournau's unsparing film can be viewed as a straight-no-chaser horror flick or a coming of age yarn about a young woman transitioning into dog-eat-dog adulthood, but it adroitly juggles many other themes too, including sexual awakening, teenage rebellion, and sibling rivalry.  

4. Moonlight
Director: Barry Jenkins UK release date: 17 February
Jenkins' Best Picture Oscar winner is probably too subtle for its good at times and it certainly took me a couple of watches before his movie's considerable charms inveigled their way into my heart. But, once you get past those early doubts, Moonlight is a beautifully judged and entirely powerful piece of work boasting great performances (especially Naomie Harris, Mahershala Ali, and Alex R Hibbert) and superb storytelling. It follows the same character, Chiron, at three different stages of his life as he strives to come to terms with his difficult upbringing and also with his sexuality. It's a delicate, low-key film, and I was therefore astonished - but delighted - the Academy gave it the nod over La La Land.

3. The Handmaiden
Director: Park Chan-wook UK release date: 14 April
Sumptuous adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel, The Fingersmith, which relocates the action from Victorian England to 1930s Korea. As part of a criminal scheme, a young pickpocket (Kim Tae-ri), is sent to work for a Japanese heiress (Kim Min-hee) betrothed to her repulsive uncle (Cho Jin-woong). Instead of fleecing her employer, however, she falls in love with her and the two commence an affair. The Handmaiden is all about deception - during the film's three separate chapters, it time and again picks the pocket of your expectations. Park deliberately withholds information and skews perspectives, making for a discombobulating ride that keeps you on your toes every step of the way.

2. Manchester By The Sea
Director: Kenneth Lonergan UK release date: 13 January
Excoriating, heart-rending drama starring Best Actor Oscar winner Casey Affleck as a grief-stricken janitor returning home to the titular Massachusetts seaside town following the death of his older brother. There he has to confront a terrible secret from his past whilst struggling to forge a path into a more hopeful future. Director Lonergan's sharp script balances the bleakness with occasional stabs of wry humour, Michelle Williams is dependably superb in a supporting role and Affleck turns in one of 21st Century Hollywood's great performances. You'll cry, you'll laugh, you'll cry some more. You'll carry on crying until you realise everyone in the cinema is looking at you...

1. Elle
Director: Paul Verhoeven UK release date: 10 March
An outrageous and audacious revenge fantasy of sorts which sees Isabelle Huppert's icy video game executive raped in her Paris apartment before commencing a strange and erotically-charged game of cat and mouse with her attacker. It's an incredibly divisive film that no one seems to entirely agree upon. Is it suggesting that women secretly like sexual violence? Or is it an anti-rape statement skewering the male need to subjugate difficult, powerful women? On the surface, Elle is only a short walk away from the likes of Basic Instinct (director Verhoeven's 1992 potboiler starring Sharon Stone) but it's a far more complex and rewarding work than that, helped enormously by Huppert's total immersion in one of modern cinema's most unreadable characters. Oh and, SPOILER ALERT, I think she knows who her attacker is from the moment she first lays eyes on him.

Finally, a few mid-year awards...
Best straight to VOD/DVD/streaming film: Macon Blair's I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore on Netflix.
Most pleasant surprise: Matt Damon is miscast as a grizzled mercenary and the quality of the CGI is variable but The Great Wall gives good blockbuster. 
Tip for the top: Julia Ducournau, the director of Raw (see #5), is going to be HUGE.
Worst film: Take your pick from Assassin's Creed or Power Rangers (although I'm yet to see Transformers: The Last Knight).
Biggest disappointment: Edgar Wright's Baby Driver is a lot of fun but hardly worth all those five-star reviews. See also Toni Erdmann.
Most ill-advised acting choice: Jake Gyllenhaal as a grotesque Aussie TV animal-wrangler in Okja. Ruined the whole film and reminded me of Robert De Niro's similarly OTT turn in The Adventures Of Rocky & Bullwinkle. Not a good look, mate. 
Wish for the rest of the year: That adult fans of comic-book movies finally start to engage their critical faculties and stop declaring every bit of super-powered tat that comes their way  "awesome" or "amazing".

Prevenge: Alice Lowe's directorial debut is a blood-soaked, laugh-packed delight

Lowe on a high: Alice's directorial debut is a cut above

Please note: Review contains mild spoilers

Prevenge
Director: Alice Lowe
Starring: Alice Lowe, Jo Hartley, Kayvan Novak
Running time: 88 minutes

The world needs another revenge movie like it needs a head-on collision with an asteroid, and another slasher flick even less so. But if Prevenge doesn't sound particularly promising on paper, in reality it soars.

Writer/director/star Alice Lowe famously completed the screenplay in a fortnight and shot the film in 11 days spread over three weeks, all whilst seven months pregnant. She plays Ruth, a mother-to-be whose partner has been killed in a climbing accident. Now, big kitchen knife in hand, she's out to get even with all those she blames for his demise. Or, rather, Ruth may be doing the actual murders but it's the inhabitant of her womb who is pulling the strings - urging on his/her mother in a scary little alien voice, only we and Ruth can hear, to take bigger risks and commit ever-more violent acts.

Lowe has been an increasingly essential presence in British comedy for the last dozen or so years - whether it's TV work such as Garth Merenghi's Dark Place and Horrible Histories, or movies such as Sightseers (which she co-wrote) and the underrated Black Mountain Poets. She has a perfect comedy face - eyes that go from sorrowful to psycho in a flash, a downturned mouth that encapsulates a certain British discontent, and a magnificent chin. It's all topped off by that West Midlands burr - an accent that is pretty much comic gold all on its own (it's okay for me to say that, I was born just down the road from Lowe's hometown, Coventry). Prevenge, though, is the point at which she goes from cultish character actor and gifted screenwriter to a genuine player. Expect her now to be linked with all manner of dreadful Hollywood horror sequel but I suspect - and hope - she'll continue to do her own thing.

Over the last few years, the horror/comedy bar has been lifted again and again by movies like What We Do In The Shadows and Tucker And Dale vs Evil, plus TV shows such as the BBC's Inside No.9 and Netflix's recent Santa Clarita Diet. The days of Lesbian Vampire Killers and half-arsed Fright Night remakes, starring former Doctor Whos, are mercifully long gone. What those behind the good stuff understand - and Lowe gets spot-on - is that genuine horror (guts, gore, suspense, chills, and atmosphere) has to be as high in the mix as the gags and the slapstick. Having a killer electronic soundtrack helps, and Prevenge comes packing one of those, too.

Child's play: Ruth's unborn baby urges her to kill

Initially, the killings are played for laughs as our up-the-duff slasher goes about her bloody work. These include the slaughter of a sleazy seller of exotic animals, a flint-hearted office manager, and a cocksure, middle-aged DJ - Disco Dan - who lives with his mum. Even during these seemingly knockabout moments, though, it's obvious the film's style and tone are informed as much by Dario Argento and John Carpenter as they are by good, old-fashioned British character comedy. The latter scene set in Disco Dan's flat is one of the strongest in the film, not just because it's very funny, but because it's also shocking, bloody and graphic (Ruth doesn't hang about when it's time to get stabby). More than that, Lowe even manages to show us a gentler side of her protagonist here, as she not only helps her victim's dementia-afflicted mother back to bed but puts her washing on, too. We like Ruth, even sympathise with her... apart from all the killings and that.

Lowe's script is satisfyingly economical (at 88 minutes, so is the film). She doesn't waste a word nor any of our time spelling out plot points that are obvious if you just think about them for a second. Better yet, the jokes (and there are many) are never over-egged and her characters are all fully formed (albeit short-lived). The ensemble Lowe has gathered about her contribute enormously and are practically a who's who of under-appreciated British acting talent, including Kate Dickie (The Witch), Kayvan Novak (Fonejacker), Tom Davis (Murder In Successville), Jo Hartley (David Brent: Life On The Road), and Dan Renton Skinner (aka Angelos Epithemiou). All of them have that 'haven't I seen you before somewhere?' quality and more than make the most of their limited screen time.

Scream queen: Alice Lowe writes, directs and stars in Prevenge

As the film proceeds, Ruth becomes increasingly ill at ease with what she is being bidden to do by the tiny sociopath in her womb, especially when one intended victim is actually kind to her. You also start to get the distinct impression that not all is as it seems, and wonder what significance the old black and white film to which she keeps returning - 1934's Crime Without Passion - might have (quite a bit, is the answer). Slowly but surely, Lowe is setting up what becomes Prevenge's masterstroke: an expertly executed thematic switch towards the end. What begins as a loud, lairy and gloriously unsubtle exploration of an expectant mother's fear that her body is no longer her own, actually ends up as more a meditation on the corrosive nature of grief and betrayal. Amidst the murder and mayhem, Prevenge is quite poignant.

Lowe's film is impressive for its restraint. There must have been a temptation to up the amount of story content - maybe add a subplot in which the police, or a crime reporter, are hot on Ruth's trail, leading to a big climactic confrontation. But Prevenge clearly isn't intended to be that movie - if anything, it's a character study of a woman teetering on the edge of mental and emotional oblivion and its simplicity is the key to its success in many ways.

It's towards her movie's climax that Lowe starts to show off a visual flair, and really grow into her role as director. Ruth dresses up as a hellish geisha to attend a Halloween fancy-dress party and walks across the city (Prevenge was filmed in Cardiff) to her destination, encountering other costumed horrors along the way. Shot mostly from her, first-person, perspective, it has a dream-like quality, as if Ruth is having an out-of-body experience and has finally had all control of her actions wrested away. The blurry, impressionistic, whirl of out-of-focus street lights, drunken revellers and foreboding tower blocks brings a distinctly Carpenter-esque unease to proceedings. (Her nod, in an earlier scene, to Andrzej Zulawski's utterly bonkers Possession is further proof that she clearly knows her onions when it comes to disquieting movies likely to bring you out in a cold sweat).

Pregnancy is a theme that continues to loom large in the horror movie genre (recent examples including Grace, Devil's Due, Delivery, Proxy, and Inside), but Prevenge brings something a little different to the table - not just black comedy and a penis-lopping scene, but a bit of proper emotional heft, too. Appreciate and cherish Alice Lowe while you still can because, chances are, it's only a matter of time before Hollywood comes calling with an offer to write and direct Paranormal Activity 14: Even More Ghosts 'n' Shit.

Rating: WWW½

Prevenge is in UK cinemas now and released on DVD/Blu-ray on 5 June. In the US, it will be available on the Shudder horror streaming service from 24 March

Ratings
WWWW - Wonderful
WWW - Worthwhile
WW - Watchable
W - Woeful