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**

Colossal, The Last Face, and Nocturama: Your Week In Film (September 11-17)

Big fun: Colossal is an unusual and original monster movie

The highs and lows of this week's UK home entertainment releases, on DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD. All films mentioned are available to rent, buy or stream now, unless otherwise stated.

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

Creature features, from the original King Kong down, often contain a subtext that suggests "man is the real monster", but I'm not sure such a notion has ever been spelled out so explicitly or originally as it is in Nacho Vigalondo's Colossal (DVD, Blu-ray, VOD) WWW½. 

Anne Hathaway plays alcoholic Gloria, who, after losing her job and being kicked out by her boyfriend (Dan Stevens), is forced to return from New York to her sleepy hometown. There she reconnects with old school friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) and even gets a job in the bar he owns. At the precise same time Gloria is making her less than triumphant hometown comeback, a monster – or "kaiju", as we nerds call them – starts stomping its way across Seoul, leaving death and destruction in its wake. Gloria quickly realises that she and the creature are linked in some weird way and that she can even control its actions. Things just get stranger and wilder from there...

Of course, Colossal's subtext is screamingly obvious. It is really about the toxic effect Gloria's drunken behaviour has on other people – how her bad choices impact those around her, especially long-suffering boyfriend, Tim. It's about selfishness and depression, about how being drunk all the time makes you a colossal pain in the arse, how your lies compel even those who love you to turn their backs. When inebriated, Gloria is, quite literally, a monster. As it turns out, she isn't the only one. Films about drunks are mostly very, very serious, whether that's Leaving Las Vegas, Clean And Sober or Krisha, but Spanish indie director Vigalondo turns all that on its head to pleasing effect as he expertly mixes comedy, melodrama and action, whilst hitting us with some cleverly worked twists. 

Despite her Oscar success for Les Mis, I've always considered Hathaway a rather underrated actress. Gloria is a deceptively complex character, one who attempts to wear her despair and self-loathing lightly, and Hathaway really nails that dichotomy. I've always had a soft spot for Sudeikis too, even when he's playing insufferable wise ass characters in the middling likes of Horrible Bosses and We're The Millers. He's great here, a study in bullying, boorish, toxic masculinity, the result of unrequited love and small-town frustration.

Upon its theatrical release, some critics suggested Colossal falls apart towards the end but I'm not having any of that. Vigalondo (Timecrimes) smartly raises the stakes, offers up a gratifyingly wacky explanation for Gloria's kaiju connection, and even gives her redemption, as another entity linked to a different character enters the fray as her monster's nemesis. In fact, the only thing I didn't like about the movie is Hathaway's wig, which is every bit as abominable as the creatures menacing Seoul.

Appetite for destruction: Anne Hathaway has a Colossal problem

Nocturama WW½ has arrived on Netflix with precisely the sort of fanfare you'd imagine the streaming service might reserve for a French arthouse film about a terrorist attack on Paris – none whatsoever. I doubt director Bertrand Bonello will mind too much though as the notoriety it has gained in the past year or so guarantees his seventh feature is certain to make a splash. It was snubbed at last year's Cannes (not invited, never mind screened), and that's understandable really as France had suffered the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan atrocities at either end of 2015. Understandably, no one was much in the mood for a rather arch, unknowable movie about blowing people up. Despite that, Nocturama is perhaps the most hotly-debated foreign language film of the past couple of years.

Bonello (Saint Laurent) spends much of the first hour introducing us to a large group of characters – all young, multi-ethnic, and attractive – as they go about their business, riding the Paris subway, passing around mysterious packages, and generally putting things in place for the co-ordinated assault on a number of targets – including a corporate office and a government building – that follows around halfway through. The group – minus a couple who run into trouble – then retire to an opulent Harrod's-style Parisian department store to lie low for 24 hours, before trying to make their escape, as the police close in.

The filmmaker at no stage lets you into his characters' heads – not David's (Finnegan Oldfield), Yacine's (Hamza Meziani), Sabrina's (Manal Issa) nor any of their comrades'. You therefore have precisely no idea what the group's attack is meant to achieve, or in who's interest it has been carried out. None of them call up a newspaper to claim responsibility for it. Moreover, they seemingly have no demands they wish to extract from the French state and none of the group mentions politics or religion – in fact, they don't have much to say at all and barely a single personality between them (getting such oddly "blank" performances from his cast can't have been easy for Bonello). In fact, these are the sort of fresh-faced kids you're more likely to encounter at an undemanding pop concert than on a highly-charged political demo or on their way to an ISIS training camp in Syria. 

Despite being so deliberately opaque, Nocturama has the urgency and tension of a bonafide thriller, even in its meticulous, slow-burn first half, but Bonello leaves you to draw your own conclusions about his characters' motives. Are they lashing out at capitalism, only to be seduced by it later when they reach the department store, with its flash designer clothes and expensive TVs? Are they merely a bunch of bored, mixed-up kids for whom blowing stuff up is just another lifestyle choice? Is Nocturama even about terrorism at all, and is it in fact meant to be more of a scream into the void at the way in which the young are perceived and treated in 21st Century western society? They are required to get jobs they hate, consume "stuff" they don't need, and any rebellion against that will inevitably bring down the full sanction of the state upon them. To be honest, I have no idea, and no one else seems to either, which is, of course, the film's blessing and curse.

Nocturnal animals: Young terrorists launch multiple attacks on Paris

I don't know whether The Last Face (DVD and VOD) W is quite as dreadful as the reviews have suggested (the film currently sits at a derisory five per cent on Rotten Tomatoes), but it's certainly damned close. Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem are doctors – she the head of an international aid agency, he a dashing surgeon – conducting a fraught romance, amidst the murder and mayhem of Liberia's second civil war in 2003.

Actor-turned-director Sean Penn (Into The Wild) occasionally conjures images both haunting and powerful from the violence, and his film exhibits a woozy, dreamlike quality that calls to mind Terrence Malick. Unfortunately, everything else about The Last Face is horribly clumsy and cloyingly earnest. Despite being set in West Africa, not a single black character is granted any agency whatsoever – the Liberians, cast either as victims or savages, are little more than extras in what should be their story. Meanwhile, Jean Reno, Jared Harris and Adèle Exarchopoulos are wasted in nothing supporting roles, the film proceeds at a snail's pace, and some of the dialogue is cringe-making ("She leaks urine, but she's dancing"). It's a well-intentioned but profoundly wrong-headed holiday in other people's misery, from which Bardem and Theron only just about emerge with their dignity intact.

Losing Face: Sean Penn's war drama is a wrong-headed mess

Finally, there's Suntan (Dual format) WWW½, a film I praised back in April when it received a simultaneous cinema and VOD release, and then again in July when it made #20 in my top 25 films of the year so far. It's out as a dual format Blu-ray/DVD this week, the first release from Montage Pictures, a new sub-label from indie distributor Eureka, intended to showcase "ground-breaking and thought-provoking world cinema from new and upcoming directors".

Argyris Papadimitropoulos's film (in Greek with English sub-titles) starts off as an offbeat black comedy about a lonely middle-aged doctor (Makis Papadimitriou's Kostis) relocating from the mainland to one of Greece's resort islands, and struggling to fit in with the locals. As summer comes, he falls in love with a carefree tourist, much younger than himself (Elli Tringou's Anna), and quickly inveigles himself with her friends. Of course, his clumsy infatuation leads to disaster as the movie's tone turns ever darker. It's original, creepy and disturbing, and hopefully indicative of the quality of films Montage will be bringing us in the months to come.

Doctor in trouble: Kostis's infatuation with a young tourist doesn't end well

What I shall be watching this week: I need to catch up a bit this week, so It and Wind River.

My 25 favourite films of 2017 so far: Part One #25-11

The first six months of the year pretty much flew by, didn't they? It doesn't seem like five minutes ago that it was January and I was sat in my local multiplex watching A Monster Calls - my first new movie of 2017. Since then we've had the usual parade of the good, the bad and the downright terrible (I'm looking at you Assassin's Creed). This is Part One of my top 25, with Part Two - featuring my top 10 - following tomorrow. If you see anything you violently disagree with, feel free to let me have it in the comments below...

To qualify for inclusion, films had to have been released into UK cinemas between 1 January-30 June 2017. Just because a film was released in the US or other territory last year doesn't preclude it from inclusion on this list. Movies that went straight to DVD, Blu-ray or VOD (including releases exclusive to Netflix and Amazon Prime) are not eligible for inclusion...

25. Frantz
Director: Francois 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.    

24. Their Finest
Director: Lone Scherfig UK release date: 21 April
Gemma Arterton's best role in years sees her signed up as a screenwriter for Allied propaganda films during WWII. In this sexist milieu, she is assigned the task of writing the 'slop' (i.e. dialogue for women). Suffice to say, she soon shakes things up in an absorbing book adaptation that nicely balances broad comedy and heart-rending drama.

23. 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.

22. Hacksaw Ridge
Director: Mel Gibson UK release date: 27 January
Gibson returned from the Hollywood naughty step with this powerful World War II epic about Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), an army medic and staunch pacifist who refused to take a gun into the hell of Okinawa. Garfield's terrific, while the visceral nature of the battle scenes make his character's point about the horrors of combat better than any dialogue ever could.  

21. Colossal
Director: Nacho Vigalondo UK release date: 19 May
Alcoholic 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.

20. 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.

19. Kong: Skull Island
Director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts UK release date: 9 March

The only blockbuster this year that had me gripped from beginning to end. A weird amalgam of monster movie and war film (Apocalypse Now's influence looms large), it may have wafer-thin characters but more than makes up for that deficiency with some terrific action set-pieces and a kickass Kong.

18. Neruda
Director: Pablo Larrain UK release date: 7 April
Off-kilter but visually sumptuous biopic of the famous Chilean poet, Nobel Prize winner and communist. Luis Gnecco's titular lead becomes a fugitive in his own country during the 1940s as he is pursued by Gael García Bernal's disturbed police officer. Larrain (Jackie) takes all sorts of liberties with real events, while his portrayal of Neruda is enjoyably unflattering.

17. Mindhorn
Director: Sean Foley UK release date: 5 May
Julian Barratt (The Mighty Boosh) is a washed-up former TV detective in this Isle Of Man-set comedy which comes on like a cross between Bergerac and The Six Million Dollar Man. Some critics suggested it petered out before the end but I think the opposite is true - the crazier it gets, the funnier it gets. Sequel, please!

16. T2 Trainspotting
Director: Danny Boyle UK release date: 27 January
Spud, Sick Boy, Begbie and Renton are reunited on Edinburgh's mean streets after 20 years in a nostalgia-soaked meditation on ageing and coming to terms with your past. It's certainly not as good as Boyle's original movie from 1996 but is extremely funny, endlessly entertaining and, ultimately, oddly moving.

15. Certain Women
Director: Kelly Reichardt UK release date: 3 March
The Meek's Cutoff director presents three loosely-linked stories about the lives of four very different women, the best of which sees a naïve young Native American (Lily Gladstone) desperately trying to forge a romantic connection with Kristin Stewart's oblivious teacher. Gorgeous-looking, low-key, and poignant.

14. Free Fire
Director: Ben Wheatley UK release date: 31 March
It turns out a 90-minute shoot-out in a filthy warehouse between two gangs of inept criminals is a hell of a lot better on the big screen than it sounds on paper. Michael Smiley, Sharlto Copley, Brie Larson, and Armie Hammer are all on top form in a violent and riotously funny piece of work that doesn't owe quite as much to Reservoir Dogs as you'd imagine.

13. The Levelling
Director: Hope Dickson Leach UK release date: 12 May
Compellingly dark British drama about a young woman (Ellie Kendrick) returning to her family's farm following the suicide of her younger brother. Director Leach conjures an atmosphere of dread and claustrophobia which is only a hop, skip and a jump away from proper horror. These are helpless people caught in life's vicious crosshairs.

12. Silence
Director: Martin Scorsese UK release date: 1 January
Based on Shûsaku Endô's novel, Silence sees two Catholic missionaries (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) searching for their lost mentor (Liam Neeson) in 17th Century Japan, at a time of great religious persecution. Bloated, self-important and old-fashioned? Maybe, but nobody does heavyweight epic with quite as much pizzazz as the Goodfellas director.

11. Lady Macbeth
Director: William Oldroyd UK release date: 28 April
The title's a warning about what to expect in this merciless Victorian-set drama about a young woman sold to a wealthy landowner as his wife. While he's away, she commences an affair with a stable-hand and, soon emboldened, her thoughts turn to darker matters. A blisteringly bleak meditation on class, race and sex based on the Nikolai Leskov novel.

Your Week In Film will return next week. Look out for #10-1 here tomorrow...