My favourite films of 2017 #20-11

Take the leather with you: The Villainess is full of twists and crazy action

20. 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, just as you'd expect from director Reichardt.

19. God's Own Country
Director: Francis Lee  UK release date: 1 September
Yorkshire-set love story in which Josh O'Connor's disillusioned young farmer falls for Alec Secareanu's Romanian migrant worker. There's more mud, sex and beautifully-photographed scenery than you can shake a stick at, but it's the growing tenderness of the two men's relationship that is the real star here. Beautifully written, beautifully acted.

18. 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 (Florence Pugh) 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 Nikolai Leskov's 1865 novella.

17. City Of Ghosts
Director: Matthew Heineman  UK release date: 21 July
Cartel Land director Heineman returns with another visceral, eye-opening documentary, this time focusing on citizen journalists in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which was seized by ISIS in 2013. It's horrifying and inspiring by turn, our band of journos risking life and limb (quite literally) to bring the world news from inside the city, as ISIS strengthen their grip on its populace and infrastructure.

16. The Villainess
Director: Byung-gil Jung  UK release date: 15 September
Cracking revenge thriller from South Korea that doubles as the year's maddest action film. A twisty plot sees assassin Sook-hee (Ok-bin Kim) on the trail of the man who murdered her father, but it's the film's numerous action scenes that remain in the memory, particularly the climactic chase and confrontation on a fast-moving bus.

15. I Am Not Your Negro
Director: Raoul Peck  UK release date: 7 April
Narrated by Samuel L Jackson, Peck's documentary about black novelist, playwright, poet and activist James Baldwin focusses mainly on an unfinished book featuring his memories of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. "The story of the negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story," writes Baldwin. Peck shows us how and why that story hasn't got any prettier.

14. 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 in which grief is a palpable ingredient. These are helpless people caught in life's vicious crosshairs. David Troughton – as shattered patriarch Aubrey – is immense.

13. A Ghost Story
Director: David Lowery  UK release: 11 August
There's rather more to Pete's Dragon director Lowery's film than Rooney Mara's famous pie-eating scene and Casey Affleck dressed in a white sheet. It's actually a powerful, poetic exploration of love, grief and the impermanence of life. We die but the world keeps turning, our loved ones move on, our legacy is small and soon fades. Rarely has so harsh a notion been so elegantly expressed.

12. Mudbound
Director: Dee Rees  UK release date: 17 November
A boldly ambitious and all-too-resonant tale of two American families – one white, one black – in the years before, during and after WWII. Despite its large cast and multiple narrators, Rees' film is perfectly paced, with the climactic melodrama and its fallout providing scenes both memorable and horrifying. Breaking Bad's Jonathan Banks, as racist patriarch Pappy, is the personification of toxic hatred.

11. On Body And Soul
Director: IIdiko Enyedi  UK release date: 22 September
Unconventional love story in which two abattoir workers – Géza Morcsányi and Alexandra Borbély – share dreams of being together in an Eden-like forest as deer, and slowly grow closer in the real world too. You quickly come to care about Enyedi's characters, especially lonely, vulnerable Maria (Borbély), whilst marvelling at the sheer chutzpah of the film's setting and storytelling.

**Next up: The countdown concludes with #10-1**

Lady Macbeth, The Belko Experiment, What Happened To Monday, and Pawn Sacrifice: Your Week In Film (August 21-27)

For the chop: The Belko Experiment takes an axe to office politics 

This week's best and worst in UK home entertainment, to buy, rent, and stream on DVD, Blu-ray and VOD. All films are available to watch now, unless otherwise stated.

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

Office Space meets Battle Royale in The Belko Experiment (DVD, Blu-ray and VOD) WWW, Wolf Creek director Greg McLean's savage, and indeed savagely funny, satire on office politics and modern corporate life. Written by James Gunn, whose penchant for pitch-black comedy permeates his pre-Guardians Of The Galaxy work in Slither and Super, it is set in Bogota, Colombia, and sees 80 American workers locked into their Belko Corporation office block and subjected to a sick social experiment.

A mysterious voice, coming from the company's intercom system, commands the employees to start killing each other or be killed themselves. Some take to the task with worrying enthusiasm (Scrubs' John C McGinley) or chilly practicality (Divergent's Tony Goldwyn), while others desperately try to formulate a Plan B (John Gallagher Jr's everyman hero Mike Milch), or simply collapse in panic and despair. Madness and violence reign as the body count piles up and Katniss Everdeen fails to show up to save the day.

Belko has all the subtlety of a brick but delights in its horror-show trashiness and enjoyably '80s-style gore effects. Better still, at a brisk 89 minutes, the film doesn't outstay its welcome. Indeed, McLean never takes his foot off the accelerator, delivering a number of shocking deaths, some smart twists and a couple of memorable set-pieces (including a terrific sequence in a lift shaft). Notions, such as demanding employers want to work you to death and your office colleagues are literally the worst people on earth, are hardly new or fanciful, but have rarely been so gruesomely or amusingly articulated. I particularly enjoyed the sight of a Sellotape dispenser being used as a lethal weapon and the bit near the end featuring an hilarious "exit interview". Despite the blood and brutality, this is a lot more fun than a 09:30am meeting with creepy Clive from accounts. 

Kill list: Work might just be the death of you in McLean's horror satire

The title is a warning. Just like the character of the same name in Shakespeare's "Scottish play", the young woman placed front and centre in Lady Macbeth (DVD, Blu-ray and VOD) WWWW is scheming and ruthless. In fact, so unforgiving is she, it's difficult to imagine her having so much as a twinge of guilt over her appalling behaviour or her own "Out, damn spot" moment. Suffice to say, William Oldroyd's film makes for uncomfortable viewing in its depiction of murder most foul, while its exploration of Victorian attitudes to race, sex and class are hardly an iota more consoling.

Based on the novel Lady Macbeth Of The Mtsensk District, by Nikolai Leskov, William Oldroyd's film relocates the action from 1865 Russia to England during the same period. Katherine (Florence Pugh) is sold into a loveless, sexless marriage to Alexander (Paul Hilton), and the pair live on a vast estate belonging to his ghastly, bullying father, Boris (Christopher Fairbank). Katherine isn't permitted to leave the house ("You will remain indoors, with your prayer book") and spends her days bored and resentful, until she falls for stable-hand Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), a man she first encounters tormenting Boris's black maid, Anna (Naomie Ackie). With Alexander and Boris away on business, the pair commence a torrid affair but, when it is revealed, Katherine's thoughts turn from passion to poison. 

Here's a film so corrosive you could strip paint with it. At first you'd be forgiven for thinking Katherine's rebellion is a powerful act of proto-feminism but the longer it goes on, and the deeper she sinks into the amoral quagmire, you realise she's gone from fighting for survival to being the thing other characters are required to survive (to quote Breaking Bad, she is most certainly "the one who knocks"). Oldroyd – usually a director of theatre and opera, making his feature debut – shows her pent up and frustrated indoors, and the precise opposite once outside on the moors or in the woods. It's as if her suffering has unleashed something primal in her, made her a force of nature, someone who simply won't be fobbed off, stitched up or put back in her box. This is a very still, quiet film but Katherine's raging heart of darkness sits at its centre like a gigantic black hole, sucking everyone around her to their doom. Like her Shakespearean namesake, Katherine's ambition is to be queen of all she surveys; independent, in control, free from harm. She's frightening and frightful, and Pugh lends her a calm but unnerving intensity. It's a splendid performance in a film every bit as compelling as it is discomfiting.

Iron Lady: Florence Pugh is not a woman to be messed with

What Happened To Monday (Netflix) WWW½, is a crazy, campy slice of sci-fi and probably the most fun I've had watching a Netflix Original, well, ever. Noomi Rapace (Prometheus) stars as seven sisters, all named after a different day of the week, including the titular Monday. They live in a dystopian, over-populated future in which families are only allowed to have one child, a measure ruthlessly enforced by Glenn Close's Child Allocation Bureau (CAB). Rather than allow six of the girls to be taken by the authorities and placed in "cryosleep", their grandfather (Willem Dafoe) comes up with an ingenious (read: utterly ludicrous) plan.

The women all share one identity, Karen Settman, and take turns being her on the day of the week that corresponds with their name. They each live one-seventh of a life and spend the rest of the time lying low in the family's spacious apartment. The scheme works well for 30 years as the girls grow up, go to school and start work, but when Monday fails to come home one night, everything changes and their very existence is threatened.

There are plot holes in Dead Snow director Tommy Wirkola's film to keep Honest Trailers in business for a month and the premise is admittedly absurd. But What Happened To Monday is carried off with such energy and invention, you'd forgive it pretty much anything. The underrated Rapace is clearly having the time of her life and imbues all seven hastily-sketched women with just enough depth to make you care for them. The film has a healthy sense of its own silliness but takes itself just seriously enough to satisfy as both a black comedy and a bonafide action thriller. There are moments that are laugh-out-loud funny, moments that are genuinely shocking, and even a couple of moments that ask you to consider the meaning of identity, like a gloriously trashy version of Bergman's Persona. It's uneven and all over the place but somehow still manages to come out on top, helped considerably by some sterling work from its effects team ("Seven Noomi Rapaces? No problem!"). A future cult classic, or I'll eat my hat.

Manic Monday: Noomi Rapace is great as seven sisters

Finally, there's Pawn Sacrifice (VOD and cinemas) WWW½, Edward Zwick's fascinating biopic of American chess genius Bobby Fischer. Made in 2014 and shown pretty much everywhere else in the world over the last two years, before limping unheralded into British cinemas and onto streaming platforms this month, it stars Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man) as Fischer and Liev Schreiber (Spotlight) as his great Russian rival Boris Spassky. Although the film touches on Fischer's life before and after, it mostly concerns itself with the 1972 series of matches between the pair to be crowned world champion. Their clashes – and Fischer's errant behaviour during them – hit newspaper front pages all over the world and briefly made chess the new rock and roll. 

Fischer was a troubled man – arrogant, demanding, at times even megalomaniacal, but also suffering with undiagnosed mental illness. He struggles with wild mood swings, and intense paranoia about "Jews and communists" plotting against him, but is nevertheless encouraged and indulged by US authorities (including the Nixon White House), who are desperate to get one over on the Soviets as the Cold War continues to rage. Fischer is, essentially, the pawn sacrifice of the title.

This is one of Maguire's very best performances as he brings real nuance to a complicated, difficult but patently brilliant man, one who is clearly haunted by the fact he never knew his father and whose relationship with his mother implodes as she abandons him to move from New York to California. It's a film with real pedigree, too, exuding quality from top to bottom. Not just from Maguire, Schreiber and Zwick (Glory, Defiance) but also co-writer Steven Knight, who penned and directed Locke, and co-stars Peter Sarsgaard (Jackie), Michael Stuhlbarg (Trumbo) and Lily Rabe (Redemption Trail). Precisely how and why such a movie has been so shabbily treated in this country is therefore beyond me. 

Checkmate: Tobey Maguire is chess master Bobby Fischer

What I shall be watching this week: Despite the hideous reviews (16 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes), I shall be giving The Dark Tower a look.

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...