My favourite films of 2017: #30-21

Top gun: Brie Larson fights for survival in Ben Wheatley's Free Fire

30. 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 policeman. Larrain (Jackie) takes all sorts of liberties with real events, while his portrayal of Neruda is enjoyably unflattering.

29. Dunkirk
Director: Christopher Nolan  UK release date: 21 July
Nolan expertly utilises three different timelines (a week, a day and an hour) to tell the story of the famous WWII evacuation in an artistically bold and emotionally potent way. Aided and abetted by Hans Zimmer's frantic score, this is immersive, inventive filmmaking to take the breath away. Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh and Mark Rylance supply the actorly gravitas.

28. It Comes At Night
Director: Trey Edward Shults  UK release date: 7 July
Krisha director Shults turns up the paranoia to 11 in this post-apocalyptic thriller-cum-horror, grabbing you hard by the lapels in its first few minutes and refusing to let go until its haunting closing shot around an hour and an half later. A great cast - including Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo, and Riley Keough - are the icing on the cake.

27. 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.

26. Land Of Mine
Director: Martin Zandvliet  UK release date: 4 August
Fact-based drama about young German POWS forced to clear thousands of land mines from Danish beaches after WWII. Roland Møller is the sadistic sergeant charged with completing the task - whatever the cost to his prisoners. An under-appreciated gem that powerfully explores notions of human decency and forgiveness.

25. The Age Of Shadows
Director: Kim Jee-woon  UK release date: 24 March
I Saw The Devil director Kim's blistering period piece set in Japanese-occupied Korea centres on members of the resistance and a cop (played by Song Kang-ho) with divided loyalties. It's breathless, it's brutal, it's sumptuous to look at - it also happens to be one of the year's richest and most rewarding action films.

24. Thelma
Director: Joachim Trier  UK release date: 3 November
A supernatural "coming out" story with shades of Carrie about a young university student, played by Eili Harboe, with terrifying psychic powers. This is far from a super-powered CG fest, though, as Trier (Louder Than Bombs) focuses as much on Thelma's burgeoning sexuality, and repudiation of her strict religious upbringing, as he does on her abilities.

23. In Between
Director: Maysaloun Hamoud  UK release date: 22 September
Hungarian-born Hamoud's directorial debut is a compelling story of three Palestinian women living together in Tel Aviv, and torn between embracing modernity and the more conservative diktats of their families' culture. Mouna Hawa as Leila is a revelation, while the friendships are beautifully explored and believable. The final shot is perfect.

22. 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.

21. 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. 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 schmaltz-fest I was expecting.

**Up next: #20-11**

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...

Passengers, Silence, and In The Shadow Of Iris: Your Week In Film (May 8-14)

Lost in space: Passengers fails to live up to its intriguing premise

UK home entertainment highs and lows for the next seven days. All films ready to buy or stream now, unless otherwise stated.

The French movie industry isn't a big fan of Netflix and I can't imagine In The Shadow Of Iris W½ is going to do a whole lot to improve relations. Not because there's been a row over the Paris-set erotic thriller's release in the country but more because it isn't particularly good.

This latest 'Netflix Original' centres on the supposed kidnap of Claudia (Charlotte Le Bon), the wife of successful banker Antoine Doriot (Jalil Lespert), by former jailbird car mechanic Max (Romain Duris). However, it soon becomes clear the kidnap plot is a fake and that Claudia and Max are in it together to collect the ransom. That is until another big twist arrives - this time involving the titular Iris (Hélène Barbry) - throwing the whole thing up into the air again. There's quite a bit of this for the next 90 minutes or so, and it soon becomes quite tiresome.

Lespert clearly wants his film to be thought of as Hitchcockian - part of the main story involves a mistaken identity plot not a million miles away from Vertigo - but Iris really never earns that description. The twists all feel a bit too familiar and are hardly fiendish or inventive. When a film pulls the rug out from under your expectations, it should take your breath away. Chan-wook Park's recent The Handmaiden does that over and over but the supposed sleights of hand presented here just sort of happen, inspiring little more than a half-interested shrug.

I'm not really giving much away by revealing that sexually frustrated Antoine likes a bit of the old BDSM - it's a post-50 Shades Of Grey erotic thriller, so of course he does. But In The Shadow Of Iris is more like the sort of grubbily glossy movie Brian De Palma might have knocked up 30 years ago, only not nearly as good. I'm a fan of Duris (he's brilliant in The New Girlfriend from a couple of years back), but he spends pretty much the entire film scowling out from under a Charles Bronson moustache. In fact, both he and Lespert are off-puttingly hirsute, like long-lost members of The Bee Gees, who have had a falling out.

At least Lespert's direction is assured and eye-catching. He handles the tsunami of twists well, imbuing Iris with genuine pace, and perfectly captures Paris in all its twinkling night-time splendour. The most enjoyable aspects of the entire enterprise, though, are Adel Bencherif (A Prophet and London Has Fallen) and Camille Cottin (Allied), as two romantically-entwined cops investigating the kidnap. I cared about their story far more than I did anyone else's.

Shadow of a doubt: Ransom, kidnap and BDSM

In old-fashioned football pundit parlance, Passengers (DVD, Blu-ray and VOD) WW is a game of two halves. The first is good solid sci-fi fare, the second clumsy and formulaic. Set entirely on a spaceship full of thousands of 'sleeping' humans, heading for a colony planet many light years away, a malfunction causes Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) to wake up 90 years early from his slumber to find everyone else still happily snoozing away. Unable to return to 'suspended animation', Preston's loneliness and boredom cause him to fixate on another passenger, writer Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence). Should he wake her to share his burden, even though doing so will condemn her to the same fate he faces - death years before the spaceship reaches its destination?

Suffice to say, Preston makes altogether the wrong choice, which should have been a springboard for something interesting, inventive or crazy, but instead Passengers soon gets bogged down in the kind of plot you could see most weeks on any sci-fi TV show of the last 50 years. The malfunction with the sleeping pods soon spreads to other areas of the ship threatening to destroy it - unless Jim and Aurora can find a way to fix the problem. Pratt and Lawrence are always watchable - as is Michael Sheen, as a robot barman - but this never lives up to its intriguing premise.

Bad romance: Pratt and Lawrence star in Passengers

"Three hours of my life I won't get back - bored shitless," reckoned Ian, while Jamie weighed in with "Just as boring as religion itself". Linda wasn't too impressed either: "Liam Neeson was in it for all of 10 minutes. Bored to tears." Everyone's a critic, it seems, but these comments - lifted from the official Facebook page of Silence (DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD) WWWW - pinpoint why Martin Scorsese's latest failed to hit the right note with audiences and flopped at the box office. Too long (2hrs 41mins), too slow, and not the kind of film Scorsese (or Neeson, for that matter) is best known for.

Unfortunately, Ian, Jamie, and Linda - as well as the film's other numerous detractors - are all talking out of their hats because Silence is only a little short of magnificent. It's deliberately paced and takes its own sweet time to unfold, yes, but is also powerful, compelling, multi-layered and heart-breaking. Add beautifully shot to the list, too. Why do films have to move quickly? Why does everything have to be tied up in a neat bow inside 90 minutes? Why do people who regularly think nothing of watching 10 or 12-part TV shows have such a problem with any film that dares 'go on a bit'?

Based on Shūsaku Endō's 1966 novel of the same name and set in the 17th Century, Silence sees two young Portuguese Jesuit priests - Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver - travel to Japan to track down their former mentor Neeson, who is rumoured to have publicly renounced his Catholicism. Entering the country is fraught with danger for our protagonists as religious persecution is at its peak, with Catholics who refuse to commit apostasy tortured until they do, or executed. The pair are under constant threat and the tension they feel is palpable.

More than anything, though, Scorsese's film - a project he'd been trying to get off the ground for decades - is a bold and serious-minded interrogation of religious faith: what it actually means and whether it is wasted on a God who never answers your questions and entreaties (hence the title). The big question it poses - and, ultimately, answers too - is whether it is ever right to repudiate your faith, even if in doing so you will save lives, not least your own. It wrestles with big themes other supposedly weighty films wouldn't dare go near, although I would have liked to see it tackle the idea that the importation of religion into a country often went hand in hand with imperialism. It raises the subject but drops it too quickly.

Never mind Heartbreak Ridge, this is Garfield's best performance to date, but he's matched all the way by a couple of the Japanese supporting players. Issey Ogata as the chief interrogator is cruel, charismatic and comic by turns, while I'm not sure I've seen a more powerful study in self-loathing than Yōsuke Kubozuka's wretched apostate fisherman. It's a great film, don't let anyone tell you different.

A prayer for the dying: Scorsese's underrated Silence

I didn't expect to like Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie WWW half as much as I did but the film's knockabout laughs and air of general silliness had me under its spell from the get go. Curb Your Enthusiasm's Jeff Garlin is Gene Handsome, a Los Angeles homicide detective investigating the murder and dismemberment of his new neighbour's young babysitter. With its catchphrases, call-backs and cast of eccentric characters, Garlin's movie (he directs, co-writes and stars) isn't a million miles removed from the kind of inspired mucking about Police Squad/The Naked Gun specialised in 30-odd years ago. Despite its undoubted (and deliberate) debt to other cop shows and films (its theme tune even sounds like Henri Mancini's The Pink Panther), however, Handsome is both charming and funny.

Garlin is his usual likeable, lugubrious self but, truth be told, it's Handsome's supporting cast that steal many of the scenes here, especially Orange Is The New Black's Natasha Lyonne as the detective's highly-sexed cop partner Fleur Scozzari, and Brad Morris's Burt Jerpis, a fellow officer never short of a ridiculous and convoluted whodunit theory. I could have done without Kaley Cuoco, from The Big Bang Theory, popping up for a pointless cameo late on, but I hope this isn't the last we see of Handsome and his outlandish ensemble. A series, please, Netflix.

Watching the detectives: Jeff Garlin is Gene Handsome

Also showing this week...
1. Hell Or High Water (Amazon Prime Video, Tuesday)
2. Martha Marcy May Marlene (Channel 4, 2am, early Thursday morning)
3. Aliens: Special Edition (Film4, 11.25pm, Thursday)
4. 12 Years A Slave (Channel 4, 9pm, Saturday)
5. The Mask (ITV, 9.50pm, Saturday)

What I Shall Be Watching This Week: Curzon Home Cinema features an attractive double bill of new films from Friday - Hope Dickson Leach's The Levelling and François Ozon's Frantz. Both available on the same day as they hit UK cinemas.

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