![]() ![]() The film rockets along at a screwball pace to an emotional payoff that’s both achingly uncertain and genuinely lovely. Star Saoirse Ronan’s constant squabbles with mom Laurie Metcalf have the exhausted, lived-in banter of two people who love each other very much but probably shouldn’t be in the same room most of the time. ![]() This umpteenth teenage coming-of-age saga sprints through our feisty heroine’s senior year with such tenderness and generous attention to detail it feels like you’re seeing all these old tropes for the very first time. Greta Gerwig’s enchanting solo directorial debut covers such well-trod terrain in the plot department that any synopsis does it a disservice. Instead he just acknowledges that since institutions like the church and law enforcement have failed us, all we really have left is each other. It’s the movie that felt most to me like what it feels like to be alive in 2017, with blind allegiances and an inchoate, fulminating rage fueling every interaction. McDonagh has been criticized because the film fails to "solve" racism, domestic abuse or any of the psychic rot eating away at this tiny town. Irish playwright Martin McDonagh pokes around our national sore spots with this profanely hilarious provocation, in which Frances McDormand’s grieving mother taunts her local police department in a war of words that rapidly escalates to the absurd. (Opens in Boston on Jan. 12.) ' Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri' This fiendishly funny film depicts love as war, keenly attuned to the most peculiar mysteries of attraction. This is, until he meets his match in a mistress (Vicky Krieps) who wrestles for control of the relationship in ways that range from the passive aggressive to the near fatal. Daniel Day-Lewis - in what we can only hope is not, as he claims, his final performance - stars as a persnickety 1950’s fashion designer who abruptly discards his adoring young female muses just as quickly as he seduces them in the first place. The sumptuous surfaces and voluptuous visuals of Paul Thomas Anderson’s eighth feature give way to something more sinister and perverse as the story unspools. Admittedly not for all tastes, this is a truly original picture. ![]() Somehow this silly image grows to be quite plaintive and moving, with an element of deadpan Kabuki in the wry observations of a world that refuses to stop turning in the face of a single tragedy. A moody meditation on the passage of time, it stars Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck as a young couple torn asunder by his untimely death, with Affleck hanging around the house for an eternity afterward wearing a morgue sheet over his head like a Peanuts cartoon. Writer-director David Lowery’s cosmic whatzit tells its doomed love story in innovative edits instead of words. Luckily, 2017 offered a fair amount of films that provided solace, reminded us of our shared humanity or just gave us a plain old escape. Here are my five favorites: ' A Ghost Story' That moment wondering "What in hell can it possibly be this time?" while it booted up, before the inevitable barrage of infuriating and embarrassing breaking news alerts, had me contemplating what's the point of even doing all this anymore. Why stay up all night writing about the arts when the world is such a trash fire? The most psychically fraught moments of this obnoxiously stressful year were always the three or four times a week when I’d emerge from the soothing darkness of a movie theater and begrudgingly turn my phone back on. "Lady Bird," "The Florida Project," "Three Billboards Outside Of Ebbing, Missouri" and "Phantom Thread" show up on multiple lists. Facebook Email Scenes from "The Florida Project," "Phantom Thread," "Lady Bird" and "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri." (Courtesy A24, Focus Feautres, Fox Searchlight Pictures)Īs is tradition, our film critics take a look at the movies that defined our year.
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