A Great Year for Movies: Our Favorite Films of 2017

By JBFC Marketing Associate Paige Grand Pré, Special Events Coordinator Nicole Klein, Membership & Marketing Associate Nicole LaLiberty, Programming Administrator Saidah Russell, & Marketing Associate Sarah Soliman

2017 has been an exciting year for movie-goers. It started out strong with the incisive and terrifying Get Out, offered us a summer of electrifying films like Baby Driver and The Beguiled, the moving romantic comedy The Big Sick, and the beautiful, underseen Columbus, while the end of the year has brought us the joyous Lady Bird, the sumptuous Call Me by Your Name, and the timely historical drama The Post.

A handful of JBFC staff members sat down together to reflect on our favorite films of the year. Read that discussion below and find our individual best of lists, along with contributions from our programmers and JBFC Executive Director, Edie Demas, at the bottom of this post.

Thanks for another year of watching movies with us!

The Beguiled

Nicole LaLiberty: I’m a big fan of The Beguiled. The movie lets you see all their motivations and insecurities so even though they are unlikeable they’re also fascinating. They draw you in.

Sarah Soliman: I loved how snarky they all are.

NL: It’s an extremely petty movie. Someone dies because of the pettiness.

SS: It also has one of my favorite lines from the year which is Nicole Kidman saying “bring me the anatomy book.”

NL: And her hands are dripping in blood, she’s wearing a beautiful white nightgown.

Paige Grand Pré: It’s also filmed in a way that emphasizes how cut off from the rest of the world they are. Yes, there’s a war going on but they seem so secluded even beyond that. The film has these sweeping shots of the giant trees that seem to be holding them in. It feels like a world apart.

SS: People did talk about this movie a lot when it came out over the summer but I wonder if it came out later in the year, post-Weinstein, if it might have had more staying power. Would it have really taken off?

NL: The problems people had with The Beguiled were about race and the absence of black characters, so I don’t know that a later release would have changed the reception of it.

Nicole Klein: It’s similar to Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. There’s a lot in there about feminine anger and revenge but it falls apart on issues of race. One thing really works and the other is left to the wayside.

SS: I agree those issues would still be the same, but I wonder if it would have felt weightier later in the year. I saw criticism that accused it of feeling slight.

NL: Just lady problems. People might get more out of it now if they rewatch it.

SS: I felt that way. I saw it twice and the first time I wasn’t so sure but I loved it the second time. I love the performances in this. Colin Farrell is delightfully manipulative. He knows how to charm each woman in that house in a distinct way, tailored specifically to each of them.

[Saidah Russell joins the conversation.]

NK: Do you want to say anything about The Beguiled?

Saidah Russell: Do I? I wasn’t prepared to talk about it, but it’s great. “Bring me the anatomy book.” Iconic.

 

Call Me by Your Name

SS: This movie was on pretty much all of our lists.

PG: When I try to describe the film to people who haven’t seen it, the best way to convey the tone and the look is “a daydream.” It just lilts along and even though it’s sleepy and builds slowly I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. I was so emotionally invested in every single gesture.

NK: I was so thankful in this cold and dark December to be in the North of Italy in this gorgeous summer. It felt like I took an entire jar of vitamin D and loved every minute of it.

SR: It’s such a fantasy. Beyond the look of it, everyone is so good to each other. There’s so much compassion between all the characters, it just makes you feel good.

SS: That’s what I love about it, it’s a movie where everyone loves each other.

NK: You have the main love story, Elio’s family, and the few people around them. Beyond that it’s as if there’s no outside world. These few people are all we need.

SR: It’s so remarkably detailed. Which is why I’m a proponent of seeing this movie as many times as you can, because there are so many small things you miss the first time because you’re overwhelmed and probably sobbing. The pace is very relaxing but it’s so tense, too. You’re so emotionally invested. This movie wrecks a lot of people. Timothee Chalamet, you just want to protect him.

SS: He’s wonderful in this movie.

PG: And I want his parents to be everybody’s parents.  

NK: Michael Stuhlbarg. I could not contain myself during his monologue at the end. It’s one of the most moving scenes I’ve ever seen.

SS: Everyone loves that scene, rightly, but the part that really gets me is when Elio and his parents are hanging out together and he’s just sprawled out on their laps. His dad calls him “Elly belly.”

SR: And his mother is translating German.  

SS: That translation scene is central to the movie. The question “Is it better to speak or to die?” comes up in that scene, which is the movie in a nutshell, but I like that scene because it tells you so much about Elio’s relationship with his parents.

NK: His mom can just stroke his hair.

PG: And that they treat him like an adult.

SS: They treat him like an adult but also like a pet, like a cat.

SR: The physicality of this movie is incredible.

SS: You just understand that he is such a well-loved child.

SR: He’s also kind of spoiled. It comes from a good place, his parents have raised him well and he’s a good person, but he’s also a brat because he’s seventeen years old. I so appreciated how fully realized that character is. You fall in love with him.

PG: The weight of what he does in this movie is so beyond anything else I’ve ever seen from an actor that young. It’s staggering.

SS: I keep saying that just in the moment he’s watching Oliver dance, the way he leans forward in his chair…

NK: Extended into the moment when he gets up to go dance and even though he’s dancing with someone else he’s still looking at Oliver. The music in that scene, and the music overall, is something else that will wreck everyone entirely.

SR: After seeing this movie, maybe avoid the soundtrack for a day or two so you can heal. Don’t go right into it.

NK: Another thing I loved was that it’s kind of a cat and mouse game between the two of them and Luca Guadagnino does the same thing with us, draws the audience into that. There are times when they’re in close up and we’re part of this intimacy and other times it’s a long shot where we’re kept away from those moments. The audience is teased in the same way Elio and Oliver are.

SS: And I can’t think of another movie that expresses desire so well. The movie makes you feel how it feels when you have a painful crush on somebody.

NK: It’s consuming. And then that’s what the movie does to the audience. We’re consumed by the movie in the way Elio is by Oliver.

SR: It’s at the top of my list because I think about it daily. I first saw it in October and I can’t shake it.

 

SR: John Cho!

NK: We are living in a Choaissance.

SS: I don’t think he’s ever had a role like this before. And this movie is beautiful.

SR: Every shot is a painting.

NK: It’s a masterpiece. I’ve never been so visually stunned, there’s so much to take in when watching this. It’s not an exaggeration when you say every single shot is like a painting.

SS: There are two that have stuck with me in the months since I saw it. One is the first conversation between Jin and Casey. They’re just meeting, they don’t really know each other and they are standing on two sides of a fence, and walking along, talking, with this fence between them, and by the time they get to end of that fence they’ve become kind of friendly and there’s no fence between them anymore. It’s perfect. Then there’s a scene with John Cho and Parker Posey in a hotel room.

SR: The scene shot through the mirror?

SS: Yes! He’s telling her about his childhood crush on her and they’re in the same mirror and when she rebuffs him he moves away and then they’re in two different mirrors.

SR: I think my favorite scene is when John Cho becomes a tree. Not literally. He’s just standing so still. I’m trying to remember what he’s wearing in that scene.

NK: The tailoring in this movie is award worthy. And also these really quiet performances. There’s such a stillness to it in the pacing of the shots. Kogonada gives you time to take everything in and it’s similar in that way to the dialogue and character development, it’s so deliberate. Casey in particular, her story, her reasons for why she’s chosen to stay at home, those are revealed so slowly, and because of that they resonate so strongly.

SR: It’s so rare to see something as visually impressive as this is, where the content and story and performances are all equally moving.  

 

Faces Places

NL: Everyone knows I’m an Agnes Varda enthusiast. I only started watching her movies this year.

NK: That’s exciting!

NL: My love grew fast, like a wildfire. Her movies are so personal. She invites you into her world and into the lives of the people she talks to. She did a documentary about potatoes! And it’s fascinating! So Faces Places was my most anticipated movie of the year and it was the movie I needed to see this year. To see this old woman and this young guy, who looks like he should be too cool for her but he knows he’s not and they have this beautiful friendship. The way they connect with each other and with the people they meet, the way they share people’s stories, especially people who don’t feel like their own story is valuable, Agnes and JR make them important and you start to think maybe I’m important. We’re all important. The way they bring people together is one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen this year.

SS: It’s such a balm. There is also Agnes herself. I think most people at her age feel unseen, so she has a unique perspective on feeling marginalized and can talk to these people about the individual ways in which they’re been marginalized or ignored. She and JR have come up with a way to make everyone they interact with feel seen. They take people’s photos and print huge images of them and turn them into beautiful works of art. That must be so validating.

PG: Yeah, it was the movie I needed this year. It offers moments of pure unadulterated joy that make you feel free and leads you to understand that the basic foundation of our happiness comes from our relationships. It’s bittersweet because she’s reflecting on her life with an understanding of her mortality, but at the same time realizing that she has created all these meaningful relationships and created a body of work, of amazing art, that will be there for future generations. It was such an antidote to the mood of this year.

SR: I love when she talks about being her age and making a new friend. I’m however old I am and I feel like I guess this is it, these are my friends. I’m stuck with them. But there are always new people to meet and new people who can affect you and better your life. Their relationship is also fascinating because their lives have paralleled each other. They’ve been mirroring each other. I became kind of obsessed with how she would be in a place and forty years later he’d be in that place. It introduces the idea that things are meant to be. And they’re so sweet to each other. They tease each other but it comes from such a place of love.

PG: I love that they’re a quintessential odd couple, and part of the schtick is that she’s kind of at the end of her career and he’s at the beginning but they squabble like an old married couple. It’s like they’ve known each other for decades.

SR: And in a way it is romantic.

SS: It’s also very satisfying to just look at the art they make.

NL: I think it would be captivating without getting to know the people they photograph but it’s so enhanced when you know, for example, this photo is up on this wall because the woman who lives here grew up in this house, it used to belong to her parents. Each person made me cry.

SR: Watching the reactions of people seeing themselves as art was very moving.

NL: It’s a challenge to people’s perceptions of themselves. You go about your life just feeling like an average person with nothing special about you and all of a sudden you’re a million feet high on the wall where you work. It makes you think about how you see yourself.

SR: I love how adamant Agnes and JR are about people being deserving of being turned into art. You’re necessary, you’re worthy of this.

 

The Florida Project

NK: I saw this movie three times in the theater. Three full times. Sean Baker immerses us in this world that I never knew existed, right outside of Orlando. He presents the lives of the invisible homeless community without passing judgement. He gives them dignity and portrays them with a sense of love and sensitivity. It was incredibly moving. You could watch the children in this film for hours. It’s fascinating how they manage to entertain themselves in the haze of summer, just wandering around. When I saw this with Saidah we couldn’t believe the scope, how much ground these kids cover. Sean Baker discovered Bria Vinaite, who plays Halley, the mother of the main character, Moonee, on Instagram. This is her first film and what she creates is amazing. Seeing it in the movie theater you got the sense that the audience was passing judgement on her parenting or on her crudeness, but when you pay attention she is a loving mother, she plays with her daughter and is doing the best she can with what she has.

PG: I was very taken with Sean Baker after I saw Tangerine and so much of what I valued about Tangerine he brought with him into The Florida Project. Like you just said Nicole – it’s about dignity. In telling these stories about trans sex workers or the invisible homeless you’re dealing with hot button issues, but Baker’s not doing it because he wants to be relevant – he’s doing it because he cares about their stories and has empathy for them. That he’s proven himself so capable of getting great performances out of non-actors speaks to that love for the people he’s portraying. He wants to help them tell their own stories; he’s not trying to guide the narrative, he’s allowing the people who live these lives to speak. It’s very real. He also shows that fun, colorful, campy, commercialized side of Florida that tourists see and is so alluring, but he turns it around to make you see the seedy underbelly that people have to live in. On top of that, I can’t even begin to wrap my head around getting performances like these out of very young children. It really speaks to the resiliency of kids and how they can balance terrible circumstances with the levity of being a child.

SR: I think it’s also a testament to parenthood. No matter how terrible things are in Halley’s life, she does everything she can to shield Moonee from it.

NK: Speaking of shielding, Willem Dafoe’s character in this is a treasure. I kept waiting for him to do something bad or have his own agenda or be harmful in some way, but he just genuinely cares so much about these people.

SR: Compassion is a running theme through a lot of these movies.

NK: This year, especially, we really need that.

 

Get Out

NK: Never in my life have I had a theater going experience quite like when I saw Get Out. It was packed, it was so vocal.

SS: It’s an amazing communal experience.

NL: Have any of you watched it again not with a group? My husband said he wanted to rewatch it without a group because he was wondering if his perception was skewed by the power of that communal experience. I think it’s affecting no matter what.

NK: As a huge Key and Peele fan it’s amazing to see this new side of Jordan Peele. I was blown away. The idea of the sunken place, how it’s taken hold in the cultural landscape and how he put words to that feeling and expressed it visually, what he does with that is unbelievable. I can only say brilliant.

PG: Jordan Peele has talked about the mindset of that. He cited examples of how, when you’re coming from a place of powerlessness, like if you’re a woman facing sexual assault or a person of color facing bigotry, you become paralyzed. Sometimes all you can do is freeze. The fact that he was thinking about it on that level is, I think, what makes it so poignant. The first time I saw it in theaters, I thought it was the tightest film I’d seen in a long time. There isn’t a single scene that you could cut or change that could improve the film. It’s outrageous that this is his first film as a writer/director.

SS: To me the most amazing thing was the rewatch. The first time you see it all of Rose’s behavior seems thoughtful and kind, like when he’s upset and she takes him for a walk, you think she’s being a good girlfriend but the second time you see the film you realize she’s just trying to get him away from the house so her family can hold their auction. Everything in the script is there for a reason, it all pays off.

 

A Ghost Story

SS: I can’t believe David Lowery made me feel so many feelings about a bed sheet. I really felt the sense of longing and yearning for something that you can’t identify and time is stretching out endlessly before you as you struggle to figure out what’s missing. I also loved their relationship. When the film allows you to see more of them before his death you see that it wasn’t perfect, you see the cracks. It’s epic in scale and at the same time they were just a regular couple.  

PG: It spends so much time talking about how inconsequential we are in the grand scheme of things, but what makes our lives valuable is the love we share with one another and the moments we have together. Even when they’re not perfect.

SS: There are commonalities with Faces Places in that way – they’re regular people around whom this stunning work of art is built.  

PG: Similar to The Florida Project, I came into A Ghost Story with an unreasonable love for David Lowery’s earlier film Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. The cinematography in that film is gorgeous and A Ghost Story is somehow even more accomplished. It was shot on real film and looks gorgeous when projected. I spent half the movie crying at how beautiful it was. To me it’s the pure distillation of cinema, in that there’s so little dialogue or actual plot yet it’s so capable of inducing very strong emotions with just images. That is the beauty and magic of cinema, in a nutshell.

 

I, Tonya

NK: I, Tonya is all I want to talk about, it’s all I’m thinking about. The minute that the credits started rolling I wanted it to start all over again.

NL: I don’t remember the actual situation between Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. I knew Tonya Harding was bad and thought she herself beat up Nancy Kerrigan. She was the villain. Watching I, Tonya was transformative. Not only is the movie incredible, it made me want to take a new look at this person. Margot Robbie says in the movie “America wants someone to love but they also want someone to hate.” You pit these two women against each other and it gets reduced to here’s a bad woman and here’s a good woman. The amount of people coming out of having seen this who are now looking at her in a different light is incredible.

NK: I heard so many people coming out of the theater who thought that Tonya herself had assaulted Nancy Kerrigan. There are also fascinating issues of femininity and class, and something Saidah said after we saw the movie is that Tonya has so much agency. She’s bold, she asserts her right her place in this world, while also being so flawed and suffering from these different types of abuse. It’s interesting to see what she takes responsibility for because there are many things within her control that she refuses to take responsibility for, meanwhile when it came to abuse she thought it was her fault. That was normal to her. That was something else about the script, in such a short period of time we’re able to feel secure, have some laughs, especially when we meet her mother, how quickly that turns into violence.  

SS: That really struck me too. The script is so good at making you laugh and then forcing you to reckon with what you just laughed at.

NL: I’ve read a few reviews that criticize the film’s depiction of domestic abuse but when you look at how Tonya Harding has talked about this violence, she is very casual about it. That’s not to minimize other people’s experience, but her experience and how she addresses it is as a matter of fact part of her life and to display it as more dramatic would be disingenuous to her life story. If the audience laughs and then is forced to think about what they’re laughing at it’s almost more poignant than having a dramatic scene where we know we’re supposed to be upset. It’s okay to have a problematic response to something and then have to think about why you responded that way.

SS: And there is no question that this movie doesn’t let the audience off the hook. She looks directly into the camera, look right at us and says “you are all my abusers too.” There is no separating that from the fact that the movie tries to make you laugh and then make you feel horrified that you laughed. Those choices are very deliberate.  

NK: She says that this is a daily occurrence and the movie doesn’t shy away from that. It’s very effective.

NL: If you’re trying to paint a picture of this woman’s character and why she is the way she is, how else do you show that? She endured abuse from her mother, her partner, the world, and she’s still tough. She wouldn’t have gotten as far as she did if she’d given in to the misery of the situation.

NK: She’s a very rich character made even stronger by Margot Robbie’s performance. Sebastian Stan is terrifying and disgusting as her husband.

SS: Even though there are only two or three scenes before he starts hitting her you do get a real sense for the chemistry between them and it makes it so much more heartbreaking. The movie makes you understand why she stays with him. The film come at it from a place of empathy for all the characters, even those least deserving of it. It’s so humanizing and nuanced.

NL: Tonya fights her way into a world where people are constantly telling her she doesn’t belong but she’s decides she is going to be the best at it, and for a moment she is, and then the pure idiocy that ruins her career makes it that much more devastating.

SS: And it certainly seems at least possible that she truly didn’t know they were going to assault Nancy Kerrigan. Just imagine if she didn’t. To lose your career over that after working so hard and fighting so hard to overcome the stereotypes people have about you is terrible.

NL: One of the reasons I love this movie is because you rarely get a movie that allows its characters to be as complicated as they are in I, Tonya. Throughout the movie you’re debating with yourself about your reactions to everything, including liking people who are horrible. It’s a novel movie-going experience to not be told how you’re supposed to feel.

NK: We’ll never know the full truth and the movie brilliantly addresses that all we have are these different perspectives. Who do we believe? What do we think?

 

Lady Bird

NK: What a warm hug of a movie. Now that Greta Gerwig has been here for a Q&A and we saw first-hand how warm and smart and lovely she is it can only make the movie better, which is hard to believe considering how great the movie is already.

PG: I want to watch it all the time always.

NL: I don’t think I could ever get tired of it.

PG: I’ve seen a lot of movies that make me feel like “yeah this was my life in high school.” All of that was a lie now that I’ve seen Lady Bird. It hits you so deep and is so honest. I’ve talked to so many people who use that word about the movie: honest. It’s not just that the characters remind you of people you’ve known, you just feel like it’s so authentic and it’s not just about relatability, it tells the truth about those experiences.

NK: That is really captured in the tone of Lady Bird’s relationship with her mother, the way they can go from arguing to, for example, getting excited over a dress, in an instant. That’s the way I am with my family.

For more on Lady Bird, please see our earlier blog post.

 

Lady Macbeth

NL: This movie is Florence Pugh. So much depended on her embodying the role and she was so ruthless and passionate.   

SS: You start out firmly in her corner because her husband and father-in-law treat her terribly. She’s really treated like property by them.   

NL: That’s expected from a period piece but this is an extreme case of a man treating his wife terribly. Then he leaves her alone.

SS: Not only does he leave her alone, he forbids her from leaving the house.

NL: He’s gone, she’s not supposed to leave the house, she can’t read anything but the bible. What the heck is she supposed to do? So she goes out and finds another man.

SS: She makes a bad choice.

NL: He’s a bad guy.

SS: They meet under circumstances that really demonstrate that he’s a bad guy and as the movie unfolds you feel that maybe she recognized something in him, those abusive tendencies that emerge in her are something she sees in him and is drawn to. But for all the cruelty of the characters the movie itself is beautiful.

NL: For a movie that mostly only takes place in two or three rooms it is very visually engaging.

SS: Her costuming is exceptional, that blue dress in particular is stunning. This is also a very relevant film. It speaks to issues of power dynamics, both gendered and racial and because this is a relationship between a white woman and a black man the film is able to express that in a very eloquent way.

NL: I like that we get a woman who is inherently unlikeable and ruthless. You see men like that all the time and rarely get to see a woman who just takes what she wants. Is it problematic that what she wants is just a guy?

SS: I see it as there being a very limited amount of freedom she can claim for herself. In the situation she’s in that’s all she can have. She can go on walks outside and she can be with this guy. There’s literally nothing else available to her, even after her husband and father-in-law die, because eventually another woman enters the picture and she tries to control Katherine as well.

NL: That’s true, she is another very manipulative character. The movie asks what happens when women who are conniving and manipulative find themselves free of men.

SS: Katherine fills the power vacuum that has been left and immediately becomes the oppressor. It’s a very shrewd picture of what happens when someone who has always been powerless gets a measure of control.  

 

Individual Lists 

Edie Demas, Executive Director
I, Tonya
The Post
Lady Bird
Jane
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
The Breadwinner
Get Out
Last Flag Flying
Dunkirk
Justin Timberlake and the Tennessee Kids

Karen Sloe Goodman, Programmer
The Square
Faces Places
Lady Bird 
Call Me by Your Name
Mudbound

Paige Grand Pré, Marketing Associate
A Ghost Story
Lady Bird
Call Me by Your Name
The Florida Project
Get Out 

Andrew Jupin, Senior Programmer 
Get Out
Phantom Thread
Personal Shopper
The Shape of Water
Blade Runner 2049

Nicole Klein, Special Events Coordinator
The Florida Project
I, Tonya
Call Me by Your Name
Get Out
Lady Bird 

Nicole LaLiberty, Membership & Marketing Associate
Faces Places
Lady Bird
I, Tonya
Princess Cyd
The Beguiled

Saidah Russell, Programming Administrator
Call Me by Your Name
Strong Island
Lady Bird
Get Out
A Fantastic Woman 

Sarah Soliman, Marketing Associate
Call Me by Your Name
A Ghost Story
Lady Bird
Lady Macbeth
Columbus