Our Picks for the Best Movies of Fall 2017

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Tuesday, October 31, 2017 at 3:50 p.m.

Courtesy of A24 The Florida Project: Sean Baker is one of the few filmmakers working today who gets that it's possible to find joy in small, difficult corners of the world. His film Tangerine, about two transwomen and their hilarious exploits across Los Angeles, doesn't bow to typical expectations of media featuring transpeople, where their gender identity is always a tragedy and the focus of the story. Sure, Tangerine's characters are poor, and one's fresh out of jail. But the small pleasures of a delicious donut can give them the energy to power through any day. With The Florida Project, his follow-up to Tangerine, Baker again grants both humanity and humor to his down-on-their-luck subjects. Little Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) lives with her smack-talking, tatted young mom Halley (Bria Vinaite) in the Magic Kingdom Motel, walking distance from the throngs of crowds that flock to Disney World year-round. Moonee romps around the "neighborhood" (really just a motel-dotted track of interstate) with her little pals, Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto), getting into trouble wherever they can, while motel manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe) plays the Mr. Wilson to their collective Dennis the Menace. We know that Halley's nights out drinking and her unemployment may not be building toward a happy ending, but this is a story seen through Moonee's eyes. She believes that as long as you're clever and cute enough, you can scheme your way out of anything. 1/16

Atsushi Nishijima and Netflix The Meyerowitz Stories: Adam Sandler's core as a performer has always been his self-loathing. In his best comedies, he weaponizes it with humiliating ruthlessness. Now, he's given the performance of his life in Noah Baumbach's free-spirited and likable The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), and it feels like something momentous and new for the actor. Whereas Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love used Sandler's existing persona brilliantly to create an extreme and beautifully self-aware version of an Adam Sandler Movie, Baumbach successfully brings Sandler into the real world without ever quite letting him lose his Adam Sandler-ness. As the title suggests, Meyerowitzis a self-consciously ambling comedy exploring the relationship between two very different brothers and their oddball father. Sandler is the unemployed, divorced layabout, Ben Stiller the high-powered accountant to the stars and Dustin Hoffman is their failed-artist father. So, we've got Sandler plus Stiller plus Hoffman, and somehow the result is not a comic ham salad. Sandler internalizes his self-loathing as Danny Meyerowitz, a neurotic who has amounted to very little in this world. As Danny tries to raise his precocious college-bound daughter (a wonderful Grace Van Patten) and bond with his judgmental, old-school–New York art-elite dad Harold, The Meyerowitz Stories offers a compelling look at people caught in the gravitational pull of a world where fame is ever-present but forever relative. 2/16

IFC Films 78/52: Hitchcock's Shower Scene: The numbers in the title of 78/52: Hitchcock's Shower Scene refer to the number of setups and shots that were required to create the shocking cinematic savagery that occurs less than an hour into the director's 1960 masterpiece, Psycho. You know the scene: It killed off star Janet Leigh's character — the movie's nominal lead — in brutal fashion, and stunned audiences the world over. Those numbers are an appropriately nerdy detail for Alexandre O. Philippe's gloriously obsessive deep dive into this unforgettable moment. Over an hour and a half, a wide variety of talking heads (39 editors, authors, directors, actors, scholars, sound engineers) talk about that shower scene: How it was done, how it works, why it works and why it's important — what made it historically seismic. A friend's father once described it to me as "the cinematic equivalent of the JFK assassination." Maybe that's overstating it, but Psycho's shower scene certainly did change cinema and pop culture forever. 3/16

Sean O’Reilly/Courtesy Well Go USA Better Watch Out: The recipe for a perfect Christmas horror film — think the 1974 classic Black Christmas or 2010's more arty, Finnish offering Rare Exports — calls for dark humor, at least one scene of bright red blood on snow, some kind of creepy Christmas toy or ornament and a healthy dollop of irreverence for such a sacred season. Chris Peckover's Better Watch Out contains all of the above as well as a killer twist that upends this silly-to-serious film that's sure to enter the canon of Christmas movies for people who prefer a bit of arsenic laced into Santa's cookies. 4/16

Universal Pictures American Made: Just this summer, Tom Cruise starred in a lifeless wannabe-blockbuster called The Mummy that made little use of his innate charisma (shut up, he still has some) or his star persona, turning him into an anonymous action hero. Now comes American Made, a picture that seems unthinkable with anybody but Tom Cruise in the lead. But there's one huge, beautiful catch: Doug Liman's electric film is clear-eyed about the cynicism and corruption beneath its hero's anxious grin. It voraciously breaks down both the star and the country he has symbolized for so much of his career. 5/16

The Orchard BPM: Robin Campillo's profoundly moving AIDS-crisis drama BPMplops us in its opening scenes into a meeting for the Paris chapter of ACT UP, one of the most effective international AIDS-activist organizations during the crisis of the late 1980s and early '90s. Campillo uses the meeting dynamics — all that riffing and banter — to quickly introduce us to at least ten or so integral characters. For the first third of the film, there's no clear protagonist. We rove into the POV of activists as they hold demonstrations at the offices of a pharmaceutical giant and in a local school, spattering walls with fake blood and passing out condoms to kids. Campillo presents them as an indivisible group, working in unison, faltering and then quickly righting their ship, before he focuses on the developing relationship between two men, Nathan (Arnaud Valois) and Sean (Nahuel Perez Biscayart). Quiet, handsome Nathan is HIV negative, while the boisterous Sean is "posi." The first night they spend together, Sean reveals that his high school math teacher transmitted the virus to him — it had been Sean's first time. Nathan, on the other hand, just got lucky. Sean is so very alive in every frame — with every moment to speak, to kiss, to crack a wicked joke seized — and yet we know he will almost certainly die. As they lose themselves on a dance floor, BPM makes their present so thrilling that we don't focus on what bleak future may await them. 6/16

Elevation Pictures Human Flow: You're right not to trust a film critic who calls a movie stunning. But let me say this about Human Flow, the epic new documentary surveying the scope of the global refugee crisis, from the Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei: It stunned me, in the truest sense of the word. Again and again, over its 140 minutes, Human Flow overwhelms with its visions of populations in flight — trekking down mountain roads with their possessions strapped to their backs; packed into open-air boats to cross the Mediterranean — and then those populations stuck and stymied at borders, camping in ditches, sleeping under bridges, set up at expansive refugee camps in Germany and Kenya that seem to stretch on forever but of course are never enough. The film, sometimes curiously beautiful, is above all else a challenge. Once you've seen the tent cities, the families living in filth, the children languishing bored and un-schooled in the wasteland between borders, how can you argue that fear or nationalism trump the human right to be? 7/16

Magnolia Pictures Lucky: Still trudging through the blasted desertscape of the mind 33 years after Paris, Texas, Harry Dean Stanton hoofs along beneath the opening titles of Lucky, his richly aimless swan song, past cacti and scrub brush, the sparseness of the landscape suggesting something of the lead's drift of mind. Stanton's Lucky, an old salt who director John Carroll Lynch (yes, the beloved character actor) conceived of as essentially Stanton himself, tumbleweeds about a small desert town, interested mostly in the essentials. His response to a dude at the bar telling him about the game show Deal or No Deal: "So, a guy picks a case and I've gotta wait a fuckin' hour to see what's in it?" A woman who rescues pets insists that he should consider adopting a critter, giving it "a forever home," and you may laugh in anticipation of his barfly philosopher's response: "Nothing's permanent." 8/16

John Harris/Courtesy FiGa Films Nobody's Watching: Julia Solomonoff's third feature finds the accomplished Argentine director in a naturalistic year-in-the-life mode, examining the somewhat aimless expatriate life of a Buenos Aires soap opera hunk in Brooklyn and Manhattan. As in her 2009 film, The Last Summer of La Boyita, Solomonoff exhibits a scrupulous control of her material and milieu that's too rare in episodic, humanistic indie-movie life studies. There's nothing fussy about any shot of Nobody's Watching, but there's also no shot wasted, and no shot that doesn't communicate something vital about the city or her protagonist, the blond and heartbroke Nico (Guillermo Pfenig.) Nico takes babysitting jobs and wanders the city, shoplifting and auditioning, all as Solomonoff teases out the hurt in his backstory. Up north, Nico, who is gay, feels more free to be open about his sexuality, but that man he loves, of course, is back home, married with kids. Solomonoff has crafted an arresting tale of privilege and displacement, of the ironies of navigating American society as an outsider, of what newcomers expect of New York and what it actually offers. 9/16

Pax Jolie-Pitt and Netflix First They Killed My Father: It would have been easy for Angelina Jolie's adaptation of Cambodian genocide survivor Loung Ung's 2000 memoir to go ruthlessly and repeatedly for the emotional jugular. First They Killed My Father is, after all, the story of a young girl hurled into one of the 20th century's most unthinkable nightmares. But the film unspools with admirable discipline and verve. This is Jolie's most accomplished work yet. 10/16

Courtesy of Sony Pictures Only the Brave: In the opening shot of Only the Brave, a flaming bear — not just a bear that happens to be burning but one that looks as if it had been created entirely from fire — lunges at the camera in the middle of a blazing forest. Fire crew superintendent Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin) describes the image as "the most beautiful and terrible thing I've ever seen." Clearly, director Joseph Kosinski has taken that idea to heart. Only the Brave is a visually splendid, spellbinding and surreal movie that also happens to be an emotionally shattering, over-the-top ugly-cry for the ages. 11/16

Courtesy of Netflix Strong Island: The tragic truth remains that all it takes in America for a white person to get away with killing a black person is for the white person to convince the right people — a judge, a jury, a prosecutor — of his or her own fear. If a white person is scared enough of a black person to believe that his or her life is in danger, our legal system insists that the white person is justified in killing. Yance Ford's courageous, intimate, heart-rending Strong Island examines, with wrenching clarity, one such case. Ford's brother William was shot and killed at age 24 in a Central Islip automotive chop shop in the spring of 1992 by a white man who convinced the cops and the grand jury that he had every reason to fear for his life. Yance Ford tells us, in the film's opening moments, that Strong Island is a chance to set the record straight not just on William's death but on his very character — as in so many cases of black men killed by white men, the white man's exoneration depended upon the black man's demonization. Director Yance reveals William to us through interviews with family and friends, through excerpts from William's own diaries, through the testimony of a Manhattan assistant district attorney who, the year before William was killed, got shot on the street and watched William heroically chase down and tackle the shooter. For all its raw pain, Strong Island is also a scrupulously shaped work, one of striking compositions and juxtapositions, its faces and revelations presented with artful, thoughtful rigor. Especially compelling is an early thumbnail history of African-American neighborhoods on Long Island. 12/16

Film Collection The Old Dark House: Even if it hadn't been essentially lost, James Whale's The Old Dark House (1932) wouldn't ever have fit, exactly, on the Mount Rushmore of Universal's horror greats: Frankenstein, that ol' corpse's wife, the Wolfman, Dracula and — since actually you can't see him we can get away with five faces on this mountain — the Invisible Man. Whale directed the debut of the studio's classic version of three of those characters, all but the Wolfman and the Mummy, and his impeccably atmospheric House, shot one year after Frankenstein and three years before the Bride thereof, stands as another example of his and Universal's 1930s streak of mining from horror lore an ideal essence. There's no perfect monster in House but there is a perfect haunted house, one where the lights won't stay on, the stairways creak, a madman lurks and a whimpering comes from behind a padlocked door. The film, now sparklingly restored, is to being trapped in a scary house what Frankenstein is to deranged scientists playing God: It's the movies' pure headwaters of the very idea. 13/16

Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures The Square: Ruben Ostlund's The Square, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this past May, probably says more about the times we're living in than any other film you're likely to see this year. And yet the beauty of the movie is that everybody will have their own ideas about what, exactly, it is saying. It's not vague, however. Ostlund is specific and exacting as a writer and director, and within The Square's empty spaces, we're forced to confront our own values, and our own visions of ourselves. 14/16

Courtesy of IFC Films Walking Out: "This year we hunt big game. This year you get your first kill." So says seasoned hunter Cal (Matt Bomer) to his teenage son David (Josh Wiggins), who's arrived in rural Montana for his annual visit, and even those going in unfamiliar with the premise of Alex and Andrew Smith's rapturous film may suspect that there may be some impending irony lurking beneath those words. Cal and David don't see much of each other, and it's clear from the boy's attachment to his cellphone that Cal's rugged, tough-guy ethos is mostly alien to him. Let's just say things don't go as planned. To call Walking Out a thriller wouldn't quite do it justice, though it certainly is gripping. Based on a short story by David Quammen, it maintains the hard-edged simplicity of that abbreviated form even as it becomes a drama of survival, mixed with elements of a coming-of-age tale. It's a beautiful movie about unthinkable things. 15/16

Courtesy of Amazon Studios Roadside Attractions Wonderstruck: There are few directors better than Todd Haynes at adopting varied voices and vernaculars and then blending them to create something intoxicating and new. An adaptation of a young adult novel by Brian Selznick, Haynes' vitally personal Wonderstruck follows two timelines: In one, 12-year-old Ben (Oakes Fegley), living in small-town Minnesota in 1977 and mourning the death of his librarian mother (Michelle Williams), finds a stray bookmark that may hold a clue to the identity of the father he never knew. Rendered deaf by a lightning strike (no, really), and feeling more and more like an outcast, Ben hops a bus for New York City. Intercut with his story is that of Rose (an incredible Millicent Simmonds), a deaf girl living in Hoboken in 1927 and obsessed with a silent movie star (Julianne Moore). Frustrated with her sheltered life and her domineering father, she, too, heads to the city, where she hopes to find this mysterious woman. As these kids discover New York in their own ways, Wonderstruck switches between the silent-film aesthetics of Rose's journey and the '70s stylizations of Ben's. But the intercutting isn't clean — the styles sometimes mix and riff off each other. But Haynes gives us an extended finale that not only offers emotional payoff to the held-breath anticipation of the story, but also serves as a tribute to storytelling itself — and to the wonders of following your dreams and maybe even your nightmares. 16/16

Our Picks for the Best Movies of Fall 2017

Watching movies for a living is a tough job, but somebody's got to do it, and our film critics are up to the task. While they see plenty of stellar movies, they see some not-so-great ones, too. They've weeded through them all to give you their picks for some of the best films released this fall. If a few haven’t opened in a theater near you just yet, don’t fret: There’s always a chance you’ll be able to stream them on your small screen, or they may go into wider release before the end of 2017.

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