Best of Year: Nathaniel's Top Ten

We've reached the end of our Year in Review List Making if not the end of the year in review list making -- wait wha?!. Which is to say that we still have our own awards nominations (both Oscar and fun extras) in some 40 categories to come. That's right. It's time for the annual Film Bitch Award Nominations -- our 17th annual prizes (gulp) -- which begin with the age-old tradition of the top ten list.

But first...

HONORABLE MENTION

If The Salesman borrows too liberally from Asghar Farhadi's masterpiece A Separation so be it (let's face it -- all the great auteurs steal from themselves. This is how we recognize their films). It's a riveting drama exposed by destabilizing cracks in the foundations.

Sing Street was the year's most rewarding nostalgia piece causing flashbacks of teenage identity experiments and that usually short lived  'i could be a pop star!' phase. And what a fantastically fresh cast.

Viggo Mortensen's uniquely out of place and time persona (think about it: he could be from any country or era) is a huge boon to the thought-provoking Captain Fantastic. Writer/director Matt Ross harnesses Viggo's energy for a head-first sprint into the woods of non-conformity but those idealogical woods thin out and soon enough we're face-to-face with reality.

The Fits' unique character as something of a mystical movement film had us levitating. Its hard-to-pin-down allegory wasn't so much tentative and amorphous as thrillingly ambiguous...

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Celebrate the 100 Oldest Living Oscar Nominees & Winners

The new updated list is now located here

A Year with #52FilmsByWomen

Year in Review. Every afternoon, a new wrap-up. Today Glenn on his year with #52FilmsByWomen

The hashtag ‘52FilmsByWomen’ was started by Women in Film as a means of getting people to consciously watch at least one film a week directed by a woman. It seems like a simple mission considering the number of films many of us watch for both work and pleasure, but I have no doubt that of the 10,000+ people who pledged to do it, many didn’t reach the goal. That’s all right, though, because I saw enough for two.

No, really. In 2016, I watched 105 titles including feature films, shorts, and documentaries. They cover classics, new releases, hidden gems, animations, comedy, horror, and from all over the world. Here are...

TEN OBSERVATIONS FROM MY YEAR OF #52FILMSBYWOMEN

Subverting Toxic Masculinity
We don’t just want more women making films for their fine-tuned insights into the lives of women – Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women and Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits being perhaps the most obvious examples among this year’s releases that I saw – but also for their unique takes on men and masculinity.

Look no further for Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Chevalier for a film that couldn’t have been made by a man, but which has so much to say in this year of “toxic masculinity”. What a shame it didn't catch fire with arthouse audiences and award voters. I wasn't too taken by Tsangari's Attenberg, but I responded to Chevalier more than any of Yorgos Lanthimos' works so far, so make of that what you will.

I’ll Go Anywhere with Andrea Arnold
From the surveilled streets of Scotland in Red Road, the council estates of Essex in Fish Tank, the moors of Wuthering Heights, and now, apparently, the American Midwest...

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The 16 Greatest Music Videos of '16

Every day, different angles on a 2016 wrap up. Tonight Nathaniel with the year's best musical short films...

It's true. They're more commonly referred to as "Music Videos" but since they have their roots in the Movie Musical, we think of them as short film descendants of that greatest of film genres. Music videos, which exploded so spectacularly in the 1980s with the dawn of MTV but experienced something like a midlife death rather than crisis, when MTV dropped the music part of music television, have roared back to life in the past decade with YouTube Vimeo and other saviors. The medium is alive and well and arguably healthier than ever (until the next platform crisis at least).

Though Beyonce's Lemonade dominated the conversation, 2016 actually produced a remarkable number of musical shorts that one might include under the umbrella of "Women Gone Wild," a subgenre equal parts political, erotic, and psychological...

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City of Link

ET First pic of Pixar's Coco though the text is greatly irritating as they seem to be very anti-musical "Don't call it a musical!"
Filmmixtape "if 2016's worst films were drag race competitors"
Playbill George S Irving, the voice of Heat-Miser for the Bankin Rass TV classic "The Year Without a Santa Claus" has died at 94. 
The Guardian why 2016 was a big year for female sexuality in film and on television 

Carrie Fisher & Debbie Reynolds and infinite list-making after the jump...

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