If I could describe 2016 in three words it would be – Poetry, grief and terror. The three recurring themes ran through almost all of the films on this list. They came in different forms, shapes and sizes and had different meaning for everyone out there. I personally went beyond my conventional film watch capability and tried working my way through every possible cinematic marvel I could get into. Out of around 200 films that I witnessed here are my favorite 50 Best Films of 2016.
50. Don’t Think Twice | Director: Mike Birbiglia | Language: English
Don’t Think Twice rips your heart out and presents it up for auctioning on a stage that could turn into a condo any given day. A film about improv artists and their comic sketches couldn’t possibly get any sadder than this. If you have had a dream and felt that your dream will gel up into something grand, Don’t Think Twice will make your eyes bleed. It brings melancholia, love, success and failure all into a comic set piece that throws you into a well of thoughts and never wishes to pick you right up. But then again, it reminds you that being in that well isn’t all that bad after all!
Read The Complete Review of Don’t Think Twice.
49. Mountains May Depart | Director: Jia Zhangke | Language: Chinese
The title card in Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart appears somewhere around the 45-minute mark. Not only does it instantly change the way you look at the film (with a very subtle change in the aspect ratio) but also changes your feelings towards the film. As Zhangke himself said, he wanted to make a film about feelings that are surrounded by the changing consumerism, economy and a human need for a better future. So, as we move to the next segment of Mountains May Depart, the transcending time slows down with sweetness, bitterness and bitter-sweetness intermingling together to showcase a rather convincing and thought provoking retrospect of how decisions and emotions rally over changing times and how, deep within, we are still the same people who wish to dance around shedding over sins and regrets, finding our way home.
Read The Complete Review of Mountains May Depart.
48. From Afar | Director: Lorenzo Vigas | Language: Spanish
Debutant director Lorenzo Vigas’s ‘From Afar’ is an emotionally quenching, heartbreaking and brilliant film about alienation and obsession. It pushes its moral compass so deep into the minds on its characters that the ambiguity in their actions take unexpected turns. Violence, silence, and atmospheric longing have been presented with such conviction that even with its narrative latches, From Afar manages to leave a lasting impression.
Read The Complete Review of From Afar.
Similar to 50 Best Films of 2016: The 50 Best Films of 2017
47. Fourth Direction | Director: Gurvinder Singh | Language: Punjabi
The imagery in Gurvinder Singh’s Chauthi Koot (The Fourth Direction) feels quite random at times. There are prolonged shots of farmed-green fields, rural roads, the front & back of a house, flies buzzing and rains falling outside as you look at it from inside the house in consideration. To a normal cine-goer this might seem like an exercise in ambiguous experimentalism. But to someone who wishes to consume cinema in its rawest and most delicately carved form, Chauthi Koot will transform you into the house and fill you with fear of an event that had happened almost 3 decades ago.
Read The Complete Review of Chauthi Koot (The Fourth Direction).
46. Under The Shadow | Director: Babak Anvari | Language: Persian
The fear and anxiety in Babak Anvari’s Under The Shadow not only lurk around closed doors, broken windows, shady basements, restricted roads, terrorized neighborhood but travel almost everywhere. The universality of the fear, both supernatural and real, is terrifying to an extent where the human mind starts questioning everything. And what makes Under The Shadow a brilliant horror film is when it proves your guesses to be wrong in every other instance. It’s a smart, skillful and eerie thriller that haunts you out of your mind.
Read The Complete Review of Under The Shadow.
45. Edge Of Seventeen | Director: Kelly Fremon Craig | Language: English
Kelly Fremon Craig’s The Edge Of Seventeen feels like a John Hughes film. What makes it great is the fact that it spreads its terrific writing over an array of characters that are stripped off from the generic high-school-cliche, as she gives them all a sense of enlightenment. Following Nadine on her self-loathing journey of teenage angst, Kelly Fremon Craig’s film investigates how hard it is to be a teenager. The film is not completely ridden off from the bumpy seen-before dialects but they are cleverly coated under the wrap of a profound knowledge of human nature and the human connection. The director clearly has a great understanding of how people act and thankfully her film doesn’t over-gloss the drawbacks with technological smartness that has gotten into almost all teen films these days.
Read The Complete Review of The Edge Of Seventeen.
44. Embrace Of The Serpent | Director: Ciro Guerra | Language: Spanish
Ciro Guerra’s Embrace Of The Serpent is an intoxicating experience. A dark, trippy crawl into the wilderness that poses questions that can’t be wrapped around ones shoulders. Breaking conventional boundaries set by boundary makers, Embrace Of The Serpent takes a boat to spiritual redemptions. I’m not supposed to say this, but if you watch the film closely, every single question that has haunted the human soul has been answered in here. The answers are never clear but they are in there somewhere between your own moral dilemma, vulnerabilities, greed and obsessions.
Read The Complete Review of Embrace Of The Serpent.
Similar to Best Films of 2016: 20 Must-See Documentaries of 2016
43. Elle | Director: Paul Verhoeven | Language: French.
Draped in a sick, twisted, and demented sense of paranoia, Paul Verhoeven’s Elle is a psycho-sexual character study of a woman in control. While there isn’t much to take away from this film, the sheer authenticity in Isabelle Huppert’s performance plus a screenplay that constantly pushes boundaries makes this film an incredible thriller that laughs at you for judging it too soon.
Read The Complete Review of Elle.
42. Blue Jay | Director: Alexandre Lehmann | Language: English
Alexandre Lehmann’s Blue Jay is a lovely, melancholic stroll down the love that coulda, shoulda, woulda. Shot in beautiful black & white Blue Jay works because of the charming and elusive chemistry between Mark Duplass & Sarah Paulson. They make the long lost couple feel real & genuine while the dialogues evoke nostalgia that makes and instant connection. Blue Jay is about interactions, shared histories and those few moments of guilt that remain with us forever.
Read The Complete Review of Blue Jay.
41. Évolution | Director: Lucile Hadzihalilovic | Language: French
Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution is a hypnotic tale of body horror set on a dystopian island. Where ghostly skinny women conceive boys without the help of men. Evolution is a hard film to follow. It sometimes feels like a feverish fable of motherhood in which sick boys begin to doubt their own existence, sometimes a creepy, atmospheric horror film that’s about the vast existence of a human populous without the presences of the other sex, and most essentially a coming of age film about a small boy coming with terms with the strangeness of the world he lives in. Watching Evolution is a truly unsettling and infuriating experience. It’s an act of becoming one with the ocean, like an ink of innocence dissolving into the vast sea of angst. Evolution is the most beautiful nightmare, a perfect watch for curious minds who are willing to dive deeper to catch the red starfish.
Similar to 50 Best Films of 2016: The 50 Best Films of 2018
40. Jackie | Director: Pablo Larraín | Language: English
Like a somber opera about death, grief and repressed emotions, Pablo Larrain’s Jackie is 2 in a row for the modern master who has broken the shackles of the conventional biopics with this and Neruda. Jackie is not just an account of a death and the aftermath it’s a brilliant jab at mythmaking – drawing a thin line of blood and paranoia between reality and performance. Also, Portman is godlike (the accent takes a little time to get used to, though).
39. I, Olga Hepnarová | Director: Petr Kazda, Tomás Weinreb | Language: Czech
I, Olga Hepnarová chronicles the life of Olga. A 22-year-old who mowed down eight strangers on a Prague sidewalk in 1973. Drenched in beautiful frames that evoke isolation and silent trauma, I, Olga Hepnarova is a brilliant re-telling of the life of a troubled teenager who just wished to be left alone. The way the directors subtly investigate the psychological aspect of Olga’s character is applause worthy. It both manages to make the viewers sympathetic and never seems to sensationalize a criminal activity that is supposedly the center of the film.
Similar to 50 Best Films of 2016: The 50 Best Films of 2019
38. Interrogation | Director: Vetrimaaran | Language: Tamil
Probably the mostly brutally honest and realistic Tamil film ever made. Vetrimaaran’s Interrogation convinces you that innocence is not only dead but it’s continuously tortured under the shoes of the greater power. Interrogation is a film that accounts the total lack of empathy that the system of the country has come down to. The realities and reactions in the film erases all the possibilities of justice. The brutality is presented on a scale that has never been shown before. Interrogation is a film that is redundant to our times & needs to be seen at any cost.
Read The Complete Review of Interrogation.
37. Hail, Caesar! | Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen | Language: English
The Coen brothers are not at their best here, and yet they churn out a film that’s so diverse and satirical in its representation of the 50’s Hollywood that it aptly formulates a sense in today’s world. Hail, Caesar features movies inside movies, sets inside sets, dance numbers inside dance number, noir inside comedies, doppelgangers, God almighty, communists & a fucking submarine. It’s a Wes Anderson film about a studio fixer’s dilemma that’s not made by Wes Anderson.
36. Raman Raghav 2.0 | Director: Anurag Kashyap | Language: Hindi
There’s a strange smile that appears on your face as you watch Ramanna dismantling his victims in Anurag Kashyap’s Raman Raghav 2.0. Its not because Kashyap somehow magically manages to justify the mystifying murders in his film, nor because he tries to ground you into rooting for his killing machine, but because the film jabs at that side of a human brain which has violence and anarchy all over its surface. He kicks a dark, blunt hole in your head, one that shakes you to the moment of spine chilling, psychotic disorder. Here’s a film that never steps back on its delivery of evil. It piles a dozen of grim shenanigans in front of your eyes and just keeps increasing the weight until you gasp or possibly choke yourself to death.
Read The Complete Review of Raman Raghav 2.0.
35. Take Me To The River | Director: Matt Sobel | Language: English
Take Me to the River cages you into an eerie and uncomfortable atmosphere which doesn’t really reveal what’s going on under the surface. Dirty, disturbing and unpredictable, Take Me to The River is probably the smartest indie film I’ve seen all year. It uses its minimal setting to create a claustrophobic web of secrets. Matt Sobel has created a nightmare that doesn’t open all its cards and the ambiguity or the open-ends just calls for even weirder thoughts. It is essentially a coming of age story that truly terrifies you with an experience you wish to wash off.
Read The Complete Review of Take Me To The River.
34. Aloys | Director: Tobias Nölle | Language: Swiss, German
Soaked in a Kaufman-esque sense of magic realism, Tobias Nölle’s Aloys is a hypnotic take on modern alienation. Following the life of Aloys Adorn, a private investigator who is recently grief-stricken by the death of his father, Aloys chronicles his life when a mysterious phone call disturbs his so-called solitude and forces him to blur the lines between the real and the imaginary. With wonderfully framed images, production design, and understated performances, Tobias Nölle presents a brilliant character sketch of loneliness & escapism in a world that seems like a party only till it lasts.
Related To 50 Best Films of 2016: 15 Best Women-Directed Films Of 2016
33. I, Daniel Blake | Director: Ken Loach | Language: English
Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake breaks you with every passing minute. In this incredibly subtle & beautiful drama, Ken Loach puts the struggle & sadness that the British working class goes through. There’s a scene in Loach’s film where a girl (also a mother) breaks down in a food bank because she hasn’t eaten in days to fill the bellies of her children. It’s a beautifully understated scene where Loach brings out utterly heart-breaking human emotions in people and his viewers alike.
Read The Complete Review of I, Daniel Blake.
32. Julieta | Director: Pedro Almodóvar | Language: Spanish
Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta is about guilt, about love, about loss and everything that happens when things are lost in absolutely terrible moments of silence. Being a director who rightfully focuses on visual appeal, Almodovar’s film uses past and present with shades of blue and red. With both the colors matching the incredibly stunning costume design and grandeur production design which insinuate long-used Almodovar elements of death, the nature of its cause and the aftermath. Much like Volver, in Julieta too Almodóvar’s main focus in again on the entirely debatable and emotionally draining relationship between a mother and a daughter and what makes the relationship take a wrong turn on the road to being guilt-free.
Read The Complete Review of Julieta.
31. Krisha | Director: Trey Edward Shults | Language: English
Trey Edward Shults’s debut feature Krisha is an investigation into the internal turmoil. The kind which makes you incredibly disjointed from anything that concerns your own self-being. The kind that wrecks you into two people. One of which needs to be sympathized with and the other has gone too far into the ditch and cannot be brought back to life. Shults uses the happy occasion of thanksgiving to portray how the titular character has gone past functionality. How all her tries are beyond vain, and how, sometimes people need to unravel the ugly truths about themselves, even if it results in total self-destruction.
Read The Complete Review of Krisha.
30. Kapoor & Sons | Director: Shakun Batra | Language: Hindi
A dysfunctional family drama that has its heart in the right place. Shakun Batra’s Kapoor and Sons is one of the most real, relatable, family films I have ever seen. There are times when you feel you are on the screen acting out, loving, hating and abusing fate, luck and everything that comes along. More than what it tells you, Batra’s film works because of the characters. The people who inact them are cardboard cut outs of the commercial anti-cinema, yet they manage to feel real in their ordinary self. It’s endearing, heart-warming and miles away from the sugar-soaked entertainers that have unreal situations and unreal people at their center.
Read The Complete Review of Kapoor and Sons.
Related to 50 Best Films of 2016: The 10 Best Hindi Films of 2016
29. Hell or High Water | Director: David Mackenzie | Language: English
David Mackenzie tackles multiple, well-rounded characters with a great affection for their desires, desperations and their drive to do wrong things for the right reasons. There are no villains here, just individuals who do wrong to make things right. With a surprising amount of humor, depth, and style, Taylor Sheridan (Known for Sicario) has penned a script that oozes substance even when it is just a heist thriller on the surface.
Read The Complete Review of Hell Or High Water.
28. Staying Vertical | Director: Alain Guiraudie | Language: French
A man sodomizes, then euthanizes an elderly man in front of his baby as progressive rock holler in the background. That’s just the tip of the iceberg in Alain Guiraudie’s absolutely bizarre, offhand surrealistic trip through a series of undefined goals and weirdness. The protagonist in Staying Vertical is a distant cousin of Kramer from Seinfeld. The film starts with him trying to pen-down a screenplay and goes down territories that even God wouldn’t imagine. To account the weirdness in Staying Vertical, Guiraudie has a therapist who lives on the other end of a boat ride. She uses veins to cure what is wrong with Leo’s personality which even he doesn’t understand. There are wolves, sexual encounters that don’t make sense and to top it all – There’s an instant cut to a live childbirth.
27. La La Land | Director: Damien Chazelle | Language: English
La La Land injects enough love into a dying genre that wasn’t willing to make its dream come true. With dazzling visuals and beautiful set design, Damien Chazelle’s passion project came out in the world breaking millions of hearts and winning them, all together. Plucked, played and danced around a blooming love story, La La Land is about dreamers and heartaches, about art and jazz, about failures and sacrifices. It’s about you, me and everyone who wishes to be lifted into the sky when the gravity’s amiss & smile or cry as the love walks away.
Read The Complete Review of La La Land.
26. Aquarius | Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho | Language: Portuguese
One of the most intense and powerful performances of 2016 came from Sofia Braga in Aquarius. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film is a terrific character study of a music critic. Amidst all the music, philosophy and progressiveness lies a drama about boundaries and colonialism. It’s about respecting one’s privacy and will to live in something that is more than just a home. Aquarius is a film about things, their value, and their essence. From the old dusty record on the shelf to memories of stolen times, Aquarius leaves us with a staggering climax that talks about ownership and sentimentality.
25. Right Now, Wrong Then | Director: Sang-soo Hong | Language: Korean
Every filmmaker has a story to tell but isn’t all stories his stories a version of the first one? Sang-Soo Hong’s quietly imperfect Right Now, Wrong Then restarts at half point – wronging all the rights and righting all the wrongs. It’s a film that tells us that honesty in storytelling can have it’s own interpretations. While some of us wish to fulfill our fantasies with every cinematic marvel that we witness, some of us look out for a more realistic, more sincere take on what life and interactions are meant to be. Right Now, Wrong Then told me that we can correct the stories we feel are totally banal and fake and then turn them into reality.
Related to 50 Best Films of 2016: 75 Best Movies of The 2010s Decade
24. The Wailing | Director: Na Hong-Jin | Language: Korean
Who is the savior? Who is the victim? Who is the God? Who is the devil? Who is the ghost? Who is the stranger? What is a trap? What is the road?Hong-jin Na’s The Wailing is an inquisitive questioning of moral dilemma. A dark, visceral ghost-tale. One that mixes genres of buddy-cop comedy, an exercise in investigation, exorcism, cannibalism and some more isms to its endless thematic heft. The film has an absolutely terrific buildup that slides creepy, haunting and nightmarish atmosphere around your eyes. It has the power of hallucinating you into believing all the deceptions it keeps throwing your way. While the last leg, smirks on your face with gimmicks thrown in to shock you to the bone, The Wailing still stands afloat with it’s long-lasting and impressive dismantling of mythical troops.
Read The Complete Review of The Wailing.
23. Endless Poetry | Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky | Language: Spanish
Endless Poetry dances, sings, plays, dicks-around, fucks, loves and lives Poetry. It is a fantastic piece of work that uses its cinematic independence to resolve a meta-journey. When Mr. Jordowsky comes up and narrates his own tale you love him, hate him, take a spiritual journey through amnesia lane while being fascinated at every melodramatic turn. The film is full of brimming energy and the self-reflectiveness makes it all the more whimsical and vibrant. This 2nd leg of the biographical sketch witnesses an array of characters and their journey through time and space. As the dead march on, the living are still churning out pages that are worthy of all the cinematic boners you can ever have.
Read The Complete Review of Endless Poetry.
22. Nocturnal Animals | Director: Tom Ford | Language: English
Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals is a remarkable film. A cluster-fuck of neo-noir, neo-melodrama & small, untainted pieces of melancholia soaked under bloody tendencies. An exercise in visceral, deeply rooted regrets and cold, calculative paranoia of complex emotional confusion. Framed, reframed and showy, Nocturnal Animals goes beyond past and present, reality and fiction, emotions and feelings and ambiguity and clarity. Brimming with cinematography that you can feel on your nose, and a heart-pounding score that delves you into its deeper, unexplained layers- the film doesn’t leave your head. It slowly crawls into your flesh, sits inside until you are completely relaxed and then rips into the darkness leaving you with your own breadcrumbs.
Read The Complete Review of Nocturnal Animals.
21. No Home Movie | Director: Chantal Akerman | Language: French
Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie is profoundly heartbreaking and almost unbearably sad. It’s a final testament that the late film-maker pays to the love of her life – her mother. Shot almost inside her mother’s apartment, No Home Movie chronicles the final months of the life of Natalia Akerman (a holocaust survivor). Even though the documentary features real intimate and personal conversations of Akerman’s own life, the universality that the film possesses makes its an incredible piece of art. Closely muxed with moving & still images of barren trees & long static shots of a desert, the film only feels more and more absorbing even with its abstractness. No Home Movie is a film that each one of us secretly wishes to make. Something to hold on to, something to make the love remain and something that fuels and brings down the loneliness that sets within.
20. Graduation | Director: Cristian Mungiu | Language: Romanian
Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation is the kind of drama that knows every step of its way and yet feels so bound to written tendencies. A terrifically written, brilliantly acted drama about the compromises one makes to instill a better future for everyone.There’s a scene where the protagonist revisits the street where he must have hit a dog. He cries and the scene sudden shifts to something more important. Now, Mungiu knows how important are small mistakes in the grander compromise of the film and hence a honking scene follows later on in the film. It’s absolutely subtle and doesn’t really matter but it evokes drama out of thin air.
Read The Complete Review of Graduation.
19. American Honey | Director: Andrea Arnold | Language: English
Andrea Arnold’s American Honey starts and ends with dives into two polar opposite mixes. One of them redeems you while the other makes you vulnerable. But, when the tables turn, isn’t life all about finding solace in a small little cottage somewhere in the woods? With American Honey, Andrea Arnold (know for the indie wonder – Fish Tank) makes a bold narrative choice. Her camera mostly lingers into the inside of a van seamlessly providing us with a sense of belonging. You are there – struggling, exploring and trying to get to the point where you somehow gain enough moolah to live your dream. American Honey feels like documenting life in it’s rawest form. It takes you on a journey of self-realization. A journey where there is no room for regrets, relationships and mostly – no room for latching onto something that makes you crawl when you can swim and be a part of the ocean.
Read The Complete Review of American Honey.
18. After The Storm | Director: Hirokazu Koreeda | Language: Japanese
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After The Storm is about people who can’t say farewell to the people they were before. A mother who wishes to see her kid happy in spite of him being a late bloomer, A son (who is also a father) who wishes to write the best novel he could possibly churn out of his angst, broken dreams and an eye for noticing people while mending all that has been broken with his lack of concern, A wife (who is also a mother) who wishes her husband to be a bit more concerned with his existence and the happiness of his son and an estranged kid who wishes to hold them all together within that secret hiding spot that can keep them safe from the storm called life. After the Storm brings a gentle, touching and often funny approach to family dynamics that doesn’t resign to overly-loud and docile approach of figuring out small truths about individuality, fractured relationships and all the regrets that somehow make you a wiser person.
Read The Complete Review of After The Storm.
17. Everybody Wants Some!! | Director: Richard Linklater | Language: English
Linklater’s spiritual sequel to Dazed & Confused is as important a film as the second film in the Before Series. Not because it continues the story but it shows how important and fun college life is. Not only to every single person on the planet; but to Linklater himself. Everybody Wants Some is basically about half a dozen jocks and their super-party-like lifestyle. These characters are not likable, but as you go back to college and remember those proud people who played for the university; you only remember them to be complete assholes. Linklater turns these assholes into characters who use their arrogance not only to define their personality but also as a carrying force in their competition called life. Linklater’s film is a funny, intelligent ode to growing up.
Related to 50 Best Films of 2016: 15 Must-See Coming Of Age Films Of 2016
16. Toni Erdmann | Director: Maren Ade | Language: German
Toni Erdmann works amazingly well if you slide yourself into its grilling array of metaphors. The absurd and quirky humor pushes us into a sugar rush of emotions once your get your thinking cap on and put your hands around this film that can easily handcuff you and never let you go. Toni Erdmann is about a father and a daughter. About those forgotten moments of joy that build us into the people we are and about those familiar relationships that constantly remind us of being our own ‘people’, while not leaving the self behind. Maren Ade’s idea of presenting her deconstruction of life can be a comedy to some, a life lesson to others and simply a gimmick to most of the people. For me, Toni Erdmann is a film that tells me to be happy, embrace the loneliness and never let the fire inside die.
Read The Complete Review of Toni Erdmann.
15. The Neon Demon | Director: Nicolas Winding Refn | Language: English
The Neon Demon is a visually enchanting mixture of blood & glitters. While being a terrific critic on the world of fashion, Refn’s film is basically a horror film about beauty. Where he stylizes the stage with sparks of colors and madness. He values a line of people doing their bit to stay afloat. This includes them loving, respecting, stalking and transforming in the process of doing the best they can to stay beautiful or to be around beauty all the time. Refn delves deep into the human condition which knows that the inner beauty is more important than the one we see outside but we are never attracted towards it. The harsh truth is investigated with splats of blood, hate and insane frames of poetic injustice. The film never steps back. It only delivers from start to finish while seeming hollow all through. But when you look at it closely, it chews you from the inside and spits you out. It follows you like a ghost for days where you reminiscent over the beauty that bowls you out and constantly makes you fantasize about it.
Read The Complete Review of The Neon Demon.
14. The Salesman | Director: Asghar Farhadi | Language: Persian
Asghar Farhadi structures his film around the renowned Arthur Miller play ‘Death of A Salesman.’ The complexity and motives of his character are pretty straight forward but Farhadi throws them into a dramatic truce where he digs deeper with his immaculate vision and a great precision and understanding of ordinary people forced into a test of time. The films revolve around two actors who have recently moved into a new place. The Salesman is an ingenious drama about the ambiguity of morality. It questions characters as they slowly lose grip of what they are and what they don’t wish to become. Brilliantly written and edited, Farhadi’s film almost feels like a thriller that seeps tension out of all ends. When it reaches its gut-wrenching final act you just wish for it to end. You wish to take a deep breath and take it all in. This right here is A-grade film-making.
Read The Complete Review of The Salesman.
13. Cemetery of Splendor | Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul | Language: Thai
It’s hard to account what Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s absolutely terrific Cemetery of Splendor is all about. Also, doing so will just make it lose its magnificent essence. So I’d just say what I feel I should say; Cemetery of Splendor is unlike anything I’ve seen all year. It’s a magnetic film that’s about the past, the present and the future. It’s about loneliness, solitude, and love. It’s about human excrement, governmental issues, and excavation. It’s about sleep, dreams, and dreaming the neon dreams. It’s about soldiers, kings, and sickness. It’s about goddesses, ghosts, and ghosts of goddesses. It’s about imagination, healing, and hypnosis. It’s about hysteria, loss, and self-discovery. Cemetery of Splendor hides its weight under the calmness of half a centimeter of hard concrete. One that pushes on, dragging its weight and perspiring in this world. Its a surreal experience in phantasm of the general populous and their wide open eyes to everything that is wrong with the world. Cemetery of Splendor is about the dead leaves that cling on to the inner core of our memories and don’t leave until they fall to the ground and still become a part of existence.
Related to 50 Best Films of 2016: The 20 Best Movies Of 2016 [Editor’s Picks]
12. Our Little Sister | Director: Hirokazu Koreeda | Language: Japanese
Hirokazu Kore-eda has weaved a niche for himself. The master of modern family drama uses incredibly subtly to implore the lives of vulnerable and complex individuals. He quietly lets us into their life where the loudness simmers down on the shore nearby and only deeply touching and melancholic situations slowly build up to become something that touches you deep within. Our Little Sister is about forgiveness, about love and above everything – acceptance. There is more than one instance where you feel the feelings are deliberately tucked under the rug, but that’s exactly what Kore-da does. His sole aim is to explore the lives of little people, living in little houses and having little dreams. Out Little Sister is a beautiful film that explores the lives of three women as they welcome their new companion with open arms.
Read The Complete Review of Our Little Sister.
11. Manchester by the Sea | Director: Kenneth Lonergan | Language: English
Manchester by the Sea is an extraordinary film. A film about grief has never felt so deeply moving and profound since Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life. While The Tree Of Life bases its emotional wallop on incredibly artistic imagery, Lonergan’s film wishes to convey the emotions with a devastating study of human behavior and how people interact with each other. The film opens and closes in the sea. Where the characters are seen riding the family boat. While the sea remains unchanged, the boat acts as a metaphor for everything that gets broken, destroyed and tattered soon finds it’s proper place when it’s mended and worked upon. And sometimes, the proper place is the world that gets you better is the world itself, with everything in it. Where every passing minute and memory brings sadness along with a hope that everything can be made better, if not perfect.
10. 20th Century Women | Director: Mike Mills | Language: English
I love how immensely understated, yet profound 20th Century Women really is. There are moments of sadness that, without a shadow of a doubt, can’t be embraced easily. But Mike Mills’s film gives you the strength to look beyond the conventional stream of things. He gives you technicolor highways, skateboards, planes and cars to ramble on. With beautifully layered characters that peel off without scratching their heads and some of the most wonderful writing that 2016 witnessed, Mills’s film works like therapy under the stars. It blinks at every passing regret, takes a snapshot and tries to mend it in the best way possible. It’s an incredible ode to people who like to look beyond what has been told and taught, ones that know the difference between the Art fags & Black Flag. 20th Century Women is an artful construct of the very idea of understanding people. A feminist epic that puts you in a spell of its warmth.
9. The Handmaiden | Director: Park Chan-wook | Language: Korean, Japanese
Every frame in The Handmaiden looks like a painting. The deprived, women species has been shown to be materialized, sodomized and liberated, all together. It’s a masterful work by Park Chan-Wook, as he puts his audiences in the midst of a large puzzle spread all over the floor. Where they are forced to question every action, feel distressed by some of them & in a very darkly hilarious kind of way, feel greatly amused by them. Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden is like a sexy threesome. While it gives pleasure & pain in equal measures to all the parties involved, someone or the other is always left gasping & confused. That is until someone takes them by their hands and shows them the way.
Read The Complete Review of The Handmaiden.
8. Cosmos | Director: Andrzej Żuławski | Language: French
Welcome to the land of the obscure. Dead birds are found in the backyard and people talk like Donald Duck. But wait, that’s not where Żuławski’s farewell note to cinema end. There are three endings to this film that is supposedly too much cinema for its 103-minute runtime. One of those ending goes way into the closing credits and makes you want to question everything that you had just seen. Cosmos is a baffling work of art. It irrevocably satirizes the very idea of a thought. It questions the chaos that goes inside one’s head, encapsulating almost everything there is in the world. Everything that can’t be expressed in any sort of non-crazy form. Andrzej Zulawski’s film motions through randomness pushing the narrative upside down to a point where the existence of the narrative becomes super-bleak in itself. Żuławski’s Cosmos is a scrutinizing tale of colorful characters and strange reactions.
Related to 50 Best Films of 2016: 10 Most Weird Films Of 2016
7. Neruda | Director: Pablo Larraín | Language: Spanish, French
Larrain’s aim is not showing the vision or power of Neruda’s verses. Larrain wishes to convey the sole reason for the existences of an artist. Which is, in fact being a voice among many others. A voice that guides other similar or disjointed voices in an opaque unison. Where life, death, and everything else become a part of a piece of paper which can summarize, analyze, alter and fictionalize the life according to one’s wishes. Where you are always the leading character of a story about your favorite idols and their escape to nowhere. What makes Neruda a great film lies in the way Pablo Larrain & co-writer Guillermo Calderón playfully engaged us out of the biographic element, to present a meta, sometimes poetic dream of a storyteller. It’s a biopic that almost defies its own subject matter to become a subtle investigation of how and why a person decides to romanticize with words and phrases.
Read The Complete Review of Neruda.
6. Moonlight | Director: Berry Jenkins | Language: English
There have been films that question identity, that explores the early years of sexuality and films that expand on the horizon of what goes into the making of a man or a man’s man. Jenkins’s film is, however, beyond those literal definitions. It does something that hasn’t been done before. It strips down the very essence of a supposedly manly figurine at the center of it all and recounts the flaccid life of its protagonist from childhood through adolescence and eventual adulthood. Berry Jenkins’s Moonlight is a subtle investigation of a character’s motivation to find love. It’s about the constant struggle to find oneself while trying to fit right into the body we are supposed to be in. It’s about not succumbing to being a product of the environment but rather being a product of yourself. It’s about going past all the heartbreaks, questions, and complexities that bring you down and finally being able to find the voice you need and the listener who listens.
Read The Complete Review of Moonlight.
5. The Witch | Director: Robert Eggers | Language: English
Robbert Eggers’s The Witch has to be the most terrifying viewing experience I have had in a long time. This debut feature film is so freakishly unsettling yet grounded that I had to convince myself that it’s just some insane cinematic artistry at work. There are no half measures in Eggers’s film. It’s brutal and has such immensely haunting imagery that it can create a complete facial blur. There are no answers that Eggers provides and that just make it all kinds of devastating. The Witch is that rare horror film that not only seduces you to its grim, dark patches in the wood but it also traps you into its human trapping tendencies were wronging the wrong and righting the right can no more ensure your safety. It’s a film that can be what you magically want it to be.
Related to 50 Best Films of 2016: 20 Must See Horror Films Of 2016
4. Arrival | Director: Denis Villeneuve | Language: English
Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival is an emotional, deeply touching story about writing your own stories and learning to listen to that jumbled voice in the head that has all the answers. While exploring the necessity of communication, where it needs a specific channel to process things through, Villeneuve also weaves a beautiful story about life, death, and new beginnings. Unfolding in typical Villeneuve fashion, the drama and thrill in the film is understated. That is, it keeps slipping off the edges just to progress into something that captures each layer of a deeper exploration of how our minds work and how they really need to work. Arrival is big, not because of the scale but because it leaves you with a feeling of having seen something that you will absorb and take into consideration.
Read The Complete Review of Arrival.
3. Swiss Army Man | Director: The Daniels | Language: English
Swiss Army Man is a tender, funny and deeply moving coming of age film.The Daniels, know for their twisted sense of wry humor in their famous music video ‘Turn Down For What’ bring their senses to this symbolically astounding, charmingly weird comedy about an introvert/suicidal dude and a farting corpse. While one of them is stranded on an Island, the other throws a light into life. Swiss Army Man features Daniel Radcliffe as a farting corpse whose farts are stored by corking his asshole and using him like a jet-skies whenever necessary. The film basically jabs into the dead side of every single one of us – the soul. So when we meet the corpse, i.e Manny he is just something which is repulsive (farting and being dead) but slowly we get to know that he is a multi-tasking tool (much like a Swiss Army Knife). The Daniels are basically telling us that all the answers that we are looking for are inside us. We know when someone wants to reject us, we know why we are alone and we also know that life is still worth living with all the dirt in the world. They want you to fall in love with yourself. They want you to embrace what you are, even if you are someone who farts out loud or likes to dress up every once in a while.
Read The Complete Review of Swiss Army Man.
2. Kaili Blues | Director: Bi Gan | Language: Mandarin
There are a few technical glitches that Kaili Blues suffers from but the purity of this film lies right in the imperfect perfections. Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues is a dreamy, surreal and incredibly original film about time and memories. About the past, the present and the future. It’s a visual poem that unfolds upon itself. It floats and glides and often hovers over lives that shape and unshape when looked through a singular vision of love. The film talks about the endless wounds that are inflicted on us and the constant sorrow that comes out as these upstaged poems which hold that unconventional narrative of life – together.
Read The Complete Review of Kaili Blues.
1. Paterson | Director: Jim Jarmusch | Language: English.
When you watch Jarmusch’s Paterson the world will seem different to you. We are so used to seeing conflicts in films that when Paterson (Adam Driver) wakes up late on a Friday, we worry about his schedule – which is probably the least of the worries we could have when the characters in our films are thrown into life-threatening situations. Paterson is a quite, sincere and gentle film about the beauty of the mundane elements of our daily life. A dreamy, almost magical escape into a supposedly boring life that showers poetry through all it’s edgy corners. Jarmusch’s Paterson is an extraordinary film as its tap into the creative process with such charming humanity that you are bound to get mesmerized by it.
