On Thursday, the New York Film Critics Circle voted up their list of awards, and today we’ll be hearing from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. This update on the ongoing best-of-2016 list-making, our first since Thursday, is fairly UK-centric. We begin with one of the biggest polls of the season, Sight & Sound. 163 critics and curators have cast their ballots, and the first draft of the results, all done up with links and trailers, runs to 30 titles. The top ten:
- Maren Ade‘s Toni Erdmann (49 votes).
- Barry Jenkins‘s Moonlight (34).
- Paul Verhoeven‘s Elle (33).
- Kelly Reichardt‘s Certain Women (25).
- Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (20).
- Ken Loach‘s I, Daniel Blake (17).
- Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea (16).
- Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come (15).
- Jim Jarmusch‘s Paterson (14).
- Albert Serra‘s The Death of Louis XIV (13).
While we look forward to S&S posting the full results, hopefully with individual ballots and all, we can listen to Kieron Corless, Erika Balsom, Henry K. Miller, and Catherine Wheatley discussing four films that have made the top 30, Certain Women, Elle, Moonlight and Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama (tied at #13 with Pedro Almodóvar‘s Julieta and Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea, all with eleven votes each).
The list from Time Out very much reflects the theatrical release schedule in the UK. Of the top 25, fourteen were released somewhere in 2015. The top five:
- László Nemes’s Son of Saul.
- Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight.
- Andrea Arnold’s American Honey.
- Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang.
- Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake.
Today’s Observer is a best-of-2016 blowout. Alongside Mark Kermode on the best films of the year, we have Laura Cumming on art, Alex Preston on fiction, Susannah Clapp on theater, and much more.
“My favorite film of 2016 was the spine-tingling British production Under the Shadow from Iran-born, London-based writer/director Babak Anvari,” writes Kermode. “The UK’s entry for next year’s foreign-language film Oscar, this brilliantly intelligent chiller is set in Tehran, shot in Jordan, and filmed in Farsi. There are nods to Roman Polanski’s The Tenant and Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, but Anvari’s gem conjures an atmosphere that is it’s own.”
“Iranian and world cinema lost Abbas Kiarostami in July of this year,” writes Hossein Eidizadeh for Kinoscope. “This tragic news notwithstanding, 2016 has been splendid for an Iranian film.” And he writes up “a few of my top choices,” including Mani Haghighi‘s A Dragon Arrives!, Asghar Farhadi‘s The Salesman, and Reza Dormishian’s Lantouri.
Without comment, Tom Shone‘s posted his lists of the top ten films and performances and top five scores of the year.
More top 50 albums lists: Consequence of Sound, Paste, and Stereogum. Which brings us full circle. You’ll find Beyoncé’s Lemonade high up on all three lists—and tied at #26 with Julia Ducournau’s Raw, Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals, Pablo Larraín‘s Neruda, and João Pedro Rodrigues‘s The Ornithologist in the Sight & Sound poll.
