Anomalisa
Middle-age angst rendered in stop-motion animation from Charlie Kaufman, as a depressed self-help author holes up in a hotel during a sales convention and becomes fixated on a woman he meets in the bar.
What we said: It is really funny, and incidentally boasts one of the most extraordinarily real sex scenes in film history. It also scared me the way a top-notch horror or a sci-fi dystopia might.
Arabian Nights: Vols 1-3
A three-film epic from Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes, which uses the famous tale/cycle as a structuring device for Gomes’ anatomy of Portugal’s social and economic malaise.
What we said: An opaque compendium of stories – like the ones Scheherazade told to stave off her own death – all responding in indirect ways to the miseries forced on Portugal by austerity.
The Assassin
Taiwanese master director Hou Hsaio-hsien released his first feature since 2007, featuring Shu Qi as the eponymous killer in an elaborately stylised wuxia tale.
What we said: Its moments of sublime gorgeousness are captivating. There is such delicacy and artistry in The Assassin, as if the film is spun from some exquisite, evanescent tissue of precious material.
A Bigger Splash
Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes star in Luca Guadagnino’s four-handed psychodrama based on Jacques Deray’s 1969 psychological thriller La Piscine, in which Swinton’s island idyll is invaded by Fiennes’ over-exuberant music promoter.
What we said: A terrifically assured switch to English-language film-making from Guadagnino … He is surely coming to rival Paolo Sorrentino as an Italian auteur on the world stage.
Captain America: Civil War
The third in Marvel’s Captain America series, with two sets of superheroes lining up to battle each other over whether the Avengers should retain their independence, or give up control.
What we said: Crazily surreal, engaging and funny in the best Marvel tradition, building to a whiplash-twist reveal that sports with the ever-present idea of duplicity and betrayal within the Avengers’ ranks themselves.
Chronic
Cannes-award winning drama from Mexican director Michel Franco, with Tim Roth as a terminal-care nurse who steps in to help take care of patients in their final days.
What we said: Tim Roth stars, and gives what may well be the performance of his career – calm, studied, mysteriously impassive.
The Club
Chilean director Pablo Larraín takes on the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship once again in this dark and difficult film about a “retirement home” for priests apparently guilty of child abuse.
What we said: The Club is a startling and disturbing film in many ways – and replete with ideas … The flavour of fear and disillusionment is all but overwhelming.
Deadpool
Zinger-packed comic book adaptation from Marvel, featuring Ryan Reynolds as the pansexual superhero and mutant mercenary assassin taking on Ed Skrein’s Ajax.
What we said: A horribly violent, shriekingly self-aware and macabre Marvel super-antihero movie, and it’s the funniest Ryan Reynolds film since Van Wilder: Party Liaison.
Dheepan
Jacques Audiard-directed thriller about Tamil refugees struggling to adapt to life on a French housing estate, which won the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2015.
What we said: It’s bulging with giant confidence and packed with outbursts of that mysterious epiphanic grandeur, like moments of sunlight breaking through cloud-cover, with which Audiard endows apparently normal sequences and everyday details.
Everybody Wants Some!!
Richard Linklater’s semi-sequel to his 1970s high-school comedy Dazed and Confused, here following a bunch of college students on baseball scholarships in the early 1980s.
What we said: A deceptively subtle comedy, and also a challengingly and almost provokingly unironic film intensifying and cartoonifying what it is like to be young and male, but quite without the obviously readable drama and poignancy of his earlier film Boyhood.
Hail, Caesar!
Entertaining Hollywood satire from the Coen brothers, featuring Josh Brolin as a studio fixer attempting to establish the whereabouts of missing actor Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), star of the eponymous Roman epic.
What we said: It’s a crazy, if lugubrious, caper about the golden, post-war age of Tinseltown, like a Hollywood tale that PG Wodehouse might have written, but with that ominous deadpan, quirky-Coeny quality where the cheeriness would otherwise go.
The Hateful Eight
Kurt Russell, Samuel L Jackson and Jennifer Jason Leigh star in Quentin Tarantino’s snowbound western, in which copious bloodletting results after a motley group of travellers are stranded at a roadhouse.
What we said: A Jacobean western that is also an American epic set mostly in just one room: intimate yet gigantic. It is horribly violent, exhilaratingly intelligent, discursive and sinewy – brutal and cerebral in this director’s signature ludic style.
High-Rise
Adaptation of JG Ballard’s celebrated fable of alienation and conflict in 1970s Britain, directed by Ben Wheatley and starring Tom Hiddleston as a doctor witnessing the breakdown of law and order.
What we said: I loved its gnomic refusal of normal storytelling and the way it approximates the distance of Ballard’s prose. It’s the social-surrealist film of the year.
The Jungle Book
A live-action 3D retelling of Kipling’s Mowgli tales, directed by Jon Favreau, and retaining much of the celebrated Disney cartoon’s infectious spirit.
What we said: A terrifically enjoyable piece of old-fashioned storytelling and a beautiful-looking film: spectacular, exciting, funny and fun.
Love & Friendship
Kate Becksinsale reunites with her Last Days of Disco director Whit Stillman for an unlikely adaptation of an early Jane Austen novella (which has filched its title from a different one).
What we said: A very satisfying archery contest of zingers … a film of surfaces and cynicism, in which the romanticism of the more famous stories is almost entirely absent.
Miles Ahead
Don Cheadle directs and stars in a biopic of jazz legend Miles Davis, focusing on Davis’s burnout years in the late 1970s and his attempt to achieve a comeback.
What we said: This is a labour of requited love for Cheadle, a subject he clearly feels passionate about that responds to his touch.
The Nice Guys
Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, as a private detective and a for-hire heavy respectively, team up to solve a gruesome, complex crime in the moral swamp of late 70s Los Angeles.
What we said: A comedy hardboiled noir, a plastic Black Dahlia with something of PT Anderson’s Boogie Nights, Altman’s version of The Long Goodbye and even some weird touches of Lynch.
Our Little Sister
Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda directs a quiet “family drama” about four sisters of varying ages who live together in a large house in the seaside town of Kamakura.
What we said: Superbly unforced and unassuming, finding delicate notes of affirmation and optimism and discreetly celebrating the beauty of nature and family love.
The Revenant
A hallucinatory epic of survival in the old west, about frontiersman Hugh Glass who survives bear attacks and the treachery of his fellow travellers, which won Oscars for its star Leonardo DiCaprio and director Alejandro González Iñárritu.
What we said: What is so distinctive about this Iñárritu picture is its unitary control and its fluency: no matter how extended, the film’s tense story is under the director’s complete control.
Room
An adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s kidnap-and-imprisonment novel, itself inspired by the Kampusch and Fritzl cases in Austria, for which Brie Larson won the best actress Oscar.
What we said: This is a disturbing and absorbing film, shrewdly acted, particularly by Larson. It lets the audience in; it does not just let the nightmare stun them into submission.
Sing Street
Irish director John Carney follows Once and Begin Again with another musician-oriented film, this time about Dublin schoolkids who form a band to escape their humdrum lives.
What we said: A wish-fulfilment comedy about idealism, aspiration and getting off with girls, riffing on that age-old truth that being in a band might just give you the cachet that will make up for a lack of money and looks.
Son of Saul
Stark and uncompromising account of existence inside a Nazi death camp from Hungarian director László Nemes, with Geza Röhrig as the Sonderkommando attempting to survive.
What we said: Its good faith and moral and intellectual seriousness are beyond doubt. And Röhrig’s performance is transfixing, without ever drifting into the realm of actorly pretence.
Spotlight
A hardhitting and impassioned Oscar-winning study of the Boston Globe’s campaign to expose clerical child abuse in the city, and the Catholic church’s ongoing cover-up.
What we said: There are a few journo cliches – but it has the sinew of a really good procedural, underpinned by genuine moral outrage.
Victoria
Single-take thriller from German director Sebastian Schipper, following a Spanish girl who winds up helping out four men she meets in the street to pull off a robbery.
What we said: A gripping heist drama set on the streets of Berlin that plays out in real time in one continuous, 138-minute camera shot, carried along on a giant skittery wave of adrenaline and logistical daring.
Zootropolis (aka Zootopia)
Buddy-cop animation from Disney featuring Ginnifer Goodwin as a rabbit called Judy Hopps who moves to the big city and ends up solving a major crime despite her superiors’ doubts.
What we said: This deft comedy, set in a world in which all the different animal species have put aside their natural positions on the food chain to coexist in harmony, is the latest in a run of first-rate family films from Disney.
- In our critics’ opinion, these are the highest-rated films of the first half of 2016. Are we right: are there glaring absences, or inexplicable inclusions? Bear in mind these are films released in the UK between January and June, so if you are in the US you might want to speak up for The Lobster or Sunset Song (released last year in the UK), or Brooklyn and 45 Years if you are in Australia.
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