 |
| Add caption |
In a year where action-packed superhero blockbusters and big-budget animations were the norm, it’s always refreshing to take a break from the all too predictable movies the Hollywood mainstream trots out month after month and check out the fruits of the less ubiquitous world of independent film. And thankfully, 2016 was proof that indie filmmaking is as strong as it ever was.
The films listed here are diverse in terms of genre, budget and eventual success. Every genre from neo-Western and black comedy to sci-fi and drama are represented, as are films with budgets ranging from miniscule to still pretty small and movies that managed to earn crossover hit status and ones that flew largely under the radar.
But a few things unite them all: they don’t need excessively huge budgets, big studio backing or hackneyed Hollywood tropes to be compelling, brilliant movies.
So, let’s hear it for the underdog and celebrate the cream of the crop of indie filmmaking in 2016.
20. Don’t Think Twice
Directed by and starring the multi-talented Mike Birbiglia, Don’t Think Twice was one of 2016’s most critically acclaimed comedy-dramas.
Centring on the ups and downs of working New York City’s comedy circuit, the movie focuses on a comedy improv troupe and how its members are affected when one of them finds fame and success by nabbing a spot on the fictional TV programme Weekend Live – a thinly veiled stand-in for the most hallowed of all comedy sketch shows, Saturday Night Live.
Co-starring a host of comedic talents including Keegan-Michael Key and Kate Micucci, it’s been hailed as an honest and bittersweet exploration of the life of working comedians and one that will resonate with anyone who’s had to grapple with the dilemma of following your dream or facing reality and giving up.
19. Louder Than Bombs
Joachim Trier, the Norwegian director behind the critically acclaimed films Reprise and Oslo, August 31st, returned to the big screen last year with his first English language film Louder Than Bombs.
Focusing on teacher Gene (Gabriel Byrne) and his sons, newly married Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) and high school aged loner Conrad (Devin Druid), the film examines the impact on the remaining family unit when a retrospective of their matriarch – a successful and celebrated war photographer played by Isabelle Huppert – threatens to reveal the true circumstances of her tragic death three years earlier.
Byrne, Eisenberg and Druid excel as the grieving trio dealing with conflicting memories of their matriarch but it’s Huppert who really shines, despite a relatively small amount of screen time compared to her co-stars.
18. Indignation
The novels of Philip Roth are no stranger to big screen adaptation and 2016 saw two of the acclaimed author’s works transferred to film, one being the critically panned directorial debut of actor Ewan McGregor, American Pastoral. The other was Indignation: also the directorial debut of screenwriter James Schamus but thankfully a far superior one to McGregor’s.
Set in the early 1950s, the film focuses on Marcus (Logan Lerman) – a young, working class, Jewish atheist student who leaves his New Jersey hometown to attend a prestigious Midwest college where he comes up against both anti-Semitism and the institution’s conservative Christian culture.
It’s a fascinating, character driven drama whose power is clear in a standout scene in which Marcus comes to blows with the college’s dean Hawes D. Caudwell (Tracy Letts). At almost 20 minutes and 13 pages of script long, it’s not the kind of scene moviegoers are used these days but its gripping nature is testament to both Schamus’ strength as a screenwriter and director and the actorly talents of Lerman and Letts.
17. A Bigger Splash
Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s latest film is a simmering, sexy psychological dramedy set on an idyllic Sicilian island and based on Jacques Deray’s 1969 French thriller La Piscine.
Tilda Swinton stars as androgynous rock star Marianne Lane recovering from vocal surgery while on vacation with her suicidal filmmaker boyfriend Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) whose peaceful convalescence is disturbed when her old flame and Paul’s former friend Harry (Ralph Fiennes) arrives on the island along with his newly discovered daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson) and an uneasy ménage à quatre develops between them.
Fans of Fiennes will be pleased to find the movie features a lot more than most have seen of the talented actor, by which we mean a rather candid full-frontal shot. The Sicilian scenery isn’t half bad either.
16. Swiss Army Man
It might be known as ‘the movie where Harry Potter plays a farting corpse’, but don’t let that simplistic synopsis put you off Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s directorial debut.
Paul Dano stars as a man marooned on an island and on the verge of suicide who is unusually saved by the arrival of Daniel Radcliffe’s flatulent corpse, Swiss Army Man tells the tale of the unlikely bromance that develops between the pair as they both gradually bring each other back to life.
Granted, it might have its fair share of more lowbrow humour. There’s the aforementioned posthumous farting, plus projectile vomiting and a few post-mortem erections too but beneath all that is a heartfelt meditation on life, death and what it means to be human. Honestly.
15. Creative Control
Director, screenwriter and actor Benjamin Dickinson’s second feature film might revolve around a group of self-indulgent Brooklyn hipsters, but don’t let that put you off: it’s a wryly funny sci-fi satire that never fails to poke fun at its subject matter.
Set in a not-too-distant future the film follows Williamsburg ad exec David (also played by Dickinson) as he lands a dream account coming up with a marketing campaign, spearheaded by actor-comedian Reggie Watts playing an exaggerated version of himself, for a pair of augmented reality glasses. Dissatisfied in his relationship with his yogi girlfriend, David starts to use the glasses to conduct a virtual affair with an avatar of his crush, out of work fashion designer Sophie, who just so happens to be the girlfriend of his philandering photographer best friend Wim.
Beautifully shot in black and white, apart from some strategic uses of colour when David indulges in his augmented reality, it’s a stylish movie with some thought-provoking stuff to say about out increasingly intimate relationship with technology.
14. Little Men
Ira Sachs last film, the critically acclaimed Love Is Strange, dealt with the impact on a same-sex couple torn apart by Manhattan’s ever-increasingly expensive property market. For his latest film Little Men, Sachs stays on familiar ground but switches the action to Brooklyn and the emerging friendship between two teenaged boys as their parents come to blows over rising rent, gentrification and entitlement.
Greg Kinnear stars as a down on his luck actor who inherits an attractive Brooklyn brownstone from his later father and moves in with his breadwinner wife and introverted, arty son Jake (Theo Taplitz).
An unlikely camaraderie is struck up between Jake and Tony (Michael Barbieri) – the outgoing, aspiring actor son of the seamstress that rents the first-floor shop of the property – but is threatened when Kinnear’s character demands she start paying higher rates that his father was seemingly too sympathetic to enforce himself.
It’s a simple yet moving coming-of-age story exploring the complexities of modern urban living told through the eyes of its two teenage protagonists that’s firmly placed Barbieri and Taplitz as two young talents to watch.
13. Love & Friendship
Given director Whit Stillman’s fondness for cinematic comedy of manners it makes sense that he’s one day turn his attention to the grand dame of literary social parody, Jane Austen.
Adapted from her epistolary novel Lady Susan, written when Austen was in her late teens but not published until fifty years after her death, Love & Friendship stars Kate Beckinsale as a wry, calculating and upwardly mobile widow attempting to marry herself and her timid daughter off to suitably wealthy husbands.
Co-starring a host of talents from both sides of the pond including Chloë Sevigny as Beckinsale’s conniving American confidante Alicia Johnson and Stephen Fry as her disapproving husband, the movie went on to earn critical acclaim worldwide and made $19.6 million at the box office. Not too bad for a period comedy made on a relatively small budget of just $3 million.
12. Weiner
From Lord Profumo’s affair in the Swinging Sixties with a teenaged go-go girl to Bill Clinton’s seminal artwork on Monica Lewinsky’s dress, politicians and sex scandals seem to go hand in hand.
Nowadays of course, politicians have smartphones and social media at their disposal which hails a whole new means of conducting scandalous affairs but also many more ways to get caught. See Exhibit A: disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner who has been at the centre of several sexting scandals since 2011.
It’s unfortunate enough that his surname sounds like a penis synonym, but doubly unfortunate that the politician was so un-savvy with social media that he accidentally posted an explicit photo of himself on his Twitter account and sexted under the pseudonym ‘Carlos Danger’. Perfect tabloid fodder, if there ever was.
His former chief of staff Josh Kriegman teams with filmmaker Elyse Steinberg to chronicle the politician’s downfall, attempted comeback as a New York City mayoral candidate and subsequent second undoing when further sexting scandals emerged in their documentary Weiner – a riveting, fly on the wall look at a man on the road to ruination.
11. Captain Fantastic
Matt Ross might be better known as an actor, appearing in the likes of American Psycho and HBO’s hit TV show Silicon Valley, but judging by the quality of his second feature length film Captain Fantastic it’s time he got more attention as a director.
The indie dramedy stars Viggo Mortensen as an idealistic father living off the grid with his large brood of children in the wilds of America’s Pacific Northwest who must re-enter society after the suicide of the family’s matriarch and scooped Ross the Un Certain Regard award for Best Director after its screening at Cannes last year.
Mortensen is brilliant as the grieving father forced to reconsider whether his alternative lifestyle is right for his family, at once both arrogant in his principles but also self-doubting and concerned with creating a better life for his kids. He already lost out on a Golden Globe to Casey Affleck this year but with the results of his BAFTA nomination for Best Actor still pending, Mortensen could still see awards success yet.
10. The Lobster
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ first English language feature is a dark dystopian comedy set in a near future in which all single adults are transported to a mysterious hotel where they are legally required to find a partner within a set period or else they are turned into an animal by the powers that be and set loose in the woods.
It’s an animal of their choosing, mind – this isn’t a total dystopia.
Colin Firth, in probably his best performance since In Bruges, stars as a man made newly single after his wife leaves him whose animal of choice is the titular lobster and whose pet dog is actually his former brother in canine form after failing to find a suitable partner himself. It’s a bizarre little story, but beneath the quirky concept is actually a biting satire of societal pressure to find The One™ and settle down.
9. Everybody Wants Some!!
Dubbed the spiritual sequel to his 1993 cult comedy classic Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater’s latest offering switches from a 1970s high school setting to the start of a freshman’s first year at university in the early 1980s but like its predecessor focuses on a group of young ‘uns on the cusp of adulthood and is every bit as charming and nostalgic too.
Like Dazed, Slacker and Boyhood before it not much goes on plot-wise in Everybody Wants Some!!, at least on the surface. His films in this vein are more like snapshots of ordinary and relatable people at ordinary and relatable, yet nevertheless significant, turning points in their lives.
Part of the movie’s charm and success is no doubt owed to its cast of relatively unknown young actors who bring a likeable naturalism to their roles. And of course, for the 80s throwbacks out there, the retro soundtrack and fashion are a nostalgic treat for the senses.
8. Wiener-Dog
Director Todd Solondz is definitely an acquired taste, but if his particular brand of suburbia-set black comedy boils your kettle (or if you just really love sausage dogs) then Wiener-Dog, the sort of sequel-spinoff to his breakout debut Welcome to the Dollhouse, will likely be right up your street.
Split into four vignettes, the storyline is connected by the eponymous dachshund as she is passed between four different oddball owners – firstly, a young boy; secondly a veterinary nurse named Dawn Wiener, who Solondz fans will remember as Welcome to the Dollhouse’s protagonist; next a failed filmmaker turned film school professor played by Danny DeVito and lastly, Ellen Burstyn’s crotchety old grandmother.
It’s a typically offbeat Solondz affair and features a two-minute long intermission during which the canine protagonist strolls past various American landscapes to the tune of her very own theme song, The Ballad of Wiener-Dog. But what’s not to love about a film starring both a cute pup and Danny DeVito?
7. Krisha
Adapted from his short film of the same name and made on a tiny crowdfunded budget, Trey Edward Shults’ powerful feature length debut Krisha has firmly placed him as an indie filmmaker to keep our eyes on.
The eponymous character (played by Shults’ own real-life aunt Krisha Fairchild) is a 60-something recovering addict who returns home the prodigal daughter after a lengthy absence to celebrate Thanksgiving with her family.
As is so often the case with family gatherings, old tensions and mistrust rear their ugly head and what starts out as a family reunion soon descends into a hellish family psychodrama. The winner of both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at South by Southwest in 2015, it’s a distressing portrayal of the devastating impact addiction can have on a family unit.
6. Hunt For The Wilderpeople
Following on from his critically acclaimed 2014 vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, Kiwi director Taika Waititi treated film fans to another delightfully quirky indie this year with Hunt for the Wilderpeople.
Based on a book by fellow New Zealander Barry Crump, the charming adventure comedy-drama stars young newcomer Julian Dennison as a foul-mouthed, hip-hop obsessed delinquent and Sam Neill as his begrudging guardian and focuses on the manhunt that follows after the pair purposefully go missing in the New Zealand bush. Not only did it open to rave reviews at its Sundance premiere, it also took its homeland by storm where it currently ranks as New Zealand’s highest grossing homegrown movie.
Next up in Waititi’s career he’ll be making the leap from indie flicks to big budget blockbusters with Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok, but hopefully won’t lose any of his quirky charm in the process.
5. Sing Street
With the critically acclaimed Once and Begin Again already under his belt, Irish director John Carney is fast proving himself the maestro of modern-day musicals and cemented that reputation this year with the release of his latest film Sing Street.
Set in 1980s Dublin, it’s a cross between feel-good musical, boy meets girl and coming-of-age story that focuses on teenage misfit Connor as he forms a band with his ragtag group of mates to impress the girl of his dreams, and along the way discovers a true passion for music.
Whether you’re a nostalgic 80s pop music fan or not, the movie is an uplifting delight with a brilliant soundtrack that features a mix of original songs and classics from the likes of Duran Duran and The Cure.
4. The Fits
Anna Rose Holmer’s stunning debut feature starts out as a seemingly simple enough inner city set coming-of-age story before dreamily drifting into surrealist territory – a genre not often mastered but here executed beautifully and eerily.
The film follows young tomboy Toni, played by talented newcomer Royalty Hightower in her acting debut, who boxes at her local recreation centre but finds herself increasingly drawn to the dance team that practices there. After joining the dance team, she discovers its members are falling victim one by one to mysterious seizure-like episodes – the ‘fits’ of the title.
Inspired by real-life cases of communal female hysteria, it’s a powerful and poetic portrait of female adolescence, conformity and social acceptance that has deservedly earned both its maker and breakout star a tonne of Best Director and Best Actress nods on the indie film festival circuit.
3. The Witch
Robert Eggers’ directorial debut The Witch was a dazzlingly unnerving one indeed. Set in 17th New England, the period horror tells the tale of a Puritan family living out in the sticks whose peaceful, pious existence is torn apart by black magic and satanic forces.
Anya Taylor-Joy shines in her breakout performance as eldest daughter Thomasin, accused by her family of witchcraft after her infant sibling is snatched while under her care, and the film scooped Eggers a Directing Award for Best US Dramatic film after its Sundance premiere in 2015.
It’s a different kind of movie than most horror fans are used to with a focus on a creeping sense of doom rather than a rapid-fire succession of guts and gore, which earned it a few naysayers. Nevertheless, its slow-burning plot builds to a satisfyingly shocking ending that’s both violent and chilling.
2. Hell Or High Water
Part gritty neo-Western, part compelling character study, Scottish director David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water was the crossover indie hit of 2016 and its highest grossing independent film too.
Chris Pine and Ben Foster star as brothers who commit a series of robberies at the bank chain about to foreclose on their family ranch while Jeff Bridges – in his most impressive performance since fellow Western, True Grit – and Gil Birmingham play the old-school Texas Rangers hot on their trail.
It’s a blistering, beautifully shot modern-day Robin Hood-esque fable, but most of all a fascinating portrayal of brotherly bonds both blood and fictive.
1. Moonlight
Based on award-winning playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, director Barry Jenkins second feature film Moonlight is a haunting and bittersweet portrayal of a young gay black man growing up in South Central Miami.
Its protagonist Chiron is expertly brought to life by three different actors during three distinct periods in his journey from boyhood to adulthood – first as a young kid under his drug addicted mother’s care, secondly as a bullied teen and lastly as a drug-dealing adult reuniting with his past.
It’s being hailed as the best indie film of last year and with a Golden Globe award for Best Drama Motion Picture already under its belt, it looks like Oscar success could be on the horizon for Moonlight too.
Which other 2016 indie movies belong on this list? Share your picks below in the comments thread.
No comments:
Post a Comment