The Best Movies of 2. Zach Clark’s “Little Sister,” starring Addison Timlin, tops the list for the best films of 2. Credit. PHOTOGRAPH BY FORAGER FILMS / EVERETT Hollywood is the world’s best money- laundering machine. It takes in huge amounts of money from the sale of mass- market commodities and cleanses some of it with the production of cinematic masterworks. Earning billions of dollars from C. G. I. Sometimes there’s even an overlap between the two groups of movies, as when Ryan Coogler made “Creed,” or when Scorsese made the modernist horror instant- classic “Shutter Island,” or when Clint Eastwood makes just about anything. Kendra Wilkinson The Full Sex Tape “EXPOSED” + The New Lesbian SEX TAPE 2016. Read reviews, watch trailers and clips, find showtimes, view celebrity photos and more on MSN Movies. It was this Meryl Streep—simultaneously grieving and infatuated, a theater actress new to movies—who got word from her agent, Sam Cohn, about a possible role in. The 25 Best Movies of 2016. With just days left before we turn another page in the calendar, here's a look back at the year's best films. Scott and Stephen Holden — share their picks for the best movies of the year. The Hollywood Reporter is your source for breaking news about Hollywood and entertainment, including movies, TV, reviews and industry blogs. There used to be more of an overlap, both before the age of television, when Hollywood was the only audiovisual game around, and in the age of television, when Hollywood was still the prime source of feature films. At that time—a time that has only recently passed into history—the laundering of Hollywood money took place inside Hollywood, which is how Howard Hawks, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk, Joseph Mankiewicz, Fritz Lang, Frank Tashlin, Jerry Lewis, Elaine May, Michael Cimino, and the other geniuses of the system were able to make their movies. The machine is now more complex—the connection between Hollywood and the best movies is circuitous and intricate. Spike Lee’s “Chi- Raq” was produced by Amazon Studios, not by Hollywood, but its stars, technicians, facilities, distribution network, and movie theatres are Hollywood by- products. Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight” and James Gray’s “The Lost City of Z” (coming in 2. Plan B, the company co- founded by Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt, and Brad Grey; though Scorsese’s uproariously bitter comedy “The Wolf of Wall Street” was made with private financing, it was ultimately released by Paramount. Many independent filmmakers who started out with their own money and that of friends and family are now working with Hollywood without actually being a part of it. Alex Ross Perry’s third feature, “Listen Up Philip,” starred Jason Schwartzman and Elisabeth Moss, both of whom have made their names and their livings within the system; he followed it with “Queen of Earth,” starring Moss and Katherine Waterston; and his new feature, “Golden Exits,” premi. Joe Swanberg’s latest round of films (“Drinking Buddies,” “Happy Christmas,” and “Digging for Fire”) has featured such actors as Anna Kendrick, Jake Johnson, Olivia Wilde, Ron Livingston, Rosemarie De. Witt, and Orlando Bloom; his forthcoming film, “Win It All,” will star Johnson and Keegan- Michael Key. Sophia Takal’s recently released drama “Always Shine” stars Mackenzie Davis and Caitlin Fitz. Gerald. Dustin Guy Defa’s new feature, “Person to Person” (also premi. Josephine Decker’s new film, “Movie No. Molly Parker and Miranda July, who, in 2. The Future” with Hamish Linklater as her co- star. Most of these actors make their living from Hollywood movies or television series, which frees them up to take on projects made on a very low budget. This is all to the good. Latest Hollywood Movies ( New English Movies) 2017 Releases Here is the list of Latest Hollywood Movies 2017 ( New English Movies) release dates for India. Richard Brody on the state of Hollywood and the independent scene, and the best films of 2016, including “Little Sister,” “Moonlight,” and “Sully.”. With Frank Welker, Matthew Lillard, Grey DeLisle, Kate Micucci. The Scooby gang try to rescue an old movie studio, which is not only threatened by developers, but a. Hollywood and independent filmmaking have engaged in an important division of labor: Hollywood specializes in making money, the independents specialize in making movies. Although there are still plenty of good movies produced by the studios, even at the most overtly commercial levels (“Pete’s Dragon,” “Doctor Strange,” and “Ant- Man,” for instance, are delights), and although, conversely, the mere fact of working independently on a low budget is no guarantee of artistic quality, there are many more boldly conceived and originally realized films emerging from the independent scene than from Hollywood. This is, and should be, no surprise. My list for the best films of the year has hardly any Hollywood movies on it. I’m not sure exactly how to define the term, but I have maybe four or five major- studio releases out of thirty- five selections. It’s a commonplace to wring hands on the subject of how bad Hollywood has become, but it’s more than counterbalanced by how good independent films have become. And yet, the critic on my shoulder whispers, whereas everyone goes to the local multiplex to see studio movies, how many people ever see those independent films? Answer: it doesn’t matter at all. What matters is what excites a viewer, what excites a critic. It’s a critic’s job to say, when necessary, that some movies being made widely available and being widely promoted—and sometimes even widely praised—are not good at all, and that some of the best movies being made might take a viewer a little work to find. It doesn’t matter that an overwhelming majority of viewers may never find many of the best movies in their local theatres—because they can find many of them streaming at home. Given the prominence of television as a presumptive artistic counterpart (or rival) to movies, there’s less reason than ever to disdain small screens at home as a primary mode of watching films. My list sticks to films that have had what’s formally considered a theatrical release, a week- long run in New York, in 2. Some of the best movies I’ve seen this year aren’t included solely because of the vagaries of theatrical distribution (or, rather, non- distribution), including two virtual top- ten films, “collective: unconscious” and “The Arbalest,” which were released by streaming video (the producer of the former, Dan Schoenbrun, discusses the subject at Indie. Wire and mentions the movie’s availability for free on a variety of sites). In all likelihood, neither film will get a regular theatrical release this year or ever—yet, by way of their streaming platforms, they’re available to far more viewers nationally than would ever be likely to catch them in a New York theatrical release. There’s also a phantom entry for the best movie of the year, the top of the list, what you might call a Movie Zero: “A Quiet Passion,” Terence Davies’s bio- pic about Emily Dickinson, which premi. I thought it would get a year- end qualifying run, at least to promote Cynthia Nixon’s starring performance for awards consideration. That didn’t happen, and it’s now scheduled to be released here in March. Spoiler alert: I’d be surprised if it doesn’t top next year’s list. The point of criticism is the long haul—as seen in the resurgence of interest in Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust,” currently playing at Film Forum, where it was released twenty- five years ago. Her career, which should have been propelled into varied and ceaseless activity by that film, didn’t get going as it should have—or, rather, producers didn’t come forward to enable her to make another feature—and I can’t help but think that, if critics had done their jobs more astutely and more vigorously back then, things might have gone differently. Had Dash made more films, it would have been good for her, for the movies, and for the world—the world of enthusiastic moviegoers, a coterie of cinephiles. But the fact of good movies being available widely doesn’t help the world at large, and it’s an enduring critical delusion (as well as a mode of demagogy) to assume and assert that it does. Great movies made and put into wide release by Hollywood have had no effect on anything but the experience of watching great movies, as understood by the few people who recognize the terms of their greatness. This year’s best example is “Sully.” Though Clint Eastwood supported Donald Trump, “Sully” is no Trump- ite film; it’s a work of tragic imagination, an endorsement of hard- won and long- honed professional ability, a paean to steadfast and reliable character, and a vision of an inextricably interdependent society. Read more stories about the year in culture and politics. There may well be viewers who go to see an Eastwood film expecting that it will make their day, and they might choose to take the story of “Sully” as they’d prefer it to be, as the legend of an unambiguously confident American military hero. Yet that’s not what Eastwood actually presents in the movie; there’s little or nothing in the way of Trump’s personality or actions in the movie’s protagonist, but rather a great deal of Hillary Clinton’s character. This paradox shows that Eastwood- the- filmmaker is far greater and more important than Eastwood- the- talker—and that the essence of the art of cinema is for movies to surpass and even defy filmmakers’ intentions. The dream of restoring Hollywood filmmaking to what it once was, of Making Hollywood Great Again, is noxious nostalgia that omits the unbearable circumstances in the world at large that went hand in hand with the best of classic Hollywood, the prejudices and the exclusions on which its films depended. It’s also why fretting over the decline in the artistry of wide releases is irrelevant at best, destructive at worst. Maybe the error would have been to believe that a system in which so much depended on so little (and so few) was anything but fundamentally shaky, if not terminally rotten. In any case, movies, and art over all, don’t help, can’t help, aren’t meant to help—in the short term or in specific terms. The good they do reaches deep into the marrow of the soul of a relatively few people and does so spontaneously, unexpectedly, irresistibly, decisively, and sometimes even unconsciously. The changes that the best movies wreak may not be perceptible in any reasoned public discourse close to the time of their release. But, for just that reason, these movies are all the more essential and enduring—they bring about changes in mood, tone, emotional tenor or temperature, changes in the inner life, in the inner inner life. That was also true in times that seemed better, too. Best Movies of 2.
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