2016 Little Fox Movie Awards (Part 2): Visual Categories

 Click here to see Part 1 and my reasons for starting so late. Remaining categories will commence within the coming days.

Best Cinematography

American Honey (Robbie Ryan) - For the tight, hemmed in corners of its 4:3 frames, binding intimate, sprawling, and social-realist textures.

Arrival (Bradford Young) - For resourceful ingenuity of communication scenes, Tarkovskian wit of clairvoyant memories, and boxed-in framing of Adams.

Jackie (Stéphane Fontaine) - For symmetrical candor at odds with forceful preservation of heritage, and that tricky balance of macabre/elegance.

Moonlight (James Laxton) - For an exciting array of palettes, light, movements, and surfaces, smartly cohering through specific emotional/visual energies.

Silence (Rodrigo Prieto) - For revealing a decidedly austere world less through severe images/content than through metaphysical light and landscapes.

Matches with Oscar: 3/5.

Runners-Up: Lion, Things to Come, The Light Between Oceans, Embrace of the Serpent, Cemetery of Splendor, Café Society, Francofonia, The Lobster, Captain Fantastic

2016 Little Fox Movie Awards (Part 1): Sound and Music

Just to set the stage, 2016 was a good year for film and a bad year for American democracy and human decency. As atypical of me as it sounds, I struggled to take much of an interest in movie-going (or much of anything, honestly) because of it, especially since Election Day. But as we've seen in the past couple of months, we must persist. I've given myself until today to release my best-of-2016 lists and to catch myself up on some of the titles I missed last year. Even extending my deadline to the tail-end of April didn't give me the chance to catch up with Certain Women, Closet Monster, From Afar, I Am Not Your Negro, Ixcanul, or Tikkun, so these lineups are subject to change.

In order to cut down on the verbiage and to speed along the process of getting my ballots out, I'm devoting 16 words to each nominee in honor of the calendar year of their release. Let's kick things off with the sound categories: