2016 Little Fox Movie Awards (Part 5): Top 16 and Individual Winners

I've had about seven months to sit on this list, so I feel pretty good about most of these. I wanted to watch American Honey, Silence, and Toni Erdmann again before releasing a finalized version of the list, but they're each in the three-hour range and, as you'll see, I'm very much a fan of all three, so I'll just watch them on my own time. So yeah, I'd say I'm pretty content. Otherwise? Everything I said at the start of this venture remains true. Here's the Top 16 Films (yes, I'm extending it to a Top 16) of 2016.

Top 16 Films of '16

1. 20th Century Women (Mike Mills) - No film held me as warmly while stoking a distant, curious, graceful affection for its characters.

2. Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve) - Such a subtly precarious vision of entangled ideals/individual choice, the ways in which they do/don’t liberate.

3. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins) - Artful control of a very rare milieu and character-type, even as psychology and drama constantly shapeshift.

4. The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos) - Singular vision of totalitarian compatibility and self-isolating rebellion; open to which is a more dubious fate.

The remaining titles on the Top 16 are after the jump:

2016 Little Fox Movie Awards (Part 4): Acting

We're already halfway through 2017 and I still haven't finished my year-end lists for 2016. I'm putting the final touches on the Top 10, which will hopefully be up within the coming days if my schedule permits it. But for now, enjoy my favorite performances of last year! Behold:

Best Actress in a Leading Role

Annette Bening (20th Century Women) - Communicates a million shades of hilarity, resentment, openness, and reticence within single reaction shots and line-readings.

Sonia Braga (Aquarius) - Who appears 30+ years/30+ minutes post-prologue and achieves a sense of enduring ease necessary to survive.

Viola Davis (Fences) - Backgrounding Rose with attentive care in first-half scenes and wearily finding her voice in the second.

Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann) - Sustains and brazens through Ade’s precarious comedic tone/setpieces, fluidly transitioning from chagrin, amusement, self-containment, and self-abasement.

Isabelle Huppert (Elle & Things to Come) - Two specific women, equal forms of restraint and nerve, both confounded and intrigued by their reactions.

Matches with Oscar: 1/5. (Viola nominated in Supporting; Bening M.I.A.)

Runners-Up: Portman (Jackie), Stone (La La Land), Steinfeld (The Edge of Seventeen) Adams (Arrival), Negga (Loving), Field (Hello, My Name is Doris), Beckinsale (Love & Friendship), Hightower (The Fits)

2016 Little Fox Movie Awards (Part 3): Direction and Screenplays

If you're tired of seeing so much 20th Century Women and Moonlight then you'll be sorely disappointed by these nominees, though perhaps you'll be excited by some of my other favorites that are finally getting mentions:

Best Director

Kleber Mendonça Filho (Aquarius) - Harnessing film's length, images’ energy, and Braga’s magnetism to pinpoint a personal history and its intrusions.

Mia Hansen-Løve (Things to Come) - Few stylistic risks, but understated intersectionalities and frictions of radicalism, disappointment, and freedom are bold feats.

Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) - Synthesizing a triptych of experiences, filtering their reverberations through filming-styles rarely seen within this narrative type.

Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster) - Exuding total confidence in his humor, frames, actors, and vision by embracing the bleak, slippery ambiguities.

Mike Mills (20th Century Women) - Seeing in Bening a mother’s ambivalence, and rooted in that ambivalence a whole ancestry of paradox.

Matches with Oscar: 1/5.

Runners-Up: Villeneuve (Arrival), Arnold (American Honey), Ahn (Spa Night), Larraín (Neruda), Audiard (Dheepan), Verhoeven (Elle), Ade (Erdmann), Almodóvar (Julieta)

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: