20. “Cemetery Of Splendour”
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the deliriously dreamy “Cemetery Of Splendour” takes the “acquired taste” slot on our list. Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has redefined the art of molasses-paced semi-surrealist filmmaking, apparently fell into a deep reverie after his magnificent Palme d’Or-winner “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” in 2010. Experimenting in the interim years, Apichatpong returned with a signature feature that’s become instantly classic for his ever-growing fan base. It’s a peculiar fable about an ordinary housewife called Jen (played by a radiant Jenjira Pongpas) who visits a Mekong River clinic where soldiers suffer from a mysterious sleeping illness, and who gradually falls under the area’s spiritual and sentimental spell. She meets a medium, makes a connection with one of the soldiers, and ends up having her eyes and mind opened to the healing wonders of unconventional medicines. Brimming with allusions to Thai traditions and legend, “Cemetery Of Splendour” mesmerizes almost like a metronome with its perfect compositions, endlessly fascinating photography (courtesy of Diego Garcia) and deeply felt conversations, pulling you into its world and tickling like a feather on your skin, while intriguing like some amorphous jelly-shape floating in the sky. It’s a wonderful mesh of fantasy and reality: a bottomless wishing well of strange and fascinating topics. —Nikola Grozdanovic
19. “Things To Come”
Even by her high standards, Isabelle Huppert has had an absolute banger of a year, kicking off at Berlin with this exquisite collaboration with one of our very best young filmmakers Mia Hansen-Løve. The French director examined youth in her last couple of films, “Goodbye First Love” and “Eden,” but here turns her eye to late middle age with the same kind of wit, compassion and empathy that has typified her work so far. Huppert stars as Nathalie, a philosophy professor whose life is upended — not always for the worse — when her husband leaves her for another woman, and her mother (the sublime Édith Scob) falls into increasingly poor health. The tone is winningly low-key — it’s not that nothing happens, it’s just that Hansen-Løve shapes her narrative in a way that makes it feel like life rather than drama (no film this year was better edited, telling pages of story with a simple cut), and you come away feeling like you have a complete portrait of a fascinating, and refreshingly unexceptional woman. That’s largely down to Huppert, who is so deft, so disarmingly funny, so capable of playing about five different beats at once, that her turn here comes close to career-best work. Hopefully this is just the start of a long series of collaborations between her and her director. —Oliver Lyttelton
18. “Cameraperson”
On the surface, Kirsten Johnson’s “Cameraperson” is little more than a collection of footage she has amassed in her decades of experience as a documentary cinematographer, with the clips allowed to stand in as her memoir, so to speak (“these are the images that have marked me,” intones an opening title card). The profundities of the film, however, lie in the details. Its free-associative juxtaposition of clips suggest a mind sifting through her life experiences, processing them, veering off into tangents, before circling back to stand-out memories. But astonishingly, “Cameraperson” cuts even deeper than as a personal remembrance. With Johnson’s empathy toward individuals in crisis, the film is, in some ways, an activist documentary disguised as a memoir. She even manages to lightly touch on matters of documentary ethics, with Johnson occasionally heard talking about her subjects in terms of how good they might look in front of a camera — an acknowledgment of the detachment necessary to some degree in crafting cinematic nonfiction. To have one documentary embody all of these layers is something of a miracle. You feel as if you’re seeing an entire world through Johnson’s singular, humanistic perspective — the highest accomplishment of any work of art worth taking seriously. —Kenji Fujishima
17. “Embrace Of The Serpent”
With a small theatrical release at the beginning of the year and a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2015 Oscars, this absolute stunner of a third film from young Colombian director Ciro Guerra (“The Wind Journeys”) is perhaps easy to overlook after another long year of trying to keep up with movies. But was there any more immersive cinematic experience to take in this year? This widescreen adventure is without doubt an art film, but it’s so accessible and straight-up pleasurable to watch that it should entrance a wide swath of viewers. Its two-pronged narrative ping-pongs back and forth (sometimes in the same unbroken take) between events 40 years apart in the life of Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and the last survivor of his people. He encounters and travels with two scientists, one inspired by the other to search the Amazon for a sacred healing plant. The black-and-white visuals, druggy hallucination sequences, memorable performances, and killer soundtrack — ancient tribal music mixed with the natural cacophony of the jungle — all make for an incredible, you-are-there experience that’s also a funny and beautiful rumination on dying, colonialism and being the last of one’s kind. It’s a film to go get lost in at the cinema. —Erik McClanahan
16. “The Fits”
Sometimes we go to the movies to seek the familiar; we pay the price of admission to bathe in the warm glow of the big screen and soak in movies we already know and love in the company of our friends. Sometimes, though, we go to the movies in pursuit of the new, and that’s a far riskier business. But 2016 has proven to be a dazzling year for the new, especially new filmmakers, and especially Anna Rose Holmer, whose debut film, “The Fits,” is new from top to bottom: Its aesthetic feels new, its perspective feels new, and its devotion to its central theme both within and without the context of its narrative feels new. Take the story of a girl who wants to trade in her boxing gloves for breakdancing kicks, blend it with the unpredictable terror of mass psychogenic illness, and you have the essence of Holmer’s film, in which young Toni (breakout Royalty Hightower) can only watch helplessly as her friends and classmates are struck down one by one by inexplicable seizures. “The Fits” is layered with meaning and metaphor — maybe it’s an accidental allegory for the Flint water crisis, maybe it’s the story of girls’ coming of age suffused with historical context — but most importantly, it’s crafted beautifully, with superb technique to elevate its ideas. —Andy Crump