The 20 Best Movies of 2016

The Best Movies of 2016

Best and Worst Movies of 2016 — David Bornfriend; Black Label Media; Claire Folger; Despina Spyrou

Among Entertainment Weekly's best movies of the year, you'll find heartbreakingly personal dramas, a superhero movie or two, a bittersweet ode to Hollywood, and an allegory for modern relationships that features a man potentially being turned in a crustacean. These are original, honest, and thrilling films that tap into what connects us and take audiences to places they could only conjure up in their dreams (or nightmares). This year was not good for many things, but it was excellent for movies. Anyone who says otherwise isn't looking hard enough.

20. Doctor Strange

GALLERY: Best/Worst Movies of 2016: ALL CROPS: Marvel's DOCTOR STRANGE (2016) Doctor Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) CR: Jay Maidment

Marvel films have become such cash engines that it would be understandable if they kept getting safer and safer. But Doctor Strange proudly let its freak flag fly. With the film's kaleidoscopically trippy visuals and surprisingly layered performances (courtesy of Benedict Cumberbatch and Tilda Swinton), Marvel not only gave us the year’s best franchise-character launch, it also whipped up Hollywood’s most subversive midnight stoner movie. —Chris Nashawaty

19. Fences

GALLERY: Best/Worst Movies of 2016: ALL CROPS: Denzel Washington plays Troy Maxson and Viola Davis plays Rose Maxson in Fences from Paramount Pictures. Directed by Denzel Washington from a screenplay by August Wilson. — David Lee

Denzel Washington’s adaptation of August Wilson’s award-winning stage play is a master class in acting. As a frustrated working-class husband and father undone by his own pride, Washington is like an exposed nerve. And Viola Davis, as his long-suffering wife who’s been bending for so long that she’s about to break, delivers a performance of radiant warmth and ferocious intensity. —Chris Nashawaty

18. The Invitation

GALLERY: Best/Worst Movies of 2016: THE INVITATION (2016) David (Michiel Huisman)

At the end of the year, it’s easy forget movies that impressed back in the Spring. But Karyn Kusama’s psychological chiller is a hard movie to shake. Centered around an L.A. dinner party that ends up going to some very unexpected places by dessert, The Invitation has its hooks well into you by the time it closes with one of the best sting-in-the-tail endings in years. —Chris Nashawaty

17. Toni Erdmann

Bizarre and disarming, hilarious and heartbreaking, Maren Ade’s German idiosyncratic import gets to the messy heart of a very strained relationship between a lonely, eccentric merry prankster (Peter Simonischek) and his workaholic daughter (Sandra Huller). That may sound like the set-up of a pretty conventional drama, so just wait for the fake teeth, an excruciatingly awkward party in the raw, and one giant Bulgarian hair monster. —Chris Nashawaty

16. Elle

Filmmaker Paul Verhoeven and French national treasure Isabelle Huppert prove to be a match made in psychosexual heaven in this tricky, heady tale of a bourgeois Parisian who undertakes her own brand of justice after a brutal sexual assault. It’s like I Spit on Your Grave gone fully European-arthouse bananas, fiercer and wilder and funnier than anything Verhoeven’s done in years. —Leah Greenblatt

15. American Honey

GALLERY: Best/Worst Movies of 2016: American Honey — Parts and Labor

It took the eyes of an outsider (British-born director Andrea Arnold) to capture the true essence of contemporary Americana in this naturalistic stunner—a dreamy nearly-three-hour road ramble that pulses with the sounds and slang and electric energy of youth in revolt. —Leah Greenblatt

14. Jackie

Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s astonishing, gorgeously stylized drama reinvigorates the traditional biopic form, and provides a singular showcase for Natalie Portman's indelible under-the-skin performance; it’s like no film—or First Lady—you’ve ever seen before. —Leah Greenblatt

13. 20th Century Women

GALLERY: Best/Worst Movies of 2016: 20th CENTURY WOMEN (2016) Annette Bening — Merrick Morton

Director Mike Mills, who eulogized his late father in 2010’s Oscar-winning Beginners, pivots to tell the story of his equally unconventional mother (played here by Annette Bening with all her requisite wit and pathos) in a charmingly ramshackle indie set in the late-1970s Santa Barbara of Mills’ adolescence. —Leah Greenblatt

12. Moana

A color-saturated Polynesian rhapsody led by a tough, smart, utterly beguiling young heroine (Auli’i Cravalho) Moana carries the essence of everything classic Disney does best, with an added circa-2016 sheen (joyful multiculturalism, songs co-penned by Lin-Manuel Miranda). —Leah Greenblatt

11. Fireworks Wednesday

GALLERY: Best/Worst Movies of 2016: Fireworks Wednesday (2016) Hedieh Tehrani — Grasshopper Film

If you want to get technical, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s quietly explosive look at passion, betrayal, and jealousy among the residents of one Tehran apartment building was made in 2006. But it only made its way to U.S. theaters this year—and it was worth the wait. Like his most famous film, 2011’s Oscar-winner A Separation, Farhadi displays an intimate understanding of human behavior that few directors possess—or even seem interested in. —Chris Nashawaty

10. Captain America: Civil War

GALLERY: Best/Worst Movies of 2016: Captain America: Civil War (2016) Captain America (Chris Evans)

The best avengers movie that doesn’t have the word Avengers in its title (it’s better than those, too), Captain America: Civil War is the superhero extravaganza that Marvel has been building up to for the past decade. After all, this was the moment our gang of omnipotent misfits’ all-for-one-and-one-for-all foundation finally cracked. And it wasn’t pretty. It was like a family reunion gone violent. Or, to make the metaphor more timely, the U.S. electorate circa 2016. A rift comes between Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers (a.k.a. Captain America) and Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark (Iron Man) after the world’s governments try to rein in the crime fighters and put them under U.N. oversight. New alliances are formed, brutal smackdowns are dispensed, and a few new faces are sprinkled into the mix. (It’s actually one of the few Marvel flicks where brand extension feels organic rather than craven.) If all superhero movies were as good as Civil War, no one would complain about the number of them. Even nonbelievers might see the light. —Chris Nashawaty

9. Sing Street

GALLERY: Best/Worst Movies of 2016: Sing Street 2016 The cast of SING STREET — The Weinstein Company

Boy meets girl, guitar, and world, roughly in that order, in the winning third outing from Irish musician-turned-filmmaker John Carney (Once, Begin Again). As his boisterous, bittersweet coming-of-age dramedy opens, hapless young hero Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) is trapped between two divorcing parents in depressed 1980s Dublin, and stung by the more casual daily cruelties of life as a teenage outcast at an all-boys school only slightly cozier than a prison camp. But hope arrives in the form of an acid-washed angel named Raphina (Lucy Boynton), an aspiring model far too gorgeous and sophisticated for the local delinquents—though she might be persuaded to open her heart to a bona fide rock star. And so begins Conor’s quest to transform himself into one of the new-wave gods he sees on Top of the Pops, no matter how many hours of mind-numbing band practice or humiliating hair experiments it takes. Though there’s nothing particularly new or trenchant in Carney’s storytelling, it would be a shame to dismiss this scrappy charmer as insignificant; its heart is too tender, and its aim is true. —Leah Greenblatt

8. Weiner

GALLERY: Best/Worst Movies of 2016: Best Movie Gallery - Weiner (2016) Anthony Weiner

Political scandals come in all shapes and sizes, but no one has been on such familiar terms with all of their ignominious varieties as the disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner (a.k.a. Carlos Danger, he of the d--- pic Twitter brouhaha of 2011...and 2013... and 2016). Shadowed by a documentary film crew during his quixotic 2013 bid to restore his reputation and become the next mayor of New York City, Weiner manages to step on virtually every land mine in his path (and a few that aren’t) as his long-suffering wife, Huma Abedin, looks on in stunned disbelief. It doesn’t take long to know exactly how she feels. Weiner is like a slow-motion car crash you can’t look away from. By the end of Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s extraordinary all-access chronicle, you might walk away with a better understanding of how the campaign sausage gets made, but you’ll still have no clue how one very smart, very ambitious man could be so reckless and stupid. —Chris Nashawaty

7. Midnight Special

GALLERY: Best/Worst Movies of 2016: Midnight Special (2016) JAEDEN LIEBERHER as Alton — Ben Rothstein

The truth is out there in Jeff Nichols’ supernatural thriller, an eerie sci-fi tone poem that quietly upends the whiz-bang conventions of the genre. An anxious father (Michael Shannon) has managed to extract his 8-year-old son, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), from a Texas doomsday cult (led by Sam Shepard, as a gentleman-preacher type with shades of Branch Davidian madness). But the cult wants him back, and now so does the government. What’s so important about one little boy? The first clue is what happens when Alton removes the swimming goggles his dad takes care to keep in place: His eyes shoot incandescent beams of blue light. And weaponized vision is the least of his paranormal gifts—almost none of which his protectors (who grow to include Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, and Adam Driver) understand. Nichols, whose interracial drama Loving is already an early awards-season darling, plucks his mood from atmospheric forerunners like Starman and Close Encounters of the Third Kind: a stark Americana of deserted highways and dingy motel rooms haunted by the low, ominous thrum of impending Armageddon. By making the implied explicit, the ending loses some of the movie’s carefully cultivated mystery, but the feeling lingers. —Leah Greenblatt

6. The Handmaiden

Dear movie freak: Korean auteur Park Chan-wook sees your crazy, and he raises you. The man behind mind-bending exports like Thirst and Oldboy dips into delicious madness once again with The Handmaiden—a historical romance that is to Merchant Ivory what Molotov cocktails are to tea cozies. Loosely adapted from British novelist Sarah Waters’ 2002 Victorian-era novel, Fingersmith, and recast in 1930s colonial Korea, the film follows a young grifter named Sookee (Kim Tae-ri) assigned to serve Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), a lonely Japanese aristocrat held captive by a cruel uncle at his remote country estate. Sookee’s duty is to set the stage for a seduction by Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo, who is neither a count nor a Fujiwara). The first surprise is that she falls hopelessly in love with her mark; the rest come tumbling after in the most twisty, audacious, and wildly sexy 145 minutes of cinema this year. —Leah Greenblatt

5. Hell Or High Water

GALLERY: Best/Worst Movies of 2016: Hell Or High Water (2016) (Left to right) Chris Pine and Ben Foster — Lorey Sebastian

You might have to go all the way back to 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde to find a film about outlaws on the run that feels as timely as David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water. A folk-hero ballad for the age of predatory lending, the film stars Chris Pine and Ben Foster as West Texas brothers who set off on a string of bank heists to save their late mother’s ranch (which happens to sit on millions in untapped crude). The Howard siblings are desperate men, but they still have their pride. They’re a pair of hard-luck losers in a game that’s been rigged against them since birth. Hot on their trail is Jeff Bridges’ leathery Texas Ranger. And the miracle of Bridges’ performance is how he slowly draws complexity out of a familiar cliché. His crusty wisecracks aimed toward his put-upon partner (Gil Birmingham) mask an end-of-the-road vulnerability he’s too macho to reveal. You could call Hell or High Water a modern-day Western, I suppose. But it’s the best kind of Western: the kind where the heroes and the villains are impossible to tell apart. —Chris Nashawaty

4. The Lobster

GALLERY: Best/Worst Movies of 2016: The Lobster (2016) Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz — Despina Spyrou

There are some movies that are so singular and strange that they defy explanation—and then there’s The Lobster. The most original and gorgeously demented romantic satire since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ English-language debut stars Colin Farrell as David, a hangdog thirtysomething whose wife has left him for another man. So far, so safe, right? But in Lanthimos’ cracked alternate universe, that means David now has 45 days to find a new partner or else he’ll be turned into an animal of his choosing and be released into the wild. He chooses a lobster. David checks into a spa-like retreat to court potential mates and finds the whole Kafkaesque charade too much. So he joins a chaste group of rebel loners, which includes Rachel Weisz’s “Short Sighted Woman,” who he believes is his soul mate—although it’s now too late for happy endings. Or is it? Lanthimos creates an existential rabbit hole that some may find too weird to go down. At a time when sequels and familiar formulas rule at the box office, The Lobster is like a deep breath of sea air. —Chris Nashawaty

3. Manchester By The Sea

GALLERY: Best/Worst Movies of 2016: Manchester By The Sea (2016) Casey Affleck (L) and Lucas Hedges Credit: Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions

A story so beautifully lived-in that it feels like a shock to emerge from the theater into the “real” world, Kenneth Lonergan’s deceptively low-key drama unfurls in a way movies are rarely allowed to anymore—slowly, patiently, and with infinite care. The obsessively perfectionist filmmaker, who turns out projects about as often as pandas reproduce in captivity (and with nearly as much mystery), aims for the defiantly ordinary in both setting—the shabby Northeast town of the title—and story: An ornery Boston janitor (Casey Affleck) loses his older brother (Kyle Chandler) and is forced to return to his hometown to care for his teen nephew (Lucas Hedges). Those are the bones of it, at least, but Lonergan fills every frame with the clarity and compassion of his vision. (Whatever you’ve heard about a to-be-revealed tragedy is true; what gets mentioned less is that the movie is also funny as hell.) The exquisitely crafted, emotionally ragged Manchester doesn’t just ask for time and effort; it earns it. —Leah Greenblatt

2. Moonlight

GALLERY: Best/Worst Movies of 2016: Moonlight (2016) Alex Hibbert and Mahershala Ali — David Bornfriend

Nothing portended Moonlight as a masterpiece. Shot on a shoestring over a scant 25 days by an unknown director and largely devoid of big-name stars, Barry Jenkins’ hushed, artful indie didn’t so much arrive as drift gently into moviegoers’ consciousness. But by the time the credits rolled, the effect was both radical and sublime, a rare cinematic grace note in a noisy, bitterly fractious year. We first meet Chiron (played at various stages by Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes) as a wary latchkey kid in Miami drawn out of his shell by a local drug dealer (Mahershala Ali), then watch as he grows slowly, fitfully into his own skin. The movie could easily be dismissed as a panopticon of hot-button intersectional issues—addiction, poverty, single parenthood, black male sexuality. Instead, it’s something much richer: an achingly personal portrait of lives lived on the margins, and a filmmaking triumph of transcendent, heartbreaking beauty. —Leah Greenblatt

1. La La Land

GALLERY: Best/Worst Movies of 2016: La La Land ILLO From Issue 1444/1445 — ILLUSTRATION by MAR CERDÁ for EW

In a year dominated by division, distrust, and disappointment, it might seem strange to anoint a swooning musical as the top film of 2016. But as the escapist Busby Berkeley fantasias of the Great Depression proved, sometimes the best medicine can only be found in a darkened movie theater. Damien Chazelle’s thrillingly ambitious, unapologetically romantic La La Land is a movie that’s out of time and arrives at just the right time. It’s a balm for our weary national soul. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, reteaming from 2011’s Crazy, Stupid, Love (with sparks intact), play struggling young artists in modern-day Los Angeles whose dreams seem out of reach. At least until they find each other in, of all places, a traffic jam on the 105 that erupts into a showstopping frenzy of singing and dancing. The next 120 minutes are just as intoxicating—an irresistible cocktail of heart-swelling joy and heartrending sadness as we follow the ups and downs of their relationship. Nostalgic without seeming old-fashioned, La La Land is pure movie magic. It’s a testament to the timeless, transporting power of cinema. —Chris Nashawaty