10. “T2: Trainspotting”
Sometimes the greatest feeling a trailer can inspire is one of relief, and a lot of our fears about Danny Boyle‘s return to the scene of his greatest, generation-defining triumph, were allayed when we caught this trailer. In a lot of ways it’s almost fan-servicey, with certain shots seemingly directly recreated from the original and the iconic, ironic “choose life” voiceover updated to include references to Facebook. But there’s a knowingness to how that is done that makes it clear that even though Renton, Sick Boy, Spud, Begbie et al may have got older, this isn’t just a graying version of “Trainspotting,” but an actual attempt to contend with what it might mean to have beaten the odds of your drug-addled, dangerous youth and survived into middle age. The surreality of Boyle’s imagery doesn’t seem to have blunted, and even if it’s unlikely this trailer will do for Wolf Alice what the original did for Underworld, the track is still pretty great. And that replicated last shot of Ewan McGregor‘s deranged smile over the hood of a car did something weird to my heart.
9. “The Handmaiden”
Park Chan-wook‘s delicious period drama is a summary lesson in a lot of things – cross-cultural adaptation, exquisite mise en scene, and cheeky perspective shifts to name a few – so it’s only right that the trailer should also be a masterclass in the art of trailer cutting. Picking up momentum as it goes, and concentrating on fetishizable little details of the film’s look, it conveys the deliciously twisted mood, without even attempting to get into the enormously twisty, involved plot. Which is a good thing with a story as labyrinthine as this one, and with images that seem increasingly as the trailer wears on, to all seem to be visual metaphors for voyeurism, lust and erotic obsession – for sex, basically.
8. “Suicide Squad”
Right, so last year we had the “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” trailer on this list despite our reservations, to put it politely, about the film. So there’s a certain depressing symmetry to the fact that with similar reluctance we admit that the trailer for “Suicide Squad” was really one of the best of the year – and infinitely better than the movie it promoted. Of course, Queen‘s “Bohemian Rhapsody” is such a banger that any film that can afford to soundtrack its trailer with it is already given a massive head start, but it’s also the perfect track for the film that “Suicide Squad” ought to have been – a mass-appeal, rock’n’roll blast. And the cutting here is fun and clever, timed around gunshots and Margot Robbie quips, it made us look forward to seeing how all these slivers coalesced into a proper whole, before we found out that they didn’t.
7. “La La Land”
Showcasing the original song “City of Stars,” as sung with breathy imperfection by Ryan Gosling, this trailer for Damien Chazelle‘s presumptive multi-Oscar-nominee is a perfect mini-sampler of the film in terms of its bittersweet, nostalgic emotionality but it’s also impressive for how much it holds back. The film’s bigger set pieces aren’t referenced as much as the smaller beats between Emma Stone‘s aspiring actress and Gosling’s jazz-pianist, meaning that the grandness of some of that spectacle remains in store for the actual experience of the film. And similarly, though there’s a version that duets Stone’s voice with Gosling, this particular recording works better, because it keeps the surprise of Stone’s lovely singing voice in reserve, and because she rather shows up Gosling’s weaker vocals, which here have a tremulous charm of their own.
6. “Dunkirk”
Ok, it’s only a teaser and lord knows we’d be the first to roll our eyes at the Christopher Nolan fanboys who seem to regard any scrap of new news about his work as a piece of the True Cross, and yet here we are. Maybe it’s because of the classy decision not to pack loads of tiny glimpses into this minute-long taster, and instead to use close to half of it to showcase one continuous sequence. And what a sequence: more than the beautiful shots of gray surf and lone weary soldiers, it’s the meticulous way that huge scene of the men in the landing craft responding to a bomber attack is orchestrated that reminds us that, even though we may not identify as such, we’re kind of Christopher Nolan fanboys too.
