Oli Lyttelton’s Top 15 Films Of 2016

5. “20th Century Women”
After painting a portrait of his dad a few years back with “Beginners” (one of my faves of that year), Mike Mills turns his lens to his mother, and the other women who helped raise him, with “20th Century Women,” and it’s just as lovely and personal a film, if not more so. Mills surrogate Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) has three women in his life: mother Dorothea (Annette Bening, better than ever), a child of depression left baffled but winningly curious by the culture of the late 1970s, Abbie (Greta Gerwig, also amazing), a young woman on the cusp of the next step but unsure of where to take her life, particularly with the recent revelation that she probably can’t have children), and his crush Julie (Elle Fanning) a precocious free spirit with a troubled soul. So specific that it could only mostly be drawn from life, it’s a film of extraordinary warmth and generosity that positively adores every one of its characters, and feels like such a tonic right now as a result.

4. “Embrace Of The Serpent”
It turned out to be a pretty good movie year by the end, but the first half was pretty rough: in the first six months of this year, I found shockingly little in theaters that I wanted to see, and even less that I liked once I did see it. But the major exception there was “Embrace Of The Serpent,” a movie I adored even though, as the title suggests, it massively fed the crippling snake phobia that gives me a panic attack if I even think about the slippery, limbless fuckers. A crazy ambitious, psychedelic, Herzogian journey into the darkest depths of the Amazonian jungle from Colombian director Ciro Guerra, tracking two trips up river nearly forty years apart led by one indigenious man (Nilbio Torres and Antonio Bolivar), it’s a true masterpiece of post-colonial cinema, a rare movie that truly grapples with the exploitation and genocide created by white settlers, but also a film that’s funny, beautiful, terrifying and utterly magical.

3. “Raw”
It’ll already have passed into legend by the time it hits theaters (look for it early next year), with reports of fainting and vomiting at its TIFF screenings due to the gruesome nature of some of its scenes, but somehow the blood and gore of “Raw” is the least memorable thing about it. An extraordinary feature debut from French helmer Julia Ducournau, it follows Justine (Garance Marillier), a teen from a strictly vegetarian family who follows her wilder older sister to a veterinary college. But when she’s forced to eat meat for the first time in an initiation ritual, she can’t stop craving it, and her newfound carnivorous streak may start to head towards eating people. Ducournau’s film is, technically speaking, a horror pic, and there is some stomach-churning stuff here, but it’s as a coming-of-age that this really sings: it’s so good and incisive at depicting early college life, the ways that both external pressure and internal fear can change you as a person, about the discovery of your own sexuality and even fetishes. And it’s so, so impressively achieved: Ducournau walks an impossible tonal tightrope without a wobble, creating a unique world and shooting it with a fine eye. Maybe it’s a measure of how desensitized I am at this point, but it even made me kind of hungry…

2. “Kubo & The Two Strings”
I’ve admired the stop-motion work of Laika (“Coraline” in particular), but hadn’t yet loved any of their films when I walked into “Kubo & The Two Strings.” But I walked out a full-on convert: it’s the most beautiful, exciting and moving animated film in quite some time. Marc Haimes and Chris Butler’s screenplay is original, but its story — of a young boy (Art Parkinson) forced on a magical quest to find his father’s lost armor — has that rare sense that it’s captured folklore and fable in a fresh and authentic way (though its authenticity hits a bump with the use of American actors to voice Japanese characters, the film’s socking great single flaw). And the immaculate detail of the models and locations makes it a thing of really exquisite beauty. But it’s the film’s heart that makes it so indelible: there’s an extraordinary sense of melancholy and loss to it that’s almost unique among American animation of this kind, and it builds towards an ending where a revelation about the meaning of the film’s title left me sobbing in my seat through most of the credits.

1. “Moonlight”
Breaking: Seven Hundredth Film Critic Puts “Moonlight” At Number One In Their Best Of 2016 List. My personal fave of 2016 might be lacking in surprise or distinctiveness, but if you’ve seen this film, you’ll know why it’s here, and if you haven’t yet, you’ll soon understand. Maybe not completely immediately: Barry Jenkins’ film (his first since the wonderful “Medicine For Melancholy” eight years ago), a triptych about a young black gay man in Miami across two decades, is the rarest of films in that it grows in stature and power and beauty the more it lingers in your memory — and no matter how many other films you see in the weeks after, it can’t help but linger long. It’s a movie that flatters your senses to an almost synesthetic degree: a score that makes you remember the tidal spray of a beach at night, photography that recalls near-traumatic memories from childhood, framing that makes you feel like you’ve just been reunited with a crush you haven’t seen for two decades. It’s one with a brace of towering performances: the guilty paternal care of Mahershala Ali, the warmth and goodness of Janelle Monae, the deep confusion of Ashton Sanders, the sad, hazy self-destruction of Naomie Harris, the aching heart under wafer-thin armor of Trevante Rhodes, the single-handedly-bumping-you-a-point-on-Kinsey-scale of Andre Holland. And it’s a movie that looks at identity — racial identity, gay identity, manufactured identity, identity that comes through hard-worn self-knowledge — with almost novelistic depth. And in 2016, nothing even came close to the pleasures and pain that it offered.

I Also Loved: “Weiner,” “Hell Or High Water,” “Swiss Army Man,” “The Age Of Shadows,” “One More Time With Feeling,” “Midnight Special,” “Toni Erdmann,” “Hail Caesar!,” “Elle,” “De Palma,” “10 Cloverfield Lane” and “Homo Sapiens.”

I Also Liked: “Maggie’s Plan,” “Tickled,” “Captain America: Civil War,” “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping,” “Zootopia,” “Train To Busan,” “Neruda,” “Their Finest,” “April And The Extraordinary World” and “Under The Shadow” (to name but a few).

I Haven’t Seen: Plenty of stuff, but most prominently “Jackie” and “La La Land,” which don’t open in the U.K. til next month, and which from the looks of them, might well have made my list if I’d got to them in time.

I Saw Late: But a late U.K. release meant I finally caught up with the sublime “Spotlight” back in January — if I’d seen in time, it would have placed high on my list last year.

Click here for our complete coverage of the Best Of 2016.