Barry Jenkins’ drama could have crashed into so many awful clichés and shortcuts, and he deftly avoids them all. Moonlight is an incredibly challenging film, not because of how it’s presented or what it presents, but in how it shows a young man searching for what love he can find in a world that surrounds him with hate. It’s going to be the one about the gay black kid who has to struggle with his identity and relationships.
So if I have only one film to recommend for 2016, it’s not going to be the one that’s currently on Netflix or the one with the two movie stars. Really, any of my top three choices this year could have been at #1, but I accept that there are readers who just scroll down to the bottom of the list to see what the top choice is. I know a lot of people don’t have the time to see dozens of new releases, so if you can only see ten movies from 2016, I suggest you go with these. Most importantly, this list is to help guide folks to what I feel are the essential movies of the year. I didn’t use some formula, and my evaluation of some movies over the course of the year changed based on repeat viewings and/or how much I thought about a picture. If you came away from 2016 thinking that film was dead, you frankly weren’t looking hard enough, or really, looking at anything outside of the movies with the biggest budgets.Īs I note every year, my Top 10 list isn’t meant to be some definitive. Thankfully, we get more than just blockbuster films released every year, and you didn’t really have to hunt too far to find excellent movies in a variety of genres.
There were plenty of disappointments, and the good films struggled to break through and find an audience.
If you were to only look at the blockbuster landscape of 2016, it would be easy to say that this was a bad year for cinema.