2016 is almost over! Hallelujah! With everything that’s happened in the last 12 months, we can’t wait to rip the last page of our 2016 Spider-Man wall calendar and hang up our 2017 Spider-Man wall calendar.
Too much time and effort in Cinemaland is wasted turning film into a game of winners and losers; Movie X made Y dollars so it matters more than Movie Z. But a film is way more than its box-office total. Some of the best movies released in 2016 failed to meet their financial expectations.
It’s always exciting to see the latest work from a beloved director, or to watch a great actor return to a classic role. But one of the most underrated pleasures of going to the movies is discovery; watching an actor you’d never heard of before surprise you with their incredible range or charisma, or realizing, in real time, that you’re witnessing the work of a major new artist. It really doesn’t get much better than that.
There were a lot of great movies in 2016. There were! Please don’t let this list convince you otherwise. The movies were absolutely wonderful this year. Just not these specific movies. These were bad. So, so, so bad. Just awful.
Horror is one of the most flexible film genres, encompassing everything from the broadly fantastical to the disturbingly real. Because of that, it’s sometimes hard to nail down exactly what belongs on a “best horror” round-up and what doesn’t. Undoubtedly, genre aficionados will quibble about what’s on and what’s off the list below, not just because of differences of opinion over quality, but because of disagreements over definition.
Our ongoing celebration of the year in cinema wouldn’t be complete without a few (or 1500) words about our favorite actors and actresses of the year. With the staff of ScreenCrush finalizing their lists of 2016’s best movies (you can already read Editor-in-Chief Matt Singer’s top ten here), we had to take a moment to celebrate the men and women who made the movies so memorable. And with some actors already breaking out of the pack and getting a lot of acclaim from critics groups and voting bodies, we decided to try to pick at least a couple names that aren’t popping up as frequently among the year-end awards. So we love you, Natalie Portman in Jackie and Mahershala Ali in Moonlight, but we decided to throw a little extra love some other performers’ way.
What a difference six months makes. Back in the summer, the world of film was all gloom and doom. Television was great; the movies were terrible. One respected critic even speculated that someday the world would look back at 2016 as “the year that movies died.”
Our ongoing celebration of the best from the world of film in 2016 continues with our ranking of the finest movie posters of the year. In the gallery above you’ll see our picks for the 25 best. They range from massive hits to to tiny indie releases; we decided not to limit our list just to huge commercial successes. We don’t determine a movie’s quality by its box office totals. Why should we determine a poster’s quality that way?
December is officially upon us, and so is year-end list-making season. We’re kicking things off by looking backwards and forwards: By ranking the finest teasers, trailers, and coming attractions of 2016. To qualify, only the trailer had to be released in this calendar year; you’ll see trailers below for movies that haven’t even been released yet and can’t be judged next to the films they represent. That’s as it should be; beyond their function as pieces of advertising, trailers should stand alone, as bite-sized entertainments and even, in a few rare occasions, as works of art. Here are the ten trailers of 2016 (plus a few honorable mentions) that came closest to that lofty ideal.
Along with the great deluge of awards programs, the end of 2016 brings best-of-the-year lists from just about every publication under the sun. Those film obsessives who catalogue such things eagerly await rulings from newspapers of record, major film magazines, and critics’ organizations, and the ball just got rolling earlier today with announcements from a pair of reputable sources. (We continue to patiently await High Times’ Top 10 Films of 2016 list, however. Word is they were big into Manchester by the Sea, but c’mon, who wasn’t?)