News You Can Bruise for 2017 January 3

Film: Maintaining Film Roundup Roundup (now updated with 150 high-quality films!) makes it pretty easy to come up with a top ten for 2016:

1. Man With A Movie Camera (1929)
2. Dekalog 10 (1989)
3. Tampopo (1985)
4. Inquiring Nuns (1968)
5. Approaching the Elephant (2014)
6. Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed (2004)
7. A Short Film about Killing (1988)
8. Dekalog 1 (1989)
9. Hail, Ceasar! (2016)
10. The Defiant Ones (1958)

Look at that list, we got four documentaries on there.

My lower-tier "recommended" list gets longer every year; here's a quick stab at the top ten of my twenty-one recommended movies from 2016:

1. Moana (2016)
2. Ghostbusters (2016)
3. Deadpool (2016)
4. Caucus (2013)
5. La La Land (2016)
6. Avanti! (1972)
7. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
8. Three Colors: Blue (1993)
9. Synecdoche, New York (2006)
10. It (1927)

I'm not really happy with calling that second tier "recommended" because it implies I'll scoff at your decision to see a solid film like Arrival or Kung Fu Hustle that I didn't put on my list. Hopefully no one does the data gathering necessary to deduce (incorrectly) that I'm scoffing at you.

After several years of Film Roundup I think I can now make what to me looks like a normal person's top ten film list, containing only movies from 2016. All of these were worth watching:

1. Hail, Ceasar!
2. Moana
3. Ghostbusters
4. La La Land
5. Deadpool
6. Arrival
7. Star Trek: Beyond
8. A Beautiful Planet
9. Shin Godzilla
10. Zootopia
11. The Last Arcade

Kind of a boring list though! Where are the nuns, the fourth-wall-breaking gangsters, or the convicts handcuffed to each other? Answer: in movies from previous years.