<p>Since this year ender list looks at just a few highlights from Hollywood, there was no room to write about the best films this year from elsewhere, and about other personal favourites. <br /><br /></p>.<p>This also left out documentaries — or as they are called now, non-fiction films! So, to start with, here’s a list of features and docs that got left out here. The top three on my list would have to be: I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach’s new masterpiece, The Lobster, and Dheepan. And then, in no particular order, Moonlight, The Handmaiden, The Hateful Eight, Fences, Snowden, The Birth of a Nation, Hell or High Water, O.J.: Made in America, Loving, Silence (Martin Scorsese’s version of Endo’s cult novel) Miles Ahead, and Nocturnal Animals. <br /><br />Queen of Katwe<br /><br />A personal favourite this year is this little offering from Mira Nair, which attracted a modest audience and four-star reviews, but never got on any critic’s ‘best of’ list. We are all familiar by now with the ‘underdog winning at the end sports movie’ from Hollywood, but Nair skirts that tired, feel-good fantasy and grounds the film in something more realistic — the complications of winning when you are poor. <br /><br />Queen of Katwe is the true story of Phiona Mutesi, a Ugandan girl from the Kampala slum of Katwe, who turned out to be a chess prodigy. She was discovered in the slum, and now plays on the global stage, having become a titled chess player. After Mira Nair’s Shantaram project got derailed, I wondered what she would turn to next, and though no one expected this winning, understated movie, I am glad she picked a small story that deserved to be told on the big screen. As usual, she gets wonderful performances from her actors, from newcomer Madina Nalwanga to her two stars here, Lupita Nyong’o as her mother and David Oyelowo as her teacher. If you missed it, or it didn’t come up on your movie horizon this year, it’s worth chasing after.<br /><br />The BFG<br /><br />The BFG did poorly at the box office, but that’s no reason to miss this gentle, sweet-spirited Steven Spielberg fantasy of a beloved Roald Dahl book from 1982. Admittedly, this simple Dahl story did not need the Spielberg special effects treatment and pseudo Hollywood magic, but if you look past the CGI wizardry, you will meet Mark Rylance’s wonderful portrait of the friendly giant. Perhaps, both the audience and critics expected Spielberg to do something else with the material, but Melissa Mathison’s script (she wrote E.T.) stays faithful to the novel. <br /><br />A young orphan in Britain befriends a giant and they go on a journey that takes them on an enchanting quest filled with not just wondrous visuals but lessons learnt about tolerance and friendship. <br /><br />Rylance’s expressive performance and beautiful voice (Rylance is considered as the greatest Shakespearean actor today) is what you come away with the most at the end. There’s a priceless comic scene involving farting, with none less than the Queen of England! <br /><br />Arrival<br /><br />This emotional sci-fi epic may not be to everyone’s taste — in fact, it’s exactly the kind of science fiction movie I avoid, but I went to see it mistaking it for another luminous space journey in the tradition of Interstellar, and Arrival, in just its first 40 minutes, revealed itself to be a more emotional and philosophical experience than a rousing spectacle. In this first, historic encounter between extraterrestrials and humans, breaking the code for an alien language takes the place of special effects! Not exactly what one wants to see in a big budget Hollywood movie. Still, it wins you over with its first depiction — at least in a long, long time — of alien visitors being vulnerable, emotional and sensitive than interplanetary invaders. Their intelligence or superiority lies in how they use language, not technology. <br /><br />There are many things left hanging loose in the movie, frustratingly so — such as whether the events in the heroine’s life is part of her past or future — and other silly loopholes in the plot, but what holds you, what grips you, is director Denis <br />Villeneuve’s masterful style of unravelling plot. As in his previous pulse-pounding thriller, Sicario (where once again, the plot was intriguing but murky), he keeps the narrative mysterious, holding back information from us until the very last minute, keeping you in suspense and on edge. <br /><br /><br />Doctor Strange <br /><br />Like most adult moviegoers, I have become fed up with the Marvel Comics’s superhero franchise with its yearly offering of comic book blockbusters, looking and feeling more and more like factory-made products coming off the Hollywood assembly line. So, I almost skipped Doctor Strange, and in a last minute turnaround, I caught it for Benedict Cumberbatch. And I wasn’t sorry. Doctor Strange turned out to be the most un-Marvel of Marvel comic-to-book-adaptations with old-fashioned special effects that feel richer and more splendid than anything we’ve seen before from Hollywood. The narrative arc is the same stereotypical Marvel Comics arc. However, the alternative universes that we encounter in Doctor Strange are something new to the Marvel franchise. It breaks new imaginative ground in conjuring up effects and production design to mirror a parallel world.<br /><br />La La Land<br /><br />What happens in this movie is nothing new to us: the hero and the heroine suddenly break into song — it’s our movie staple after all, but it’s taken Hollywood by surprise: a modern musical that everyone’s cheering, including hardened critics. <br /><br />In Damien Chazelle’s stylish romantic musical starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as struggling, ambitious artistes, the relationship is developed through song and dance. The production design is another unusual feature: done in rich and strong colours, much like our own musicals. Original songs and lyrics were written for La La Land; the choreography is full of energy, the sets imbued with nostalgia. You’ll love it or hate it. <br /><br />Love & Friendship<br /><br />It has been a while since we had a really good Jane Austen movie adaptation, and Whit Stillman’s intimate chamber piece hits all the right notes to make us hear Austen’s prose and wit, and feel pleasure in her characters. It’s an adaptation of one of Austen’s early novellas called Lady Susan, and like Sense and Sensibility, the narrative unfolds through letters. <br /><br />This epistolary plot allows director Whitman to bathe the film in Austen’s prose as characters read to each other (and for us, the audience) letters that seem to always be flying back and forth as the story unfurls. <br /><br />As the wax seals of the letters are broken, Whitman even allows the scribbled notes to appear on the large screen, as if they were characters in the movie. Lovely dialogue abounds, as in a line like this: “It would be the death of the honest pride with which we have always considered you.” Kate Beckinsale returns as a heroine after a long spell, and she is perfect as Lady Susan, “the most accomplished flirt in England.”</p>
<p>Since this year ender list looks at just a few highlights from Hollywood, there was no room to write about the best films this year from elsewhere, and about other personal favourites. <br /><br /></p>.<p>This also left out documentaries — or as they are called now, non-fiction films! So, to start with, here’s a list of features and docs that got left out here. The top three on my list would have to be: I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach’s new masterpiece, The Lobster, and Dheepan. And then, in no particular order, Moonlight, The Handmaiden, The Hateful Eight, Fences, Snowden, The Birth of a Nation, Hell or High Water, O.J.: Made in America, Loving, Silence (Martin Scorsese’s version of Endo’s cult novel) Miles Ahead, and Nocturnal Animals. <br /><br />Queen of Katwe<br /><br />A personal favourite this year is this little offering from Mira Nair, which attracted a modest audience and four-star reviews, but never got on any critic’s ‘best of’ list. We are all familiar by now with the ‘underdog winning at the end sports movie’ from Hollywood, but Nair skirts that tired, feel-good fantasy and grounds the film in something more realistic — the complications of winning when you are poor. <br /><br />Queen of Katwe is the true story of Phiona Mutesi, a Ugandan girl from the Kampala slum of Katwe, who turned out to be a chess prodigy. She was discovered in the slum, and now plays on the global stage, having become a titled chess player. After Mira Nair’s Shantaram project got derailed, I wondered what she would turn to next, and though no one expected this winning, understated movie, I am glad she picked a small story that deserved to be told on the big screen. As usual, she gets wonderful performances from her actors, from newcomer Madina Nalwanga to her two stars here, Lupita Nyong’o as her mother and David Oyelowo as her teacher. If you missed it, or it didn’t come up on your movie horizon this year, it’s worth chasing after.<br /><br />The BFG<br /><br />The BFG did poorly at the box office, but that’s no reason to miss this gentle, sweet-spirited Steven Spielberg fantasy of a beloved Roald Dahl book from 1982. Admittedly, this simple Dahl story did not need the Spielberg special effects treatment and pseudo Hollywood magic, but if you look past the CGI wizardry, you will meet Mark Rylance’s wonderful portrait of the friendly giant. Perhaps, both the audience and critics expected Spielberg to do something else with the material, but Melissa Mathison’s script (she wrote E.T.) stays faithful to the novel. <br /><br />A young orphan in Britain befriends a giant and they go on a journey that takes them on an enchanting quest filled with not just wondrous visuals but lessons learnt about tolerance and friendship. <br /><br />Rylance’s expressive performance and beautiful voice (Rylance is considered as the greatest Shakespearean actor today) is what you come away with the most at the end. There’s a priceless comic scene involving farting, with none less than the Queen of England! <br /><br />Arrival<br /><br />This emotional sci-fi epic may not be to everyone’s taste — in fact, it’s exactly the kind of science fiction movie I avoid, but I went to see it mistaking it for another luminous space journey in the tradition of Interstellar, and Arrival, in just its first 40 minutes, revealed itself to be a more emotional and philosophical experience than a rousing spectacle. In this first, historic encounter between extraterrestrials and humans, breaking the code for an alien language takes the place of special effects! Not exactly what one wants to see in a big budget Hollywood movie. Still, it wins you over with its first depiction — at least in a long, long time — of alien visitors being vulnerable, emotional and sensitive than interplanetary invaders. Their intelligence or superiority lies in how they use language, not technology. <br /><br />There are many things left hanging loose in the movie, frustratingly so — such as whether the events in the heroine’s life is part of her past or future — and other silly loopholes in the plot, but what holds you, what grips you, is director Denis <br />Villeneuve’s masterful style of unravelling plot. As in his previous pulse-pounding thriller, Sicario (where once again, the plot was intriguing but murky), he keeps the narrative mysterious, holding back information from us until the very last minute, keeping you in suspense and on edge. <br /><br /><br />Doctor Strange <br /><br />Like most adult moviegoers, I have become fed up with the Marvel Comics’s superhero franchise with its yearly offering of comic book blockbusters, looking and feeling more and more like factory-made products coming off the Hollywood assembly line. So, I almost skipped Doctor Strange, and in a last minute turnaround, I caught it for Benedict Cumberbatch. And I wasn’t sorry. Doctor Strange turned out to be the most un-Marvel of Marvel comic-to-book-adaptations with old-fashioned special effects that feel richer and more splendid than anything we’ve seen before from Hollywood. The narrative arc is the same stereotypical Marvel Comics arc. However, the alternative universes that we encounter in Doctor Strange are something new to the Marvel franchise. It breaks new imaginative ground in conjuring up effects and production design to mirror a parallel world.<br /><br />La La Land<br /><br />What happens in this movie is nothing new to us: the hero and the heroine suddenly break into song — it’s our movie staple after all, but it’s taken Hollywood by surprise: a modern musical that everyone’s cheering, including hardened critics. <br /><br />In Damien Chazelle’s stylish romantic musical starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as struggling, ambitious artistes, the relationship is developed through song and dance. The production design is another unusual feature: done in rich and strong colours, much like our own musicals. Original songs and lyrics were written for La La Land; the choreography is full of energy, the sets imbued with nostalgia. You’ll love it or hate it. <br /><br />Love & Friendship<br /><br />It has been a while since we had a really good Jane Austen movie adaptation, and Whit Stillman’s intimate chamber piece hits all the right notes to make us hear Austen’s prose and wit, and feel pleasure in her characters. It’s an adaptation of one of Austen’s early novellas called Lady Susan, and like Sense and Sensibility, the narrative unfolds through letters. <br /><br />This epistolary plot allows director Whitman to bathe the film in Austen’s prose as characters read to each other (and for us, the audience) letters that seem to always be flying back and forth as the story unfurls. <br /><br />As the wax seals of the letters are broken, Whitman even allows the scribbled notes to appear on the large screen, as if they were characters in the movie. Lovely dialogue abounds, as in a line like this: “It would be the death of the honest pride with which we have always considered you.” Kate Beckinsale returns as a heroine after a long spell, and she is perfect as Lady Susan, “the most accomplished flirt in England.”</p>
