One thing you should know about the Reader‘s year-end film rankings is that, from time immemorial, we’ve limited the candidates to movies that premiered locally between January 1 and December 31—that’s why Toni Erdmann, a big awards favorite in 2016, wasn’t eligible until this year, and a handful of highly touted films premiering on the coasts now to qualify for the Oscars (such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread and Michael Haneke’s Happy End) won’t be considered until 2018. Another thing you should know is that, for the first time, I and contributing writer Ben Sachs, whose year-end list appears on the Bleader, agreed on three whole films: Toni Erdmann, Nocturama, and Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. That gives them a coveted 100 percent rating on the Reader-meter, even more coveted because the only other possibilities are 50 percent or zero.
4 Lady Bird Greta Gerwig has spoken warmly of her single-sex education at a Catholic girls’ school in Sacramento, California, and Lady Bird, her solo writing and directing debut, is heavily informed by the experience, radiating sisterhood but without a hint of rancor. The gangly, 17-year-old heroine, played by Saoirse Ronan of Brooklyn, chafes against her lower-middle-class parents and dreams of ditching Sacramento for college in the east. Hoping to raise her social status, she tries out a couple of boyfriends, but they’re peripheral to a story in which girls are allowed to be their own sweet and irritable selves.
9 The Red Turtle A rebuke to the glibness of most children’s entertainment, this enthralling debut feature by longtime Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit transpires without a word of dialogue, its human characters dwarfed by a majestic natural environment. Washed ashore on a deserted island, the hero is harassed by a giant turtle with a ruby-red shell; after it expires on the beach, it’s reincarnated as a beautiful woman who becomes the man’s emotional lifeline. This was the first European animation ever funded by Japan’s Studio Ghibli and shares with that studio’s films a sense of nature’s mysterious power.
