

Time slips away in the film almost imperceptibly, and the narrative arc doesn’t yield easily to the viewer. It’s a perplexing and challenging film, crafted without the traditional guardrails that guide most biographical movies - dates, times, major accomplishments, and so on.

21) Star Wars: The Last JediĪ Quiet Passion is technically a biographical film about Emily Dickinson, but it transcends its genre to become something more like poetry.

Here are my top 21 films of 2017 and how to watch them at home, with 14 honorable mentions. And it is a keen reminder to me of all the 2017 conversations I’ve had around and at the movies - and the ways I will never be the same. Some of the films on my list have commonalities - ghosts, meditations on memory and interpersonal connection, and women who refuse to behave - but mostly they underscore just how vibrant cinema remains as an art form, even in the midst of massive cultural shifts in the industry and beyond. That’s the feeling I get constructing my list of the best films of 2017, a year that overflowed with great films in every genre, from horror and romantic comedy to documentary and arthouse drama. I think I have.” She meant what most movie critics realize at some point: that reading your past reviews and revisiting the lists of films you liked most during the year reveals not just something about a particular year in cinema, but something about you as well. In the introduction to her review anthology For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies, the legendary film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs.
