Best Films 2017

It’s that time of the year. Blockbuster season has nearly finished and with it the yearly doom and gloom analysis about massive tentpole flops dragging the industry down arrives. Meanwhile, festival season is about to begin and every day a new line-up with the films everybody will be talking about from the autumn onwards is announced, taking cinephile excitement to the roof.

It’s a good time to look back and count the best of what 2017 has delivered. As usual, we don’t include anyyhing released before March, because that was the deadline for the films we considered for our 2016 Robers, which already included most of the films that featured heavily during the awards season, except perhaps for Asghar Farhadi’s excellent drama ‘The Salesman,’ which unexpectedly became a symbol against Trump’s Islamophobic policies, or Raoul Peck’s superb documentary ‘I Am Not Your Negro.’

Latin America reaffirms the good moment its production it’s going through with four titles featured in our Top 20: From Brazil ‘Aquarius’; from Mexico ‘The Untamed’; from Venezuela ‘La Soledad’ and from Argentina ‘The Human Surge.’

Genre films also feature preeminently in our selection. The only big studio productions highlighted, except for the majestic war epic that is Christopher Nolan’s ‘Dunkirk,’ are very distinctive horror films such as ‘Get Out’ which uses the current racial tensions in the States as the source for its thrills or ‘Logan’ which almost single-handedly saved the superhero subgenre from destruction porn clichés, with a classic Western-like storyline.

The latest works by Cristian Mungiu, Aki Kaurismäki, Sofia Coppola, Radu Jude or James Gray add a strong authorial flavour to the mix and the extraordinary ‘A Ghost Story’ by James Lowery, next to Trey Edward Shults’ ‘It Comes At Night’ proves that there is still life in the increasingly formulaic world of American indies.

Altogether, these films may not herald a vintage year in film; but they are diverse, challenging and ground-breaking enough as to guarantee a decent supply of quality work, appeasing the growing choir of voices who claims the death of the industry as we know it, sacrificed in the altar of the digital platform.

And our Favourite Films of 2017 so far are…

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