By Tasha Baldassarre
2016 was a good year for good cinema. Here are 14 indie movies you should definitely watch if you haven’t already.
1. Paterson
Hey, it’s iconic Stranger Than Paradise/Only Lovers Left Alive/Coffee And Cigarettes/Night On Earth filmmaker eccentric Jim Jarmusch back again to direct Adam Driver as a bus driver called Paterson in the town of Paterson whose secondary internal life as a poet is chronicled against the backdrop of his quiet, mundane workdays.
2. Miss Stevens
A short, sweet and effective story about high school English teacher chaperoning her three students to a drama competition. A certified good time featuring the underrated Lily Rabe.
3. American Honey
Shia Leboeuf’s been getting a lot of traction for his #HeWillNotDivideUs protest campaign these days, but he puts on an firecracker performance in Andrea Arnold’s immersive Cannes Jury Prize-winning road film that follows abused runaway Star (Sasha Lane) as she falls in with a group of travel to sell magazine subscriptions door-to-door. A sprawling portrait of the American landscape and one of the most beautifully shot films of last year, we don’t deserve movies this good.
4. Chronic
A little like the nurse version of Adrien Brody’s protagonist in Detachment, another touchstone for tragedy, Tim Roth tells a solemn tale of how anticlimactic the death of loved ones can really be.
5. Jackie
If, like me, you’ve missed Natalie Portman in a serious role, you’ll barely recognise her transformed into the memorable First Lady during the hardest week of her life in this, poised on the fine line between performance and mimicry to a grim soundtrack.
6. Manchester by the Sea
Casey Affleck is an awful person but his performance in this one is probably the best I’ve seen in 2016, making for another bad creator/good art dilemma. Nuanced and elegant, you’ll have a lump stuck in your throat for the entire two hours of this masterpiece of the hardships of familial reconciliation.
7. Moonlight
I can’t wax poetic enough about this one, and the awards it’s picking up speak for themselves. Watch it, really.
8. The Childhood of a Leader
Uncannily appropriate given today’s political atmosphere, and boasting one of the best scores of 2016 and one of the best debuts in a long while, Brady Corbet’s first feature film is loosely based on Sartre’s short story and tells of an American boy living in France with his authoritarian parents in 1919 and how his experiences birth a chilling worldview.
9. The Fits
If you’re keen on diverse, female-centric cinema, The Fits follows a young boxer in Cincinnati who switches gears to the dance team. Director Anna Rose Holmer subtly captures the feeling of being alone in institutional spaces and her film doubles as an unconventional coming-of-age story that loops back on itself as mysterious ills begin to plague the girls.
10. Swiss Army Man
A profound marvel from title to credits, Daniel Radcliffe plays a dead body called Manny that’s a shipwrecked companion to a stranded man trying to find his way home, inventing various worlds in the wilderness in a surreal, hilarious study of the subconscious.
11. The Witch
Aesthetically creepy at its core, a paranoiac slow burn of an experience that matches It Follows as the model modern horror film.
12. I, Daniel Blake
Stark and strong, a story of a carpenter on welfare and a woman in a similar situation that’s familiarly frustrating and urgent in how it deals with money and health problems. You’ll cry and cry and have no idea what to do with yourself when the credits roll.
13. Notes on Blindness
Using the audio diaries of John Hull, a theologian who went blind a few days before his first son’s birth in 1983, as source material, directors James Spinney and Pete Middleton transcribe with the help of incredible dreamy cinematography a form-challenging film about Hull’s adjustment to his lost vision
14. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Taika Waititi is back at it again with being better than literally every other filmmaker out there – this time with an obnoxious kid and his grumpy foster uncle trying to survive as fugitives in the New Zealand badlands while the nation bands together on a manhunt for them, a story that’s as highly rewatchable as the rest of his films.
Feel free to leave any other suggestions in the comments!