The past year has been a cursed one. It began with the death of David Bowie and proceeded to get worse on every level: political hysteria, impending ecological doom, the creeping encroach of net-connected tech into every corner of our lives, and a blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality now known as ¡°post-truth.¡± It was not a great year for cinema ¡ª as the gazillion-dollar franchises increasingly shoved everything else to the margins ¡ª but the best films seemed both timely and truthful, speaking directly to the chaos of 2016.
10 Zootopia: The movie that neatly summed up everything that¡¯s wrong with Hollywood in one line: ¡°If you don¡¯t try anything new, you¡¯ll never fail!¡± With its cute anthropomorphic critters, I was expecting another ¡°Madagascar,¡± but the fingerprints of former ¡°Simpsons¡± writer Rich Moore are all over this, and the gags are razor-sharp. ¡°Zootopia¡± uses clever foxes, dumb bunnies and timid sheep to deal with issues of race and diversity ¡ª and how people play the identity politics game ¡ª in a way that even a 6-year-old will get.
9 The Revenant/Embrace of the Serpent: Two beautifully shot (on location) deep-wilderness odysseys that seem to owe a lot to Werner Herzog, sharp jolts of colonialism and spirituality. ¡°Embrace of the Serpent¡± follows a German ethnobotanist and an Amazonian shaman on a quest for a mythical healing plan in the early 1900s, while ¡°The Revenant¡± depicts the Pacific-Northwest frontier of 1823 as white trappers and traders clash with the Arikara tribe.
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