Runner-ups: “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” “Benediction,” “Bones and All,” “EO,” “The Eternal Daughter,” “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” “Happening,” “Hit the Road,” “Jackass Forever,” and “Mad God.”
10. “Babylon”
A bombastic epic as artistically ambitious as those made during the height of the silent era, writer/director Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” takes the audience on a visceral odyssey through the highest highs and lowest lows of late-1920s Hollywood, from orgiastic parties and chaotic film sets to personal triumphs and melancholic moments of utter despair. As the movie business transitions from silents to talkies, characters like aging matinee idol Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), wannabe starlet Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), assistant Manny Torres (Diego Calva), sensationalist journalist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), jazz musician Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), and multi-talented entertainer Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) struggle to find their footing in an industry in flux.
Although the story follows fictional players at the fictional Kinoscope Studios, Chazelle’s script is steeped in a deep knowledge of old Hollywood’s dark, complicated history and its most pervasive (and perverse) mythologies. Linus Sandgren’s fluid cinematography, coupled with Justin Hurwitz’s hot jazz score, raises this larger-than-life era back from the dead with humor and pathos. Tom Cross’ dynamic editing keeps the film vibrating at a breakneck pace, its three-hour runtime barely registering as one zany set piece after another barrels toward the film’s denouement. Ending on a note as rhapsodic as it is elegiac, Chazelle’s film is ultimately a condemnation of the Hollywood machine that crushes everyone with equitable cruelty and an ode to the innovative artistry and ineffable magic of the movies, whose siren call continues to lure audiences and filmmakers alike towards its warm glow. (Marya E. Gates)
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9. “RRR”
It’s hard not to love a movie where a herd of snarling Big Cats leaps out of the back of a truck as one (in slo-mo) to sic themselves on a crowd of British imperialists milling about in evening dress. It’s hard not to love a movie where two men (Ram Charan and N.T. Rama Rao Jr.), strangers to one another, collaborate on the fly to save a child in peril, their plan involving a motorcycle, a horse, a long rope, a gigantic flag, and simultaneous swan-dives off a burning bridge. S.S. Rajamouli’s “RRR” calls into question all other action sequences in all other films, sequences which may have thrilling moments and impressive stunts but lack the dazzling bravura of the spectacle on display here. “RRR” makes you ask: Why CAN’T we show a bare-chested man wielding a crossbow emerging through a ring of fire? Why CAN’T we include family trauma, political commentary, ahistorical wish-fulfillment, revenge/redemption fantasies, sweet romances, rousing dance numbers, and the Platonic Ideal of a Bromance all in the same film?