I loved it and it would definitely make my list but for the technical 2015 release date. Although these things get really muddy with limited, end-of-year releases, so I don't know why I bother drawing these lines anymore.

Yes! Funny but also true…

The only reason Mustang didn't make my best of 2016 list was that I'm pretty sure I saw it at the end of 2015. But I loved the hell out of it, for sure.

A couple of ways. First, directly: as I mentioned above, there are debates and arguments and speeches that form the intellectual "content" of the film, even when they're treated irreverently: we're dealing with competing notions of belief, juxtaposing the acquisition of religious faith against Marxist…

I think we maybe have a different experience of the film, then, because I was taken aback by how many layers were crammed into that last third, in particular. I don't know how you read it, but as a study in unrequited love (a la Wong Kar Wai), and as a displaced coming-out (not for nothing the movie ends with Chiron…

Disagree: it's designed as dialectic rather than exposition, but that doesn't make it shallow. In fact, I'd argue one of the frustrations expressed in the film is how inaccessible these issues are to laypeople, with various forms of dogma disappearing up their own linguistic and conceptual asses. Look at all the…

There's one detail I like quite a bit. In The Seven Samurai, the bandits have an advantage in the final fight because one of them has a gun. For this, Fuqua substitutes the Gatling gun. I don't know if this was intentional, but I thought it might be a reference to events in the Wilmington insurrection, where the gun…

I was genuinely disappointed not to see Bennett's Churchill monologue on their list of favorite scenes this year, because I don't think anything made me laugh harder.

The Magnificent Seven was such a disappointment that I forgot it existed until you mentioned it. Yeesh.

I do disagree with that somewhat, but I'm also not sure that it matters? Speaking only for myself, it doesn't seem matter much in the way the film is constructed: Chiron is largely built out of reactions to other people (listening, absorbing, avoiding, rejecting), and the drama comes out of that fullness of range of…

Good taste! I think HC ultimately treats despair the way the ending scene of Burn After Reading does: where meaninglessness is cruel cosmic punchline. But there's something weirdly poignant about Mannix having a capital-M Moment in front of a movie studio prop crucifix (only to undercut it a few minutes later when the…

Huh? I saw the movie specifically because of how much critical praise was lavished on it.

With apologies for the format, I really liked this analysis, which dovetails with my own reading of the way the film is constructed along competing but mixed-up allegories (e.g. the Stalinists are given a Messiah and 12 disciples), that end up echoing and reinforcing each other, even if it's just turtles all the way…

Agreed.

I think my favorite role of his is Inherent Vice, which is just flawless.

Huge if true.

"Fine name, Churchill!"

That's fair. I liked how lean, almost Carpenter-esque the movie was (especially given our tendency toward excess in contemp. action movies), and how unnervingly quiet the ending was, as if it had no interest in going out on a high note. Different strokes, though.

The movie was rocking a >90% RT score two months before the lead actor died, so you are probably alone on the latter part, yes.

Hail, Caesar! may feel lazy, but it's possibly their most ideologically dense movie - Jeet Heer and Anne Helen Peterson spent a lot of time picking apart its sneaky layers bit-by-bit, and there's just so much there. Maybe not every aspect works, but it's some of the most intellectually exciting filmmaking I saw this…