Movies

Ty Burr’s top 10 films: Movies aren’t dead yet

Casey Affleck in “Manchester by the Sea.” Claire Folger / Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions

December 17, 2016

1 minute to read

All right, so maybe the movies aren’t dead, after all.

Earlier this year, a few other writers and I caused a ruckus among those who care deeply for the medium by stating that the sun may be setting on the movies as we’ve known them for over a century. Outrage ensued, and valid disagreements, and an awful lot of testy sub-tweets. Which is as it should be.

I was writing at the end of an especially dispiriting summer silly season, after our communal cultural sensibilities had been ground to a nub by hollow, joyless spectacles like “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” and “X-Men: Apocalypse” and cynical “alt”-superhero movies like “Deadpool” and “Suicide Squad,” the former a big, snarky hit and the latter a seeming commandment.

Soon enough, though, the fall film festivals and the run-up to awards season were here, and, lo, cinema that was rewarding, interesting, and good was once more upon the land. As it had been all year, if you knew where to look.

In point of fact, it has been harder than usual to narrow my Top 10 list this year, since there was so much out there that deserves to be seen. On the most straightforward level, 2016 was a tremendous year for the movies. If you look at it another way, though, by far the majority of audiences will see the films below not in a movie theater but at home on TV or on a laptop, where those movies will compete with long-form TV series that encourage novelistic binge watching, with short-form video that serves as a daily entertainment drip, and with an ongoing barrage of social media that saps our attention span for anything we can’t pause at the press of a button.