Jackie (2016)

This movie was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Natalie Portman for Best Actress.  It chronicles the days immediately after the assassination of JFK.  Portman plays Jackie and as you might imagine, one is not at one's best in that circumstance.  I just felt it was like hitting below the belt to make an entire movie which is 100 minutes and feels longer even than that, about a grieving woman vacillating greatly about what to do with the funeral of her dead husband, all the while having to pack up and move out of her house, and deal with her two young kids who have absolutely no idea what is happening to them.  Portman renders the quaking woman well, and the music and dresses are exceptionally spot on (all three were nominated for Oscars.  None won, but the nominations were well deserved).  The movie, however, is painful to watch, and not in a way that makes you think or that you learn something from.

Florence Foster Jenkins (2016)

Wow, it is so weird to see Meryl Streep sing badly!  She plays a woman who was a patron of the arts but who was exceptionally untalented herself.  She was surrounded by people who worked very hard to protect her from figuring that out, and that is the essence of the movie.  It was nominated for two Oscars.  First, Meryl Streep in the role of Florence Foster Jenkins, a woman who contracted syphilis on her wedding night at age 18 from her first husband, who then led an unconsummated married life with her devoted husband, played quite competently by Hugh Grant.  He loves her but he is not sexually faithful to her.   He makes her feel adored.  The other arena that the movie was nominated in is costume design, which is the real start of the show, along with the period music.  The detailed dress of the period is lovingly recreated, so detailed and lovely.  If neither of these things appeal to you, skip this nominee.

Captain Fantastic (2016)

This movie is carried by Viggo Mortensen, who was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor.  The story is that he and his wife and their six children live completely and totally off the grid.  He is very capable, and their lives are certainly more luxurious than if I were to try the same thing.  They hunt and build and fix things and climb things.  All of the kids are physically active, they speak multiple languages, they read literature and have high level discussions about it.  They are impeccably home schooled, but they lack one thing.  They cannot function in the world as we know it at all.  We never meet the wife.  She is hospitalized psychiatrically when the movie begins and not long into it she kills herself.  The father and kids make contact with her parents and it is very clear that they hold him responsible for her death.  The movie is a road trip to her funeral, and how they struggle to manage, hold true to what is good about their lifestyle without being completely consumed by it, and how they eventually make peace with it.  Mortensen is outstandingly believable in his role, and the script is outstanding, as are the actors who play the children.

The Red Turtle (2016)

This is one of the nominees for Best Animated films this year, and it is remarkable in two ways.  First, the animation is breathtaking.  This comes out of Ghibli Studios and they continue to amaze, with details of nature, and in this one, the ocean and sea life as well as landscapes.  The second is that the movie has absolutely no words.  It is a silent film whose story is told only with images, and a sound track that the understated most of the movie.
The story is of a castaway, a man thrown up on the shore of a deserted island.  He is able to find food and once he has revived himself a bit, he builds a raft to leave the island.  It is destroyed within a few feet of shore, broken up into a thousand pieces.  He rebuilds it, it happens again, and again, and while he looks under the raft when he leaves the shore, he never sees anything.  Then a red turtle starts to pay him a visit.  The turtle plays a very significant role in the rest of the story, but I don't want to spoil it.  Suffice it to say that this year's nominees in this category are outstanding, and this is not to be missed.

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)

This is it, my selection for Best Animated movie this year.  I am pretty sure that Zootopia (or possibly Moana) will beat it out and I have yet to see My Life as a Zucchini, which looks excellent but adult, but I am pretty sure this is it.  I loved every character, the stop motion animation is simply gorgeous, and the story is wonderful.  I didn't;t think about it when I was watching the movie, but it is a story that gives the audience a lot of credit as well.
Kubo is a young boy who takes on the very large task of fighting a magical evil force.  He gets some help from a very charming monkey and a laugh out loud funny beetle, who guide him, rescue him, believe in him and help him to accomplish his goals and saving his small village.  There are a lot of powerful messages in the movie, but it is also a beautifully told story with impactful images and memorable characters.

Hell or High Water (2016)

This is a crime drama, which is not my favorite brand of movie by any means, but this is a very good version of one.  As one of my kids aptly pointed out, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Jeff Bridges, and West Texas all turned in top notch performances.  It is the very best that this genre can put together, including an ending that is ambiguous. 
The story is that after their mother dies, two brothers need a modest amount of cash to pay off a loan to the bank that the mother took out.  The loan is all or nothing, with the property itself as the collateral.  The rub is that not only do they not have the money, but that oil has been found on their property and so if they lose the land, they loose about $300,000 a year in oil income, all for not having $40,000 at the moment.  So who do they steal the money from?  The very bank with the predatory lending practices.  And who stands to gain?  Not the brothers themselves but the offspring.  The motives of the bank robbing brothers is understandable, but the story becomes morally complicated for everyone involved by the end, which is the makings of a great story.  One of the very best of this year's best picture nominees.

20th Century Women (2016)

I cannot figure out why the only thing this movie was nominated for was Best Screenplay, because I loved it.
  And the writing is excellent to boot, but so are the performances, both individually and as a group.  Billy Crudup, who was underwhelming in Jackie, is outstanding here as a man who successfully seduces women but then doesn't know what to do with them.  Annette Benning is outstanding as Dorothea, a 50 something year old mother set into the 1960s. She presides over a rambling household with an open-door policy and two lodgers. Dorothea senses that a single mother might not be "enough" to usher Jamie into this new phase in his life. She asks her lodgers to help Jamie by sharing their lives with him. How this will help is not exactly clear, but it drives the story in a positive direction forward.
Dorothea is terrific (despite the above described momentary lack of judgement).  She has a way of squinting tightly when she listens to people talk: she tries to figure out what's really going on beneath the surface. Her son wriggles away from that piercing gaze. She throws makeshift dinner parties for friends (and anyone else she happens to meet over the course of her day). She's a homebody, but not a recluse.

Fences (2016)

Wow.  First of all, I have loved August Wilson for a very long time, and the opportunity to watch yet another of his plays about the African American experience in the 20th century with such incredible acting is something not to pass up. The fact that Tony Kushner, one of my favorite living American playwrights, helped bring it to the screen only adds to it's allure.  For me.  Let me clarify that my second said that this movie should be called "Denzel Washington and Viola Davis put on an acting clinic in an otherwise boring movie".  I am giving her my vote for best supporting actress, that is for sure, and Denzel Washington's performance is brilliant, but he has the bad luck to be up the same year that Casey Affleck completely nailed an impossible role.
Why do I love this so much?  August Wilson’s plays are rich, poetic, wordy affairs tinged with music, the magical nature of myth, and symbolic elements that work extremely well as live theater. Since theater is an intimate medium, the general consensus on translating plays to screen is to “open up” the play, which quite often destroys the natural fabric of the work. The masterful thing about Denzel Washington’s direction here is that he doesn’t exactly open up the play. Instead, he opens up the visual frame around the players.  Still, the play like quality predominates, and there are ALOT of words, that is for sure.  Washington's character, the age of my grandparents,  is unlikable for very real reasons that help frame modern day life for African Americans.

Hidden Figures (2016)

This is a great story and a good movie.  I wish it were a great movie, because a movie about African American women who are math geeks winning an Academy Award would definitely help offset some of the bitterness that I have related to the treatment of Hilary Clinton in the last election.  Not enough, but a little.
The story is about the black women who worked at NASA and helped to put a man in space.  The three actresses who are in this are all terrific, and combined with other black actresses in films this year they demonstrate the depth of talent available.  So let's see some more of them in films int he future.  The story is essentially about how they are hampered by prejudice and color barriers in every way (including segregated bathrooms) but manage to succeed despite that.  All in all they could have gone further, but they did impressive things with all sorts of strings attached that held them back.  Well done, and well worth watching.

Moonlight (2016)

This is the movie I like the best that is nominated for best picture.  I still have three more to watch, but this is the one, I think.  Here is what I love about it.  It is gritty and real and tells of several struggles all at once and does so eloquent;y and without the tension that I felt throughout Lion and without the long drawn out periods that were emotional angst overload that happened in Manchester by the Sea.  I know, that one or La La Land, which is lushly beautiful, are more likely winners, but this is my choice.
What is the movie about?  It is summed up in the question posed by Mahershali Ali's character: “Who is you, man?” In particular, it is African American culture and people living in poverty.  It is gritty and clear eyed and surprisingly wonderful to watch. 
I have long been fascinated with issues of identity as a subject matter for films, but they’ve rarely been explored with the degree of eloquence and heartbreaking beauty as in this masterful film. “Moonlight” is a film that is both lyrical and deeply grounded in its character work, a balancing act that’s breathtaking to behold. It is one of those rare pieces of filmmaking that stays completely focused on its characters while also feeling like it’s dealing with universal themes about identity, sexuality, family, and, most of all, masculinity. And yet it's never preachy or moralizing. It is a movie in which deep, complex themes are reflected through character first and foremost.