All 32 films I've seen in 2016 ranked from best to worst

1. Eye in the Sky, Gavin Hood-Extremely economic storytelling and theatrical in its execution, provocative in its dedication to showing the nuance of a military strike. If it was released at a better time of year, it could have been remembered years from now as the definitive film of the military-via-drones era.

2. Hello, My Name is Doris, Michael Showalter-Sally Field's sweet spinster character is the perfect remedy to check our own ageist tendencies but this is also a bit of a psychological thriller wrapped in a misplaced comedy of errors. This lady is really on a collision course with an embarrassing truth bomb and you can't look away.

3. Don't Think Twice, Mike Biribiglia-The film has a great balance between its ensemble and really captures that world (although why they couldn't just say "SNL" is beyond me). A very loving film with characters who organically reach their stories' endings in a variety of unexpected way.

4. Hidden Figures-An uplifting film but one that’s generally earned despite a couple moments where the film erroneously steers towards schmaltz. It walks that fine line between historically faithfulness, go-for-broke sentimentally and grittily realism. Taraji P Henson deserves accolades here

5. Hell or High Water-A great exercise in genre experimentation: Tackling the housing crisis by moving the Western forward in time 120 years.

6. Mascots, Christopher Guest-The best thing about this film is that it exists at all if you read the news article a few years back that Guest didn't feel he had anything more to give to the genre he practically created. This isn't a game changer but it's a joy to see so many rich comic stories merge together like this for the first time in a decade.

7. Lion, Garth Davis-The first half had a really dark look at life in the streets of a third world country like 1990s Calcutta. The second half could have done a better job or picking and choosing which scenes were most relevant and God bless Dev Patel for finally getting an overdue Oscar nom from Slumdog, but this felt like a casting mistake: He just had too much swagger and self-confidence to fit the narrative. I would assume what motivated him to find his family was a feeling of being an outsider but he seems like the most popular kid in class and picks up Rooney Mara as a girlfriend within minutes of meeting her. Still, this is the most emotional film I’ve seen regardless so the sentimental effect overflowed past any sloppy positioning.

8. Fences, Denzel Washington- Does Troy represent the popular image of the African-American man? Is he to blame for his ill fortunes or is he a product of society? The fact that he and his situation are complex enough that you can argue so well either way makes this such a provocative work of art. The film embodies what’s best about theatrical adaptations from the poetry in the dialogue to the thoroughness with which the actors do their legwork. The film also boasts the year’s best ensemble.

9. Star Trek Beyond, Justin Lin- Very much enjoyed the smaller scale in story as it allowed the characters more quiet moments of character development and pairings that showed new angles. This was balanced by special effects that wowed me in an era where every blockbuster has a budget larger than many 3rd world countries

10. La La Land-The romantic plot between the numbers felt kind of empty, but damn, the musical numbers were amazing. I still support it for a best picture win. It was extremely innovative and extremely thematically coherent and smart. Nearly every second is visually thoughtful and it is very clear that Damien Chazelle and his team used an encyclopedic knowledge of movie musicals to fashion its commentary.

11. Aquarius-It's a foreign film (I watch very few foreign films so this disclaimer is needed) about a woman in her 60's struggling in Brazil against a corporation who wants to tear her house down. A very solid character piece that like "Hello My Name is Doris" is a celebration of an elderly woman in defiance of the way society tries to (literally and figuratively) make her obsolete

12. Popstar: Never Stop Popping, The Lonely Island team- The film sails by more on cameos and side jokes than the character-based humor of Connor 4 Real but laughter speaks: It was just plain hilarious. Lonely Island can get random and scattered in 3-minute clips, so it works to their advantage to be able to develop their riffs over a longer running time.

13. The Lobster: Satirizing both the problems with pressure to couple up and overly conservative societies, the film has thematic currents against both sexual obsession and sexual chastity which is really interesting. Colin Farrell is really interesting and the ensemble is filled with all kinds of interesting characters. Has some wierdly dark moments.

14. Alice Through the Looking Glass: It’s kid-oriented, but surprisingly coherent and complex storyline-wise and works on a kid’s level. Visually quite wonderous.

15. Deepwater Horizon: I have a soft-spot for a good disaster film and consider the genre a form of art with a slightly higher purpose than the typical "things go boom" fare. Like "Captian Phillips"the film gets full-on emotional in the last act as its hero, Mark Wahlberg, starts suffering PTSD. Both films redefine the image of the hero in a larger way then the traditional view thats restricted to members of the military, inspirational teachers and fireman/cops.

16. Arrival-Didn’t appeal that much to me beyond the deep sciencey premise. If you buy Amy Adams’ performance, then you’ll feel the film on an emotional level

17. Now You See Me 2-Sleight-of-hand magicing is a great way to reinvent the heist genre (like adding history professors as in National Treasure). The story twisted and turned too much for me to care and the sexual chemistry between Lizzy Caplain and Dave Franco was forced (I don't think either of the Franco brothers has an easy time with romance) but it was pretty fun along the way.

18. Ghostbusters, Paul Fieg-Serviceably funny. It might be a bold statement here but a side-by-side comparion of this quartet of characters to the original shows how the UCB generation of comedy really goes a step beyond in developing comic characters from the inside out.

19. Tallulah-A Netflix film with Ellen Page and Allison Janney. I thought it's most interesting element was that this despicable character played by Ellen Page is unapolagetically the protagonist. The movie is kind of a ticking time bomb. You have no idea how long she'll get away w/this ruse of stealing someone else's baby but you're bracing for the explosion.

20. The Bronze-As an Olympics enthusiast, I enjoyed the exploration of what happens to Olympics stars after their big movement. The love story was sweet and I liked that Melissa Raunch's character had to grow but she never really had to bend her own personality that much to get to a happy place w/her dad, her gymnastics and her boyfriend. Some of the humor's bread and it had the grossest sex scene I've seen in a while

21. Special Correspondents-Ricky Gervais is curiously nowhere near as bold in film (Ghost Town, Invention of Lying, this) as he is with his TV work. I would be interested in reading an essay as to why, but I can't say that these films aren't pleasant if you don't take away the high expectations. Besides Gervais'

22. Sing Steet, John Carney: Not as memorable as the last Carney film I saw ("Begin Again") but a pretty sweet film about a kid reinventing himself through creating an 80's band. It has a strong sense of place backed by the authenticity of on-location shooting, and a sweet love story. The film has a bit more empty space (both in the band's logistical scenes and the love scenes) than ideal.

23. Captain Fantastic, Matt Ross-Stretches reality a little bit in the form of this superdad who can keep his kids extremely isolated and turn them into extreme geniuses with abnormal levels of obedience (except one of the six kids) but an interesting film. Some might call it artsy, but I found the camera work obnoxious.

24. Race: A pretty generic sports film but with a lot of chemistry between the characters and interesting historic detail

25. Batman vs Superman, Zach Snyder-I'd classify this as not awful. Tonally it was pretty consistent. Batman's kind of dark and Superman kind of got there too and Jesse Eisenberg was nice and playful with his part. I don't know if the film had much to say though but I've seen worse...

26. Eddie the Eagle, Dexter Fletcher-Pretty generic with a few sweet moments. The film curiously cares very little about history which is odd because the actual historical facts of Eddie the Eagle would have made a better movie. Taran Eagleton plays a mostly asexual klutz well and has just enough charm to keep this from being completely by-the-numbers. Also, Lake Placid is all wrong.

27. X-Men Apocalypse, Brian Singer-Because it is the sole superhero series I’ve ever gotten into as a kid, I watch every X-Men film as a general rule. Still, my loyalty doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to rip on it. Still, they are going through the motions here. Some of the criticisms of X-Men 3 (needing to decrowd the landscape) would hae been wise here and Apocalypse lacked personality. Why waste Oscar Isaac’s valuable time (as well as that of the make-up department) for something so lifeless. hey needed to decrowd the landscape a bit and have given Acopalypse some personality. Special-effects wise, Psyloche was one of the highlights.

28. Gold-The film's big twist had no foreshadowing and came way too late in the movie for me to care. The first hour of the film had no real point to make? The film could have at least tried to make the gold trade interesting but instead, it is capitalism porn: the stuff found in Wolf of Wall Street, Boiler Room and American Hustle.

29. Zootopia-I heard it had an interesting message but I wasn't really interested in being preached to by a Pixar-like cartoon. Found it uneventful with a few spare jokes here and there

30. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot-Is anyone else getting tired of Tina Fey playing Tina Fey? 40ish woman feeling down on herself bc she's on the verge of no longer being able to meet Mr. Right in time to have kids who is always surrounded by idiots. And this is supposed to be about a serious war film and not an episode of 30 Rock?

31. Keanu-I like Key and Peele a lot but this felt like swing and a miss for me. They've done stuff way more nuanced and complicated than here. So they're forced to act like gangsters?  That's a 5-minute skit, guys, not a movie.

32. Suicide Squad-Oh, the horror! Why did I watch this. It felt like a violent video game specifically made for 12-year-old boys. When the dialogue seems like filler to get to the action and the action seems like filler to get to the dialogue, you know you’ve got a problem. Still, Margo Robbie manages to dazzle and Jared Leto gives a brave performance.

The Increasingly Vague Distinction between Hollywood and Foreign films

It's funny that no one is even noticing that if the Oscars follow the Golden Globes, Slumdog Millionaire will be the closest we've come to a foreign film winning the best picture Oscar.

Slumdog Millionaire was filmed entirely in India, directed by a British director (and co-directed by an Indian director), and is half-English, half-Urdu. It also utilized an entirely foreign crew and its subjects are foreign. The only non-foreign element at play is that it was produced by an American company, Fox Searchlight.

We've traditionally had easier defined boundaries between a foreign film and a non-foreign film, but in this globalized era, ownership of a movie by a single country is a little harder to define. The best directors in the world such as Brazilian Fernando Meirelles (City of God), Chinese director Ang Lee, and Mexicans Alfonso Cuaron (Y tu Mama Tambien), Rob Rodriguez (El Mariachi), and Alejandro Inarritu Gonzalu (Amores Perros) have eventually used their money to come to Hollywood and made English-language films with American actors. When Alejandro Inarritu Gonzalu won the Golden Globe for best picture with Babel, he suggested in his acceptance speech that his film was a true global picture that belonged to the people and crews among three different continents.

Experimentation works both ways however. In 2006 (2007 was technically when the ceremony was held), two of the five directors nominated for best foreign-language film, Mel Gibson for Apocolypto and Clint Eastwood for Letters of Iwo Jima, were American. Woody Allen who has had a decades-long love affair with New York, packed up shop and moved to London recently for the filming of Match Point.

The spread of filmmakers and film making ideas across borders, however, has been going on forever. And the American film industry would never have eclipsed the emerging film industries in France, Italy, and Russia if it weren't for the contributions of foreigners. In other words, this has been going on forever. Most of the great American directors from our Hollywood Golden age have come from other countries, Billy Wilder came from Austria, Otto Preminger and Ernst Lubitsch came from Germany, and Frank Capra came from Italy. This was all the more ironic considering that Frank Capra's film exemplified the ideals of Americana better than any other filmmaker to this day. He made the quintessential film about how good triumphs over evil if our constitution is enforced in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." With the exception of Frank Capra, however, these directors were Jews who were persecuted in Nazi Europe so were exiled to America. Directors who weren't forced out of their homeland tended to stay in their own countries and made films in their own languages. Even our two biggest directors of the Golden Age of Hollywood, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchkock were influenced by the German film industry. Alfred Hitchkock interned (yeah, like college internship) with the German film industry before working in the British film industry, and Orson Welles used a German cinematographer, Greg Tolland (Tolland worked with another of other American directors as well).

More recently, Czech director Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus, The People vs Larry Flint, Man on the Moon) one two Oscars and because he had made some films in Czech, he technically was the first non-English language director to win an Oscar. At the same time, most of his filmography (or at least the films he's famous for are American) is American. In 1987, "The Last Emperor" won best picture and might be considered the first foreign film. The film, about the exiled Emperor of China, utilized Japanese and Mandarin in its dialogue in addition to English and was filmed in China. It was was directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, an Italian director who had made his name in Italian-language films and earned him a best director nomination. The film was bankrolled by a British studio.

It's important to clarify here that British films aren't really considered foreign films. It's not just because of the similar language but because the flow of actors between both countries are pretty interchangeable. British directors David Lean and Oliver Reed have won Oscars for their entirely British films and many found it somewhat curious that the American film institute listed Lawrence of Arabia as the 5th best American film ever made when virtually no part of the production had anything to do with America. David Lean is, after all, is a British institution. Even more curious, the British film institute's list of 100 Greatest British films of all-time has entries which are decidedly Un-British. There is a such thing as a British film industry and certain films like the Bond series, the works of David Lean, Oliver Reed, and Richard Lester, The Red Shoes, Room with a View, etc. are considered quintessentially British films. The British Film Institute's list, however, included films such as Shakespeare in Love or Braveheart, whose only qualifications are that the films are set in Britain and revolve around British history. If we take this definition of where films are set and to what degree they revolve around the country's history and culture, then surely Slumdog Millionaire is foreign because it is a landmark film in presenting images of Indian modern-day life to audiences in the UK and US who knew very little about it.

My vote is that Last Emperor is foreign, Bernardo Bertolucci was the first foreign director to win an Oscar, and that Slumdog Millionaire will be #2. What's yours?