‘Burning’ gets nod as the year’s best film

By Jake Coyle

Associated Press

1. “Burning”: It was, for sure, an extraordinary movie year. Little to nothing separates my favorite 10 films, or, for that matter, my top 20 or 30. Many of the year’s best were found overseas, and none haunted me more than Lee Chang-dong’s smoldering slow-burn thriller. An adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story, “Burning” is about a triangle of young Koreans (Yoo Ah-in, Jeon Jong-seo, Steven Yeun – all astonishing) divided by class but united in heartache and rage. At sunset, with Miles Davis playing, it reaches an aching crescendo.

2. “Private Life”: Tamara Jenkins’ comic and compassionate fertility drama is like “Waiting for Godot” with two of the best actors around: Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti.

3. “First Reformed”: Chiseled out of a lifetime of doubt, Paul Schrader’s late-in-life masterpiece throbs with an existential despair that has hardened into a taut and tormented religious drama.

4. “Shoplifters”: The films of Hirokazu Kore-eda unfold so nimbly and breezily that their profundity (and your tears) can come as a surprise. In this, a high-point for Kore-eda and the winner of Cannes’ Palme d’Or, the Japanese master depicts the ragtag life of a makeshift, impoverished family that slowly, heartbreaking gnaws at the question: What makes a family? The answer is more than DNA.

5. “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” In this, an anthology of six Western tales of death and storytelling, life is a Poker game where everyone’s holding – like the two pair of black aces and eights that Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) refuses to play in the film’s first chapter – a dead man’s hand.

1. “Cold War”: A stone-cold stunner, the second straight from Pawel Pawlikowski (“Ida”), about a romance torn between exile and home (and based on the director’s parents).

2. “The Rider”: Chloe Zhao’s second feature, starring real-life rider Brady Jandreau as an injured South Dakota cowboy forced to give up the only life he knows, is so richly filled with the beauty and struggle of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation where it’s set.

3. “Paddington 2”: In an endlessly dispiriting year, Paul King’s charm overload was the go-to antidote, a salve of confectionary delight: marmalade for your maladies.

4. “The Favourite”: It’s just such an irresistible acting spectacle. Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone set a torch to the traditional historical drama in Yorgos Lanthimos’ wild and caustic period romp.

5. “Zama”: Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel’s elliptical tale of a Spanish magistrate in remote 18th century Argentina, adapted from Antonio di Benedetto’s novel, casts a deliriously hypnotic spell.