As I did last year and the year before, I’m making a Best of the Year list following the conventional system for what counts as a 2016 film, mainly the nonsensical and ahistorical system that decrees that critics may only consider movies to have existed once they have played for a week in a commercial venue in New York City, or, in a new twist this year, on a television or streaming service in New York. This is the system that claims my favorite film of 2013 (La última película), which played for a week in Seattle in 2014, can only be considered a 2015 film because that is when it finally got a New York release, although it played Los Angeles for the first time in 2016. Not to mention the absurdity that my favorite film from 1991, Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday, qualifies for this list, along with a 30 year old Edward Yang movie and an Apichatpong Weerasethakul movie I saw in Vancouver in 2012. But alas, we all must bow to convention, however silly, every once in awhile.
My 2016 list of course will never be finalized, as there’s no such thing as a final list here at The End: there are always more new movies to discover and old movies to reevaluate. But in a couple of weeks I’ll have the nominations up for the 2016 Endy Awards, with the winners to be announced during the Academy Awards ceremony. This list is a snapshot of my favorites of 2016 as they stand now, on the last day of the year.
1. Only Yesterday (Isao Takahata)
2. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch)
3. Love & Friendship (Whit Stillman)
4. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade)
5. Mountains May Depart (Jia Zhangke)
6. Elle (Paul Verhoeven)
7. Lemonade (Beyoncé Knowles & Kahlil Joseph)
8. Things to Come Mia Hansen-Løve)
9. SPL 2: A Time for Consequences (Soi Cheang)
10. Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
11. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)
12. Sully (Clint Eastwood)
13. Sunset Song (Terence Davies)
14. The Love Witch (Anna Biller)
15. The Terrorizers (Edward Yang)
16. Three (Johnnie To)
17. Kaili Blues (Bi Gan)
18. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sangsoo)
19. Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater)
20. The Mermaid (Stephen Chow)
21. Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (Karan Johar)
22. The Age of Shadows (Kim Ji-woon)
23. Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick)
24. The Thoughts that Once We Had (Thom Andersen)
25. Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
26. Hail, Caesar! (The Coen Brothers)
27. Crosscurrent (Yang Chao)
28. The Edge of Seventeen (Kelly Fremon Craig)
29. I Am Not Madame Bovary (Feng Xiaogang)
30. The Shallows (Jaume Collet-Serra)
31. Tower (Keith Maitland)
32. Rogue One (Gareth Edwards)
33. Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson)
34. Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt)
35. Train to Busan (Yeon Sangho)
36. OJ: Made in America (Ezra Edelman)
37. De Palma (Noah Baumbach & Jake Paltrow)
38. Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan)
39. Short Stay (Ted Fendt)
40. Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
41. The Witch (Robert Eggers)
42. My Beloved Bodyguard (Sammo Hung)
43. A Train Arrives at the Station (Thom Andersen)
44. The Wasted Times (Cheng Er)
45. One Night Only (Matt Wu)
46. Indefinite Pitch (James Kienitz Wilkins)
47. SoulMate (Derek Tsang)
48. Call of Heroes (Benny Chan)
49. Garfunkel and Oates: Trying to Be Special (Riki Lindhome & Jeremy Konner)
50. La La Land (Damien Chazelle)
The End of Cinema 
Love the choices, and more so, the choice of images. Curious about the still at the top of the piece, the girl at the lake. Is that from The Witch?
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It’s from Sunset Song, but I think not the film, maybe only the trailer. At least, I don’t remember seeing it in the film. Found it on a google image search and thought it looked nice.
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Did you dislike The Handmaiden or haven’t you seen it?
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I thought it was fine. I have it ranked in the mid-70s.
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