Welcome to the Mid-Term Report. All this week the Herald's entertainment team will be highlighting the very best that 2017 has had to offer so far.
T2: Trainspotting
Karl Puschmann: Nostalgia tends to be as cosy and comforting as an electric blanket cranked up to three on a cold winters night. Well, not here. Instead, director Danny Boyle uses the 20-year gap between this sequel and the first Trainspotting to confront both his characters and the viewer.
While the gang's all here, Renton, Sickboy, Begbie and Spud, the most prominent new character in T2 is time itself. With frequent use of fuzzy flashbacks and sound cues that tease and tingle at the memories in your brain, the power of the film is in how it forces you to take a good hard look at how you and your mates turned out.
In a very real way who you were then is watching this film as much as who you are now. If you weren't there in '96 then the impact, perhaps, will not be as strong. But for those that were, T2: Trainspotting is nothing short of brilliant.
Manchester by The Sea
Francesca Rudkin: My 10 year-old son recently asked, "why do all films have happy endings?". Other than reminding me he hasn't seen Star Wars: Rogue One, I immediately thought of director Kenneth Lonergan's heart wrenching drama Manchester by the Sea.
Released in January, the impact of this film still lingers. It's a raw and shattering study of loss and grief; but more than that, it's also a beautifully subtle film filled with achingly good performances and the perfect balance of heartbreak and humour. There's little better than an ending which makes the audience gasp.
Dom Corry: This indie blockbuster didn't exactly set the box office on fire upon its initial release in April, but history will judge it well. Combining a unique, grounded character study with Godzilla-sized monsters, the film's most revelatory quality is how it pushes back against a kind of male romantic entitlement that mainstream cinema has upheld for far too long. Anne Hathaway is absolutely fantastic in a lead performance that forces her legion of detractors to eat crow. The increasingly ubiquitous term "elevated genre cinema" has never been more appropriate.
Alien: Covenant
Chris Schulz: I missed the Alien premiere. I missed the iMax screenings. I even managed to miss every single evening screening during its cinematic run. So at 3.45pm, after work, on a Friday, six weeks after its debut, I trotted along to one of the last screenings of Alien: Covenant and plonked myself down into the smallest theatre Events' Queen Street complex has to offer. I was there, alone. Sitting in the theatre was one other sad-faced loner, and a couple that appeared to be on their first Tinder date. An Alien film? WTF guys?
Sitting there chomping through my one person choc top combo (yeah, I know), I loved every single second of it. Feral aliens, stupid humans, super-smart AI bots, the fate of the human race. What other blockbuster in recent memory has asked questions about creationism while unveiling humanity's deepest fears - extinction - in such an epic way?
I'm sure seeing Covenant outside the hype period, when reviews were decidedly mixed, helped. In fact, it may have changed the way I watch movies.
Get Out
Sienna Yates: Where else have you ever seen a mix of horror, comedy, race relations and general weirdness like this? Sure, the hypnosis plot is a little nonsensical but what it represents is both eye opening and terrifying.
Allison Williams' performance as Rose really shines, particularly when she's playing the white woman unaware of her privilege, while LilRey Howery's character Rod says what we're all thinking, managing to lighten the increasingly strange and dark mood at each turn.
Get Out is creepy, funny, woke as hell, and refreshingly different, while still leaning on some tried and true horror/thriller film conventions.
Siobhan Keogh-Dwyer: There was a lot of pressure on Wonder Woman. The failure of Batman v Superman didn't make anyone say, "Maybe we shouldn't make superhero movies with men anymore," but if Wonder Woman had been unsuccessful, we'd have been lucky to ever see another DC or Marvel movie with a female lead.
Fortunately, Gal Gadot was as tough, straightforward and amazonian as Diana Prince needed to be, and director Patty Jenkins did an outstanding job of creating a world we can all believe in. With the help of some great source material, of course.
Logan
Rachel Bache: This was a hard decision. Both Split and Wonder Woman captivated me, but Logan is taking my top spot. I loved the darker and more insular story they told with this movie, focusing on an ageing Charles Xavier, Logan and a mysterious young mutant played by 12-year-old actress Dafne Keen, who needs their help.
Keen's wonderful in this film, giving off some great Stranger Things vibes. Not only was Logan by far one of the most grounded superhero movies I've seen - which was a welcome change in a market saturated with them - but it was the perfect bookend to Huge Jackman's 17-year career as Wolverine.
George Fenwick: Okay, so it's technically a 2016 film, but as it was only released in New Zealand in 2017, Moonlightcounts as one of my top films this year. The power in this film existing alone is enough to get me emotional - as a recent GLAAD media report indicated, representation of LGBTQ communities in Hollywood films remains abysmal, with only 23 of the 125 films released by major studios in 2016 featuring queer characters.
So when Moonlight was released, telling the story of a black queer man from Miami with nuance, power and beautifully subtle filmmaking, it became the film that queer audiences not only needed, but deserved. This is what the future of film should look like.
Existentialism, nightmares and... cooking? Tune in tomorrow as the mid-term report team looks at the best games of 2017.
