Beastly Reviews: The Best Films of 2017
My picks, not the Academy’s. Ten films that got it right this year.
I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written mostly for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here.
This is Beastly Reviews, where I write about films that made me feel something.
These posts are free to read. Subscribe to unlock essays, advice, and more personal work.
Hi boys,
It's that time of year again. The 2017 Oscars are fast approaching. I don't really review films on this blog like I used to—my blog has changed focus—but I'm still a devoted cinephile who occasionally gets frustrated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
I've once again taken matters into my own hands as I did in 2015—here's my list of winners for 2017.
10. Colossal
Anne Hathaway's Colossal did what Wonder Woman tried to do. Gal Gadot's blockbuster trudged through its tired superhero formula with a weird, deflated ending and paraded itself as a feminist manifesto.
Colossal, a less recognized indie from director Nacho Vigalondo, changed itself at every turn and was the must-see feminist movie of 2017. Midway through, it's a totally different film, teetering from oddball comedy to dark psychological thriller.
Deadbeat alcoholic (Hathaway) returns to her hometown and meets old friends, only to discover she's somehow connected to a giant monster terrorizing the city of Seoul. Gradually, the film bends from a quirky sci-fi into a story about abuse that feels painfully real, and its ending is an authentic triumph for women.
9. Dunkirk
Watch this film for the impressive, edge-of-your-seat cinematography. You won't get close to any of the characters, but that's by design. Dunkirk is an intense, elegant ensemble piece—an ode to war and its myriad evils. Its nerve-rattling sound is enough to drive the film forward with intense action from opening to close.
Christopher Nolan's picture focuses on the "Miracle of Dunkirk,” the evacuation of Allied soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk in the north of France following a failed campaign against Germany during World War II. Its sparse dialogue makes it feel like a cross between a nail-biting drama and a graphic war documentary. You'll be holding your breath, waiting for a moment of stillness that only comes at the very end, a whimper rather than a bang.
8. Raw
I'm still not sure I like this movie, but I certainly haven't forgotten it. This movie was delicious in that horrifying, WTF way you want a juicy mindfuck to be.
Raw is about the horror of eating meat. The story focuses on two vegetarian sisters at vet school who learn they crave more than burgers. As a nouveau spin on cannibalism, the film avoids being a heavy-handed vegetarian statement, which would be too easy (and is reserved for Okja, further down on this list). It's a vegan horror flick without an antidote: understated, unsettling, unmissable, and undeniably ick.
7. Atomic Blonde
This cool, sexed-up, 80s-era fight movie is chic, confusing, and filled with fabulous hits like Depeche Mode's "Behind the Wheel.” The violence is hardcore—Charlize Theron broke two teeth filming its extended fight sequences. Yes, Atomic Blonde felt out of place this year, but aside from being a badass thrill ride, it's thankfully not the start of another franchise. It's a one-and-done comic book flick with a queer protagonist and subtly feminist overtones without ever going brow-beatingly political. Theron's MI6 agent woos, womanizes, and kills, and looks so hot doing it.
6. The Little Hours
The Catholic League called his movie "trash, pure trash." It prompted two petitions by Catholic organizations (one garnering over 31,000 signatures), sent to the film's distributor. Need another reason to see it?
It's crass, crude, funny, dark, and ultimately happy—a witty and irreverent period piece set in a time no one would reasonably want to live in (Italy, 1347).
5. God's Own Country
This quiet, British Brokeback Mountain was written and directed by Francis Lee in his directorial debut and touches on racism, poverty, and queerness in present-day Yorkshire.
A young alcoholic sheep farmer, Johnny (Josh O'Connor), falls in love with a Romanian migrant worker, the handsome, scruffy Gheorghe (Alec Secăreanu), who seeks seasonal work on Johnny's farm. The premise is simple enough, but the young actors deliver believable onscreen chemistry, and O'Connor's strong performance leads the delicate, occasionally bleak film.
Peter Bradshaw, writing in The Guardian, describes the film as a "very British love story, bursting at the seams with unspoken emotions, unvoiced fears about the future, and a readiness to displace every emotion into hard physical work.” And unlike so many queer love stories on film, this one actually has a happy ending.
4. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
I loved this movie—read my review in The Advocate.
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women tells the story of American psychologist William Marston, creator of Wonder Woman, and the real women in his life—his wife and their young lover, Olive—who inspired the comic book hero.
All of Wonder Woman's classic accouterments—lasso of truth, gold wrist cuffs, penchant for bondage—came from their kinky, polyamorous relationship that went (mostly) undetected in the mid-1940s. It's empowering to see a happy, kinky, polyamorous relationship onscreen and know that it inspired one of the most classic figures in Americana. The film was strategically placed for 2017—Marvel released the CGI-heavy blockbuster Wonder Woman a few months prior.
3. Okja
Okja is why I stopped eating meat for over a year.
Director Bong Joon-ho's film focuses on the relationship between a girl, Mija, and her "super pig" named Okja. She raises Okja in the mountains of South Korea, unaware that the pig is owned by the Mirando Corporation, an organization committed to solving world hunger by breeding enormous pigs.
One day, Okja gets taken to Seoul to be awarded, bred, and killed, and most of the film is Mija's thrilling race to save her pet with sometimes-helpful assistance from the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a weird group of no-harm guerrilla activists bent on exposing the evils of the Mirando Corporation to the world.
Yes, the film has a sort of happy ending, but overall, I can't describe it as a pleasant experience. It’s grueling, demanding, and unspeakably sad. Like many of Joon-ho's films, it's also odd and unsettling—not quite the real world, but close enough. It’s reality pitched one degree into the kooky and absurd.
We know the horrors of factory farming and the meat industry, and Okja spares no gritty details. I included the film on this list because, unlike any global warming documentary I've seen, this sci-fi flick inspired me to think about my role as a meat-eater and the ethics of meat consumption. It changed me.
2. Call Me By Your Name
This film wrecked me. Based on Andre Aciman's novel, Call Me By Your Name is a delicate story about first love. Set in 1983 in a remote part of northern Italy, the film tells the love story between 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and 24-year-old Oliver (Armie Hammer).
Oliver is a graduate-student assistant to Elio's father (Michael Stuhlbarg in a career-defining performance) who lives with Elio’s family for a summer. Elio and Oliver's love story ends too soon, but that's how young loves go. We know it's doomed, but that, too, is part of its delicate beauty.
Chalamet's performance is Oscar-worthy, and the script should win. The film's gift is that this story is allowed to unfold in a place free of religious judgment or homophobia—standard features of gay coming-of-age films. In this sunny corner of Italy, there is a paradise far removed from America and the AIDS epidemic ravaging gay communities at the time. Unrealistic? Maybe. But it’s nice to watch gay love unfold when it’s divorced entirely from gay trauma—a love story that is, I imagine, much like a straight love story, all stolen looks and broken hearts, without the fear of exposure or judgment hidden in every glance. Watch it and remember your first crush.
1. I Am Not Your Negro
I don't think I grasped the complete picture of racism in America until I watched this film. I Am Not Your Negro is a 90-minute documentary directed by Raoul Peck based on James Baldwin's unfinished work Remember This House, a collection of notes and letters written by the Black, gay writer in the mid-1970s.
In the film, Baldwin's words are narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. The documentary explores racism in America through Baldwin's words and memories of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. There is a startling moment in the film that has stayed with me: Onscreen, a white American family plays in the backyard of a lovely suburban house. Baldwin's voiceover says that no country on earth assumes for its citizens a life of such excess. It's unsustainable, and someone must be paying for it. And someone is. The wealth of white America is built on the backs of slaves.
That picture of excess was my life growing up—the yard, the house, the wealthy family. After watching this film, it clicked: Chances were given to me because of my whiteness and wealth, which were not given to Black kids who were more talented and more driven than I am. I Am Not Your Negro is a devastating picture of systemic racism and a call to arms from a thinker whose ideas were ahead of his time. The film has powerful and necessary resonance in the era of Black Lives Matter and increased attention on police murdering unarmed Black men—a critical, urgent film.
Love, Beastly