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Year In ReView: Our 10 favorite films of 2017

For all of the shit that's been slung at us over the course of 2017, it's been an absolutely incredible year for cinema, and it was nearly impossible to whittle the over-175 movies I've seen this year down to 10 favorites. Normally people put phrases like that at the start of a year-end list, but it's not just bullshit. From The Disaster Artist to Logan to Mudbound to Dunkirk to Professor Marston and the Wonder Women to Star Wars: The Last Jedi to Blade Runner 2049 to Stronger and plenty more, there were some great fucking movies that I left off this list and I'm so grateful to have seen them all. But here's 10 that I think are the truly essential and interesting films of the year, and are my personal favorites from 2017.

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Raw

I never got around to properly reviewing this French horror film from first-time director Julia Ducournau, but it’s stuck with us since I saw it on my last day in Austin for SXSW at the South Lamar location of the Alamo Drafthouse. It’s an artfully handled exploration of themes covered a thousand times over by horror films — the fear of being an outcast, of coming into your own away from home, the terror of your family’s legacy — but Ducournau mixes it up in new and fresh ways, and its New Extremity roots mesh well with the director’s odd grace. Raw also features one of the best performances of the year from the young French actress Garance Marillier, and some of the straight-up grossest scenes you’ll see in a movie this year. I’ll never forget looking behind me at that screening at the Drafthouse during one of the movie’s most intense scenes, and seeing a dude on a date — who had decided to eat a full meal during the screening — turn all sorts of green. Probably a bad movie to have gotten a hamburger served to you in, dude.

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