The Top Five Movies of April 2017
Welcome to another installment of our monthly feature in which a rotating cast of film critics hold forth on the highs and lows of month of moviegoing.
5. The Fate of the Furious
4. Your Name
3. Slack Bay
Best New Old Movie: Yi Yi
As part of the newly-renovated Quad Cinema’s First Encounters series—in which a notable film person presents and sits in for a screening of a new-to-them movie—Manchester by the Sea director Kenneth Lonergan screened Edward Yang’s Yi Yi this month. 2017 already happens to be my year of crossing off Yang blindspots (I had done Taipei Story and A Brighter Summer Day earlier this year and fallen in love with both), but Yi Yi absorbed me whole—I felt like I had lived it, and not just because of its nearly three-hour runtime. “My uncle says we live three times as long since man invented movies,” one character says. “It means movies give us twice what we get from daily life.” Yi Yi contains the life cycle through its cast of characters—pregnancy, birth, childhood, a wedding, and a funeral—but it’s the way Yang lingers with each one of them that makes this movie feel so lived-in. The character who resonated with me the most (and I assume is a favorite among many) was Yang-Yang, the small boy who uses his camera to let us see what we cannot see for ourselves (the back of heads). By extension, the director taps into our latent memories and feelings, while soaking us in his primary-adjacent color palette—the mustard yellows of the stuffy indoors with the neon reds of nightlife and the quiet blues of dusk.
Dud of the Month: The Circle
There are far worse movies out this month, but those also happen to be not worth wasting a breath on (I’m looking at you, Rupture). But The Circle—oh my god, The Circle is just the right kind of bad where I’m like, you should maybe just go see it for yourself. (I just DMed the unbelievable plot points of this Dave Eggers adaptation to someone and was met with explosive, incredulous laughter.) Watch it for Tom Hanks as a charismatic but evil Steve Jobs figure, or Emma Watson as the sharp newbie employee, but mostly watch it for the Internet troll comments that bombard the screen and poor Ellar Coltrane who faces an online witch hunt after an incredibly silly social media misunderstanding. I’m still wrapping my head around this film, but I’m not so sure if director James Ponsoldt himself knows what a comedy this is.