So is it movies of the year time? Eh, probably. The only one I might want to add is La La Land which looks interesting but odds are that'll be it.   I more consistently watched movies than TV shows this year; the only 2016 show I watched was Stranger Things, and I feel pretty good about making time for that. (Game of Thrones was good enough but at this point it better end competently or I'm going to feel like I should have checked out years ago.)   In order of release:   The Lady in the Van: I saw this with my mum and we had very different experiences. I watched a great little British film about a homeless woman who becomes reliant on a British playwright who's not nearly as charitable as he likes to think he is, and an exploration of the vast gulf between "doing good" and actually helping. My mother saw a horror film about a poor old lady who went mad and died and no-one did anything. Zootopia: probably my favourite animated film this year. The back half of Zootopia is way ballsier than I expected from a global animation company, and it has a mystery plot that basically works. You can see the seams where they went through multiple failed passes and kept the two or three ideas that work, and like Frozen it's a little too obvious when they're about to do an inevitable reveal but it's still pretty great. 10 Cloverfield Lane: a taut little thriller about a woman trapped in a bunker with a man who may or may not be worse than what they're hiding from. Slightly spoiled by the last scene, but it's a movie that rests on the masterful performances of the leads. The Nice Guys: a cracking Shane Black comedy about a world willingly getting worse and a few bad people trying to be better. Not as good as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but it's more ambitious thematically than that film was. Tickled: a truly incredible New Zealand documentary. A New Zealand journalist starts to investigate "competitive endurance tickling" to do a light news piece on it, and gets back a stream of homophobic insults, and then legal threats, from the production company. Peoples' lives have been ruined. The whole thing is vastly bigger and more organised than seems possible. And it's all to make videos of young men being tickled. Hunt for the Wilderpeople: another great New Zealand film, this time a comedy about a kid who goes bush rather than get sent back to another foster home, and his adoptive father who goes out to save him. It's a real charmer. Kubo and the Two Strings: a more traditionally structured film, sometimes to its detriment, but it's inventive and big-hearted in the right ways. Arrival: excellent sci-fi about trying to establish communication with aliens when you know nothing about them, even why they're here. It has some really clever solutions for the usual problems with this setup, and it marks the first appearance I recall of shock jocks/conspiracy nuts in the stock role of the bloodthirsty antagonist who nearly fucks everything up because war's easier for them to understand. The Founder: I'm real excited for Michael Keaton to have a career again, especially if he keeps turning in cracking performances like he does here, where he plays Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald's. It sometimes feels like it's trying to hit the famous beats in the McDonald's story without properly justifying it, but like The Wolf of Wall Street I think it's ultimately a really great picture of capitalism in the 20th century - compelling while also being deeply fucked up. Rogue One: this is a Star War, and it's pretty good! It's easily my favourite Star Wars film, particularly thanks to its gritty tone and on-point action scenes and camera work. (I would like Star Wars a lot more if it hit the tone Rogue One hits more often.) There's stuff that doesn't work, particularly at the start, and it's weird how little of the teaser footage actually made it to the final film, but I still liked it a whole lot.   I also liked Deadpool, The Jungle Book, Ghostbusters, Midnight Special, Star Trek Beyond and Doctor Strange but they weren't on my top 10 for the year.