Guillermo del Toro was unquestionably the most visible and voluble directorial presence on the fall festival circuit this season, and the beautiful film he brought with him provided a lot to talk about. Image Credit: Courtesy of Fox Searchlight It's the rare modern film in which the dialogue could be discarded with no loss of meaning or power. But the way Nolan told his story was the surprise, in fragmented vignettes, on land, sea and in the air, with no artificial build-up of pre-packaged heroism or emotion. To be sure, the film's verisimilitude and physicality are extraordinary. There was never much doubt that Christopher Nolan would deliver an exceptionally vivid panoramic depiction of the enormous event that first suggested Hitler might not roll unimpeded to victory in World War II. Image Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros. As the Patriots showed in the last Super Bowl, if you score enough points in the final quarter (and overtime), you win. A few very good indies turned up but were not widely seen, including Columbus, Logan Lucky and Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer.įinally, nine months in, the major early autumn festivals once again signaled that all was not lost after all, and enough very-good-to-excellent films have emerged since September to have made 2017 a pretty decent year after all. The first one, Christopher Nolan's much-anticipated Dunkirk, flooded theaters in July and planted a flag for quality big-budget Hollywood fare. But where were the rest of the contenders? Yes, there was a wonderful documentary, Agnes Varda and JR's Faces Places, and one mesmerizing out-of-the-blue entry in the Directors' Fortnight, The Florida Project, made by a director whose previous feature had cost little more than the cellphone camera it was made on. Nor the did Cannes Film Festival in May yield much of potentially enduring value. Sundance gave us Call Me by Your Name last January, but by the end of June, people whose job it is to speculate about what other films might be up for year-ends awards and critics' lists were weighing the chances of good genre entries like War for the Planet of the Apes, Get Out, Wonder Woman and Baby Driver - not normally the kind of stuff of which Oscar dreams are made. It was looking pretty grim there for a while.
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