NINE IS ENOUGH

Only nine movies made it onto my "Top Ten" list of favorite movies this year. I don't think this means I'm getting any crankier (who, moi?), or even that the movies overall are getting any worse.

The problem is I only see about half the number of movies per year that I used to. This is largely due to space constraints in the paper, but also because the complicated technology of digital movies has pretty much ended the practice of advance film screenings for regional press.

All of which means there are less chances for me to discover those offbeat, unexpected gems (like, say, The Fall) that used to lead off my Top Ten lists.

Of the movies I did see this year, however, these are the most list-worthy!

How about you? Any unexpected gems you'd like to share?

LA LA LAND It takes a lot of audacity to mount an old-fashioned Hollywood musical in these cynical times. But Damien Chazelle's virtuoso production makes the movie musical sing again. And dance. And how! As dubious as you might find the idea of a modern musical starring actors — Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone — not previously known for their singing or dancing, this is one glorious joyride from start to finish.

Did I mention several scenes are shot in my home town of Hermosa Beach? Shots inside the venerable Lighthouse jazz club (top, left) were especially nostalgic!

THE EAGLE HUNTRESS The best girl-power stories are true. Aisholpan Nurgaiv, the 13-year-old heroine of this stunningly beautiful documentary, is a daughter of Mongolian nomads who defies tradition to master the ancient art of hunting with eagles. Directed by Otto Bell, and shot by Simon Niblett, with great sensitivity to the severe beauty of the vast, craggy steppes of the Kazakh region of Mongolia, and for the folkways of its people.

MOONLIGHT Black lives matter in filmmaker Barry Jenkins' eloquent coming-of-age drama that explores issues of race, culture, and love in unexpected ways. Three terrific actors play the lead character as child, teen, and adult, and Mahershala Ali (left) is wonderfully charismatic as the boy's surrogate father figure. A slice of cinematic poetry with a vision all its own.

MANCHESTER BY THE SEA Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan brings his playwright's instincts to this intimate story of love, loss, and family in a close-knit fishing community on the Massachusetts coast. These rugged folks don't articulate their feelings, but those feelings run deep, and Lonergan finds continually inventive ways to express them in this quietly moving film.

THE HANDMAIDEN It may seem like an odd collaboration: bad-boy Korean filmmaker Chan-wook Park, famed for the violent male revenge melodrama Oldboy, and British author Sarah Waters, whose erotic thrillers are set in the Dickensian underworld of Victorian London. But it turns out to be a surprisingly happy match-up in Park's Asian riff on Waters' novel Fingersmith. It's a sly entertainment of sex, larceny, deception, double-crosses, and female liberation.

Cristina Pato, Spanish bagpiper, The Music of Strangers

THE MUSIC OF STRANGERS: YO-YO MA AND THE SILK ROAD ENSEMBLE This beguiling and bittersweet documentary chronicles the efforts of the renowned cellist to found a performing group of international musicians from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, whose existence is dedicated to cultural diversity, and common humanity. Filmmaker Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom) knows a great music doc needs to feature not only wonderful music, but dynamic personalities to perform it, and this one is incredibly rich in both.

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT The journey is the destination in Ciro Guerra's haunting meditation on culture, colonialism, and loss, shot in captivating black-and-white, on location in the remote jungles along the Amazon River. An indigenous shaman guides two separate scientific explorers down the Amazon, decades apart in the 20th Century; through his eyes, we see the disruptions of tribal culture before, during, and after exposure to the outsiders. Guerra's dreamlike pacing and sensuous imagery make this an absorbing piece of filmmaking with the power of myth in every frame.

THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS I was completely entranced by the sophisticated storytelling of Derek Cianfrance's film adaptation on the M. L. Stedman novel. Michael Fassbender is terrific as a stoic WWI vet who takes a job as lighthouse keeper on a lonely rock off the Australian coast. Alicia Vikander is remarkable as a local woman who eases past his defenses and changes his life plan. This is movie-making for grown-ups, thoughtfully conceived and beautifully shot.

THE VVITCH Set in early colonial America, and meticulously researched by rookie writer-director Robert Eggers, this is not the cheesy horror movie you might expect, but an often squirmingly intense psychological drama of hysteria and religious fanaticism. Sure, it's still plenty scary (or at least creepy), but it's fearful anticipation that propels the narrative, not in-your-face violence.

DAMNED YANKEES

Psychological dread amps up eerie 'The VVitch'

From January to Oscar night, the movies are in the doldrums. The last few Oscar contenders are trickling into neighborhood theaters, along with a few lumbering misfits that are not now, nor have they ever been worthy of any kind of awards push.

But it's a very fertile time for horror movies, the traditional antidote to feel-good holiday fare, and the gnarlier, the better.

So you don't expect too much from a movie called The Witch (or, to be true to the advertising campaign, The VVitch). Its early colonial America setting suggests the Salem witch trials, satanic rites, vintage Hammer horror films.

But this movie is nothing quite so cheesy, nor as gory, as you might expect; it's an often squirmingly intense psychological drama of hysteria and religious fanaticism.

It's still plenty scary (at least, very, very creepy), but it's fearful anticipation that propels the narrative, not in-your-face violence.

Like the best horror/suspense movies (think of the original The Haunting, from 1963), The VVitch plays mercilessly on our dread of what might be lurking in the shadows, rather than actually showing much onscreen—and is all the more effective because of it. Oh, yes, there's blood, but not so much of the usual fx gore-mongering.

Set in New England, ca. 1630—60 years before the famed Salem witch trials—The VVitch is rich in period detail, meticulously researched by rookie writer-director Robert Eggers. It concerns a family cast out of the community to make what living they can on a distant, isolated tract of land at the edge of a sinister wood.

At the center of the tale is eldest daughter, Thomasin (lovely Anya Taylor-Joy). A psychic firestorm seems to be brewing around her that gradually engulfs the entire family. The hysteria and paranoia levels rise to fever pitch, even as the movie's visual focus becomes smaller, more claustrophobic and intense. The action is staged in cramped quarters by flickering firelight, a shadowy barn, or deep in the dense, dark woods.

Subtitled A New England Folk Tale, the film conjures classic images from fairy tales and folklore. Whether or not The Devil is loose among this family, or they're preyed on by devils of their own making, Eggers leaves it up to the viewer to decide. (Read entire review in this week's Good Times.)

Btw: about that title. Filmmaker Eggers says that during his research, he ran across various pamphlets and tracts on witchcraft like this one (from 1643). In the early days of printing, when supplies were often short, if a printer ran out of the letter "W," he might substitute two "Vs" instead. "I thought it looked transportive and exotic," Eggers has said in interviews, "so I used it."