MUST-SEE MOVIES: MY TOP TEN OF 2017

MY TEN favourite films of 2017 are a strikingly diverse bunch, so I won’t try to place them in order of preference. I loved

The Florida Project, Sean Baker’s slice-oflife drama about an impoverished young mother and her precocious six-year-old daughter living on the breadline practically in the shadow of that symbol of the American fairy-tale, Disney World. At the other end of the budget scale are a pair of sci-fi blockbusters: Star Wars: The

Last Jedi and Blade Runner 2049 starring Ryan Gosling (right). The World War II film Dunkirk was a triumph (unlike the real thing) and superbly crafted by writerdirector Christopher Nolan.

Get Out, a startlingly original debut feature by writer-director Jordan Peele, is hard to categorise. It’s a beguiling hybrid of thriller, comedy, horror film and psychological drama, but perhaps above all it’s a very clever satire on race relations. I really liked Baby Driver, Edgar Wright’s exhilarating joyride of a picture, about a fresh-faced getaway driver (Ansel Elgort) who constantly plays music to drown out tinnitus and falls in love with a sweet waitress (Lily James). It was the one film all year that I enjoyed enormously and my wife didn’t like at all, which always throws me, as our tastes normally coincide. Happily, she and my children adored Paddington 2, which we all watched together on Christmas Eve and deemed the perfect film for the occasion. It really is an absolute delight, an innocent pleasure for the entire family. Another member of my family, my brother, loved Armando Iannucci’s comedy The Death Of

Stalin. That seemed significant, because he is a professor of Russian politics specialising in the Stalinist era, and told me that he roared with laughter from start to finish.

Lady Macbeth marks a first-time foray into screenwriting by accomplished playwright Alice Birch, and into feature films by stage director William Oldroyd. Together, they masterfully re-work Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 moody Russian novella, Lady Macbeth Of The Mtsensk District, placing the story in Victorian North-East England. Possibly my biggest cinematic treat of the year, though, by virtue of being so unexpected, was Jawbone, a brilliant boxing film, directed by another debutant, Thomas Napper. It crept into cinemas in May with very little fanfare, but seek it out if you can. Happy New Year!