See It! Hear It! Read It!

Newsweek’s staff picks its favorite movies, books and music from 2016. All the best to you and yours—and your Spotify playlist

MOVIES

The Edge of Seventeen

High school sucks. This movie doesn’t. The Edge of Seventeen is about outcasts, by outcasts, for outcasts. Newcomer director Kelly Fremon Craig wrote the sharp script about a brainy, alienated 11th grader whose life spirals into despair after her best friend hooks up with her brother. Edge of

Seventeen crackles with that sense of irredeemable humiliation that is the high school experience, and it has a lot to say about the real crisis of teen depression without slipping into mawkishness. —Zach Schonfeld

Love & Friendship

It’s been a dark year for women, what with America electing a president whose flirtation style consists of grabbing pussies, but in

Love & Friendship, writer-director Whit Stillman serves up a precious little antidote to swaggering oafishness. In this 18th-century period drama based on one of Jane Austen’s lesser-known works, Kate Beckinsale plays the gorgeous and subversive Lady Susan Vernon, a lively widow running out of funds and seeking suitable, rich husbands for herself and her daughter. While manipulating everyone around her and getting what she wants, Lady Susan is always the smartest woman in the room, but as she puts it, she’s too romantic to be satisfied by just money. The dialogue delights the ear and mind, there are lots of laughs, and the spirit of Lady Susan is balm for the female soul. That apparently is what Stillman intended. “I’m a pleasure seeker, and I want people to have 90 minutes of pleasure, not pain,” he said recently. “To have a positive, interesting world, cheerful in some way—i like that.” So do we. —Nina Burleigh

Hell or High Water

I admit was drawn to director David Mackenzie’s Hell or High

Water because it stars Chris Pine, who plays Captain Kirk in the Star

Trek reboots. Pine is terrific as a small-time bank robber who’s the opposite of Kirk: Rather than being in command, he’s knocked about by events he can’t control. Ben Foster plays his brother and partner in crime, and their relationship is one of the highlights of this engaging film. The other is the laconic Texas Ranger who’s pursuing them, played wonderfully by Jeff Bridges. If you liked No Country for Old Men, don’t miss this one. —Paul Raeburn

Jackie

Natalie Portman will win the Oscar, or she won’t. She gets the accent right, or she doesn’t. Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, or he didn’t. Who cares? Jackie is not a movie about fixed truths. It is about a world unmoored, about a week in which the dull machinations of daily life were devoured whole by the national trauma of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. A personal trauma, too. The essence of Portman’s deeply convincing performance Jackie Kennedy is this: She embodies the most glamorous first lady in modern American history in mannerism and voice, then tears this invariably composed character apart, fills her with grief and existential rage. Pablo Larraín’s film is tightly wound and hypnotic. There is no room for nostalgia. The set design and visuals capture 1963; the screenplay captures personal devastation. —Z.S.

The Lobster

This very funny and very sad meditation on modern love by Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos throws viewers in a dystopian post-tinder world where finding and keeping a romantic partner is a legal requirement. All single people are shipped off to a special hotel, where they’re required to find a mate in 45 days or be transformed into the animal of their choosing and then released into the woods. Recently dumped by his wife, David (Colin Farrell) faces some desperate, dark stuff at the hotel. Just days away from an imminent life as a lobster, he makes a risky escape to the woods, where he finds a group of outcasts who have chosen an equally miserable reality—to permanently camp in the wilderness and commit to a life of celibacy. David meets the woman of his dreams (Rachel Weisz) in this motley crew, and they’re soon forced to make dangerous choices in a community in which lust and true love are verboten. —Jessica Firger

Arrival

It has been compared to 2001: A

Space Odyssey or the more recent Interstellar, because director Denis Villeneuve, like Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan, has made not just a visually stunning film but imbued it with an enigmatic tone that envelops you in the world he has created. Some viewers might find Arrival a touch pretentious, but what profound, great film isn’t? —Jordan Saville

Moonlight

Moonlight tells an especially troubling story about a black boy who suffers and survives years of rejection and oppression, with little justice except what time provides him. As we try to understand what it’s like to grow up a poor, darkskinned outcast boy raised by a single, drug-addicted parent in Miami, Moonlight’s main character, Chiron, struggles to find kindness in his world. The boy is judged into silence. Every day is managed within a fixed state of oppression. Portrayed by multiple actors as he ages over the course of the film, Chiron somehow survives into adulthood. But adulthood is just another way of saying a long time has passed, and that time has freed him from a difficult circumstance without offering him the justice and acceptance he is due. —Margarita Noriega

The Witch

I’ve seen whining that The Witch isn’t really a horror film, which is a compliment, and a lie. It’s scary, and exponentially smarter than shock-shlock like Paranormal

Activity, and therefore so much more disturbing. It’s not about cheap shocks; it’s about the most fundamental kind of terror, about being chased in the dark by something worse than pain, worse even than death. The best comparison is with The Exorcist, in which it’s clear that the battle over a little girl’s soul is a war for the entire world.

The Witch would be great even if it weren’t about wonderfully wicked witches, because it sucks you into the horrors of colonial life for Puritans in New England. You want real horror? Imagine being a pubescent girl with no heat, no plumbing, no privacy and a zealot father as unbending and self-righteous as Peter Thiel. Writer-director Robert Eggers was crazy enough to take these crazy people seriously—imagining that their Old Testament God is real, vengeful and cruel. And that Satan does lurk at the edge of those dark woods, promising pleasures both carnal and eternal. The Witch is also a beautiful movie, with haunting tableaus, and replete with shots that echo Vermeer, the master of chicks with starched collars, and Goya, the master of unspeakable atrocities. —Bob Roe