2) Manchester By The Sea
Kenneth Lonergan’s third film, Manchester by the Sea, is an unremarkable piece of work. It’s slow, methodic, lingering, dreary, and that’s what makes it all so very rich and so hauntingly beautiful.
Touching in its intimacy and compassionate in its sorrow, yet never one draped in melodrama or excessive self-pitying, Lonergan’s near-masterful triumph in exploring grief, guilt, masculinity and patchy redemption is, at once, a lumbering, listless character drama built upon misery and heartache, and an attentive, softly-humming contemporary cinematic tone poem, one that’s as relatable as it is emotionally distant.
That it centres on a perfectly-cast Casey Affleck, in the role that will ultimately define his mumbling, decidedly jagged and unkempt on-screen persona as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Crowd Robert Ford once did, gives this mood piece an even more haunting, cutting rugged edge — one that won’t be shaken at the end of this year, nor any year.
Manchester by the Sea is 2016’s most unremarkably remarkable film. It’s a quiet one, but it’s not one that’s going to go away quietly.