6. Ingrid Goes West
This year’s Writing Award winner at Sundance, Ingrid Goes West is a savvy comedy from newcomers Matt Spicer and David Branson Smith. It’s the story of a disturbed young woman pursuing her obsession for a social media star, slowly insinuating herself into her idol’s inner circle through a fabricated identity that only the girl’s brother, played by Billy Magnussen. Aubrey Plaza plays the lead, while Elizabeth Olsen puts her comic timing to test as the social media star in question.
It’s really a smart script, giving depth to characters we normally see as only the “eccentric sidekicks” in more conventional comedies. Plaza finds a way to keep us on Ingrid’s side even as she crosses line after line of sanity and basic social interaction. A necessary and pretty pointed satire of web culture, Ingrid Goes West needs to be seen.
7. Roxanne Roxanne
The Roxanne Wars are an important part of hip hop history. During the 1980s, the trade of diss tracks and rivalries between various MCs helped raise hip hop’s profile and made history within the genre – at the center of it all, then 14-year-old Roxanne Shanté, who first recorded a response track to U.T.F.O’s “Roxanne, Roxanne”. The eponymous film calls attention to that particular time while serving as the biopic of one of hip hop’s most influential and, conversely, most forgotten early figures.
Newcomer Chanté Adams kills it as Roxanne, earning her the Breakthrough Performance award at Sundance, and the film counts Mahershala Ali and Nia Long among its supporting players. Michael Larnell’s second feature confirms him as one of the greatest talents of the new generation.
8. The Big Sick
This very well-reviewed comedy tracks the relationship of an interracial couple, played by Zoe Kazan and Kumail Nanjiani. Nanjiani also wrote de script, alongside his own girlfriend Emily V. Gordon, so the whole thing is very tinted with autobiographical overtones – even so, it manages to translate an universal experience while tackling very particular issues that a couple of different cultural backgrounds would face in real life. It’s a disarmingly honest comedy.
To top it all off, it has the very able Michael Showalter at the helm, fresh from his brilliant Hello My Name is Doris, a similarly sensitive and engrossing comedy. Holly Hunter and Ray Romano play memorable supporting players in this story.
9. Pop Aye
This adorable yet profound Thai fable about a disillusioned architect reuniting with his childhood pet (an elephant) is an eccentric road movie about isolation, depression and growing old, and yet it still manages to be uplifting and vibrant with life. When Thana (Thaneth Warakulnukroh, in a pitch-perfect performance) reunites with his old friend, he’s in a crisis, as his celebrated and time-consuming work doesn’t seem rewarding anymore.
Kirsten Tan achieves a complicated tone balance in Pop Aye, making it a study on loneliness and the different life journeys that lead to it, adding a new color to its masterful palette with every person Thana meets on his way, while also building a progressively touching relationship between her human and animal leads.
10. The Incredible Jessica James
While Jessica Williams’ claim to fame up until now was less on her film and TV roles and more on her stint as a Daily Show correspondent, she’s a damn good actress, as the rom-com The Incredible Jessica James definitely proves. Jim Strouse, the able but not revolutionary director/writer responsible for Grace is Gone and Peoples Places Things, puts Williams center-stage and builds a fairly conventional film around her, trusting her performance to freshen up old clichés.
Along a perfectly serviceable Chris O’Dowd, that’s exactly what she does. This is the stuff that breakout performances are made of, as she goes beyond what the screenplay offer her to build a multidimensional and relatable character out of the aspiring playwright who strikes a special friendship soon after a horrible break-up.