We’ve discussed our favorite films of 2016. We’ve talked about our favorite shows, scenes, musical moments, performances, horror films, documentaries, animated films, trailers, posters, action scenes, cinematography, soundtracks and scores — and that’s merely scratching the surface. Hell, we’ve also looked ahead to our most anticipated films and TV shows of 2017 too. Yet, we’ve notably overlooked our favorite music videos in the process.

Music videos often get the bum’s rush, both in the film and music communities.

Continue reading The 20 Best Music Videos Of 2016 at The Playlist.

“Man Not Accepting Any More Television Recommendations At This Time,” went a particularly good Onion headline this week, and most of us can probably identify. An estimated 455 scripted shows aired on U.S. TV in 2016, and it’s likely to be even more than that in 2017, more than anyone could watch even if they devoted every waking hour (and beyond) to the idiot box.

READ MORE: The 30 Best TV Shows Of 2016

We’ve already highlighted a good 250 hours or so in our 2017 TV Preview, but we only focused on new shows (or, in a couple of cases, a sequel, in “Top Of The Lake: China Girl,” or the decades-later follow-up to a beloved classic in “Twin Peaks”), whereas the year to come will see plenty more established hits returning, some of which took a year out last year (or even beyond that).

Continue reading The 20 Best TV Shows Returning In 2017 at The Playlist.

Among so much 2016 coverage, we’re particularly proud of our collective Best Films of 2016 feature, but we do realize its paucity in one area: animation. Only one animated film made it onto the list, and that doesn’t really reflect just what a strong year it was for the form — in fact, it was possible that there were so many outstanding ones over the past 12 months that the votes got split and a couple more potentials narrowly missed the cut as a result.

Continue reading The 11 Best Animated Movies Of 2016 at The Playlist.

Well, here we are, in the brave (terrifying) new (still terrifying) world of 2017. Whatever else we have to expect in the 363 days to come (and actually, the first 48 hours have been pretty good on the whole), it promises to be a good year for the movies, as you might have seen from our 100 Most Anticipated Movies piece a month or so back. But somehow, that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Continue reading The 20 Best Movies Of 2017 That We’ve Already Seen at The Playlist.

I don’t think I’m the only person to have wondered about the usefulness of watching, discussing and writing about film — or any art — when it feels like outside the theater, the sky is falling. Great chunks of catastrophe are raining down from the heavens and I’m pondering crucial issues like the mythology of the “Transformers” cinematic universe and whether there’s any way to use the phrase mise-en-scene without sounding pretentious.

Continue reading Jessica Kiang’s Top 20 Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.

I will spare everyone by not starting this list with reasons why 2016 sucked. However, one thing that has to be called into question are these “Film is Dead,” “TV is Winning the Culture War,” and “Why 2016 is the Worst Year in Film” clickbait headlines. If film is truly dead, and 2016 is truly the worst year in cinema, I ask you this: why was it so damn difficult to whittle this list down to just ten picks?

Continue reading Ryan Oliver’s Top 10 Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.

For a variety of reasons, 2016 marked my personal record for the most new films I’ve seen in any given year, which is simultaneously a triumph and a problem. More movies equals more choice, and I’m nothing if not terrible at making decisions. But the following 10 films (and runners-up, because again, I’m terrible at making decisions) are the ones I loved most this year, edging out the titles I found worthy of respect, but not affection (like the ambitious Martin Scorsese opus “Silence“).

Continue reading Kimber Myers’ Top 10 Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.

No matter what you may cover or love you can’t watch everything. You can’t watch every movie. You can’t watch every TV series. It’s almost impossible to listen and truly appreciate every major album release (well, maybe that’s a bit easier). 2016 is a year I’d like to forget (too late), but there were some memorable entertainment moments along the way.

Obviously, this is a personal list. And, yeah, it’s a bit gay, but don’t expect any of us to go quiet into the night about that over the next four years.

Continue reading Best of The Rest of 2016: ‘All Stars 2,’ Thandie Newton, ‘Lemonade’ at The Playlist.

Every year when I do this, I try to find a theme among the films that stuck with me for the year. Sometimes it’s women directors or the American Dream or the triumph of the human spirit. I find that those themes run through this list as well, from Mike Mills’ “20th Century Women” to Andrea Arnold’s “American Honey” to Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson.” But as I was writing this, a theme revealed itself to me, a theme of “this movie shouldn’t work but it does,” encompassing, yes “Paterson” as well as “Toni Erdmann,” and “Camerperson.” Each one of these films feels like a small miracle, that it was even made, that it emerged so singularly formed.

Continue reading Katie Walsh’s Top 10 Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.

There’s too much TV, too many films, and there have been a few other things going on in 2016. So for sure, there are very few of us, even among the fraternity of full-time film commentators, who can say they’ve seen everything. Thus, here’s our annual roundup of the films we feel most likely either fell off your radar while you built your nuclear bunker, disappeared from their short runs while you attended an underground resistance meeting, or languished in your Netflix queue while you researched alternate-universe theory and the likelihood of a life-sustaining nearby planet being discovered in the next four years.

Continue reading The 25 Best 2016 Films You Might Not Have Seen at The Playlist.

With Christmas come and gone, and just a few days left of 2016, we’re very nearly at the end of our month-look binge of the best and worst of the year at the movies. We’ve got a couple more features still to come, but despite the thousands of words we’ve already dropped, there’s still lots more to talk about that didn’t quite fit in one of the existing features we already had.

And so comes an annual piece we refer to as the grab-bag: a chaotic, unruly, sprawling look at basically whatever we want, with a particular focus on films, or elements of films, that we haven’t talked about elsewhere.

Continue reading The Best & Worst Moments, Scenes, Odds & Ends And More Of 2016 at The Playlist.

I promised my editors that I’d ease off on the ‘2016 was awful’ intros to our year-end features. That said, fuck 2016, right in the eye. It’s been a crappy twelve months personally and politically (though happily not professionally), and for the first six months or so, cinematically too.

But fortunately, the movies came through, and the late summer and fall pulled things back to, if not a classic year of film, at least one with a variety and diversity of great movies of every kind.

Continue reading Oli Lyttelton’s Top 15 Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.

Howard Hawks once defined a good movie as one with “three good scenes and no bad ones.” Whether or not you think he’s right — and he’s not massively wrong — it’s often the moments that make the movies for us, and there’s no better way to make a moment memorable than with some music.

READ MORE: The 25 Best Films Of 2016

From the chorus lines of Busby Berkeley and “The Sound Of Silence” in “The Graduate” to Chuck Berry in “Pulp Fiction” and “Where Is My Mind” in “Fight Club,” movies and cinema are intrinsically linked together, with songs made indelible by scenes in films, and scenes made by indelible songs.

Continue reading The 25 Best Movie Music Moments Of 2016 at The Playlist.

Happy holidays, happy Festivus, merry Christmas, happy Kwanzaa, happy Hanukkah and whatever holiday you celebrate. We hope you have a really good one. We wanted to take this time to thank you for your patronage this year. 2016 has been a rough one for everyone, and that includes us. We love to ask: If you enjoy The Playlist, please continue to share our content. It keeps us going and lets us have our own happy holidays.

Continue reading Best Of 2016: All Of The Playlist’s Year End Coverage Right Here at The Playlist.

Condensing a manageable list of our favorite performances of the year proved to be far more difficult than expected, and it was a hard-fought battle amongst The Playlisters to determine who would make the cut and what the ranking would be. It was a much debated, constantly shifting (until the very last minute) beast, but we’ve finally wrestled this one to the ground. Perhaps it was because we decided to include TV performances in here as well, or that there were no clear front-runners, or that there were that many great performances this year that each camp, with their favorites, swore a blood loyalty to defending their honor.

Continue reading The 25 Best Performances Of 2016 at The Playlist.

We’re deep into the week before Christmas and still cutting a swath through our Best/Worst/It’s Complicated Year-End coverage, most of which we hope you’ve all read and enjoyed, or at least been engaged by (it’s okay, you can disagree). This year, a few documentaries made it onto our collective 25 Best Films of the Year list; in 2016, it seems that many of the achievements in non-fiction cinema have rendered moot the notion of keeping narrative and documentary separate for evaluation.

Continue reading The 22 Best Documentaries Of 2016 at The Playlist.

As we slowly and eagerly await the end of a year that history will squint back on forever, we can take some solace in knowing that it hasn’t been completely devoid of good things. And if you’ve been following our marathon year-end coverage from the beginning of December, which course you have been, you know of what we speak. Today we finally zero in on the element that best illuminates the unassailable power of the silver screen — cinematography.

Continue reading The Best Cinematography Of 2016 at The Playlist.

2016 needs to end for so many reasons. Frankly, I’m not convinced 2017 will actually be better, but at least there is always the hope great new movies will distract us from the authoritarian government that is quickly swooping into power. Keep hope alive, right?

As we enter the annual the “best of” season many have commented on “what a great year for movies” 2016 was. This writer thinks that hot take may exaggerating the overall mediocrity of the past 12 months.

Continue reading Gregory Ellwood’s Top 10 Movies of 2016: ‘Moonlight,’ ‘Personal Shopper,’ ‘Rogue One’ at The Playlist.

We compiled an aggregated Playlist Best Films Of 2015 which you can find here. However, regular contributors were also given the chance to submit personal lists.

I think we can all agree that 2016 has been a dumpster fire on top of a pile of burning kittens and puppies kind of a year. We lost some of the greatest artists and immeasurably important pop culture icons, and got rewarded with a last minute kick in the nuts after one of the ugliest and enraging election campaigns the U.S.

Continue reading Oktay Ege Kozak’s Top 10 Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.

There’s an old saying at the Playlist Mansion: you do not truly know a person until you’ve asked them to chose the one film they feel was most overrated and the one they feel was most underrated in any given year. It’s not very catchy. But it is a credo with a surprising amount of wisdom in it, as well as the welcome potential for our beloved, esteemed and generally faultless contributors to make complete public fools of themselves.

Continue reading The Most Overrated & Underrated Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.

A few weeks into our annual year-end binge of the Best and Worst of the movies in 2016, and we’ve looked at the finest trailers and posters, the best movies and TV shows, the breakthrough directors and actors, the best scores and soundtracks, the worst films, and the most anticipated films and television series. There’s plenty more to come, but with the weekend here, and a weekend where a new “Star Wars” movie is opening, no less, we wanted to loosen up a bit and talk about the Best Action Sequences of 2016.

Continue reading The 25 Best Action Sequences Of 2016 at The Playlist.

We have a great job. We know that. But along with all the sunshine, there’s gotta be a little rain sometimes, and while we spend weeks in late November and December in deliberations about the best of the year in film, we also always take time — just one day, one feature — to consider the worst. By this stage, “2016” has become an adjective meaning “unexpectedly horrible and depressing,” but that’s not necessarily borne out in the world of film, where, certainly now that the prestige releases are happening thick and fast, the outlook is generally pretty upbeat, at least for those of us who haven’t seen “Collateral Beauty” yet.

Continue reading The 20 Worst Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.

In the realm of problems that aren’t really problems, “too much good TV” is the one that consumes our nights (and our DVRs). Because there was so much to choose from, what was a 25-show list last year and a 25-show list when we started our rankings for 2016 has now ballooned up to 30. With over 400 scripted television series across the last 12 months, we wouldn’t have struggled to fill an even longer list, as you’ll see from the also-rans at the end.

Continue reading The 30 Best TV Shows Of 2016 at The Playlist.

The year-end love keeps coming for “Toni Erdmann.” Maren Ade‘s breakout film topped best of lists from Cahiers du Cinema and Sight & Sound, and recently swept the European Film Awards, and was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globes. And now the film has another honor as 2016 winds down.

Film Comment has released their Best Of 2016, and yep, “Toni Erdmann” has come out on top. 

Continue reading ‘Toni Erdmann’ Tops Film Comment’s Best Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.

Those of us who call it home can kind of take it for granted, but it’s an honor and a pleasure to be part of a collective effort like The Playlist, and that’s never made more abundantly clear than when we compile our official annual Best Films ranking. As in recent years, we’ve collated our rankings of films from a wide sample of individual top ten lists (this year, 20 of our contributors submitted lists for consideration), and once again we could not be prouder of the results, or more convinced of how well they represent the blog’s eclectic, broadminded and passionate cinematic taste.

Continue reading The 25 Best Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.