5. Your Name
Makoto Shinkai’s Japanese smash hit is dazzling in more ways than one. The range of lighting effects and painterly panoramas makes it the most spectacular cartoon of the year, and the plotting gets weirder and more apocalyptic as it goes along: Your Name starts as a high-school comedy about a country girl and a city boy who switch identities every few days, and then it grows into a mystical, time-travelling disaster movie. But amid all the visual and narrative fireworks, it never loses sight of the tender coming-of-age story at its heart, as its young protagonists realise that they may never meet their soulmates. (Credit: Toho Company)
4. Florence Foster Jenkins
In Stephen Frears’ sparkling comedy drama, Meryl Streep is predictably glorious as a New York grande dame who can afford to stage lavish opera recitals in the 1940s – never mind that she has the voice of a dying parrot. But it’s Hugh Grant, as her husband and enabler, who steals the show. Grant hasn’t always chosen the most challenging material, but in Florence Foster Jenkins he fulfils his potential, injecting his richest ever role with anguished energy and conviction. Thanks to his committed performance and Nicholas Martin’s complex script, the unbelievable true story deepens from a delightful farce to a mature and touching portrait of an unconventional marriage. (Credit: Alamy)
3. The Distinguished Citizen
The Argentinian entry for Best Foreign Language film at February’s Oscars, The Distinguished Citizen stars Oscar Martinez as a suave author who has turned down every honour since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but who decides to accept a tin-pot award from his own home village, 40 years after he left it to find fame in Europe. Gaston Duprat and Mariano Cohn’s wry, perfectly performed comedy drama strolls breezily from mischievous jokes about provincial incompetence to rigorous debates about the purpose of culture, covering a vast amount of territory in between. (Credit: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
2. Anomalisa
Anomalisa was directed and co-written by Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And, in its modest way, his latest film is as surreal, ingenious, heartbreaking and hilarious as either of them. An unsettling commentary on loneliness, depression and the ease with which we can fall in and out of love, Anomalisa uses stop-motion animation to tell the strange tale of Michael (David Thewlis), a customer-service guru who is so sick of the human race that, to him, everybody sounds as if they have the same voice (Tom Noonan’s voice, to be precise). The one exception is Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a fan he meets in a Cincinnati hotel. Anomalisa was written as a play to be performed by three actors on a bare stage, and yet the animated figurines are so integral to its mood and themes that it’s hard to imagine it any other way. (Credit: Alamy)
1. Toni Erdmann
No other comedy in 2016 matched Maren Ade’s third feature for side-splitting set-pieces, which is inconvenient for anyone who believes that Germans don’t have a sense of humour. It isn’t just the year’s funniest film, though. With its unsparing depiction of soulless, globalised corporate life, Toni Erdmann is one of the year’s saddest and most insightful films, too. Peter Simonischek is wonderful as an ageing music teacher who finds it so difficult to connect with his careerist daughter, Sandra Hüller, that he resorts to desperate measures: he puts on a cheap wig and a cheaper suit, and turns up at her offices in Bucharest, claiming to be a life coach and/or ambassador.
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