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The 20 best films of 2016

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Sandra Hall's Top 10

It's getting tougher but the game goes on. In the franchise-driven world of Hollywood's major studios, 2016 was all about trying to keep old brands alive with spin-offs as well as the usual multiplicity of sequels. We also saw Marvel and DC dusting off some of the more obscure members of the comic book canon.

Familiarity is still selling – up to a point. While Marvel's latest Captain America sequel and Finding Dory, Disney's Finding Nemo follow-up, grossed more than a billion US dollars worldwide, DC failed to hit the same target with its highly anticipated and very expensive Superman vs Batman. Other big sequels had lacklustre openings, arriving long after fans of their predecessors had stopped caring. Nonetheless, the majors are not about to change their ways. For that, they would have to change their structures, which rely on tent-pole movies to hold them up.

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The vacation of a famous rock star and a filmmaker is disrupted by the unexpected visit of an old friend and his daughter.

Yet there were plenty of films worth leaving the TV screen for. The one that moved me most was I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach's story of a Newcastle carpenter battling the bureaucratic absurdities embedded in Britain's social welfare system with guts, good humour and old-fashioned gallantry. Loach and writer Paul Laverty exerted exquisite control over their anger to come up with a perfect marriage of the personal and political. I got my biggest laughs from Hail Caesar!, the Coen Brothers' screwball celebration of 1950's Hollywood. Maybe you had to be a movie obsessive to surrender to it but if you could, the delights just kept coming.

It was the year in which the screen discovered Florence Foster Jenkins, the wealthy New York philanthropist who tormented her friends, family – and eventually, the opera-going public – with her belief that she could sing. Meryl Streep gave us a boisterously entertaining take on her but I liked Catherine Frot's imaginative variation on her character in French director Xavier Giannoli's Marguerite for achieving the seemingly impossible and turning her into a tragic figure.

An equally compelling study in self-delusion was Weiner, Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg's, documentary about the unfortunately named Anthony Weiner, the once-promising New York politician who allowed photos of his erect penis to find their way on to his Twitter feed. The fact that he was married to Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's closest aide, intensified the film's significance as the Clinton email controversy worked its way into the election campaign.

And there were more political insights to be had in my favourite foreign-language film of the year, which came from Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey. This was Mustang, Gamze Erguven's bittersweet and dreamily photographed tale of five sisters and their spirited attempts to defy their guardians' decision to take them out of school and marry off to men they hardly knew.

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And to clinch the argument that less can be more, there was Lenny Abrahamson's Room with its Oscar-winning performance by Brie Larson and its audacity in enclosing much of its action within four walls. Its success was a fitting antidote to the majors' failure to distinguish between the grand and the grandiose. 

My top 10 of 2016: I, Daniel Blake, Hail Caesar!, Mustang, Snowden, The Founder, Marguerite, Weiner, Spotlight, Room, Hunt for the Wilder People SH 

Craig Mathieson's Top 10

In my two favourite films of 2016, Boxing Day's audacious musical La La Land and the science-fiction thriller Arrival, the respective main characters both experience the sensation of floating free as gravity unexpectedly dissipates. One pair dance in the air, the other grimly head into the alien unknown, but either way that sudden, untethered feeling was emblematic of the movies this year. We definitely had lift-off.

Not all the best movies were wondrous – Laszlo Nemes' Hungarian Holocaust drama Son of Saul, with its claustrophobic intimacy at the very cusp of history's nightmare, was crushing – but whatever the subject matter or style you came out of them altered. The hot sun, backbeat and libidos of A Bigger Splash, with the give and take between Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton, was intoxicating until director Luca Guadagnino expertly broke the spell and left you looking back in despair.

Swinton, one of our greatest screen actors, was also a deft presence in Doctor Strange, which along with Captain America: Civil War cemented Marvel's superhero movies as a production line of cautious, capable blockbusters. The same can't be said for the rival DC Comics franchise, which produced the torturous Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and the ill-conceived Suicide Squad this year. They were painful in their excess and errors.

My superhero for 2016 was the French actress Isabelle Huppert, whose intermingled self-control and cruelty transformed Paul Verhoeven's Elle from a comic farce invoking rape and revenge into a coruscating character study. Women had compelling, transformative roles in front of the camera – although they were still under-represented behind it – in Todd Hayne's 1950s romance Carol, with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, and Park Chan-wook's scabrous, subversive The Handmaiden.

No Australian film made my top 10 this year, but those that came closest – Girl Asleep, Goldstone and Joe Cinque's Consolation – all benefited from directors with distinct styles and creative resolve. Big mainstream hits for local releases are always going to be rare, but a vibrant, diverse array of smaller films is something that can be built on.

The struggle to vindicate your art was also central to La La Land, in which Emma Stone plays a struggling actress and Ryan Gosling a jazz musician, and its expressive joy and tender truths are vindication for the picture's young American writer/director Damien Chazelle. His film is a triumph that I can't wait to experience again – you can't ask the movies for anything more.

My top 10 of 2016: La La Land, Arrival, Carol, Hell or High Water, Son of Saul, The Handmaiden, Elle, A Bigger Splash, The Fits, Under the Shadow