The 50 best films of 2016 in the US: the full list

₁

Moonlight

^{Heartrending account of a black teenager’s struggle to come to terms with his gay identity: potentially difficult material handled with almost miraculous lightness of touch by director Barry Jenkins. Read more}

₂₌

La La Land

^{Unashamed homage to the glory days of the Hollywood musical, with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone cooking up genuine chemistry as a jazz musician and wannabe actor trying to make it in LA. Read more}

₂₌

Toni Erdmann

^{The three-hour German comedy that everyone who went to Cannes thought ought to have won is a sad and ecstatic delight about parenthood and professional priorities in the west today. Read more}

₃₌

Arrival

^{Emotionally intelligent alien-contact sci-fi from Sicario’s Denis Villeneuve,with Amy Adams as the unhappy linguist called in to try and decipher communications from mysterious extraterrestrial arrivals. Read more}

₃₌

Elle

^{An audacious comeback from Paul Verhoeven has Isabelle Huppert on career-best form as an icy career woman dealing with a violent sexual assault in a shocking manner. Read more}

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A Bigger Splash

^{Superbly acted four-hander from I Am Love director Luca Guadagnino, with Tilda Swinton’s musician having her idyllic holiday home invaded by fast-talking (and dancing) Ralph Fiennes. Read more}

₅

Jackie

^{Natalie Portman delivers a standout, Oscar-worthy performance as Jackie Kennedy, telling her story during and after the assassination of JFK in 1963. Read more}

₆

Fire at Sea

^{Low-key, elegiac documentary dealing with a toughly contemporary subject: the life-threatening trips taken by refugee boats across the Mediterranean to the Italian island of Lampedusa. Read more}

₇

Love & Friendship

^{Whit Stillman consolidates his return with a superbly witty adaptation of Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan (with a title borrowed from another early Austen work), featuring Kate Beckinsale as a hard-headed society beauty. Read more}

₈

Little Men

^{Ira Sachs’ follow-up to Love Is Strange, a beautifully observed study of a liberally inclined family with money worries, and the effect it has on their son. Read more}

₉

The Handmaiden

^{Supercharged erotic potboiler by Oldboy’s Park Chan-wook, adapted from Sarah Waters’s novel Fingersmith and transposed to 1930s Korea. Read more}

₁₀

Weiner

^{Freakishly topical documentary about disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner, whose addiction to sexting became a contentious feature of the Clinton-Trump presidential election. Read more}

₁₁

Sausage Party

^{Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg put their potty-mouthed talents to work on a gross-out comedy animation, featuring food items who have only the haziest idea of what happens outside the supermarket shelves. Read a full review}

₁₂

Manchester By the Sea

^{Casey Affleck stars in Kenneth Lonergan’s acutely observed study of a handyman who becomes the legal guardian of his nephew in the Massachusetts town of the title. Read a full review}

₁₃

Nocturnal Animals

^{Tom Ford’s cruelly beautiful adaptation of Austin Wright’s book Tony and Susan, starring Amy Adams as the woman disturbed by the manuscript of novel she receives from her ex-husband. Read a full review}

₁₄

Loving

^{Sturdy, righteous drama about an interracial marriage that fell foul of the law in 1950s America, with Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton both impressive in the lead roles. Read a full review}

₁₅

The Club

^{Jackie director Pablo Larraín skewers Chile’s culture of denial in the post-Pinochet era, through a troubling study of a retirement home for “sinning” priests. Read a full review}

₁₆

Our Little Sister

^{A tender story of three sisters whose lives are affected by the arrival of a fourth family member, a half-sister, by the Japanese auteur Hirokazu Koreeda. Read a full review}

₁₇

Paterson

^{Jim Jarmusch’s slow-burn story about a bus-driving poet, played elegantly and mysteriously by Adam Driver, whose apparently happy life in New Jersey suffers unexpected disruption. Read a full review}

₁₈

The Lobster

^{One-of-a-kind black-comic satire, with Colin Farrell barely recognisable as a hapless singleton desperate to avoid being transformed into a crustacean, directed by “Greek freak” pioneer Yorgos Lanthimos. Read a full review}

₁₉

Hell or High Water

^{Robustly impressive bankrobber movie that carries some of the charge of the Hollywood new wave, featuring Chris Pine and Ben Foster as brothers on a complicated criminal mission. Read a full review}

₂₀

Doctor Strange

^{Marvel’s bizarre, surreal tale of Benedict Cumberbatch’s superpower-encumbered medic, enlisted by Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One to fight evil Mads Mikkelsen. Read a full review}

₂₁

American Honey

^{Brit auteur Andrea Arnold heads to the US for a raucous, scabrous road trip following a group of hard-partying kids as they sell magazine subscriptions door to door. Read a full review}

₂₂

20th Century Women

^{Impressive 1970s-set fable about motherhood and adolescence by Mike “Beginners” Mills, starring Annette Bening as a matriarch attempting to raise her boy right with the help of younger female friends. Read a full review}

₂₃

Things to Come

^{An exceptional performance by Isabelle Huppert ballasts Mia Hansen-Løve ’s study of a philosophy professor mired in mid-life crises. Read a full review}

₂₄

Deadpool

^{An unexpected comedy hit for Ryan Reynolds as the “pansexual” Marvel character, a smartmouth, self-deconstructing superhero who battles Game of Thrones’ Ed Skrein as Ajax. Read a full review}

₂₅

Tale of Tales

^{Gomorrah’s Matteo Garrone conjures up an eccentric, exotic collection of 16th-century Italian folktales, with Salma Hayek, Toby Jones and John C Reilly among the talent on show. Read a full review}

₂₆

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

^{Highly likable new runner in the Harry Potter stakes, boasting an original JK Rowling script derived from the Hogwarts textbook and Eddie Redmayne as “magizoologist” Newt Scamander. Read a full review}

₂₇

Green Room

^{Blue Ruin director Jeremy Saulnier pits a bunch of rockers against feral, marauding skinheads (led by Patrick Stewart) in a gruesomely effective siege-horror flick. Read a full review}

₂₈

Dheepan

^{Palme d’Or winning thriller by A Prophet’s Jacques Audiard, following Sri Lankan civil war escapees fending off threats and violence on a drug-ridden French housing estate. Read a full review}

₂₉

The Childhood of a Leader

^{Amazingly prescient work, by first-time director Brady Corbet, about the origins of fascism as depicted through the early years of a kid who is destined to grow up a dictator. Read a full review}

₃₀

Chronic

^{Sombre, disturbing drama by Mexican director Michel Franco, with Tim Roth as a carer of terminally ill people who cultivates an unhealthy significance in the final stages of his patients’ lives. Read a full review}

₃₁

Sing Street

^{Charming 1980s-set comedy from Once’s John Carney about a bunch of Dublin schoolboys who get a band together to try and impress local girls – particularly Lucy Boynton’s Raphina. Read a full review}

₃₂

Zootopia

^{Entertaining and funny Disney animation about a bunny rookie cop, working in a city populated by animals, who gets a sniff of a missing-mammal case and aims to prove her worth. Read a full review}

₃₃

Embrace of the Serpent

^{Oscar-nominated study of indigenous peoples in the Colombian Amazon, based on the journals of two 20th-century explorers and detailing the havoc wreaked by the west. Read a full review}

₃₄

The Light Between Oceans

^{Swoonsome melodramatic weepie with Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander as a lighthouse-keeping couple who decide to keep a baby they find drifting in an open boat in post-first world war Australia. Read a full review}

₃₅

Everybody Wants Some!!

^{Subtle 1980s-set comedy from Richard Linklater, conceived as a semi-sequel to Dazed and Confused, as it follows a bunch of jocks to college on baseball scholarships. Read a full review}

₃₆

From Afar

^{Raw, disturbing story by Venezuelan director Lorenzo Vigas (winner of Venice’s Golden Lion) about a well-off middle-aged man who falls in love with a teenage street thug. Read a full review}

₃₇

Cemetery of Splendour

^{Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s follow-up to the Palme d’Or winning Uncle Boonmee, an elegantly mysterious fable set largely in a hospital filled with soldiers who have succumbed to sleeping sickness. Read a full review}

₃₈

Hunt for the Wilderpeople

^{New Zealand-set comedy snappily directed by Taika Waititi (What We Do in the Shadows), featuring Sam Neill as a gruff backwoodsman who heads for the hills with teen delinquent Julian Dennison. Read a full review}

₃₉

High-Rise

^{Ben Wheatley’s phantasmagorical adaptation of JG Ballard’s housing-block dystopia, starring Tom Hiddleston as a doctor caught in between-floors class warfare. Read a full review}

₄₀

I, Daniel Blake

^{Righteously angry, nerve-touching benefits-assessment drama by Ken Loach, which won him a Cannes Palme d’Or for the second time. Read a full review}

₄₁

The Witch

^{Creepy, disturbing horror with folk-tale elements set in 17th century New England, following an immigrant family’s terror as they are tormented by mysterious, witch-like entity. Read a full review}

₄₂

Wiener-Dog

^{Black-comic anthology of dachshund-themed stories by Todd Solondz, with Greta Gerwig, Danny DeVito and Ellen Burstyn among the dog owners whose emotional lives are anatomised. Read a full review}

₄₃

Hail, Caesar!

^{Tricksy Coen brothers comedy set in postwar Hollywood, with Josh Brolin as the film-biz fixer trying to hush up the disappearance of George Clooney’s biblical-epic star. Read a full review}

₄₄

The Eagle Huntress

^{Eye-opening documentary about a teenage girl who breaks taboos among Kazakh émigrés in Mongolia by becoming the first female to take up traditional eagle-hunting. Read a full review}

₄₅

The Jungle Book

^{Live-action retelling of the Rudyard Kipling stories, directed with verve by Jon Favreau and garnished with impressive CGI-animated animal performances. Read a full review}

₄₆

The Clan

^{Gruesome Argentinian crime thriller from director Pablo Trapero, which offers a political edge in its study of a family who specialise in “disappearing” their kidnap victims. Read a full review}

₄₇

Fences

^{Denzel Washington directs a powerfully performed adaptation of August Wilson’s stage play, with Washington as a baseball player turned garbage collector and Viola Davis as his wife. Read a full review}

₄₈

10 Cloverfield Lane

^{Sort-of sequel to the JJ Abrams-produced found-footage monster movie. This one is recast as a Hitchcockian thriller about a girl (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) trapped in an underground bunker. Read a full review}

₄₉

The Neon Demon

^{Nicolas Winding Refn’s follow-up to Only God Forgives: a self-consciously trashy and blood-soaked fable about the flesh-devouring LA fashion industry. Read a full review}

₅₀

Deepwater Horizon

^{Impressively tense disaster movie about the catastrophic 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, with Mark Wahlberg doing his American-everyman thing as hero engineer Mike Williams. Read a full review}

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