When it comes to moviegoing, personally this has been a very weird year. With a few exceptions I wasn’t actively reviewing films for Chicagoist (working on my own film put a stop to that) and I wasn’t going to see them in the theater as much as either. So the list that follows is pretty peculiar. As usual, I care not a whit when a film was actually “released”; in all the ways that are most important, a release date is arbitrary. Here in alphabetical order are my ten favorites from this year:

Anomalisa (2015, Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson)
Arrival (2016, Denis Villeneuve)
The Big Short (2015, Adam McKay)
Certain Women (2016, Kelly Reichardt)
Driftwood (2016, Paul Taylor)
45 Years (2015, Andrew Haigh)
A Multiple Choice Test (1972/2016, Don Klugman)
Sausage Party (2016, Greg Tiernan & Conrad Vernon)
A Summer Place (1959, Delmer Daves)
Wolf and Sheep (2016, Shahrbanoo Sadat)