Top 10 - 2017

Last year, I introduced my Top 10 by enumerating some of the year's cinematic moments that left an indelible impression on me, those transcendent scenes that elicited in me sensations and perceptual states that exceeded language. I was in the midst of my cinema studies Master's program at UCLA and, about to take the concept on as one of my primary scholarly subjects, had affect on the mind.

As an affect-generating machine, film is uniquely bound up with our material and psychical existences, possessing the ability to shape and intensify ordinary life experience. The best films of 2017 were not only enriching and elating, but were able to cut through the mundanely representational to access the primal and the ineffable. Perhaps it is no coincidence that three of the films that appear on my list deal explicitly with memory - the province of affect.

Some notable films I have not yet seen at the time of this list-making: Lady Macbeth, A Fantastic Woman, Loveless, Darkest Hour.

TOP 10 after the jump...