The past year has been a cursed one. It began with the death of David Bowie and proceeded to get worse on every level: political hysteria, impending ecological doom, the creeping encroach of net-connected tech into every corner of our lives, and a blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality now known as "post-truth." It was not a great year for cinema — as the gazillion-dollar franchises increasingly shoved everything else to the margins — but the best films seemed both timely and truthful, speaking directly to the chaos of 2016.
10 Zootopia: The movie that neatly summed up everything that's wrong with Hollywood in one line: "If you don't try anything new, you'll never fail!" With its cute anthropomorphic critters, I was expecting another "Madagascar," but the fingerprints of former "Simpsons" writer Rich Moore are all over this, and the gags are razor-sharp. "Zootopia" uses clever foxes, dumb bunnies and timid sheep to deal with issues of race and diversity — and how people play the identity politics game — in a way that even a 6-year-old will get.
9 The Revenant/Embrace of the Serpent: Two beautifully shot (on location) deep-wilderness odysseys that seem to owe a lot to Werner Herzog, sharp jolts of colonialism and spirituality. "Embrace of the Serpent" follows a German ethnobotanist and an Amazonian shaman on a quest for a mythical healing plan in the early 1900s, while "The Revenant" depicts the Pacific-Northwest frontier of 1823 as white trappers and traders clash with the Arikara tribe.