My top 10 non-2017 movies of 2017

I'm a little behind on getting this done, but I didn't want to miss out on one of my favorite annual traditions. This year, I made a resolution (that I stuck to more often than not) inspired by this Matt Singer ScreenCrush article to watch at least one movie a week that was released before I was born, so I probably had a wider selection to choose from than in previous years. Here are the best movies I saw for the first time in 2017 that were released in previous years.

1. The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (Nicolas Gessner, 1976) I didn't know what to expect from this movie, other than a young Jodie Foster in some sort of thriller. What I got was a fascinatingly unpredictable mix of thriller, coming-of-age drama, horror and teen romance, with one of Foster's best-ever performances (at age 13!), as a teenager trying to balance a secret life after both of her parents die, leaving her alone in a big, isolated house. Martin Sheen is wonderfully creepy as the sleazy neighbor who wants to expose (in more ways than one) the young girl's secrets, and the plot deals with serious issues of morality, maturity and consent in a frank and direct way while still telling an entertaining, twisty story.

2. Red-Headed Woman (Jack Conway, 1932) This delightfully disreputable pre-Code comedy, starring a fantastic Jean Harlow as a brazen gold-digger and home-wrecker, was my favorite film at the 2017 TCM Fest. Harlow's Lil Andrews openly declares her intent to sleep her way to the top, seducing her married boss, marrying him and then seducing an even older, richer industrialist. She never even really faces a moral reckoning, although the hapless men eventually get wise to her scheme. It's weirdly feminist in the way the anti-heroine exploits the patriarchy for her own selfish ends, and it's absolutely hilarious while she does.

3. Don't Bother to Knock (Roy Ward Baker, 1952) I've seen Marilyn Monroe in entertaining performances that play to her popular image, but this is the first time I've been truly impressed with her dramatic skills, and it's a shame that this movie isn't as well-known as her more stereotypically sexy performances. She's still sexy here, but she's also haunted and tragic as a woman whose mental instability becomes more apparent as she works as a babysitter in a hotel and flirts with a fellow guest. Richard Widmark plays the ostensible hero, who has a more sensible love interest waiting in the wings, but Monroe is the real star of this surprising, unsettling and sad movie.

4. Christmas, Again (Charles Poekel, 2014) I have a sort of love/hate relationship with Christmas movies, finding them fascinating but also mostly annoying, but it's worth watching the bad ones in order to come across gems like this, which I checked out thanks to a review from colleague Mike D'Angelo. Like Joe Swanberg's Happy Christmas, it's a micro-budget mumblecore take on the Christmas movie, starring indie stalwart Kentucker Audley as a mopey guy working at a bargain Christmas-tree lot in New York City. Audley is endearing, and the movie is full of entertaining character details, charming little moments of interaction that get at the spirit of the holidays without being sappy, and while always balancing the cheer with melancholy.

5. The Children (Tom Shankland, 2008) And speaking of Christmas movies, this was probably the nicest surprise of the series I did on Christmas horror movies at the end of 2017. It's a creepy killer-kids movie that takes advantage of the inherent stress of family togetherness during the holidays to create a tense atmosphere even before the kids start committing violence against their family members. The characters are well-defined enough that the domestic squabbles feel real, but there isn't more back story than is needed to fuel the suspense. The kids are genuinely frightening, the isolated rural estate is a great location, and the ending has just the right mix of cruelty and triumph. More in my original post.

6. Ava's Possessions (Jordan Galland, 2015) Sometimes things sit for so long in my Netflix queue that I have no idea why I wanted to see them when I finally get around to watching them, so I can't say how this random straight-to-video horror movie came across my radar, but I'm glad it did. Like a lot of the movies on this list, it's unpredictable and determined to confound expectations, starting out as a dark horror comedy with a sitcommy premise (what if there was a support group for people recovering from ... demon possession?) before veering off into darker, more twisted territory. Director Galland gives it a sort of garish, sickly neon color palette somewhere between noir, EC Comics and an '00s alt-rock video, and the plot gives Louisa Krause's title character the chance to go from victim to righteous avenger, all with a devious smile.

7. Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher, 1959) One of the best Western plots is "determined lawman does the technically right thing even though it will lead to his certain death and is also futile," and this movie really nails that story. It's embodied by Randolph Scott as self-destructively righteous bounty hunter Ben Brigade, who uses a wanted outlaw to bait that outlaw's brother (Lee Van Cleef) into coming after him, delivering perceived justice for both, most likely at the cost of Brigade's own life. Scott's Brigade is stoic and tragic, and the movie is, too, with its beautiful but harsh frontier vistas and a pair of opportunistic gunmen entertainingly played by James Coburn and Pernell Roberts.

8. Risky Business (Paul Brickman, 1983) I put this on expecting a light '80s teen comedy in the vein of a John Hughes movie, and I discovered something more like Ferris Bueller's Day Off meets The Graduate. Sure, everyone remembers Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear to "Old Time Rock and Roll," and this movie also features Curtis "Booger" Armstrong as the main character's crass best friend, plus a giant over-the-top house party (filled with hookers) while parents are away. But it's also surprisingly bleak and pessimistic, with an undercurrent of hopelessness about the future. Cruise's Joel Goodson discovers that his life of privilege and wealth is completely hollow, and risking it all for an alluring prostitute (played by Rebecca De Mornay at her most alluring) is more meaningful than getting into Princeton.

9. Who Can Kill a Child? (Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, 1976) And we're back to killer kids! I actually saw the remake of this movie (titled Come Out and Play) at AFI Fest in 2012 without having any knowledge of the original, and I found it slow and dull and not very scary. But (not surprisingly), the original is much better, an incredibly eerie, suspenseful and downright nasty movie about a vacationing British couple finding themselves on a Spanish island full of kids who've turned homicidal. There's a misguided prologue with real news footage of atrocities affecting children, and the movie doesn't quite support that thematic weight. After that, though, it's tense and well-acted, full of impossible situations as represented by the title question, the answer to which is always bad news.

10. The House on Telegraph Hill (Robert Wise, 1951) I had a few potential choices for this last spot and went with this one in part because like so many movies on this list, it unfolds unpredictably, at first seeming like one kind of movie and then developing into something else. The main character is a concentration-camp survivor who moves to San Francisco by adopting the identity of a fellow inmate who died, but the story isn't about her deception being uncovered. Instead it's about her uncovering deception and murder in the wealthy family into which she insinuates herself, going from one horror into another that's more devious and not as readily apparent. The shots of 1950s San Francisco are stunning, and Wise builds an atmosphere of dread that sustains all the way until the very end.

Previous lists:

• 2016
• 2015
• 2014
• 2013
• 2012
• 2011
• 2010
• 2009
• 2008