This second part of our Best Films list is dedicated to the rebels, the misfits, the semi-permanently disgruntled if not entirely mad souls who will be both freshly relevant in the new year and quaking with targets on their foreheads.
11. Moonlight African American director Barry Jenkins aces his feature with a layered account of three stages in the life of a young gay black kid. Moonlight dramatizes the forces arrayed against the mere survival of a gay black kid at home and at school.
12. Mifune: The Last Samurai Japanese-American director Steven Okazaki's hip and engaging bio-doc of the great action-movie star Toshiro Mifune provides insights on the development and cultural import of the action movie in both America and Japan. The long career of Mifune (1920-97) not only made him one of the first non-white action heroes, but also gave him an international fan-club of filmmakers, including such superstar directors as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. With the assistance of both American disciples, Okazaki's film shows how Japanese "sword dramas" made possible such Hollywood classics as Star Wars and The Magnificent Seven.
13. Gimme Danger Punk rock star Iggy Pop is the subject and the main attraction of this music bio-doc on the rise and fall and rise again of the bare-chested Iggy Pop and the Stooges. The film never broaches why Iggy isn't queer or what fuels his exhibitionist tendencies. While his face shows a great deal of wear, his body and mouth look good for a million more punk-music miles.
14. Closet Monster In one of the best-reviewed gay male dramas of the year, Canadian director Stephen Dunn mixes genres from domestic comedy to teen horror/fantasy centering on an ambitious Newfoundland-raised kid. Oscar is double-cast: Jack Fulton is a seven-year-old discovering the terrors of what appears in his bedroom when the lights go down, and the handsome Connor Jessup is the teen Oscar, terrified of his emerging gay self, and working at a hardware store next to his high school's most gorgeous hunk, Wilder (lanky tease Aliocha Schneider). The film is a sexy compilation of every imaginable erotic and social misadventure. From his fumbling attempts to be a movie special-effects makeup artist to the social meltdown of a disastrous Halloween costume party, Oscar's struggles are funny and identifiable. The film also boasts a terrific son/dad meltdown.
15. Fire at Sea Italian director Gianfranco Rosi's narrative doc is a compelling attempt to drag a reality-TV-distracted film audience into the all-too-real world of this decade's "boat people." It's agitprop film theater whose maker is all but shoving your head down into the diesel-tainted waters off the Sicilian island of Lampedusa.
16. Patterson Jim Jarmusch, America's indie-film darling whose 1984 breakout B&W feature Stranger than Paradise opened the Opera Plaza Cinemas, returns in top form with a tale about a handsome poet/bus-driver (low-key Adam Driver). It's rare when a drama pivots on the beat of "The dog ate my poetry."
17. Heartbreak Ridge Anglo-American (LA-born, British-raised) actor Andrew Garfield returns with a touching portrait of a pacifist military medic who's truly tough when the combat going gets rough. A small gem for a war-weary, uncertain time.
18. Lion This docudrama recreates the odd but true story of an Indian-born boy who in one terrible night loses a brother, a mother and a homeland. Raised by white Australian parents, the grown man's story is resolved through the help of big hearts and Google Maps.
19. O.J.: Made in America Director Ezra Edelman takes eight hours of TV time (ABC/ESPN) to examine the complicated cocktail of race, sex, celebrity and politics driving so much that titillates and frightens us in these divided states of America.
20. Company Town Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow offer a provocative peek at the impact of the tech industry on everyday Bay Area life. The film both documents the ravages of tech's impact on affordable housing and offers tentative solutions and possible new heroes. A good place to begin while contemplating the lessons of the "Ghost Ship" Oakland warehouse fire.
PS: This top-film list is dedicated to the memory of young actor Anton Yelchin, remembered in these pages because the 27-year-old had among his 68 professional credits a number of films that connected the dots on youth sexuality, drug use, gun violence and the difficulty faced by American kids in making life-and-death decisions in a world where adults abdicate their duties as teachers and role models. The Russian-Jewish-born American actor was killed by his malfunctioning vehicle, and has at least three final releases remaining for 2017.