My 10 best movies of the year

It's always tempting to sum up the year in movies with a single word: "bad" or "good." Of course, every movie year includes abundant examples of both, and no 10-best list can -- or should -- be taken as the ultimate statement about anything. For me, the point of making such a list is to remember the year and honor the films that offered me stimulation, provocation and pleasure.

Of course, no list can be inclusive: I had fun at a movie such as Dr. Strange, but you won't find it among my absolute favorites. Same goes for parts of Sausage Party, a ribald bit of animation.

I also suffered through plenty of movies, but there's no need to rehash the year's disappointments here.

Looking forward isn't easy. Movies don't develop instantly, and it will be a while before we know how the Trump years influence what we're watching.

In the meantime, I offer my list in hopes that you'll make your own, and with a wish that you and yours enjoy a happy and healthy 2017.

1. Moonlight

Watching a young black man struggle to find his voice at three different stages of his life proved both instructive and stirring. Chiron, the movie's main character, doesn't say much, but director Barry Jenkins brings insight and small moments of grace to a story that's tough and tender in equal measure.

2. Manchester by the Sea

Director Kenneth Lonergan obtains a great performance from Casey Affleck as a young man carrying a tremendous burden of guilt and shame. At the same time, Longergan finds humor in characters who are deeply embedded in their Massachusetts milieu. A profoundly sad movie about how one man deals (or doesn't) with an unbearable past.

3. Arrival

Director Denis Villeneuve had the courage to make a sci-fi movie about the mind-bending effects of language, a heady theme presented with a welcome lack of apocalyptic special effects -- amazing considering that the movie involves the arrival of aliens on Earth. Amy Adams gives a fine performance as a linguist who needs to learn a whole new system of communicating.

4. The Handmaiden

Korean director Park Chan-wook's elegant masterwork, like some of his previous movies (Old Boy and Lady Vengeance) benefits from the perverse breezes that waft through the story in ways that spur Park's considerable imagination. This beautiful period piece takes place in Korea in the 1930s, but the sensibility is all Park's. The story kicks off when a con man hires a young woman to become the maid of an heiress. He hopes to steal her inheritance. The rest should be discovered in a theater.

5. The Fits

An 11-year-old (Royalty Hightower) at a Cincinnati recreation center attempts to choose between the world of boxing and the world of competitive drill. Director Anna Rose Holmer's movie mixes ambiguity and specificity in ways that prove haunting. Holmer brings a distinctive and welcome new voice to the movie scene.

6. 13th, OJ: Made in America and I'm Not Your Negro

Twists and eroticism in this thriller

In the Handmaiden, director Park Chan-wook keeps us guessing about who's being conned.

If you're familiar with the work of Park Chan-wook, the South Korean director of movies such as Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, you already know that perverse breezes waft through Park's work in ways that spur his considerable and often bizarre powers of invention.

At first blush, Park's latest -- The Handmaiden -- seems like the director's most conventional work to date, an elegant period piece set in Korea during the 1930s. Don't be fooled, treachery looms.

The story begins when a young woman named Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) becomes a maid for Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), a woman whose strangely tormented upbringing rises to the surface as the movie's three-part, time-bending structure unfolds.

Enter Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), a Korean con man. Korea was under Japanese rule in the 1930s, so it paid for Fujiwara to take a Japanese name and pose as a nobleman.

Fujiwara, who's after Lady Hideko's inheritance, makes Sook-hee a player in his attempted con. He wants to marry Lady Hideko.

Park divides the movie into three sections, each allowing us to understand more about the story as it's told from varying points of view.

As it turns out, Lady Hideko lives with her weird uncle. A book dealer specializing in exotic porn, Uncle Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong) has imprisoned his niece on his estate -- a bizarre place that's divided into two distinct architectural styles: British Victorian and traditional Japanese. Take this bit of architectural schizophrenia as a bow to Fingersmith, the 2002 British novel by Sarah Waters on which the movie is based.

Twist upon twist unfolds as Park keeps us off guard about who's conning whom.

When the relationship between Lady Hideko and Sook-hee turns erotic, Park offers explicit depictions of their sexual encounters. I leave it to you to decide whether a mention of explicitly depicted and very spry lesbian sex constitutes a warning or an invitation.

Eventually, Park adds the expected violent flourishes, and, by the end, he tempers the movie's real perversity -- the way the characters attempt to exploit one another -- with as sweet a love story as a director such as Park can muster.

Despite the movie's often beautiful images and Park's deliberate pacing: The Handmaiden can't conceal the director's preoccupation with vengeance, lust, perversion and all around weirdness. Did I mention romance? Yes, that, too.

You're right to think that such disparate elements should be slamming against one another with all the grace of colliding garbage can lids. But Park's ability to fit conflicting ingredients into the movie's overall design results in a sly, seamless and exceptionally accomplished piece of work.