Year In ReView: Our 10 favorite films of 2017

Raw

I never got around to properly reviewing this French horror film from first-time director Julia Ducournau, but it’s stuck with us since I saw it on my last day in Austin for SXSW at the South Lamar location of the Alamo Drafthouse. It’s an artfully handled exploration of themes covered a thousand times over by horror films — the fear of being an outcast, of coming into your own away from home, the terror of your family’s legacy — but Ducournau mixes it up in new and fresh ways, and its New Extremity roots mesh well with the director’s odd grace. Raw also features one of the best performances of the year from the young French actress Garance Marillier, and some of the straight-up grossest scenes you’ll see in a movie this year. I’ll never forget looking behind me at that screening at the Drafthouse during one of the movie’s most intense scenes, and seeing a dude on a date — who had decided to eat a full meal during the screening — turn all sorts of green. Probably a bad movie to have gotten a hamburger served to you in, dude.