Retrospective 2016 – A Year in Film

November

Plenty to be Thankful For

Image sources: Sony Pictures, Universal, Vertigo Releasing & 20th Century Fox

While our cousins across the pond were having their Thanksgiving, audiences in the UK had plenty to look forward to in November; from much anticipated Amy Adams fare like Denis Villeneuve’s “feeling man’s sci-fi” ‘Arrival’ and Tom Ford’s stylish dark thriller ‘Nocturnal Animals’, to a brace of Philip Roth adaptation period dramas ‘American Pastoral’ and ‘Indignation’, as well as the Ben Affleck action/thriller ‘The Accountant’ and delightful South Korean supernatural horror ‘The Wailing’.

Five, is the Magic Number

Image sources: Warner Bros.

Five years after the last “Harry Potter” film, November 2016 signalled the beginning of the next cinematic era in the “wizarding world” of J.K. Rowling with the release of the much anticipated ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’. A film which marks Rowling’s debut as a screenwriter and expands on her context-building 2001 book, following the adventures of “magizoologist” and former Hogwarts student “Newt Scamander” in 1920s New York, 70 years before the exploits of the head-scarred boy wizard. And as we now know, this is the opening salvo of a 5-film series, signifying the second multi-billion dollar chapter in this extraordinarily successful media & entertainment franchise.

Those We Lost

Image source: Getty Images, MGM & Paramount

November saw the passing of two music legends who occasionally moonlighted as film writer/composers Leon Russell (74) (Tightrope, Dralien) and Leonard Cohen (82) (Other Tongues, Night Magic), as well as veteran American film & TV actor Robert Vaughn (83) (The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Magnificent Seven) and “Brady Bunch” matriarch Florence Henderson (82) (The Brady Bunch, Venus & Vegas).

December next page>

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