Define conservative.

I work for a non-profit that functions as two independent movie theaters (basically the only organization in my city that brings smaller indie, Sundance, foreign, and documentary films to the big screen) so I see quite a few films year to year. I thought 2017 was very strong for film, at least distribution-wise on the independent circuit. I'll go through the top 10 I saw this year. Some of these may have been made earlier but only arrived stateside 2017:

1) Frantz. Latest film by French auteur François Ozon and one of the most magical experiences I'd had in a cinema in recent memory. Story about a young French WWI veteran who travels to a small town in Germany after the war to ask for forgiveness from the family of the soldier he killed. Beautifully shot and rendered, filled with youthful, passionate acting. A meditation on survivors' guilt and redemption. Just a really tender, moving film that makes full use of the medium.

2) I, Daniel Blake. Ken Loach's social realist drama about a man, the eponymous "Daniel Blake", a 60-ish widower and carpenter and his struggle stay financial solvent and retain his dignity amid the bureaucracy of England's welfare system. The government won't give him a disability allowance despite his fragile heart and so has to rely on a jobseeker's allowance for jobs that his doctor advises him he cannot take. Wrenching film but great character study on a particular type of worker left behind in a world where everything is online and everyone's expected to be computer literate. The sort of film Mike Leigh used to traffic frequently in.

3) Paterson. American indie-giant Jim Jarmusch's latest film. If you know Jarmusch (Dead Man, Down by Law, Mystery Train and many other films) you know the vibe to expect. A quiet film, another character study, this time of a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey who also happens to be a Frank O'Hara-esque poet. Engrossing film which for once doesn't paint the blue-collar protagonist a downtrodden and unhappy put-upon prole who dreams of his big artistic break. Paterson is perfectly happy being a bus driver who also writes poetry.

4) Neruda. Part crime noir, part biopic on Chile's most well-known poet, and blurs the lines of both genres with wit, whimsy, and ease. Terrific acting and oddly optimistic.

5) I Am Not Your Negro. Documentary on the life and work of James Baldwin, who along with his fellow contemporaries and friends Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the 20th century's most important critics and essayists. Just a really well-done production, and informative.

6) Columbus. Another low-key, character-driven drama about two people in Columbus, Indiana who form an unlikely bond. Jin, the estranged son of a dying patriarch and renown architect returns home to the small burg of Columbus and befriends Casey, who is in her own small-town limbo taking care of her mother. Avoids the usual cliches and is quite a moving film on the human experience. Artful shots of Columbus frame the human drama of two people both chained, in their own way, to their parent.

7) Killing of a Sacred Deer. Dark, dramatic revenge-and-redemption drama by the same director as The Lobster. Really tense and engrossing, with real stakes involved. Colin Farrell plays a surgeon who had a patient die during surgery and his interaction with the surviving teenage son who ingratiates himself into his family's life to horrifying effect. I didn't particularly like The Lobster and thought it was smug and too enamored with itself--but this film totally redeemed the filmmaker for me.

8) Kedi Turkish documentary about the lives of feral cats on the streets of Istanbul, and the people who befriend and/or take care of them. Just a purely feel-good doc about a interesting intersection between Man and animal.

9) Land of Mine: Danish post-WWII film about an embittered sergeant who is given the charge of a company of young German POWs, boys really, and puts them to the dangerous work of defusing mines that the Germans had left behind while also being responsible for their welfare, whether he wants to or not. Not your typical WWII movie and definitely not as big and extravagant as something like Dunkirk. It sort of exists in the same bracket as The Truce and Woman in Berlin about the human toll and experience immediately after the war. For me it was excruciating tense--I was on the edge of my seat every time one of those boys was busy defusing a mine (and it didn't always go well).

10) 13 Minutes. Nazi Germany period film dramatizing one of the lessor-known assassination attempts on the life of Adolf Hitler, in this case by one George Elser. In 1939 he manufactured a bomb that detonated in the wall behind a podium in a Munich speaking hall. The title comes from the fact that HItler cut his scheduled speech short much earlier than was scheduled and the bomb detonated 13 minutes after he'd already left. In the assassination business, timing is everything. There are so many WWII, Nazi Germany, and Holocaust films made year after year that a sort of fatigue can set in with these sort of films, but I really liked this one, which focused in on a little known man and wrinkle of a plot. Excellent casting and acting, from Elser down to the SS who were his interrogators and tormentors.

Honorable mentions go to: The Beguiled (my favorite Sophia Coppola film it turns out), Goodbye Christopher Robin, Wind River, Mother! (will definitely put you off having guests over ever again), and the Romanian film Graduation. These were all excellent and some made their way on top ten lists of more famous critics. And I still have yet to see Call Me By Your Name, Phantom Thread, and I, Tonya and all of those are riding on a very laudatory critical wave.

Most overrated film on 2017: Lady Bird. It seems like the biggest story about this movie was its uncontested 100% on Rotten Tomatoes until some killjoy "ruined" it. It's the directorial debut by former mumblecore darling and ex-Noah Bambach muse Greta Gerwig, about the trials and tribulations of a teenager who attends a catholic high school in Sacramento, grows up in a lower middle-class home, and can't wait to emancipate in New York. Wildly overrated; I thought the critics were heavily drinking the kool-aid with this one. It really wasn't so different from scads of other coming-of-age films churned out of Sundance every year, and felt basically like Gerwig's own formative years dramatized--just add (holy) water. Female Squid and the Whale it wasn't, even with Saoirse Ronan in the lead.

Sorry about the length--maybe this list will turn someone onto a flick they'll enjoy!

Totally agree with you on Trainspotting 2 being the most unnecessary sequel to an original cult movie. Overall I found it an empty and largely meaningless exercise, after the nostalgia with the various "reunions" Mark, aka "Rent Boy," makes wears off. They dug up both the original director Danny Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge but couldn't replicate the manic magic of the original film. These people just aren't that interesting to hang out with 20 years on from their heroin-chic days.