The Best Movies & Shows Released in 2017 on The Roku Channel
Find the best movies and show to watch from the year 2017. These handpicked recommendations are highly-rated by viewers and critics.
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Named after a slur for people of Asian descent, this 2017 film put Justin Chon on the map as a director. More than that, he also starred as the main lead in this raw and uncompromising period drama about Asian-Americans and the LA riots in 1992. Shot completely in black and white, it tells the […]
Remarkably for a movie about women being shunned and exploited by those more powerful than them, I Am Not A Witch is often wryly funny. That’s because this satire about Zambia’s labor camps for “witches” is told with a matter-of-fact-ness that brings out both the heartbreak and absurdity of the film’s events. The bitter gravity […]
This is a hilarious political comedy starring the ever-great Steve Buscemi. Set in the last days before Stalin’s death and the chaos that followed, it portrays the lack of trust and the random assassinations that characterized the Stalinist Soviet Union. Think of it as Veep meets Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator. Although to be fair, […]
x9Is a TV adaptation necessary when we already have a novel and film version of Howards End? Probably not, but this four-parter from the BBC is beautiful and damning nonetheless. As in previous texts, the show follows two families of opposing ideologies—the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes—as they ponder on ideas of class and politics, ultimately […]
At first glance, those who enjoyed Hulu’s Ramy might be tempted to view this as the UK version of it. However, Man like Mobeen is a bit more street than Ramy and a lot more British. It’s also not so much about being a good Muslim. Mobeen (Guz Khan), Eight (Tez Ilyas), and Nate (Tolu […]
The Square is a peculiar movie about a respected contemporary art museum curator as he goes through a few very specific events. He loses his wallet, his children fight, the art he oversees is does not make sense to an interviewer… Each one of these events would usually require a precise response but all they […]
Michael Jackson’s death triggers the sudden unraveling of a young imam’s buttoned-up life in this idiosyncratic Egyptian character study. The news of the singer’s passing sets Khaled (Ahmed El-Fishawy) straining against reawakened memories of his youth as a mullet-sporting MJ fanatic, before his joyful creative spark was stamped out by two disparate forces: a mocking, […]
For the longest time, religious cults have been an untouchable subject in Korean dramas, especially with some of the crimes that occurred that still remain controversies to this day. Because of this, Save Me is quite a surprise, as it depicts the journey of a girl who moves to town being sucked into and trying […]
When there’s lives at stake, and there’s no one around, you know who to call. Not Ghostbusters– you call an emergency hotline. It’s exactly the high risk, high stakes job that makes for an excellent police procedural, and it’s why Korean drama Voice is so compelling– the premise necessitates that the ensemble is given a […]
Ray Romano and Chris O’Dowd (Bridesmaids) star in this dark comedy-thriller about a gangster who attempts a career as a Hollywood producer. It’s based on the novel that the 1995 John Travolta and Danny DeVito movie by the same name was also based on *catches breath*. There is something undeniably funny about people in crime […]
After being held captive his whole life, a man sets out to finish the only show he’s ever seen. Thoughtfully written with a creative cast; it is not a film you would expect to laugh at and enjoy so thoroughly with such an unconventionally dark premise. However, it is a hilarious, wholesome, and loving film […]
The work of two people stand out here: the actor Christian Bale and the cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi (Silver Linings Playbook, Warrior, The Grey, Spotlight, etc.) Bale plays an Army Captain who agrees to escort a dying Cheyenne war chief and his family through treacherous lands. The general and the chief, being old enemies, embark on a […]
Fourteen-year-old Segundo dreams of being just like his father Noé, a revered tableau artist in their small Peruvian town. The teenage apprentice follows Noé’s every move and instruction, that is until one day, he discovers a shocking truth about Noé’s identity. Hurt, angered, and incredibly confused, Segundo starts detaching from his family, as well as […]
This coming-of-age drama is set in a remote fishing village in Iceland. It follows a group of boys during a summer who catch a break from the harsh Icelandic nature. They spend a lot of time outdoors bonding together and discovering themselves. One of the boys develops feelings for his best friend, Kristian, while Kristian […]
A cynical down-on-his-luck Seoul taxi driver is hired by a German journalist to go to another town called Gwangju. What seemed like an easy and overcompensated journey at first takes him into the heart of a city under siege by the military. This is in fact the student uprising that will be a very important […]
In one scene, the main character’s husband looks at her with disdain after she makes an inappropriate joke – “you are somebody’s mother!” She looks back with the same disdain – “I’m sorry, I forgot, moms aren’t supposed to be funny.” Funny is a good word to use here, because this show is hilarious. Comedian […]
Dark and almost too realistic, Wentworth is the women’s prison drama that I’ve been waiting for. This Australian show might have the same set-up as Orange is the New Black — following a recently incarcerated woman as she discovers a new world — but the two series couldn’t be more different. Wentworth is more Breaking […]
I can’t get a song out of my head from this movie: the 1985 UK hit Desire As from Prefab Sprout. It plays when the two main characters, a sensitive kid who’s bullied by his school for not liking rugby, and the school’s rugby star; talk over the “Berlin Wall” that separates their dorm room. […]
From early footage of country-folk threshing their crops to blissed-out clubbers at a rave, there is a mesmerizing, insistent sense of rhythm and motion to Arcadia. Director Paul Wright has curated an astonishing array of archive material for this feature-length video montage examining the British and their sometimes uneasy relationship with the land. Cut together […]
This fun drama is about a 90-year-old who’s still searching for answers to life’s existential questions. Lucky smokes, drinks, and is pretty angry (a not-so-chill atheist); but he’s still around. Harry Dean Stanton, in what feels like an extension to his character Lucky, passed away a year after the film premiered in 2017. This was […]
An indigenous language is dying, and the last two people who speak it have not spoken to each other in 50 years. In this calm drama from Mexico, linguists are sent to try to get them to talk so they can document the language. The story goes that two men have stopped talking because they […]
Richard Wershe, Jr. was arrested for carrying eight kilos of cocaine in 1988, when he was just 17. He went on to become one of Michigan’s longest-serving non-violent juvenile drug offenders, dubbed by the press as White Boy Rick. His fate was sealed by Michigan law that had just been passed, which stated that anyone […]
This moving biopic is about Maud Lewis, the legendary Canadian painter who suffered from arthritis. In the film, Maud gets away from her controlling family by finding a job as a live-in housekeeper for a local fish peddler. It is there where she begins to paint, before marrying the fish peddler in spite of their […]
A hilarious British sitcom about 24-year-old Tracey Gorden, a shop assistant living in a housing estate in London with unusual friends and an even more unusual family. A bit messed up by a very religious upbringing, she navigates adulthood and trying to untangle herself from the unexciting life her neighbourhood offers (mainly by trying to […]
