The Film Experience

Year in Review. Each day a new wrap up list. Today Nathaniel with a litter of cinematic felines...

It's time for a purrfect top ten list. The following list is dedicated to your editor's beloved and much-missed furbaby, Monty who left us in August. In honor of Monty, the web's first Oscar pundit cat, here are some of the most memorable felines of this screen year on movies and television.

Sorry not sorry to all the dog people out there. Isn't that unconditional love from your pup reward enough? Must you always demand doggy time? Let we, the crazy cat ladies, have the spotlight this time!

10 BEST CINEMATIC CATS OF 16

10 Mountain Lion The Neon Demon
This menacing cameo is primo WTFery and hard to forget but surely I did forgot some other key cats. You'll fill me in in the comments about felines who might have made this list, I'm sure...

09 James, 20th Century Women
I think his name was "James"? He belongs to Dorothea as much as a cat could belong to anyone or as much as Dorothea would presume to own another living thing (i.e. she wouldn't). But those peaks into her not quite solitude were a thing to treasure. There's something eminently relatable in the way she projects on to that furry friend her worry about her son's late hours outside the home.

08 Skarsgård Nuzzlers, The Legend of Tarzan
This pride of lions has all the luck. I mean would you ever stop rubbing up against this Swedish god while he's pretending to be British/African?

07 Sher Khan, The Jungle Book
It would be nice if Hollywood would realize that audiences actually want to LOOK at Idris Elba without animated or prosthetic filters (we're talking to you Jungle Book, Star Trek Beyond, Finding Dory and Zootopia) but until we can actually gaze at his charismatic mug, we'll take his rich vocal work as this very bad cat.

06 Cat, The Night Of...
He goes unnamed, ignored, and intermittently abandoned but he keeps popping up unperturbed by the vagaries of human nature at its darkest or most allergic. He would like to be played with though rather than just theorized about.

05 Black Panther, Captain America: Civil War
Not a real cat but definitely a deserved honorary one, sleek, mysterious, dangerous, and majestic. So much so that we're definitely looking forward to February 16th, 2018 despite the spandex glut. (Chadwick Boseman had just been cast in this role when we interviewed him a couple of years ago and he was tight-lipped. The cat had his tongue.)

04 Keanu, Keanu
He has to be cute enough to justify all sorts of dangeous comic shenanigans. He more than aces this challenge. If only the movie were as great as its namesake!

03 Darwin, April & The Extraordinary World
He's not the only talking animal in this steampunk animated adventure or even the only talking cat on this list but he's definitely the wisest. And his own connection to the myth of a cat's nine lives offers up one of the happiest resurrections in the year's movies.

01 [TIE] Pandora in Things to Come
Grey in Elle

At one point in Elle's neverending avalanche of provocations Michèle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) wonders aloud if her pussy is tight for her age to the obvious discomfort of a sometime lover. We don't get an answer but one thing is certain: Isabelle Huppert was tight with the pussies onscreen in 2016, from that tentative then loving bond with her onscreen mom's cat "Pandora" in the evocative Things to Come through her playful conversations with her own screen cat in Elle, a cat that's as inscrutable as the acting legend herself in closeups.