One night in 1991, in the Lakeview Terrace suburb of Los Angeles, an Argentine immigrant named George Holliday saw something from his balcony and picked up his Sony Handycam. This was a decade before cellphone cameras and 14 years before YouTube.

He captured several minutes of grainy, wobbly, factually undeniable footage of four LAPD officers beating Rodney King, over and over. The footage was used as evidence in court, the jury called it reasonable force, and when the King verdict came down, a disturbing number of us living in California at the time then muttered, or screamed, variations on the same morally dubious response: LA's going to burn for this. This is what comes of people not believing their own eyes.

The Rodney King beating is part of the backdrop, fabric and racial division informing every yard of “O.J.: Made in America,” the excellent five-part, seven-hour and 47-minute documentary on O.J. Simpson that played a limited theatrical run and is now streaming online. Ezra Edelman's film was this year's dominant nonfiction achievement, straightforward in technique, novelistic in breadth. Its Rodney King footage speaks directly to our own time and to this year's crop of homemade images — digital fragments that didn't play a multiplex.

In a different country, the Diamond Reynolds live-streaming video of boyfriend Philando Castile's death at the hands of a Minnesota cop might've stood out from the general run of fatal found footage.

In another time, the audio and video from 2005 in which Donald J. Trump revealed his sexually assaultive pickup tactics with women, on the set of “Access Hollywood,” might have made a difference.

People know these events happened, these words and actions took place. Caring about them is another story. America now exists in a state of disbelief, roughly one-half of the country in a belligerent good mood, the other half in a cold sweat. Facts, visual or otherwise, have lost a lot of their market value. The country hasn't been so fractured since 1968.

After these past few months, it's no wonder a movie like “La La Land,” a musical about love and work and the sun that shines on the lucky few, comes as such a tonic. It's no wonder the beautiful form and beautiful content of “Moonlight,” about a young man coming of age in contemporary Miami, is such a relief.

It's no wonder we respond to “Manchester by the Sea” so strongly, with its near-miraculous mixture of tragedy and wit. Or why we're grateful for the rock-solid storytelling of “Hell or High Water.” Or (catch this one, please) the closely watched 11-year-old protagonist of Anna Rose Holmer's superb debut feature, “The Fits.” In all of 72 minutes, the film explores what it means to be a girl growing up and making sense of her surroundings.

The following are the best movies of 2016.

1. “Moonlight,” directed by Barry Jenkins. A Miami rhapsody on the subjects of masculinity, African-American identity and human feeling, with an astoundingly good ensemble guided by a writer-director of extraordinary visual assurance.

2. “La La Land,” directed by Damien Chazelle. The best original screen musical in decades. Chazelle references a dozen old musicals without settling for rip-off artistry; Emma Stone kills it; Ryan Gosling merely dents it, but I've seen it three times now and wouldn't mind a fourth.

3. “Manchester by the Sea,” directed by Kenneth Lonergan. How much regret can one husband and father live with? Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams and company rise to a near-miraculous occasion of blended tones and sympathies.

4. “Toni Erdmann,” directed by Maren Ade (opens in January). Fantastic, unpredictable German comedy, and the less you know going in, the better. Coming soon in a Sony Pictures Classics domestic release.

5. “O.J.: Made in America,” directed by Ezra Edelman. The football hero, Hertz spokesman and double-murder suspect goes under the microscope in this essential documentary.

6. “Krisha,” directed by Trey Edward Shults. Scarily claustrophobic personal filmmaking, about a Thanksgiving dinner and the grip of alcoholism.

7. “The Witch,” directed by Robert Eggers. In Puritan New England, one family's ups and downs. Frightening, rigorous and, in the end, a leap into the fantastic.

8. “Hell or High Water,” directed by David Mackenzie. Texas crime, brothers against the banks, Jeff Bridges on the hunt.

9. “Don't Think Twice,” directed by Mike Birbiglia. A painfully honest comedy about comedy.

10. “The Fits,” directed by Anna Rose Holmer. Fabulous newbie Royalty Hightower holds the screen like nobody's business.

11-20, in alphabetical order: “Certain Women”; “Fences”; “The Handmaiden”; “The Illinois Parables”; “The Invitation”; “Little Men”; “Love & Friendship”; “The Lobster”; “Pete's Dragon”; “Queen of Katwe.”

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune