Star Wars: The Last Jedi is the quintessential Star Wars movie. It embraces everything in the franchise that came before while taking big risks to push the story into new and unexpected places.

While Soul offers food for thought and has heart, it’s never quite as funny, engrossing, or emotionally rewarding as Pixar’s best.

Sing Sing gathers a collection of heartfelt, nuanced performances in an unmissable drama about the life-altering effects of a real-life rehabilitation-through-theater program at the titular prison.

A story of magical transformation as a metaphor for personal and cultural change, Turning Red (from Bao director Domee Shi) is Pixar’s funniest and most imaginative film in years. It captures the wild energy of adolescence, uses pop stars as a timeless window into puberty, and tells a tale of friendship and family in the most delightfully kid-friendly way.

It's a melting pot of experiences from comical to romantic to thrilling to richly ruminative. Everything flows together gracefully in step through a delicate and beautiful dance that speaks to the ever-changing beast that is New York City.

While it doesn’t hit the dizzying heights of The Witch, Robert Eggers' new film is a powerful psychological thriller.

A passionate, well-intentioned deviation in style, Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Evil Does Not Exist doesn’t quite hit the mark with its meditations on nature. However, in its best moments, it’s another entrancing dramatic piece from the Japanese maestro, whose strengths lie less in observing natural environments, and more in observing people’s nature.

If you want plot and thespian displays, well, look elsewhere. For action, you can't top this film.

Kemp Powers' thoughtful script gives us an insight into what might have been going on behind the sports and entertainment performances that awed us, and in doing so urges us to look at what's still going on now. Director Regina King's cast delivers some of the best performances of the year, unveiling the hidden pain of public figures. Through a keen focus and confident flow, she unfurls their struggles in a poignant display to show how they live on today.

Belle is a gorgeously animated, futuristic interpretation of Beauty and the Beast that combines dazzling song and eye-popping visuals for a well-meaning yet meandering modern fairy tale. Unfortunately, its heartfelt message is muddled by perplexing plot holes, occasionally grating characters, and a bloated runtime.

One of Spike Lee’s best movies. With a dynamite cast, sharp script and pointed humor that underscores real-life, disturbing horrors, it’s an entertaining crime drama that amuses and shocks and invites the audience into a complex and impassioned conversation about the power of racism - and the moving image - to influence our lives.

Using familiar characters to tell a new story with fresh gags and supreme animation, Vengeance Most Fowl stands shoulder to shoulder with some of Aardman’s best work.

Visually lush and emotionally affecting, Janet Planet marks playwright Annie Baker’s bold transition to the big screen.

Vastly entertaining, but like Porco aiming for the ethereal stream of planes above the clouds, never quite reaching its profound goals.

Steven Spielberg tells an intimate story through extravagant storytelling, giving audiences an intensely relevant historical drama, and giving Meryl Streep one of her most nuanced roles in years.

Despite the fantastic basis of the story, the movie isn't dominated by its effects, or even the eight-foot-tall robot Gort. It's really just about an alien visitor trying to convince us to try and get along in an age where the nuclear threat is very real.

Redford offers just the right amounts of arrogance and innocence to make Hooker a believable hustler but half-hearted scoundrel.

Saint Maud is an impeccably crafted, deeply unsettling, and wickedly engrossing religious horror film.

It plays into the dystopian fantasy of being able to reinvent yourself in a lawless world, delivering a clever tale about what it takes for someone who's not a part of existence to want to reengage with life.

A film with sights and sounds you’ve never seen or heard, it’s an intriguing watch with catchy, energetic numbers, even if it doesn’t always land emotionally.

With a tour de force performance by Glen Powell and a sharp script, Hit Man delivers the kind of intense romance sorely lacking in sexless Hollywood movies. It’s a fascinating character study that, though directed by Richard Linklater, gives off the vibes of a chaotic, dark crime comedy from the Coen brothers. Come for Powell's ascendance to superstardom, stay for one of the funniest and most entertaining movies of the year.

In its portrait of a perennially prickly novelist (Thomas Schubert), it gets at tough and sometimes funny truths about the nature of writers.

War for the Planet of the Apes is an excellent closing act to this rebooted trilogy, but also one that does enough world-building that the series can potentially continue from here – and it’s a rare case where, after three movies, we’re left wanting more.

Less of a straight-up horror movie and more creeping dread, You Won’t Be Alone explores the spectrum of human emotion with an otherworldly curiosity. Perhaps it takes someone on the fringes of society to find out what it really means to be human.

This is an irreplicable experience that speaks volumes about following your dreams despite the challenges that await. The reward will always be worthwhile, even if it’s just about the friends you make and NPC cops you massacre along the way.

It'll probably remind you of Jurassic Park mixed with Cloverfield, plus a dash of Aliens and a pinch of Buffy's "Hush," but between its unique approach and gleeful desire to shock you, you can't really be mad at it.

Writer-director Mike Mills gets the very best from Joaquin Phoenix by pairing him with the young Woody Norman. Their pitch-perfect chemistry enlivens this quiet road drama about the perspectives of our youth with emotionality that won’t leave a dry eye in the house.

This is easily one of Bava's crowning achievements as a filmmaker and one of the greatest horror anthologies ever filmed.