Uncut Gems is about the thrill of the gambit, the jolt of glee and terror in watching someone pursue the next shiny thing.

It's dizzying and tremendously sad, but simultaneously exhilarating due to Nemes' complete control of his environment, and complete merging of his narrative and compositional elements. It isn't just a unique story, it's a unique execution.

Mary and the Witch’s Flower doesn’t just borrow elements from Ghibli, it feels like a complete continuation of the studio’s work. It’s a welcome relief for every animation fan who thought that particular era of Japanese animation had, after 30 years, quietly come to a close.

It’s a methodic meditation on living with pain that can’t be shed, and in the oily-black corners of our shared fears, Lonergan has discovered something beautiful, human, and new.

Some will say it’s pretentious, obtuse, and masturbatory, and they’d be able to find plenty of evidence. But there’s so much to love here, largely because the film is something of an inkblot. Concealed and mute, Affleck the ghost acts as a cypher on which to place one’s hopes, fears, and closely held suspicions about the meaning of life.

It is undeniably effective in setting mood and tone, and it’s the kind of film that will leave audiences talking no matter what they think of it. If the sole purpose of art is to create an emotional response, Mother! is a masterpiece.

The extraordinary success of Arrival is that it combines its bravura style and grand sci-fi questions with tremendous emotional intelligence and a heart so full it’s ready to burst.

All the beats proceed exactly as expected, but they hit with admirably precise timing, amid a strikingly beautiful landscape where every leaf is rendered with loving clarity. The humor, the wonder, and the awwww moments all hit home comfortably. This is such a perfect execution of the Disney formula, it feels like the movie the studio has been trying to make since Snow White.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a raucous, smart, self-referential adventure. The comics-inspired visuals are stunning, and the emotional coming-of-age story is relevant and inspiring, even as it acknowledges the many Spider-Man movies that have come before it.

Cooper’s A Star is Born is unquestionably a film born out of our current era and modern struggles with addiction. In that way, it serves as a potent reminder that even the most familiar stories can be used to examine the issues and concerns of a given moment.

It’s an out-and-out triumph, an adrenaline blast of pure action and emotion that lives up to its predecessors and ably forwards the MCU story in memorable and even touching ways.

Like so much of Key & Peele’s comedy, Get Out is refreshing in its naked, frank aggression about confronting racial issues, with comedy, drama, and sharp, unsparing insight.

Its complete lack of restraint, cynicism, or self-consciousness invites viewers to drop their own reservations and just feel the big, broad, simple emotions as they're played out on-screen, through memorable songs and elaborate fantasy sequences.

It’s an enthusiastic, hilarious reboot of the idea of what a Marvel movie can actually be, resulting in an effervescent, delightfully self-aware ride that was the most fun I’d had in a superhero movie in years.

Too many films that rely on secrets stop being compelling once those secrets emerge. Marrowbone just becomes more compelling. It’s one of the year’s most immaculately crafted movies, and it’s the kind of story that keeps dodging convention right up to the final shot. It fits neatly into the Gothic genre, but it innovates within it at the same time.

Plenty of films give the viewers far more information and still wind up feeling opaque and distanced from the characters' lives. But The Fits is all about the experience of the moment, and it winds up feeling remarkably immersive and lyrical.

It’s gripping, funny, and full of spectacle, but it also feels like a turning point, one where the studio has finally recognized that its movies can be about more than just selling the next installment. In the process, the studio has ended up with one of the most enthralling entries in its entire universe.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout merges the franchise’s big-budget spectacle with an utterly ferocious style of action filmmaking that far surpasses what McQuarrie executed in either Rogue Nation or Jack Reacher.

After years of movies where even the most mediocre heroes appeared to be invulnerable and indomitable, it’s an arresting jolt — and exactly the film the franchise needed.

The result is unlikely to be as influential as Argento’s movie, and it will test some viewers’ patience, but it’s still a bold, hypnotic work, an example of the richness that today’s generation of filmmakers are bringing to the horror genre.

Paul already has a pile of awards acknowledging his acting talents, but his work in El Camino is staggering, given the high difficulty factor that comes with having to play so many variations of this character.

The horror of The Invisible Man comes from the knowledge that not only would Griffin’s schemes work should such a technology exist, but also from knowing that they already do.

While Green Room shares an aesthetic sensibility with his last film (he shot and directed all his features), Saulnier is up to something very different this time around — something simpler, perhaps, but more immediately satisfying.

It rises to the occasion with strong performances and with its directors’ willingness to slow down and take their story seriously, balancing humor, action, and exposition in a carefully calibrated package.

There’s a lot going on in Tarantino’s latest film, including an exploration of the delicacy of a moment in time and how easily an era can be swept away.

Where the original film poked fun at games, this time, the subject of critique is the company’s own legacy. And it’s a smarter, more entertaining film for it.

In many ways, this is an Old Man movie — a slower late-period work by a filmmaker ruminating on his advancing age, and on the beloved classics he made as a younger guy. But it’s Scorsese’s version: pulsing with more life than most younger filmmakers, before giving way to stark, chilling regret.

Solo is a swashbuckling success, a space adventure that pays homage to the DNA of the original films while carving out its own unique space in the canon. It’s a sheer delight, but it also has the courage to explore the darker aspects of a character who could have all too easily been polished to an inoffensive, family-friendly Disney sheen.

J.A. Bayona has created an unforgettable, emotional experience with A Monster Calls, one that lets us grapple with our most basic human fears and worries, while lighting a beacon of hope that can shine through that darkness.

Eggers’ filmmaking is bold, confident, and endlessly patient, luring the viewer into a world that is seductive in its barren beauty and measured pace.

It might have come out in Japan in 1991, but you could think of it as a new film — Only Yesterday is truly timeless.

Abrams and his collaborators have made a movie that feels resoundingly fresh and new by paying tribute to a style and story that is decades old.

The conversations in Portrait of a Lady on Fire are among the most memorable people have had on a screen in some time, with each line a stanza in a poem, a reversal, a shift in perspective. With every exchange, the relationship between Marianne and Héloïse changes subtly.

Calling Crip Camp a feel-good movie feels contrary to its purpose, even as it is tremendously inspiring. It’s more of a reminder that something that seems impossible can be done; it just takes an immense, downright unfair amount of work to will it into existence and support from others who may not be impacted but benefit from a more equitable society because everyone does.

Thanks to Möller’s staging, a script full of twists, and a compelling performance from lead actor Jakob Cedergren, it’s a riveting, nerve-racking surprise — and it has a few things to say about how even the best intentions can lead to disturbing abuses of power.

The miracle of Weiner is that like the complicated man at its center, it's open to interpretation. Schadenfreude seekers who just want to see Weiner sweat and suffer will get their money's worth. But so will curious viewers who show up in a spirit of inquiry, looking for the full story. They'll get more than one.

Foster's daringly different comedy is more interested with observing its well-drawn characters, and what it takes to change them on a fundamental level. It's easy to see it as a drama that fails to fully address America's shortcomings. It's actually something better: an insightful comedy about human perspective.

For all Thompson's talent and promise, King Jack still rests most on the actors, and the way they suggest inner worlds deep enough to get lost in, without pushing or forcing the point.

It's a rousing, thrilling adventure, beautifully animated in rich, deep hues with a look that meets neatly between the flow of hand-drawn cels and the smoothness of digital animation. But it's also a powerfully emotional piece, about family and friendship, about betrayal and disappointment, and about first love and old enmities.

For all the methodical pacing and old archetypes, Hell or High Water is a thoroughly contemporary action film, complete with fast chases and flashes of dark comedy. But like the classic Westerns, it invites viewers to evaluate, one more time, the myth of the American outlaw, and the idea of criminals as heroes.

A Silent Voice didn’t necessarily demand to be an animated feature. But because KyoAni’s creators are able to put so much expressiveness into the characters, it communicates much of what they’re feeling without words.

Moonlight is hypnotic not just as a character study, or as a coming-of-age story. It's hypnotic as a performance piece, full of flawless portrayals of a kid figuring out who he is, not just in relation to other people, but in relation to himself.

Wonder Woman represents a number of delicate balancing acts: between humor and gravitas; angst and adventure; full-blown, unvarnished superhero fantasy and the DCEU’s usual unpacking of what those fantasies mean.

For those capable of falling into the spell del Toro is casting, The Shape of Water is a breathless film, anchored by Hawkins’ visible, ardent longing for connection, and her fierce defiance when the things she loves are threatened.

Brigsby Bear holds together because it’s so flawlessly navigated and so utterly sincere. James has his ups and downs, but they aren’t manipulative, cheap, or calculated.

It lacks Hitchcockian tension or Christie-level dignity, but it’s funny, surprising, and intriguing in the way it flips the usual murder-mystery script.

Search is shockingly effective, not just in creating a sense of constant, palpable tension, but also in the way it pulls off authentic, effective emotional beats.

Hereditary is a hell of an intense ride, made for a crowd that enjoys heart-clutching adrenaline spikes. The cast is unerringly terrific.

The sharp editing turns the film into a comedy about how wickedly successful the Temple’s trolling is, and how humorless and easily riled their opponents are.

In a world packed with information, it’s outright exciting to know so little about where a story is going, or how far it’s willing to go to get there.

A film that so perfectly reveals its characters both through the way they charge past calamity, and the way they subtly reflect their own pasts.

While it may not be entirely successful, it’s a film filled with clever insights, driven by the kind of sharp filmmaking voice that can push the genre forward.

Regardless of how the film looks, Soderbergh’s pacing and gift for editing are what keep the action tight, while McCraney’s crisp dialogue livens up potentially mundane, exposition-heavy exchanges. His script lets the cast — especially Sohn, Beetz, and Holland — tear into one memorable exchange after another.

The film hits all the necessary beats for a straightforward horror film in an eerie post-apocalyptic setting. But it’s more effective as a portrait of four people who have constructed a deceptively peaceful life under the constant, inescapable threat of death.

She Dies Tomorrow is a house of mirrors, a film much more interested in the reflections it offers you than in conjuring anything overly specific for you to ruminate.

Like learning how to cook a meal you grew up eating, Mucho Mucho Amor connected me with my past. It’s like the way air smells different and your heart feels a little bit bigger when you’re home with people you love and miss.

Franco has created a movie that is not just hilarious, accessible, and an incredible amount of fun in its own right, but it had me more eager to revisit Wiseau’s train wreck than ever before.

The film barrels through a variety of emotional colors: scares, laughs, moments of emotional vulnerability, and it’s a testament to director Dan Trachtenberg that the pieces fit so seamlessly together.

The film isn’t just about black horror films, it’s about the way the horror genre reflects and connects with African-American history. The result is a thoughtful, exhilarating watch, which finds hope in even the bloodiest maw.

Even without its distinctive look, Shadow would be memorable, an accomplished fusion of what Zhang does well, but the visuals take it to another plane. It becomes a kind of dark dream of the past, with unmistakable reflections of the present.

While it’s not big on declarations of love, comic misunderstandings, or many of the genre trappings, it understands that the best romantic comedies are ones where the two leads are always talking, with each other, at each other, or past each other, constantly trying to sort out their relationship, despite whatever chaos is around them.

McKay's film is coated in sugar to make it go down easy, but at its center, it's a bitter pill to swallow.

Peele directs Us with a masterful collection of horror-movie tricks — jump scares that actually pay off, a cat-and-mouse game in an isolated place filled with bright lights and deep pools of impenetrable shadow, a throat-closing Michael Abels score full of intense drumming and choral chanting that elevates the action to operatic levels of drama. But his greatest asset is the performances, which turn an already creepy premise into something endlessly inhuman and unnerving.

Endgame was never designed to stand on its own as a single well-crafted movie, and it was never designed to follow the MCU formula. It was designed to cap a decade of buildup around a single gigantic story.... In that sense, it’s certainly a triumph: it’s ambitious, towering, and above all, daring in its difference.

It’s hard to not forgive Popstar for its flaws, if only because its ambitions are so inherently silly. One senses that Samberg, Taccone, and Schaffer didn’t completely trust that silliness to stand on its own, but it’s only when Popstar reaches for something deeper that it really falters.

It's a cynical look not just at society and its structures and strictures, but at love itself. But it's still mesmerizing in its oddity, and it's exceptionally daring.

It’s a breathtaking piece of filmmaking that’s filled with some of the most intense portrayals of spaceflight ever put on-screen. But for all its technical wonder, First Man’s focus on Armstrong’s relentless stoicism ends up feeling more like a hindrance than a revelation. It’s an epic, ambitious film, but it ends just shy of true greatness.

In terms of narrative ambition, and giving meaningful screen time to an ever-growing stable of onscreen characters, Civil War rivals Joss Whedon's MCU standout The Avengers. And in terms of sheer thrill, it surpasses Avengers — at least for fans who come prestocked with an emotional investment in these characters.

Annihilation is a portentous movie, and a cerebral one. It’s gorgeous and immersive, but distancing. It’s exciting more in its sheer ambition and its distinctiveness than in its actual action.

It’s big, nerve-wracking, and utterly ridiculous at times — but it is a hell of a lot of fun along the way.

Like the best claustrophobic thrillers, the film keeps finding clever new ways to complicate what initially seems like a limited setting with limited story options.

Audiences will likely come away from The Last Jedi with a lot of complaints and questions. But they’re at least likely to feel they’re in the hands of someone who cares about the series as much as they do, someone who loves its history, but sees the wide-open future ahead of it as well.

Spider-Man: Homecoming brings the character back to his basics. In the process, it shows why he’s always been such a popular draw, and it makes a strong argument for a branch of the MCU / Sony heroverse that operates on a smaller scale than the rest of the world.

Cam focuses less on the real ways technology can be weaponized, and more on how vulnerable people can feel when their online identities are ripped away from them.

It’s a strong film, directed with confidence and a trust that the audience will be able to keep up, no matter how convoluted the narrative becomes.

Nair's film is a joyous triumph in the way it makes the story accessible, without losing sight of the specifics that make it not just a true story, but a complete and real one.

The film moves effortlessly, with plenty of tense thrills and surprise reveals. It’s relentless, but rarely rushed. The action is terse, and in one unexpected case, breathless and terrifying.

It’s visceral in its grim realism, yet it’s also poignant and cathartic in its use of the fantastical. Above all, it’s a reminder of how genre storytelling can provide real-world social commentary, not just breezy escapism.

By replacing the class system of Victorian England with the dynamic of the occupier and occupied, Park has tapped into something uniquely complex about a chapter of history that is rarely explored. There is a deep, festering malady at the heart of The Handmaiden, exacerbated by idle fantasy, cultural projection and denial.

Ghostbusters is a lively, hilarious crowd-pleaser, which is all that's really required of a big summer action comedy.

This is a film about the wilds — internal and external — and Saulnier shoots both the natural and the human side of the story with his usual sharp instincts for startling and engaging images.

Watching it is a cheer-along experience.

The Founder’s biggest strength is that it doesn’t lose the story or the characters in the larger metaphor about the gap between creation and exploitation.

The weight of graphic, grotesque violence hangs over the entire movie. But the daring emotional violence lingers longer, well after the lights go down on the final shot.

Given how much of the film is spent on watching tiny items grow to improbable size, and huge objects shrink down to the scale of toys, it seems only appropriate that Ant-Man and the Wasp neatly balances its big, serious concerns with its little petty ones. It’s a movie that understands all the variances of scale, and takes the audience along for the ride as they constantly change.

The film packs in so much material that it's bound to have dead ends and weak spots, but its confidence in its provocations is compelling.

Despite its flaws, one thing about Blade Runner 2049 is most welcome: it is trying to be about something. It is trying to be deep, rich, and complex. We’ve grown so used to lowest-common-denominator blockbuster cinema that it’s almost shocking to watch a big science-fiction movie, featuring these kinds of stars, swinging for the fences in this way. It’s hard not to be impressed by, and a bit grateful for, the ambition and care evident in every frame.

In the end, it doesn’t feel like Jonathan fully commits to its own premise.

The sheer dynamism and energy of the movie are compelling, even when the character drama isn’t.

It’s a heightened, sometimes stagey take on a trashy exploitation flick, but it is mesmerizing.

For viewers who are still impressed by CGI destruction and thrilled by the sight of realistic mechas in action, Uprising is yet another escalation in scale, staged creatively and with apparent love for the old-school kaiju genre.

Incredibles 2 is a lighter and more incident-packed adventure. The same characters are running through some of the same emotions but with much less of a sense of weight and impact.

The result isn't as novel as the original, or as effortlessly kinetic, but it is nevertheless a joke-packed action film that continues to deliver on the character's potential, while opening up the door to an even bigger series of sarcastic superhero adventures.

The sequel actually slows down the story a bit, with a lower jokes-per-second rate and a little more time for contemplation. But instead of making the new film smaller or duller, it leaves room for a little more sophistication. The sequel’s best gag isn’t a one-liner or a one-off, it’s subtly and fundamentally built into the story.

The film’s eye-candy is endlessly impressive and a worthy reason to see the film in a theater, but it’s never as memorable as authentic, unique story moments like Hiccup’s first connection with Toothless in the series’s first installment.

Baby Driver is exhilarating, fantastically entertaining, and mildly frustrating, all at the same time.

Jawline is a nuanced exploration of digital celebrity and the gap between “real” and online lives, issues that are particularly relevant during a mass reevaluation of social media. But it’s also a timeless, bittersweet film about a teenager with ambitious dreams and few opportunities to realize them.

I Think We’re Alone Now is a tone poem of a movie, telling its story with lush, vivid imagery, and quiet, nuanced performances. Its slow, methodical pacing may not appeal to all moviegoers, and the film’s final act doesn’t entirely work. But it’s nevertheless a beautiful meditation on loneliness and the walls we put up to deal with grief and loss.