A superhero movie so tightly made and brilliantly entertaining that even Deadpool himself would have trouble finding fault with it.

It challenges ideas about great power and responsibility, stories about the worlds we live in and the things we’re searching for, and our concepts of heroism and morality. And it does so with a gorgeous, imaginative animated style that makes each world seem limitless.

There’s horror and gaslighting and high-on-helium-style comedy and bits of Freud scattered about; in essence, it’s a pile of things that don’t add up to any one thing but do leave you feeling both elated and creeped out.

It’s a true story, and a simple one, but couched in Malick’s signature style, it becomes something more lyrical and pastoral.

It’s a seemingly straightforward “one last job” crime tale mashed up with a jukebox musical romance, part high-octane action flick and part music video, propelled by perfectly calibrated performances and a wicked sense of humor.

The film works on two levels: one is about the massacre; the other is about the psychology employed not only by perpetrators, but by the powerful forces that back them up.

It is a sober, clear-eyed, and haunting work of art.

Eggers recreated, with obsessive accuracy, the world of the medievals in order to lower us into a myth that feels primordial and strange, as if it’s tapping into something in the back of our minds that we’ve always known but half forgotten.

Bisbee ’17 is a fierce, lyrical probe into the soul of a town haunted by a history it would rather forget. It’s also an unsettling cipher for America, in a year when the ghosts of our past revealed themselves in frightening ways.

If you can adjust to the idea that you’re not meant to sympathize with anyone, Lady Macbeth is quite a film.

The best part of Logan Lucky is that from the get-go you know you’re in confident hands, and whatever’s about to happen, it’s going to be great.

South Mountain suggests that the moments that break us can also give us the space and excuse to grow and re-mold ourselves in new ways. There’s joy in those broken spaces.

Del Toro always renders his films’ social critiques in fantastical and imaginative images, and The Shape of Water is among his best, with a creature that’s both fully reptilian and strangely human.

It’s a subversive and powerful way to retell the Bonnie and Clyde myth for a new era — but also to reexamine what that myth has meant (something that Thelma and Louise’s feminist retelling did as well).

It has plenty of the bizarre visual flair Lanthimos cut his teeth on, from his signature extreme wide angles up to and including a bulldog with the head of a duck frolicking through a grand living room. Yet Poor Things, based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, is joyous in its weirdness, joyous in its exploration and celebration of its strange, strange world. This movie is incredibly fun to watch.

This new Emma doesn’t play too fast and loose with the story or its most familiar beats, but it digs out the absurdities of being wealthy (or adjacent to wealth) around the turn of the 19th century — the affectations, the frills that cover up the crudeness of real life, and above all, the vast, unmitigated boredom.

The reason films like Detroit are important isn’t just because they remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same; it’s because watching them forces us to tread moral ground alongside the characters.

The movie's arguments and implications for policy are a matter of life and death, and yet it’s the images that stayed with me after 13th.

It’s an intensely personal project for writer and star Shia LaBeouf, one that walks a thin tightrope, but pays off beautifully.

It’s a slow-burn horror film, one that has all the sudden scares and moments of pristine fear present in any good movie of its ilk. But in the hands of Lenny Abrahamson (Room), The Little Stranger is elevated by measured pacing that also makes the larger house-based metaphor clear — and the result is both elegiac and frightening.

Burying self-referential allusions in the background and merrily poking viewers till they bruise, The Square at times feels more like longform performance art than a narrative film. It’s social satire by way of art-world comedy, and no woke participant is exempt from its barbs.

You Were Never Really Here hints at the extent of the horrors Joe suffered, but it never tells you directly about them, which is one of its strengths.

There’s no cutting away from the disturbing in Midsommar (in fact, the camera prefers to push into the worst of it); you will look at this, and you will see the violence that is life and death, the movie says.

The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future is mysterious and elegiac, a tale of warning about a collapsing ecosystem and about deep family wounds.

Every performance in this movie acknowledges that while tragedy is what prompted the film’s events, its contours, characters, and conversations are pure, inky black comedy. Absurdity makes for good humor, and the screwed-up world in which these characters live is nothing if not absurd.

Stronger just works, thanks to strong performances across the board and lovely, understated direction from Green (who’s tremendous at how he uses the frame to highlight his actors).

A quintessentially Aardman-esque stew of slapstick, homage, and wordplay so wry it barely (but always) misses being groan-worthy, Early Man is a gentle and modest reflection on how we have, from the very beginning, always needed to treat one another with kindness in order to survive.

There are many obvious reasons why Red, White and Blue feels timely, but perhaps the greatest one is that it depicts the tricky dynamics Leroy experiences among his superiors.