Most viewed movies in 2017

The year is only half over, but it's not too early to start celebrating the finest movies offered up by both the multiplex and the art house. After six months, moviegoers have been gifted with a bounty of great blockbusters, indies, and documentaries, proving that filmmakers are continuing to find new ways—both big and small—to entertain, excite, and enlighten.

No doubt there are numerous gems to come in the months ahead, given that by the holidays, we'll have the latest works from acclaimed directors like Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg (to name just three). For now, however, these are our current picks for the best films of 2017.

10 City of Ghosts

Since 2014, ISIS has claimed the Syrian city of Raqqa as the capital of its so-called Caliphate—and, at the same time, been opposed by a band of local "citizen journalists" whose mission is to expose the Islamic State's horrific crimes. That group, known as "Raqqa Is Being Silently Slaughtered" (RBSS), is the focus of director Matthew Heineman's sterling new documentary, which embeds itself with three RBSS members as they struggle to continue their work from Germany and Turkey, where they've been forced to flee thanks to death threats from ISIS. Posting ghastly video and still photos of ISIS atrocities in order to elicit global outrage and opposition, RBSS risks literal life and limb in its battle with terrorism, and to a significant extent, so too does Heineman via his doc, which embraces its subject's cause in order to effect change. Eschewing many non-fiction conventions (talking head interviews, textual summaries) for a chronologically fractured, up-close-and-personal depiction of courage under fire, it's a film that inspires as much as it horrifies and infuriates. Preorder on Amazon.

09 Wonder Woman

Like Logan, Wonder Woman breathes bracing new life into the increasingly moribund superhero blockbuster—although in the case of Patty Jenkins's film, it does so less by reimagining its main character in unexpected ways than by fashioning a grand, unique origin story for its heretofore cinematically neglected DC Comics icon. Building upon her scene-stealing cameo in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Gal Gadot embodies her Amazonian princess with innocence, resolve, and nobility throughout this solo outing, in which her Princess Diana departs her female-warrior homeland to join Chris Pine's American spy in the fight against the Germans during WWI. Conflating history and fantasy with aplomb, Jenkins delivers the smash-'em-up CGI goods while reconfiguring standard-issue genre tropes in decidedly feminist fashion. At once courageous, determined, and guided by a heartening belief in the inherent goodness of mankind, this Wonder Woman is brains, beauty, and brawn, cast in a classical mold and yet tailor-made for the modern age. Preorder on Amazon.

08 Alien: Covenant

Blending the body horror of his 1979 Alien, the gung-ho combat of James Cameron's 1986 sequel Aliens, and the philosophical grandiosity of his 2012 prequel Prometheus—not to mention the man-and-machine musings of his 1982 Blade Runner—Ridley Scott delivers a biblically scaled interstellar nightmare with Alien: Covenant. Scott's latest spends its first hour setting up a familiar battle between human colonists and angry xenomorphs, after the former decide to investigate a mysterious distress signal from a nearby planet. Yet after expertly going through the tried-and-true monster-movie motions, the director then shifts gears by turning his prime attention to Michael Fassbender's android David—who, it turns out, is an inhabitant of this ancient world. Face-huggers, back-bursters, mecha-doppelgängers, and the most narcissistic-homoerotic sequence in sci-fi history soon follow, with the action immaculately designed for suspense, scares, and sly sinister humor. At once a rousing blockbuster spectacle and an inventive expansion of the franchise's core themes, it's the rare prequel to truly justify its existence. Preorder on Amazon.

07 I Called Him Morgan

Lee Morgan was one of the mid-century jazz scene's brightest lights, until his life was cut tragically short when his wife Helen fatally gunned him down in a New York City nightclub on the snowy night of February 18, 1972. Using copious archival footage, newly recorded interviews with friends and collaborators, and, most illuminating of all, a tape-recorded 1996 interview with Helen made one month before her death, Kasper Collin's transfixing documentary I Called Him Morgan recounts this sad real-life saga as two separate stories—Lee's and Helen's—that eventually dovetailed, intertwined, and then combusted in horrific fashion. Abandonment, drug abuse, and betrayal all factor into this sorrowful equation, as Collin assuredly conveys the messy stew of passion, need, ego, loneliness, and fury that eventually begat such a calamity. In doing so, it recognizes the jazzy spirit of Lee and Helen's doomed romance—and, also, the riffing-our-way-forward nature of life itself. Rent/buy on Amazon.

06 The Blackcoat's Daughter

Director Osgood Perkins is the son of Norman Bates himself (actor Anthony Perkins), but he proves to be a horror maestro in his own right with The Blackcoat's Daughter, a beguiling descent into dark, demonic places that's all the more chilling for refusing to chart a simple straight-and-narrow course. In upstate New York, Kat (Mad Men's Kiernan Shipka) is left by her parents to spend winter break at her boarding school alongside more popular Rose (Lucy Boynton); meanwhile, Joan (Emma Roberts) endeavors to hitchhike her way to the school, eventually nabbing a ride with a contentious couple (James Remark and Lauren Holly). What these three girls have to do with each other is a mystery to be unraveled. It's ultimately far less important than the overarching air of loss—of parents, of virginity, of adolescence—and grief that consumes them. It eventually becomes clear that all is not right with this institute and its (Satan-admiring?) staff members. Yet what lingers is the pervasive fear of abandonment, all of it encapsulated by Roberts' final, unforgettable primal scream. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.

05 Lady Macbeth

Hell hath no fury like a woman oppressed, as is shockingly born out by William Oldroyd's phenomenal feature directing debut—an adaptation not of the Bard but, rather, of Nikolai Leskov's 1865 novel Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. In a breakout performance of coiled intensity and ruthless cunning, Florence Pugh is Katherine, a young woman sold into marriage to an older landowner (Cosmo Jarvis), whose nastiness is only surpassed by that of his domineering father (Christopher Fairbank). That union is rife with problems from the start, though despite the film's Shakespeare-referencing title, the path it wends is an original and horrifying one. Suggesting a period piece version of a film noir saga as envisioned by Stanley Kubrick, this twisted feminist drama is rooted in contentious racial- and gender-warfare issues, employing a meticulous formalism to recount its cutthroat story about Katherine's at-any-cost attempts to attain liberation. Like its protagonist, it's a film that's placid and refined on the outside, ferocious and pitiless on the inside.

04 The Lure

 

La La Land's award-season triumphs may have heralded the return of the Hollywood musical, but in terms of ingenuity, flair, and sheer eye-popping weirdness, it can't hold a candle to The Lure. Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska's wackadoo import is a familiar tale of a young couple torn between individual dreams and professional desires, the twist being that these protagonists (Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olszanska) are mermaid cannibals sashaying through the seedy cabaret underbelly of 1980s Warsaw. Like the dreamy love child of Amèlie's Jean-Pierre Jeunet and The Fly's David Cronenberg—except with quite a bit more singing and dancing from its fantastical femme fatales—Smoczynska's knockout debut charts its aquatic fairy tale creatures as they make a name for themselves as a pop duo known as "The Lure," along the way falling in love and chomping on unsuspecting (male and female) victims. A bisexual Little Mermaid-by-way-of-vampire horrorshow scored to original New Wave-y tunes, it really is like nothing you've ever seen before. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.

03 Okja

Bong Joon Ho's Okja is many things at once: a rollicking kid's fable about the bond between a young South Korean girl (Byun Hee-bong) and her genetically enhanced super-pig (named Okja); a satiric critique of the corporate food industry; a wacko comedy about transcending cultural boundaries; and a fantastical adventure full of kidnappings and chases, buoyed by over-the-top performances from Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal, and culminating with a Times Square spectacular and a Holocaust-esque trip to the slaughterhouse. Most of all, however, it's the year's most exhilaratingly idiosyncratic work, indebted to the spirit of both Steven Spielberg and Hayao Miyazaki, and energized by the distinctive signature of its director. Vacillating between mirthful, madcap and morose on a dime, Bong's latest—about Byun's heroine trying to reunite with Okja after the animal is reclaimed by the conglomerate that created her—is both all over the place and yet assuredly coherent. Whether viewed on a big screen or via Netflix (its exclusive distributor), it's a wondrous whatsit unlike anything you've quite seen before. Available to stream on Netflix.

02 John Wick: Chapter 2

Rarely has a film seemed less in need of a sequel than 2014's John Wick, a self-contained bit of action-cinema perfection. Nonetheless, John Wick: Chapter 2 manages to thrill through a constant barrage of masterful gun-fu carnage, with bullets flying at a jaw-dropping rate courtesy of Keanu Reeves' nattily dressed assassin. Director David Leitch's follow-up is a symphonic orgy of frenzied firearm warfare, with violence here depicted as a culinary art form performed by stylish Zen badasses with philosophical souls. It's akin to a hybrid of Jean-Pierre Melville's noir cool and Marvel's superhero fantasy, all underworld rules and regulations and unbelievable feats of fearsome brutality, with Reeves exuding male-model chicness and powder-keg explosiveness as the epicenter of this murderous maelstrom. While the film's reason for once again forcing Wick out of retirement isn't nearly as gripping as its predecessor's vengeance-for-his-dead-dog motivation, the specifics of Chapter 2 wind up mattering little in the face of so much exhilarating death and destruction. Rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.

01 I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore

Suspenseful and hilarious, despondent and optimistic, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore is a masterful genre film, one that immerses itself in the small, painful indignities of everyday life, and then casts the battle against those wrongs as a serio-comic odyssey of sleuthing, heavy metal, and nunchakus. After her house is burglarized, nurse Ruth (Melanie Lynsky) partners with her rat-tailed martial-arts-loving neighbor Tony (Elijah Wood) to recover her stolen belongings. Their ensuing black-comedy adventure is grimy, bloody, and ridiculous, as director Macon Blair (best known for his performances in Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin and Green Room) pitches his material as an absurdist neo-noir saga about combatting existential despair. Courtesy of a great Lynsky performance that's equal parts miserable and furious, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore. (which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance before premiering exclusively on Netflix) finds humor and horror in the notion that "everyone is an asshole"—and then locates hope in the closing-note idea that, rather than worrying about them, life is best spent in the company of those precious few who aren't. Available to stream on Netflix.