I’m always thankful for great stories that we can connect with and get lost in. Below is my top 10 list for the year so far so you can hopefully feel that rush and feelings of connection!
What do kids do when their parents barely have any resources to care for themselves? The Florida Project shows us the lives of these kids, and how they learn and live with ZERO guidance. It can be heartbreaking, but it’s also more fun than you think.
What’s Twilight? Kristen Stewart’s Tour de Force anchors this really weird story about mediums, personal shopping consultants, and skyping boyfriends from Paris. Also, turns out, airplane mode is scary.
A terrifying, rousing conclusion to an improbable franchise. Andy Serkis’s Caesar channels Shakespeare better than most humans in this haunting character study of how war affects someone’s psyche.
Christopher Nolan proves again why he’s the best technical director working today. His take on the war movie weaves time and space into a rousing war epic with a unique spin.
A good horror movie can scare the hell out of you in 10 minutes, just like It does. But a great horror movie channels something within everyone that the audience can connect to and root for, which It also does, and does both well.
Like It, Get Out also connects with people, but by using very pointed social satire, the scares are doubly terrifying because they come from a place of truth. Hey comedy world, Jordan Peele has conquered you, and now it looks like he’ll do the same for the horror world too.
A western masquerading as a superhero movie. But not since the Dark Knight have I been so emotionally moved by a superhero movie. Hugh Jackman’s swansong is almost perfect, including the last shot, which brought me to tears.
This came out in Japan in 2016, but in April in the United States. Makoto Shinkai channels the great Hayao Miyazaki to deliver a larger than life tale that grabs you with jokes and holds you with love and tears. It’s also as beautiful of a movie you will ever see.
Part scathing indictment of the justice system, part hilarious study of a small town, Three Billboards again proves that Martin McDonagh should be better known, and should work more often; I mean he got Christopher Walken to say peyote.
What an amazing first feature for Greta Gerwig. This movie is for the dreamer from a smaller town that wants to get out to a bigger one; this movie is for mothers and daughters, and their fraught complicated relationship; and most ubiquitously, this movie is about how growing up is shaped by people and the world around you as much as you and your dreams. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll connect.
