   In the introduction to her review anthology For Keeps: 30 Years at the
   Movies, the legendary film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “I’m frequently
   asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.” She meant what most
   movie critics realize at some point: that reading your past reviews and
   revisiting the lists of films you liked most during the year reveals not
   just something about a particular year in cinema, but something about you
   as well.

   That’s the feeling I get constructing my list of the best films of 2017, a
   year that overflowed with great films in every genre, from horror and
   romantic comedy to documentary and arthouse drama. Some of the films on my
   list have commonalities — ghosts, meditations on memory and interpersonal
   connection, and women who refuse to behave — but mostly they underscore
   just how vibrant cinema remains as an art form, even in the midst of
   massive cultural shifts in the industry and beyond. And it is a keen
   reminder to me of all the 2017 conversations I’ve had around and at the
   movies — and the ways I will never be the same.

   Here are my top 21 films of 2017 and how to watch them at home, with 14
   honorable mentions.

  21) Star Wars: The Last Jedi

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   I am as shocked as anyone that a Star Wars movie found its way onto my
   list — but I was bowled over by The Last Jedi, which may be one of the
   series’ best. In the hands of writer-director Rian Johnson (who will also
   oversee a new Star Wars trilogy), The Last Jedi is beautiful to look at
   and keeps its eye on the relationships between characters and how they
   communicate with one another, in addition to the bigger galactic story.
   The same characters are back, but they seem infused with new life, and the
   galaxy with a new kind of hope. The movie’s best details are in the strong
   bonds that develop between characters, and I left the film with the
   realization that for the first time in my life, I loved a Star Wars movie.
   Now I understand the magic.

   Star Wars: The Last Jedi is currently streaming on Netflix and available
   to digitally rent on Google Play and YouTube.

  20) Faces Places

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   The unusual documentary Faces Places (in French, Visages Villages) turns
   on the friendship between the accomplished street artist JR and legendary
   film director Agnès Varda, whose work was central to the development of
   the French New Wave movement. The pair (whose difference in age is 55
   years) met after years of admiring each other’s work and decided to create
   a documentary portrait of France — by making a number of actual portraits.
   The film chronicles a leg of the "Inside Outside Project," a roving art
   initiative in which JR makes enormous portraits of people he meets and
   pastes them onto buildings and walls. In the film, Varda joins him, and as
   they talk to people around the country, they grow in their understanding
   of themselves and of each other. The development of their friendship,
   which is both affectionate and mutually sharpening, forms Faces Places’
   emotional center.

   Faces Places is currently streaming on Netflix and available to digitally
   rent on Google Play and YouTube.

  19) Ingrid Goes West

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   Ingrid Goes West is a twisted and dark comedy — part addiction narrative,
   part stalker story — and yet it’s set in a world that’s almost
   pathologically cheery: the glossy, sunny, nourishing, superfood- and
   superlative-loving universe of Instagram celebrity. But despite Ingrid
   Goes West’s spot-on take on that world, the best thing about the film is
   that it refuses to traffic in lazy buzzwords and easy skewering,
   particularly at the expense of young women. Instead, the movie conveys
   that behind every Instagram image and meltdown is a real person, with real
   insecurities, real feelings, and real problems. And it recognizes that
   living a life performed in public can be its own kind of self-deluding
   prison.

   Ingrid Goes West is currently streaming on Hulu and available to digitally
   rent on YouTube and Google Play.

  18) Lady Macbeth

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   Lady Macbeth is no placid costume drama. Adapted from an 1865 Russian
   novella by Nikolai Leskov, the movie follows Katherine (the astounding
   Florence Pugh), a woman in the Lady Macbeth line characterized by a potent
   cocktail of very few scruples and a lot of determination. She's a chilling
   avatar for the ways that class and privilege — both obvious and hidden —
   insulate some people from the consequences of their actions while damning
   others. Lady Macbeth is also a dazzling directorial debut from William
   Oldroyd, a thrilling combination of sex, murder, intrigue, and power
   plays. It’s visually stunning, each frame composed so carefully and
   deliberately that the wildness and danger roiling just below the surface
   feels even more frightening. Each scene ratchets up the tension to an
   explosive, chilling end.

   Lady Macbeth is currently streaming on HBO Go and HBO Now, and it is
   available to digitally rent on Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube, iTunes, and
   Google Play.

  17) BPM (Beats Per Minute)

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   BPM (Beats Per Minute) is a remarkably tender and stirring story of the
   Paris chapter of ACT UP, an AIDS activism group, and the young people who
   found themselves caught in the crosshairs of the AIDS crisis in the early
   1990s. The film follows both the group's actions and the individual
   members’ shifting relationships to one another — enemies becoming friends,
   friends becoming lovers, lovers becoming caretakers — as well as their
   struggles with the disease wracking their community. As an account of the
   period, it’s riveting; as an exploration of life and love set at the
   urgent intersection of the political and the personal, it’s devastating.

   BPM (Beats Per Minute) is currently streaming on Hulu and available to
   digitally rent on Google Play and YouTube.

  16) The Big Sick

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   Few 2017 movies could top the charm and tenderness of The Big Sick, which
   hits all the right romantic comedy notes with one unusual distinction: It
   feels like real life. That’s probably because The Big Sick is written by
   real-life married couple Emily V. Gordon and Silicon Valley's Kumail
   Nanjiani, and based on their real-life romance. The Big Sick — which stars
   Nanjiani as a version of himself, alongside Zoe Kazan as Emily — is funny
   and sweet while not backing away from matters that romantic comedies don’t
   usually touch on, like serious illness, struggles in long-term marriages,
   and religion. As it tells the couple’s story, which takes a serious turn
   when Emily falls ill with a mysterious infection and her parents (played
   by Holly Hunter and Ray Romano) come to town, it becomes a funny and wise
   story about real love.

   The Big Sick is currently streaming on Amazon Prime and available to
   digitally rent on iTunes, Vudu, Amazon, YouTube, and Google Play.

  15) Mother!

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   There’s so much pulsing beneath the surface of Mother! that it’s hard to
   grab on to just one theme as what it “means.” It’s full-on apocalyptic
   fiction, and like all stories of apocalypse, it’s intended to draw back
   the veil on reality and show us what’s really beneath. And this movie gets
   wild: If its gleeful cracking apart of traditional theologies doesn’t get
   you (there’s a lot of Catholic folk imagery here, complete with an Ash
   Wednesday-like mud smearing on the foreheads of the faithful), its bonkers
   scenes of chaos probably will. Mother! is a movie designed to provoke
   fury, ecstasy, madness, catharsis, and more than a little awe. Watching
   it, and then participating in the flurry of arguments and discussions
   unpacking it, was among my best moviegoing experiences of 2017.

   Mother! is available to digitally purchase on Google Play and YouTube.

  14) A Ghost Story

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   Director David Lowery filmed A Ghost Story in secret, then premiered it at
   the Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim. The movie starts out being
   about a grieving widow (Rooney Mara) trying to live through the pain of
   losing her beloved husband, but it soon shifts focus to the ghost of her
   husband (Casey Affleck, covered in a sheet), evolving into a compelling
   rumination on the nature of time, memory, history, and the universe.
   Bathed in warm humor and wistful longing, it's a film that stays with you
   long after it’s over, a lingering reminder of the inextricable link
   between love and place.

   A Ghost Story is available to digitally rent on iTunes, Vudu, Amazon,
   Google Play, and YouTube.

  13) The Square

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   Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, The Square is a
   hilariously needling comedy about the contemporary art world, as well as
   the kind of idealistic liberalism that is tough to maintain in the face of
   real problems. The outstanding Claes Bang stars as Christian, a curator
   whose cluelessness leads him into some outlandishly rough spots, with
   Elisabeth Moss in a too-short but brilliant part as an American journalist
   who won’t let him get away with his shenanigans. It’s a heady film with a
   lot of ideas ricocheting around — and a lot of uncomfortable satire — but
   if you (like me) are the sort of viewer who loves that stuff, its sly jabs
   at the veneer of civilization that keeps the social contract intact are
   intoxicating.

   The Square is currently streaming on Hulu and available to digitally rent
   on Google Play and YouTube.

  12) Dunkirk

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   Dunkirk, a true cinematic achievement from acclaimed director Christopher
   Nolan, backs off conventional notions of narrative and chronology as much
   as possible, while leaning headfirst into everything else that makes a
   movie a visceral work of art aimed at the senses: the images, the sounds,
   the scale, the swelling vibrations of it all. You can’t smell the sea
   spray, but your brain may trick you into thinking you can. Nolan’s camera
   pushes the edges of the screen as far as it can as Dunkirk engulfs the
   audience in something that feels like a lot more than a war movie. It’s a
   symphony for the brave and broken, and it resolves in a major key — but
   one with an undercurrent of sorrow, and of sober warning. Courage in the
   face of danger is not just for characters in movies.

   Dunkirk is currently streaming on HBO Go and HBO Now, and available to
   digitally rent on Google Play and YouTube.

  11) Rat Film

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   Rat Film is about rats, yes — and rat poison experts and rat hunters and
   people who keep rats as pets. But it’s also about the history of eugenics,
   dubious science, “redlining,” and segregated housing in Baltimore. All
   these pieces come together to form one big essay, where the meaning of
   each vignette only becomes clearer in light of the whole. It’s a
   fast-paced, no-holds-barred exploration of a damning history, and it
   accrues meaning as the images, sounds, and text pile up.

   Rat Film is available to digitally rent on YouTube and Google Play.

  10) A Quiet Passion

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   A Quiet Passion is technically a biographical film about Emily Dickinson,
   but it transcends its genre to become something more like poetry. It’s a
   perplexing and challenging film, crafted without the traditional
   guardrails that guide most biographical movies — dates, times, major
   accomplishments, and so on. Time slips away in the film almost
   imperceptibly, and the narrative arc doesn’t yield easily to the viewer.
   Cynthia Nixon plays Emily Dickinson, whose poetry and life is a perfect
   match for the signature style of director Terence Davies: rich in detail,
   deeply enigmatic, and weighed down with a kind of sparkling, joy-tinged
   sorrow. A Quiet Passion is a portrait, both visual and narrative, of the
   kind of saint most modern people can understand: one who is certain of her
   uncertainty, and yearning to walk the path on which her passion and
   longing meet.

   A Quiet Passion is currently streaming on Amazon Prime and available to
   digitally rent or purchase on iTunes, Vudu, Amazon, YouTube, and Google
   Play.

  9) Columbus

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   Columbus is a stunner of a debut from video essayist turned director
   Kogonada. Haley Lu Richardson stars as Casey, a young woman living in
   Columbus, Indiana, who cares for her mother, works at a library, and
   harbors a passion for architecture. (Columbus is a mecca for modernist
   architecture scholars and enthusiasts.) When a visiting architecture
   scholar falls into a coma in Columbus, his estranged son Jin (John Cho)
   arrives to wait for him and strikes up a friendship with Casey, who starts
   to show him her favorite buildings. The two begin to unlock something in
   each other that’s hard to define but life-changing for both. Columbus is
   beautiful and subtle, letting us feel how the places we build and the
   people we let near us move and mold us.

   Columbus is currently streaming on Hulu and available to rent on Google
   Play and YouTube.

  8) The Florida Project

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   Sean Baker’s The Florida Project unfolds at first like a series of
   sketches about the characters who live in a purple-painted, $35-a-night
   motel called the Magic Castle down the street from Disney World. The film
   is held together by the hysterical antics of a kid named Moonee and her
   pack of young friends, as well as long-suffering hotel manager Bobby (a
   splendid, warm Willem Dafoe), who tries to put up with it all while
   keeping some kind of order. But as The Florida Project goes on, a
   narrative starts to form, one that chronicles with heartbreaking attention
   the sort of dilemmas that face poor parents and their children in America,
   and the broken systems that try to cope with impossible situations.

   The Florida Project is currently streaming on Amazon Prime and available
   to digitally rent on YouTube, Vudu, and Google Play.

  7) Call Me by Your Name

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   Luca Guadagnino’s gorgeous film Call Me by Your Name adapts André Aciman’s
   2007 novel about a precocious 17-year-old named Elio (Timothée Chalamet),
   who falls in lust and love with his father’s 24-year-old graduate student
   Oliver (Armie Hammer). It’s remarkable for how it turns literature into
   pure cinema, all emotion and image and heady sensation. Set in 1983 in
   Northern Italy, Call Me by Your Name is less about coming out than coming
   of age, but it also captures a particular sort of love that’s equal parts
   passion and torment, a kind of irrational heart fire that opens a gate
   into something longer-lasting. The film is a lush, heady experience for
   the body, but it’s also an arousal for the soul.

   Call Me By Your Name is available to digitally purchase on Amazon,
   YouTube, and Google Play.

  6) Personal Shopper

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   In her second collaboration with French director Olivier Assayas, Kristen
   Stewart plays a personal shopper to a wealthy socialite, with a sideline
   as an amateur ghost hunter who’s searching for her dead twin brother.
   Personal Shopper is deeper than it seems at first blush, a meditation on
   grief and an exploration of “between” places — on the fringes of wealth,
   and in the space between life and death. Some souls are linked in a way
   that can’t be shaken, and whether or not there’s an afterlife doesn’t
   change the fact that we see and sense them everywhere. (Personal Shopper
   also has one of the most tense extended scenes involving text messaging
   ever seen onscreen.)

   Personal Shopper is currently streaming on Showtime and available to rent
   on Vudu, YouTube, Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play.

  5) Princess Cyd

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   Stephen Cone is a master of small, carefully realized filmmaking; his
   earlier films such as The Wise Kids and Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party
   combine an unusual level of empathy for his characters with an unusual
   combination of interests: love, desire, sexual awakenings, and religion.
   Princess Cyd is his most accomplished film yet, about a young woman named
   Cyd (Jessie Pinnick) who finds herself attracted to Katie (Malic White), a
   barista, while visiting her Aunt Miranda (Rebecca Spence, playing a
   character modeled on the author Marilynne Robinson) in Chicago. As she
   works through her own sexual awakening with Katie, Cyd unwinds some of the
   ways Miranda’s life has gotten too safe. They provoke each other while
   forming a bond and being prodded toward a bigger understanding of the
   world. It is a graceful and honest film, and it feels like a modest
   miracle.

   Princess Cyd is currently streaming on Netflix and available to digitally
   rent on Google Play and YouTube.

  4) Get Out

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   Racism is sinister, frightening, and deadly. But Get Out (a stunning
   directorial debut from Key & Peele's Jordan Peele) isn’t about the
   blatantly, obviously scary kind of racism — burning crosses and lynchings
   and snarling hate. Instead, it’s interested in showing how the parts of
   racism that try to be aggressively unscary are just as horrifying, and
   it’s interested in making us feel that horror in a visceral, bodily way.
   In the tradition of the best classic social thrillers, Get Out takes a
   topic that is often approached cerebrally — casual racism — and turns it
   into something you feel in your tummy. And it does it with a wicked sense
   of humor.

   Get Out is currently streaming on HBO Go and HBO Now, and is available to
   digitally rent on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, and Vudu.

  3) The Work

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   The Work is an outstanding, astonishing accomplishment and a viewing
   experience that will leave you shaken (but in a good way). At Folsom
   Prison in California, incarcerated men regularly participate in group
   therapy, and each year other men from the “outside” apply to participate
   in an intense four-day period of group therapy alongside Folsom’s inmates.
   The Work spends almost all of its time inside the room where that therapy
   happens, observing the strong, visceral, and sometimes violent emotions
   the men feel as they expose the hurt and raw nerves that have shaped how
   they encounter the world. Watching is not always easy, but by letting us
   peek in, the film invites viewers to become part of the experience — as if
   we, too, are being asked to let go.

   The Work is streaming on Topic.com and available to digitally rent on
   Google Play and YouTube.

  2) Ex Libris

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   Frederick Wiseman is one of the towering giants of nonfiction film, a keen
   observer of American institutions — ranging from prisons to dance
   companies to welfare offices — for the past half-century. Ex Libris is his
   mesmerizing look at the New York Public Library and the many functions it
   fills, which go far beyond housing books. Wiseman works in the
   observational mode, which means his films contain no captions, dates, or
   talking-head interviews: We just see what his camera captured, which in
   this case includes community meetings, benefit dinners, after-school
   programs, readings with authors and scholars (including Richard Dawkins
   and Ta-Nehisi Coates), and NYPL patrons going about their business in the
   library’s branches all over the city. The result is almost hypnotic and,
   perhaps surprisingly, deeply moving. It makes a case for having faith in
   the public institutions where ordinary people work — away from the
   limelight, without trying to score political points — in order to make our
   communities truly better.

   Ex Libris will air on PBS in the fall and then be available to cardholders
   in many library systems across the country via Kanopy.

  1) Lady Bird

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   Lady Bird topped my list almost instantly, and only rose in my estimation
   on repeated viewings. For many who saw it (including me), it felt like a
   movie made not just for but about me. Lady Bird is a masterful, exquisite
   coming-of-age comedy starring the great Saoirse Ronan as Christine — or
   “Lady Bird,” as she’s re-christened herself — and it’s as funny, smart,
   and filled with yearning as its heroine. Writer-director Greta Gerwig made
   the film as an act of love, not just toward her hometown of Sacramento but
   also toward girlhood, and toward the feeling of always being on the
   outside of wherever real life is happening. Lady Bird is the rare movie
   that manages to be affectionate, entertaining, hilarious, witty, and
   confident. And one line from it struck me as the guiding principle of many
   of the year’s best films: “Don’t you think they are the same thing? Love,
   and attention?”

   Lady Bird is currently streaming on Amazon Prime and available to
   digitally rent on Amazon, Google Play, and YouTube.

   Honorable mentions: Marjorie Prime, Phantom Thread, Casting JonBenet, The
   Post, The Shape of Water, Logan Lucky, I, Tonya, The Lost City of Z,
   Graduation, Spettacolo, Loveless, Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan, In
   Transit, The Reagan Show
