Created Jan 22, 2017 08:46PM PST • Updated Jun 11, 2017 02:55PM PST
The Great, Really Great & Perfect new movies I’ve seen in `17: new movies I graded 4.0, 4.5 or 5 beams out of 5. Includes movies officially designated 2016, but not out wide till 2017.
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- Really Great
- 78 Points
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Really Great
 Discuss
Patriots Day gets up close and personal with the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath. By turns moving, enraging, loving and occasionally funny, it's an unflinching look at lone wolf terrorism and how one American city fought back against Islamism in their midst. Two previously unseen aspects jump out. First, the Tsarnaev brothers are shown prepping their act of terrorism, coming across as craving recognition, while being pathologically deluded. These domestic scenes are bracing in their banality: a wife and baby mill about as the brothers watch online Islamist videos and pack bal… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Great
Discuss
The Founder is about the creation of McDonalds, if not necessarily about the founders of McDonalds. Those would be the McDonald brothers, not Ray Kroc, the salesman who turned their creation into a world-changing commercial juggernaut. Michael Keaton dominates this movie, just as Kroc did the McDonalds. Keaton's characteristically intense performance as "Kroc":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kroc propels this terrific biopic. It's a well rounded tale of entrepreneurship, being both a fascinating b-school case study and a penetrating character study, First the McDonald brothers str… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Really Great
1 Forum Reply
Super smart, super funny, super current, super classic and super cutting, The LEGO Batman Movie is a super sequel to The Lego Movie, that perfect piece of pop pizazz. Lego B is also the funniest Batman movie ever. Hell, it may be the best Bat movie ever, given its carte blanche to satire the comic's full history, with special attention paid to the Adam West TV series I was weaned on as a young Boomer. Boom! Pow!! The Lego Movies are now bona fide cultural phenomena. They alchemized an iconic toy franchise with iconic cultural figures, catalyzing the admixture with rapid-fire iron… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Great
Discuss
Behind every successful man is a strong woman, three in the case of John Glenn and the Mercury Seven astronauts — strong black women in fact, smart too, very smart. Hidden Figures smartly tells their tale, a can't-miss concoction of civil rights, space race and romantic drama. Lots of star power gives it smart charm, not least from Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe as some very likable brainiacs. They play "Katherine Johnson":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Johnson, "Dorothy Vaughan":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Vaughan and "Mary Jackson":https://en.w… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Great
Discuss
Kedi is a movie for cat lovers, perhaps the first movie for cat lovers. This documentary about stray cats is often shot from a cat's eye view. But more than that, Kedi is deeply in tune with feline characteristics. Cat lovers know the signs: the gracefulness, the hauteur, the affection, the napping. Kedi includes several humans who love the cats it profiles, but the humans are quite secondary to the felines, appropriate for the most self-possessed of creatures. They live in Istanbul, making Kedi something of a cat's eye travelogue of that ancient city, albeit it is much more abou… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Perfect
Discuss
I prefer a comedy after a bad day. Logan ain't no comedy, but it sure as hell was balm for a bad day. More Johnny Cash than Johnny Storm, it's the first Country comik movie, yet returns to true X-Men in the end. Marvel, wow. Keep on keeping on with one riveting, arousing blockbuster after another. Grounded in human foibles as is their special wont, Logan bids adieu to the Wolverine, a titan of the Marvel canon, alone and as a seminal X-Man. It's a hell of a swan song, with Hugh Jackman playing it for all it's worth, joined by Patrick Stewart as the even more illing Charles Xavier, Pr… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Really Great
Discuss
Get Out melds edgy African-American humor with classic horror movie tropes, the admixture delivered with near Hitchcockian mastery. That's how Jordan Peele's brilliant movie brings the Black Lives Matter sensibility to horrific life. The conceit is not that whites don't care if blacks live or die, it's that whites hunt down blacks, for sport or some crazy shit. IOW, the whole paranoid racial schtick runs rampant in Get Out. It's a spectacularly effective premise for a movie, which Peele & Co. deliver spectacularly well. No wonder Get Out is breaking box office records. Now it deser… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Great
Discuss
Vol. 2 is a great time at the mall multiplex, if not the nearly perfect blockbuster experience that Vol. 1 was. Faint praise perhaps, but then this first sequel has nearly impossible shoes to fill, as the origin movie was so effortless in its joyous affectations. Still, a great blockbuster like this ain't chopped liver, especially when it's studded with LOLs and features an iconic Kurt Russell performance. Now to several other positives:
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Great
Discuss
The Chinese vs. the Japanese in the 16th century makes for a great martial-arts war movie, full of Shaolin vs. samurai, kung fu vs. karate. This Chinese production tells the tale from the Chinese POV, with Japanese pirates raiding peaceful Han Chinese villages and engaging in war crimes as part of their pillaging. For an Occidental viewer like me, it's a reminder that China and Japan have been in conflict for centuries. God of War is mostly a hagiographic portrait of "General Qi Jiguang":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi_Jiguang, the Ming Dynasty hero who led the successful defense agai… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Great
Discuss
Their Finest is an exceptionally fine movie, a post-modern take on the decidedly earnest Greatest Generation, British variety. Unfortunately, it takes exceptional effort to find a theater where it's playing. Speaking of exceptional, Gemma Arterton, Sam Clafin and Bill Nighy are exceptionally fine moviestars. Arterton has exceptionally well-formed lips, from which subtly smart dialogue naturally emerges. Clafin's refined yet rakish good looks mark him as a post-modern Cary Grant, while Nighy remains perhaps the most exceptionally charismatic actor working today, especially when he gets … |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Perfect
Discuss
Miss Israel kicks ass as Wonder Woman. But that's not all, not by a long shot. Wonder Woman is a perfect superhero movie, deeply of the genre, yet soaring above it. That puts it in the small pantheon of DC movies, deadly earnest in the DC tradition, a la "The Dark Knight":https://viewguide.com/movie_reviews/1379-the-dark-knight, yet shot through with profoundly charming LOLs. Wow, Wonder Woman saves the summer! That's a superhero accomplishment if ever there was one. Gal Gadot and Chris Pine make an exceptionally attractive pair of leads, physically and charismatically. The onetime M… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Great
Discuss
Sam Elliott deserves a Western-icon lifetime achievement award. Hey, that'd make a great little movie, if it included the behind-the-scenes angst of an elderly man facing his mortality, even as he's feted by fans and groupies alike. The Hero is all that, albeit Elliott plays a less successful doppelgänger of himself. The Hero is every bit the Hollywood love-letter that "La La Land":https://www.viewguide.com/movie_reviews/4483-la-la-land was, Western division. After all, the pull and lore of the movie industry is purest in Westerns, e.g., Elliott in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Really Great
Discuss
Choreography comes to car chases in Baby Driver. British director Edgar Wright's benchmark blockbuster presents like Tarantino set to music. Nowhere to Run, Radar Love and Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up lead the 60s & 70s chestnuts that impart old-school cool into this new-school movie. Star power finishes the job. A juke-box musical as much as a romance, drama or satire, Baby Driver is a consummate exercise in style. Nihilistic in the extreme, its inverse-ethics could have been drawn straight from "Suicide Squad":https://www.viewguide.com/movies/381682-suicide-squad, sadly. h6… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Really Great
Discuss
Spider-Man hasn't lacked great reboots, but this third is the greatest yet. It's the most High School by far, if not the first set in that adolescent crucible. Mostly, Spider-Man: Homecoming benefits by being the first Spider-Man movie to be produced by Marvel, odd though that may seem. Marvel means a lot, a whole lot when it comes to superior superhero movies, not least having Robert Downey Jr. drop into the picture. Megawattage superstar power comes with him, and that's without the miraculous Iron Man suit, which is now voiced by the Oscar-winning Jennifer Connelly. Megawattage. A… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Great
Discuss
War is Hell — an equation that the concluding episode of Planet of the Apes hammers home relentlessly. Both sides of the war for Earth, aka the Planet of the Apes, have understandable reasons to kill The Other. Their war is most assuredly hell, a legitimate, even perfectly justifiable hell, and is perfectly brought to life. Still, this concluding chapter of the tremendously assured "Planet of the Apes":https://www.viewguide.com/searches?query=planet+of+the+apes&x=0&y=0 trilogy is far from a perfect movie. Disappointing, as perfection was expected following the really great "Dawn o… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Really Great
Discuss
Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk sets a new standard in faux cinéma vérité, so extreme is its IMAX-sized verisimilitude. As to its subject, it's not as if the Miracle of Dunkirk has been ignored in World War II movies, most recently forming the backdrop of "Their Finest":https://www.viewguide.com/movie_reviews/4554-their-finest. But it's never been recreated at THIS SCALE. Nolan deftly folds his super-sized film in on itself, as its three focus-areas flash forward and back. You end up seeing key events from multiple points of view, e.g., a Spitfire shoots down a Luftwaffe bomber at the last… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Really Great
Discuss
Wind River, the best American crime movie in recent memory, is as American as it could possibly be. Native-American at its core, cowboy on its face, Wind River transcends its stunningly assured procedural tropes to create a haunting tale of Western life in 2017, on the res and off, for Indians and Anglos alike. The acting is shockingly good, especially from Jeremy Renner, but also from the large cast of reds and whites. Graham Greene, Gil Birmingham and Kelsey Chow are three Native-Americans who jump offscreen, while the always great Jon Bernthal delivers one perfect scene as a hell… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Great
Discuss
Good Time is a helluva good time movie, if your taste in movie entertainment includes sickly funny slices of life from the underbelly of society. Mine does, for better or worse, so this demented masterpiece struck me and most of my entire theater as OMG and increasingly LOL pretty much all the way through. Wow. There weren't a lot of us in the theater mind you, but everyone seemed to know what they were getting into. Happily, I wasn't the only one laughing as one spectacularly bad decision after another led to a series of harmful outcomes. Being predictable, these pratfalls were theref… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Really Great
Discuss
Kingsman II is a fully-realized exercise in high style, low blows, expensive tricks and lots of big laughs. You could call it a brilliant blockbuster, in the British sense of brilliant: bright, bold, brisk, buttoned down.
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Really Great
Discuss
Battle of the Sexes is a terrific movie about a sociological sensation that was as fun as it was important, and it was very, very important. Bobby Riggs vs. Billie Jean King was that big. The movie illuminates not just the sexual politics at play, but also early seventies mass media and a much more elegant era of tennis. Bobby Riggs was an American original, a 55 year-old tennis hustler who spent several years as world #1 in men's tennis. Hustler? Rosie Casals quips in the movie that he put the show into chauvinist. Ironically, Riggs was a loyal husband who only played a lout on TV – l… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Great
Discuss
The American hero who almost single-handedly defeated institutional racism personified his unique first name. Lots of Marshalls, just one Thurgood, which is why Marshall is a poor title for this stirring biopic. OTOH, Thurgood sounds like a thoroughly good historical drama about Thurgood Marshall's early days, when black America, indeed all America, needed someone of his profound gifts and indomitable courage. Marshall gives us young Thurgood, thereby resetting the fixed image of an elderly Supreme Court justice. It's not just Thurgood, but The Young Thurgood, a la "The Young … |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Really Great
Discuss
See this movie. It's our duty as citizens, but also deeply cathartic. Tears ran down my face, twice, yet my heart was warmed. Real men behaving chivalrously does that to me, inspires a man-cry. Strong women too! Unwieldy title aside, Only the Brave artfully recounts the story of the 19 Arizona hotshots killed in 2013. What was unfathomable is understandable now, after the movie, yet in a gentle way. We don't see them die. The movie is about how they lived, loved and trained, followed by the brave grief of friends and families. Basically, Only the Brave is the firefighters' "Lone S… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Great
Discuss
One needn't be familiar with Blade Runner minutiae to find Blade Runner 2049 gripping from the start, thought provoking by the middle and shattering at the end. Yep, this terrific sci-fi sequel works for newbies. Thus, it's not just an aficionado's treat. It's meat for the masses. Somehow the reverse has become the conventional wisdom. Blade Runner 2 has been derided as a bust. Not only isn't it a bust, having grossed a quarter-billion dollars, but it works on its own artistic merits, "legendary origin story":https://www.viewguide.com/movies/3588-blade-runner notwithstanding. The … |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Perfect
2 Forum Replies
Marvel puts it all together for one of their very best movies yet in Thor: Ragnarok, an absolutely terrific blockbuster, and a damn funny one at that. Crayon colored, heavenly inspired, charismatically performed, deeply rooted yet easily accessible, it would be great even it weren't a sophisticated LOL-fest. But it is. Notwithstanding typical Marvel density of plot, backstory and character, Thor 3 is easier to follow than many Marvel movies, especially the often convoluted Avengers episodes. It's amazing how smooth it is. Add in well-crafted moviestar performances from Chris Hemsw… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Great
Discuss
The professional critics are wrong. Daddy's Home 2 is a very funny and wickedly entertaining movie. Sure, it's also shallow and morally repugnant, a perfectly polished expression of Hollywood Family Values. Beware and enjoy. Funny is funny, and this daddy-fest is a consistent LOL-fest. My packed theater loved it. But, wait, how can such a terribly degrading movie be great? Well, let's take it from the beginning. 2015: Daddy's Home 1 looked bad from the moment the trailer started running on heavy rotation. In the event, "the movie itself was Barely OK":https://www.viewguide.com/mov… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Really Great
Discuss
This oddly titled gem is a crazy crime movie from MidAmerica, set in fictional Ebbing, Missouri, not in Fargo, North Dakota, or Hibbing, Minnesota, or a real hicksville you may know in the Central Time Zone. Forbidding title aside, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing is readily accessible and seductively gripping. It builds on its own crazy, inexorable logic, one awful turn leading to another, with anger begetting anger, as one character observes. And yet, regular touches of grace punctuate its sad parade of deplorables, most from Frances McDormand, in yet another consummate performance… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Great
Discuss
The Last Jedi has lots to love and more than a bit to disdain. I found myself un-aggrieved, and loved it. Notwithstanding its blasters and disasters, Rian Johnson's first Star Wars movie is deeply human and personal, in true Star Wars fashion. "Why did you come?" asks Luke Skywalker in one telling example. Happily, Johnson keeps it witty throughout, in both word and deed. This is the writer/director who dazzled and tickled us five years ago with "Looper":https://www.viewguide.com/movie_reviews/3624-looper. That was a better movie than this, and yet his Star Wars VIII is still great… |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Great
Discuss
Instead of The King's Speech, Darkest Hour is The Prime Minister's Speeches, Churchill's speeches at the outset of WWII. It fixates on Sir Winston's galvanizing addresses to Parliament and the British people during the darkest hour for the UK, and for all of civilization. His words ignited the resistance, worldwide. "The King's Speech":https://www.viewguide.com/movie_reviews/2932-the-kings-speech trod nearby ground, focusing on how King George VI addressed the British people during Britain's darkest hour, with Churchill a peripheral player. Unlike his Majesty, words came naturally … |
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Wick
– with 66 Trust Points – rated it
Really Great
Discuss
All the Money in the World slays as a kidnapping thriller and as a biopic of the legendary J. Paul Getty, once the world's richest man. The thriller jumps off to a startling beginning, takes a series of surprising turns, and remains thrilling right up to the well-known ending. That's a solid showing, albeit expected with the great Ridley Scott behind the camera. The fascinating biopic, however, is an unexpected bonus. There was a time when the name J. Paul Getty was synonymous with unfathomable wealth, starting in the Sixties and proceeding into the shaggy Seventies, when his namesake … |
