Sometimes you watch a movie and you feel like you just haven’t seen the same thing everyone else saw. For me, Uncut Gems , from directors Benny and Josh Safdie, is just such a movie, because the roar of praise behind it baffles me.

Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles exploded onto the scene with the exceedingly high-energy 2002 drama City of God , and followed that up with the only-slightly-less-kinetic John Le Carre adaptation The Constant Gardener . So I was pretty curious to see how he’d handle The Two Popes , a fictional version of a 2012 meeting between Pope Benedict XVI and the man who would soon be Pope Francis—because, frankly, this sounded like it could be My Dinner With Andre with, well… popes.

Last winter, Netflix raised eyebrows by nearly winning Best Picture at the Oscars with Alfonso Cuaron’s gorgeous film Roma . But rumors at the time indicated some people weren’t willing to vote for Roma because they didn’t want to reward, or encourage, what they saw as a company that was taking movies out of theaters and threatening moviegoing culture. Now, a year later, this is going to be a lot harder to do.

Director Trey Edward Shults has previously made two movies, one of which I liked, and one of which I loathed, so I was interested to see his newest, Waves , to see how it would break the tie. Strangely, somehow it didn’t. Because I can’t remember the last time I had less of a reaction to a movie. This is an odd thing to say, and an even odder thing to experience, but, all in all, Waves made me feel… basically nothing.

The moment Daniel Craig opened his mouth in Knives Out and let forth with the most ridiculous quasi-Southern accent, I thought, “my god, Daniel, what are you doing ?” By the end of the movie, I wasn’t just on board, I was ready for a whole series starring his character, private detective Benoit Blanc.

No offense to anyone, but you’d have to be pretty cynical to approach Mr. Rogers assuming he was something different from what he appeared to be. Journalist Tom Junod was that cynical when he was assigned to profile Rogers, figuring “Mr. Rogers” was a character that the separate man Fred Rogers played on TV. But through what Junod describes as Rogers’ “relentless kindness,” Junod’s defenses fell and his entire life was changed. Junod is fictionalized as a man named Lloyd Vogel in A Beautiful Day

It’s not often a movie breaks no ground whatsoever, is chock full of clichés, is two-and-a-half hours long, and somehow still finds a way to be completely entertaining and engaging from basically the first frame to the last. But I’ll be darned if Ford v Ferrari doesn’t pull it off.

Turning Nazis into goofballs is not, in itself, really a joke, so I was relieved to find out Jojo Rabbit , from the quirky New Zealand director Taika Waititi, doesn't rely solely on this approach. It's definitely there, but it's far from the only joke, and it's also far from what the movie wants to say.

It’s likely you’ll find few movies as simultaneously vulgar and literate as The Lighthouse . Director Robert Eggers’ film is a masterpiece, though one that’s likely to put off a sizable portion of its audience.

Back in June, after I saw Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die , I argued there didn’t need to be any more zombie movies. I knew there would be, and said as much, but even though it’s only been a few months, I’ve so far been proven distressingly correct.