The best movies of 2. Every summer, The A. V. Club offers an unranked list of the best movies to be released theatrically (and, going forward, on major streaming platforms) during the first half of the year. It’s meant to be a kind of catch- up guide, a way for readers to keep pace with the year in film and start checking off significant titles before the mad rush of awards season.

Still, even getting through this inventory of 2. That’s why we’ve gone ahead and narrowed it down further this year by prefacing each movie with a reason to watch, in the hopes that this may help the cinema- starved make a more educated selection.

We’ve also, to the best of our abilities, identified how and where you can see each of the films. Watch it if. But the writer- director’s work has always been worth more than the sum of its punchlines, and with the blissfully cool Baby Driver, he pushes his gift for delirious genre mashup out of a strictly comedic framework, where it can really fly. Wright casts YA poster boy Ansel Elgort as a getaway driver who floods his constantly ringing ears with a nearly unbroken stream of music—a choice that allows Wright to stage every feverish rush- hour escape or chaotic gunfight as a synchronized pop- radio extravaganza. It’s a gearhead crime caper with a jukebox musical under its hood, and Wright’s refusal to settle on any one section of the veritable video store allows him to swipe pleasures from a bunch of them—including, yes, comedy. It’s the brainchild of comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his wife, Emily V.

Gordon, who worked elements of their real- life romance into the screenplay and then handed it off to Wet Hot American Summer’s Michael Showalter. All the same, Apatow’s influence—as hands- on producer of the film and as one of the remaining big voices of American comedy—is all over this appealing cross- cultural love story. It’s there in the focus on the backstage personalities of the stand- up scene, in the volume of funny supporting players crowded around the edges of the plot, and also, admittedly, in the film’s extended runtime.

But it’s been years since anyone, Apatow included, captured the precise, magic mixture of hilarity and humane character study that defines his best work; much more so than Trainwreck, The Big Sick demonstrates that sticking a distinct comic voice at the center of these conventions can still be a recipe for crowd- pleasing success. All the same, it’s diabolically fun to pretend that The Blackcoat’s Daughter is actually a genre- jumping spinoff of one of the most acclaimed TV shows of the decade. Remember how Sally Draper spent the last couple seasons of Mad Men away at boarding school? Well, Blackcoat drops Kiernan Shipka, the young actress who played Sally, into a nearly identical academic setting.

When no one comes to pick her up for holiday break (classic Don move), Shipka’s character falls under the influence of an unholy force. Or does she? It wouldn’t take too big of a mental leap to deduce that poor Sally, after years of repressed traumatic events (catching her father cheating, confronting a burglar), just totally snapped. Of course, one might hope for a brighter future for the eldest Draper kid than the strangely, powerfully sad denouement Perkins cooked for his terrific inaugural creepshow. Giant- monster action aside, the film works on multiple allegorical levels: There’s an obvious metaphor about the destructive nature of addiction, and a less obvious one about toxic masculinity. That all sounds awfully heavy, but Vigalondo blends pathos and humor with characteristic idiosyncrasy, and his empathetic experiment is buoyed by Hathaway and co- star Jason Sudeikis’ barroom banter. The sharp, empathetic indie drama From Nowhere—cannily released in February, at the height of outrage regarding Trump’s travel ban—tells the story of three high school students who are in the U. S. The film doesn’t pretend there are easy answers to this complex issue, and isn’t remotely interested in scoring points via exaggerated virtue or malevolence.

We reveal the best-reviewed films from the first half of 2017. Baby Driver. Watch it if you wish more crime movies had elaborate musical numbers and more musicals had high-octane car chases. As the movie opens, we see a teenage Emily at the.

Read A Quiet Passion (2017) synopsis, storyline and movie plot summary on Fandango. All the Dates That Are Fit to Print. Here you have it! 2017 Netflix Instant Streaming and DVD release dates as they become available (you can find 2011 here, 2012.

Rather, it offers a realistic, only slightly cynical portrait of a system that rescues some people and fails others, observing that no case file can convey life’s sheer messiness. In detailing the creeping and increasingly justified paranoia that a young black man (Daniel Kaluuya) feels when visiting the family of his white girlfriend (Allison Williams), Peele works in a different key than his past comedy sketches with Keegan- Michael Key, but his sensibility remains.

The movie’s laughs never feel out of place, because Peele recognizes that comedy and horror have common ground in the catharsis they can provide. The laughs supply their own jolts of uncomfortable recognition before and after the horror confirms the movie’s worst fears. Roberto Dur. Chuck Wepner. Is there a famous or even semi- famous prizefighter who hasn’t seen his highs and lows thrown up on the big screen over the past few years?

The problem with these fact- based sports dramas is that they tend to make real life look as contrived as a Rocky sequel. But The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli M. Forbidden Films (2015) Movie Out there. It’s a charming character study, one as hilariously disinterested in glory as the sweet lug at its center. And for those who have gone multiple rounds with the tired “inspirational” clich.

An ex- convict (Ichi The Killer’s Tadanobu Asano) shows up on the doorstep—or technically, at the garage entrance—of an old friend, Toshio (Kanji Furutachi), who welcomes the down- on- his- luck man to work in his workshop and sleep in the home he shares with his wife (Mariko Tsutsui) and young daughter (Momone Shinokawa). As the whole family warms to this quiet face from the past, words like “low- key” and “humane” and even “lovely” may seem apropos. That is the not the movie we’re watching, though—and even those who recognize a certain genre scenario when they see one may be shocked by where Fukada takes his story.

Rather than tug at heartstrings, Harmonium goes for the gut punch. To say much more would spoil the thrilling unpredictability. Australian director Ben Young’s pseudo- true- crime character piece dramatizes the cycles that enable domestic abuse by taking them to their extremes, examining why someone would participate in the most heinous of crimes in an attempt to please their partner. Stephen Curry and Emma Booth star as John and Evelyn White, a working- class couple whose relationship revolves around the kidnapping, torture, and murder of young women; the majority of the film focuses on one of those women, headstrong teenager Vicki Mahoney (Ashleigh Cummings), and how her captivity disrupts the Whites’ sick domestic routine.

Booth gives a standout performance as Evelyn, whose shattered psyche forms the broken heart of the film, and for a first- time director, Young shows remarkable control, giving Hounds Of Love moments of visual beauty to offset all of its emotional ugliness. After kicking things off with the finest automotive set piece of the year (sorry, Baby Driver), director Chad Stahelski concocts a first act that’s almost perversely free of violence; even more so than the original, this is a movie of strange and absurdist interludes, and it asks the audience to check their sense of realism at the door and accept its setting as a Plutonic, neon- lit alternate dimension where the honor- among- thieves clich. But when it comes time for our invincible man in black to kick ass, Stahelski doesn’t hold back on kineticism or imagination. Download Accidental Love (2015) Movie Tumblr. The most memorable sequences—including a shoot- out in a crowd of oblivious commuters and a dazzling finale set in a mirrored art installation—are modern classics of action- movie surrealism.