With the year drawing to a close, it is time to look back at some of our best reviewed movies of the year. 2017 gave us quite the memorable moments for cinema: from It being the biggest horror movie of recent times, a musical action movie in Baby Driver, the Homecoming of Spider-Man to the MCU and topped off with Luke Skywalker!
But amongst them all, 5 movies stood out as the best of the lot. Here they are, in alphabetical order. Click on the movie titles to read their full reviews.
Blade Runner 2049
Rating: 
Review summary: Full of beautiful, flavoursome visuals and an audacious expansion of the universe created by the original.
Review excerpt: Respectful of the source material, it majestically both builds and deconstructs it in simple yet audacious ways. Questions about the reality of our memories replace those of dreams while the concerns of holographic companions replace the concerns of Replicants. It is so ingeniously plotted that even the late involvement of Deckard into the plot never gives away the films position of who he really might be. Blade Runner 2049 may not provide the ultimate answer to the question of whether Deckard dreams of electronic sheep, but by the time the credits roll, you realize it doesn’t need to.
The Disaster Artist
Rating:
Review summary: A thoroughly engaging salute to an incredibly disastrous film. How often does that happen?
Review excerpt: It gets to a point where we are not sure if we are laughing at one man’s failure or one man’s success at depicting another man’s failure. Sure, it’s a film within a film and we’ve seen films that are love letters to some of the greatest eras in Hollywood. What makes The Disaster Artist a remarkable standout is the fact that this is a moving and at times inspiring love letter to a film that not only flopped, but flopped spectacularly. Which is why the big beating heart of the film is its artistic calling on what perception means to the beholder. Franco and everyone else involved just found gold in what everyone else discarded as trash.
Logan
Rating:
Review summary: Subverts every expectation you have of superhero movies taking a much-loved character & making him iconic.
Review excerpt: In a bold, daring move, the final Wolverine film doesn’t feature the character’s superhero name anywhere in the title, barely registers any connection to the X-men franchise from which it was originally spun-off and to top it all off, carries an R-rating for the heavy duty violence. A classic slice of Americana, combining the road trip sub-genre with the Western, Logan subverts every expectation you have of superhero movies in general and takes a much-loved character and makes him iconic.
War for the Planet of the Apes
Rating:
Review summary: War is a terrific yet atypical blockbuster and a fitting swansong to the Apes trilogy.
Review excerpt: Reeves concludes this trilogy with a poignant yet prophetic and equally poetic ode to humanity’s self-inflected destruction. Irrespective of how well this film does during awards season, Serkis along with Reeves have crafted one of the most memorable films of the year. And if this is the series swansong, it is also one of the most heartbreaking and fully accomplished blockbusters of the year. All hail Caesar!
Wonder Woman
Rating: 
Review summary: The movie drives on an emotional core, allowing us to discover Wonder Woman and connect with her need to save people.
Review excerpt: Patty Jenkins returns to the director’s chair after 14 years to give us Wonder Woman’s definitive superhero origin movie. Not that there has been another one, but Wonder Woman is so sure-footed and delightful that it establishes its titular heroine to film-lore with a permanency similar to Richard Donner’s Superman. The film’s narrative drives on an emotional core, preferring to allow the audience to not just discover a new superhero and her powers but to connect with Wonder Woman’s need to save people.
If you liked our Top 5 list, you can read more of our feature articles here.
