1. Licorice Pizza2. The French Dispatch Of The Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun3. West Side Story4. Red Rocket5. Titane6. The Worst Person In The World7. 8. No Sudden Move9. Spencer10. The Green Knight11. Pig12. 13. Luca14. 15. West Side Story would be the musical of the year based purely on Spielberg’s thrilling technical skill, but I teared up at least three times watching this adaptation of a more contemporary Broadway show (originated, in the interest of full disclosure, by my college classmate Lin-Manuel Miranda). For that matter, Jon M. Chu may not be at the Spielberg level, but he sure knows his way around a production number, with some of the best-staged movie-musical scenes of the 21st century so far. See our for one; see the stunning “Pacienca y Fe” for another, a tour de force juxtaposition of family memories and immigration history, very much in conversation with West Side Story’s “America.”Around these parts, folks took a sensible attitude toward the fresh-faced, energized, go-nowhere mediocrity of Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy; my trusted editor A.A. Dowd was appropriately skeptical, if a little gentle on their witless phoniness. But over on the broader movie-critic internet as repped by Rotten Tomatoes, the Fear Street movies supposedly just got better and better as they went along. It’s like everyone was hallucinating the horror pastiches of their dreams based on the movies’ appealing loglines, rather than the movies themselves—a triptych of flabby, nonsensical slasher riffs that synthetically re-process horror tropes into a teen-soap theme park, lousy with careless anachronisms and laugh-free wisecracks.Now, if you’re looking for an actually good slasher movie, check out David Gordon Green’s weirdly reviled follow-up to his . The movie’s storytelling gets a little diffuse, but Green’s ears and eyes are so attentive to the bit players of Haddonfield that Halloween Kills feels, at times, like a gorehound version of his small-town indie character studies like or . Green portrays the elderly Michael Myers as an evil, overgrown child, wandering through his hometown and destroying it piece by piece, turning the “middle movie” status of Kills into an expression of chilling despair.It’s a pulpy western with a dream cast—Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Regina King, LaKeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz, Delroy Lindo—directed by a promising artist who seems ready to prove that western revivals aren’t the exclusive territory of Quentin Tarantino. Why, then, does so much of The Harder They Fall feel like Tarantino warmed-over? Despite some zesty stylistic flourishes from director Jeymes Samuel, much of Harder proceeds at a trot, too slow for goofy Desperado status, too cartoonish to resonate as drama.I caught up with Werewolves Within on a whim, several weeks into its theatrical run, with a friend I hadn’t seen in a couple of years, and it remains one of the only comedies I’ve seen in a movie theater since COVID happened. So maybe the circumstances of this videogame-based whodunit-style werewolf comedy helped nudge it onto the lower reaches of my best-of list. But those brief good vibes were enhanced by the movie itself, a dizzying horror farce that takes infectious glee in positioning its ensemble in packed frames and supplying them with rapid-fire banter, asides, and commentary. It’s a delightful capitalization on the promise director Josh Ruben showed with the similarly housebound .