Metacritic Unveils Best-Reviewed Movies of 2017 So Far
It’s August now, and horrifying as the information that 2017 is more than half over may be, it’s still a good time to take a step back and take stock of how the year has been going so far. For Earth, and to a greater extent, America — not good. For the movies — pretty great! The first half of the year has seen a generous number of strong releases at the arthouse and multiplex, and review aggregation site Metacritic has done us a service in our effort to keep track of it all.
The site recently published a list of the 25 best-reviewed films of the year to date, and readers in search of a makeshift guide to the year in movies so far would do well to start there. Metacritic’s system of compiling reviews has a little more nuance than that of Rotten Tomatoes, assigning each review a specific numerical value and averaging those rather than working from a strict fresh-rotten good-bad binary. As such, the list favors those films that may have flown under the radar during the past months, never attracting enough attention to provoke a backlash and the negative reviews that come with it. At least, that’s one possible explanation as to how jazz great Lee Morgan’s bio-documentary I Called Him Morgan may have ended up in the number-one spot.
The top ten has been reproduced below for your perusal. On it, you’ll find many of the year’s finest unsung foreign gems (the Farhadi and Mungiu films are both excellent and underacknowledged) and indie sleepers. You’ll also find some of the bigger critically acclaimed films of the year, including Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick, and Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Happy watching:
- I Called Him Morgan (dir. Kasper Collin)
- Baby Driver (dir. Edgar Wright)
- The Big Sick (dir. Michael Showalter)
- The Salesman (dir. Asghar Farhadi)
- My Life as a Zucchini (dir. Claude Barras)
- Harmonium (dir. Kōji Fukada)
- After the Storm (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda)
- Graduation (dir. Cristian Mungiu)
- Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele)
- The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (dir. Aki Kaurismäki)