Must watched movies of the year.

                 Must watch movies of the year.

 A drama about the invention of Air Jordans, another about the invention of spicy Cheetos. The exquisite tale of a love so endless it wasn’t mean to exist in this life. And two films by Guy Ritchie. The last thing a best-of movies list should be is predictable, and coming halfway through the year we feel like this one is full of offbeat gems we’re proud to celebrate for the flukiness of their flair. That spirit extends even to the new “Spider-Verse” sequel, the rare mainstream movie chancy enough to restore one’s faith in the joys of escapism.  

Air

 The Nike swoosh is so ubiquitous, it’s hard to remember a time when the athletic-wear giant was actually the underdog in the basketball shoe business. A decade after “Argo” won best picture, Ben Affleck brings his populist instinct — plus, all the competitive energy of a classic sports movie — to the boardroom hustle it took for Nike to convince a rookie named Michael Jordan to lend his name to the company’s fledgling Airline. Like “Moneyball” and “Jerry Maguire,” the movie promises to reveal hidden dimensions of the sports industry without losing track of the human element. Here we cheer as a corporate suit (Matt Damon, running on faith and flop sweat) pitches Phil Knight (Affleck) first, and then the one person who matters: Jordan’s mom (Viola Davis). —Peter Debruge

The Eight mountains

 A relatable, realistic fable about the unbreakable friendship between an Italian city boy and the small-town kid he meets one summer in the Alps, this quietly profound portrait spans almost four decades in the lives of its two protagonists, who stay in touch, even as their paths veer in very different directions. One feels a wanderlust that calls him to the far corners of the world — including the heights of Tibet at one point — while the other stays close to home, finding solace in the familiar. Co-directed by “The Broken Circle Breakdown” duo of Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, the film invites us to examine our own life choices. —PD

 Flamin' Hot

There’s poetic justice to the fact that Eva Longoria’s motivation-minded directorial debut overcame the naysayers to become Searchlight Pictures’ all-time most-watched streaming title. Like its subject, the Frito-Lay janitor (and former gang member) whose idea for a new scorching snack-food flavor showed the company the importance of the Hispanic market, Longoria’s dynamic underdog story reminds those American businesses — including the film industry — still have much to win when embracing Latino consumers and culture. To her credit, the helmer cast actors who look like real people (as opposed to supermodels) and didn’t shy away from Spanish slang. The result fits squarely into a long tradition of inspirational Horatio Alger stories: It shakes up corporate assumptions about where good ideas can come from, while encouraging those who don’t have direct access to the decision-makers to trust in themselves. —PD

Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant

After 25 years of flashy underworld flippancy, who would have expected Guy Ritchie to make an earnest war film? And who would have guessed, given the stakes he set for himself, that it would be a blisteringly humane vision of fear, loyalty, and the existential volatility of combat? It’s set during the war in Afghanistan, where Jake Gyllenhaal, in his finest performance in years, plays a U.S. platoon leader who is wounded in an ambush, and Dar Salim is the wily, tough-as-nails Afghan translator who rescues him, in a journey of harrowing suspense, only to have Gyllenhaal return the favor by plunging back into the war. It’s an anguished, moving tale that redefines Ritchie as a deadly serious Hollywood artist. —Owen Gleiberman

Little Richard: I Am Everything

As the first documentary to fully deliver the Little Richard experience, Lisa Cortes’s film is a mesmerizing testament to the genius-freak fervor of rock ‘n’ roll’s most insanely inspired showman/inventor. Yet the film also hits us with the force of a revelation, as it peels back the layers of Richard Penniman’s identity as a Black queer man — dimensions he was outrageously up-front about, even as they remained the transgressive subtext of his rock ‘n’ roll revolution. Little Richard emerges as a figure of ecstasy and torment, at once in and out, unable to totally live — at least as he really was — in the world that he helped create. —

Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre

I’ve spent a quarter of a century never putting a Guy Ritchie film on my 10 best list. So how is it that I’m now singling out not one but two Ritchie films? There’s a good reason. “Operation Fortune,” unlike “The Covenant,” is another high-octane Ritchie crime caper, but this one is made with delectable craft and vision and play, and a screwball relatability that sneaks up on you. It’s both spry and spectacular, as thrilling in its cleverness as a good “Mission: Impossible” film, as Jason Statham (kickass mastermind), Aubrey Plaza (wizard hacker meets femme fatale), and Josh Harnett (Brad Pitt-like movie star) team up to outwit an underground arms dealer played by Hugh Grant with a puckish malignance worthy of Michael Caine. —OG

Past Lives

Celine Song begins her deeply personal debut feature with a scene the Korean-born, Canada-raised writer-director experienced a few years back, wherein she found herself in a New York bar, sitting between her American husband and her childhood sweetheart, playing interpreter for two men who didn’t speak one another’s language but had one thing in common: their shared love for her. “Past Lives” begins with that surreal exchange, gazing on the dynamic from the outside. By the time the film circles around to it again, audiences have come to identify with Song’s stand-in, played by Greta Lee, whose brain is aswirl with what-might-have-been questions and whose tender, open-hearted film has the wisdom to leave most of them felt but not spoken. —

The Polite Society

“We Are Lady Parts” creator Nida Manzoor samples from a dozen different genres to create a wholly original coming-of-age action-comedy, about a spunky Pakistani British girl named Ria (Priya Kansara) who’s determined to derail her older sister’s marriage to a super-rich, super-hot mama’s boy. Why? Well, Ria hates to see her idol give up on her dreams, so she sets out to dig up dirt on the guy, who — in a twist that would be right at home in a Jordan Peele movie — turns out to have very macabre motives indeed. Manzoor mixes martial arts with silly teen-movie tropes and Guy Ritchie-esque shenanigans (there’s even a musical number) in such a way that puts sisterhood above the patriarchy. —PD

Skinamarink

It’s a horror film set in an old dark house, but that’s kind of like saying that David Lynch’s “Eraser head” is a fairy tale about a nerd with a perm. Kyle Edward Ball shot this experimental creep-out for $15,000 in the home he grew up in, and the movie, which has no plot (but boy does stuff happen), is all about the grainy texture of 3:00 a.m. fear, the TV that blares ancient cartoons, the toys that get tossed around (by someone? something?), the empty carpeted hallways where things go bump (and door frames occasionally move), and the ethereal presence of evil that becomes a voice of evil that becomes a face of evil, all seen through the eyes of two children left on their own. There’s a reason that “Skinamarink” became this year’s unlikeliest breakout indie sensation. More than a horror film, it’s a midnight mass. —OG

The Eight Mountains

The Eight Mountains

The Eight Mountains