More than a decade in the making, James Cameron has at long last returned to Pandora, the lush reource-rich moon inhabited by tall blue cat people with swimmers builds that put Michael Phelps to shame, whose bioluminescent nature consciousness was the setting for his own massively-successful and boundary-pushing success Avatar. It’s a three hour long trip to the cutting edge of filmmaking technologies, a three-dimensional marvel of variable frame rates, and a story of a family on the run that demands to be seen in a cinema, nausea be damned.

It’s a big year for donkeys on film, but although Jenny is a sparkling figure in The Banshees of Inisherin, there’s no competition for my favorite. That’s an easy call. On a minute-by-minute basis, I have seen no film this year as surprising in framing, construction, and plotting than Jerzy Skolimowski’s truly dazzling film EO.

Although Laura Poitras’s All The Beauty and the Bloodshed puts decades of Nan Goldin’s photography onto the big screen, neither the film nor its subject are stuck in the past.

Elegance Bratton made his name as a filmmaker whose work in documentaries, short films, and television has focused on exploring the lives of vulnerable Black queer and trans young people in New York. With his feature film debut, he tells a lightly fictionalized version of his own troubled youth. Kicked out of his home at age sixteen by a staunchly homophobic mother, Bratton navigated homelessness for nearly a decade until a decision to enlist in the Marines helped him to find new purpose in his life. It’s a deeply personal story, but lyrically rendered with clear eyes, it’s also universally accessible.