★ 9.0major
Denis Villeneuve's 2016 first-contact drama opens on a linguist raising a daughter who doesn't survive childhood, then spends two hours on the painstaking work of talking to aliens. The two threads turn out to be the same thread -- told at an angle most viewers won't catch the first time.
★ 8.5major
M. Night Shyamalan's 2016 thriller follows a man with 23 distinct personalities and the three teenagers he's abducted, building toward a 24th persona his therapist fears more than any of the others. What the film is quietly doing with that fear -- and what it reveals about its own genre in its final scene -- is not what the marketing prepared audiences for.
★ 9.0mind-bending
Alejandro Amenábar's 2001 Gothic ghost story follows a mother and her two photosensitive children, sealed inside a fog-bound manor and convinced something unseen is stalking their home. Its closing minutes invert who's haunting whom, and the film is built to reward watching it again with that reversal in mind.