USA

The first ten minutes of Up depicting the entire life of Carl and Ellie Fredricksen are widely considered the most devastating sequence in animation history. Widower Carl at 78 attaches thousands of balloons to his house and lifts off for South America — accidentally bringing along eight-year-old Wilderness Explorer Russell who was on his porch. What follows is a funny warm and ultimately transcendent adventure about grief friendship and the unexpected joys that come when we finally stop trying to preserve the past.

Seven hundred years in the future Earth has been buried under garbage and all humans live on a space cruise ship while WALL-E robots clean up the mess. Only one WALL-E remains operational — a small curious robot who has developed a distinct personality from centuries of solitude and fallen in love with musicals. When a sleek probe robot named EVE arrives WALL-E falls helplessly in love. Andrew Stanton's Pixar masterpiece says more about consumerism loneliness and love in its near-wordless first act than most films manage in two hours.

Eleven-year-old Riley's interior emotional life is managed by five personified emotions — Joy Fear Anger Disgust and Sadness — working from Headquarters inside her mind. When Riley's family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco Joy and Sadness are accidentally separated and must journey through the vast landscape of Riley's mind to get back. Pete Docter's Pixar masterpiece is a genuine achievement — an adventure story that is also a profound meditation on why sadness is not the enemy of happiness but an essential partner to it.

Aspiring actress Mia and jazz pianist Sebastian fall in love in Los Angeles while both chasing their dreams. Their love is electric but as each finds the success they have been working toward the cost to their relationship becomes clear. Damien Chazelle's modern musical is simultaneously a dazzling homage to Hollywood's golden age and a bittersweet honest story about the sacrifices that passion and ambition demand. The final wordless sequence — what might have been — is one of cinema's most beautiful and quietly devastating endings.

Black photographer Chris visits the family estate of his white girlfriend for a weekend and immediately senses something wrong beneath the performative liberalism of her parents and their friends. As the weekend progresses the source of his unease gradually and horrifyingly reveals itself. Jordan Peele's debut is a masterpiece of sustained dread and social commentary using horror mechanics to examine the specific terror of Black people in white liberal spaces. Daniel Kaluuya's performance — expressing enormous distress through eyes alone in one devastating scene — is the emotional center of a film that cannot be unseen.

In a post-apocalyptic world decimated by sightless alien creatures that hunt by sound the Abbott family survives through near-total silence. Every footstep every whisper could be the last. As Evelyn approaches the end of a pregnancy the family must somehow bring a screaming newborn into a world where any sound means death. John Krasinski directs his wife Emily Blunt in a film of extraordinary tension — a horror movie that is also a deeply moving meditation on parenthood sacrifice and the lengths we will go to protect those we love.

When Loki arrives on Earth with an alien army to seize the Tesseract Nick Fury activates the Avengers Initiative bringing together Iron Man Captain America Thor the Hulk Black Widow and Hawkeye for the first time. Joss Whedon's film solved the seemingly impossible problem of balancing six very different heroes with wit flair and genuine understanding of what makes each of them interesting. The Battle of New York remains one of the great blockbuster action sequences and the team dynamic it established powered the entire MCU.

The aging patriarch of the Corleone crime dynasty Don Vito Corleone is shot and nearly killed when he refuses to back a rival gangster's narcotics operation. In the chaos that follows his reluctant youngest son Michael is drawn step by irreversible step into the world his father built. What begins as an act of love becomes a transformation so complete and so cold that by the end Michael has become something his father never intended him to be. Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece is widely considered the greatest American film ever made — a Shakespearean tragedy dressed as a gangster film.

After Spider-Man's identity is exposed Peter asks Doctor Strange to make the world forget. The spell tears open the multiverse pulling in villains and Spider-Men from alternate realities. Tom Holland's Peter must grapple with the moral consequences of trying to save people who chose evil in their own worlds while the film delivers fan service that is genuinely emotionally earned. Both the most spectacular Marvel event movie and one of its most human stories about what it truly means to be Spider-Man.

Batman District Attorney Harvey Dent and Lieutenant Gordon form an alliance to clean up Gotham's organized crime. Then the Joker arrives — not to gain power or money but simply to prove that civilization is a thin coat of paint over chaos. Heath Ledger's posthumous Oscar-winning performance is one of the most extraordinary pieces of acting in cinema history: genuinely unpredictable philosophically terrifying and impossible to look away from. Christopher Nolan's superhero film transcends the genre to become a profound meditation on order morality and the price of fighting darkness without becoming it.