8. “The Florida Project”

When you’re a little kid, you don’t know your place in the world, but that’s okay. Unless you’re terribly precocious and a bit neurotic, you don’t really care about your place in the world. Instead, the world, in your childlike perception, seems like a place where everything is yours. I can’t think of any films in the last 20 years or so that capture this feeling the way that Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project” does.

The purple motel where six-year-old Moonee lives under the intermittent care of her post-teen mom Hailey is called The Magic Castle, but it can’t be anyone’s idea of a Magic Kingdom. Nevertheless, Moonee reigns from there. Every day brings new things to do. New cars to spit on from upper floor landings at another motel. New adult customers to hustle for cones at the ice cream stand. Newish abandoned housing tracts to set on fire. That sort of thing. The poetic realism of the movie is on street level with Moonee and her unsupervised pals, taking in all the dangerous sweetness of their unfettered and feral kiddom.

The movie is about more than that, too. Its name speaks volumes: contrary to what some believed when it was first announced, calling the movie “The Florida Project” wasn’t some kind of “don’t worry, we can’t think of a title” gambit. It’s what Walt Disney called the endeavor that eventually became Disney World. That place, just across the highway from Moonee and friends but as inaccessible to them as Oz, casts its ever-longer shadow over the adult characters in the film.

The loping, summery rhythms of the movie allow the viewer to savor its unusual characters, have-nots who should not arouse our pity but rather our shame. Little Brooklynn Prince is a delight and a heartbreak as Moonee and Willem Dafoe gets to strut both his charisma and compassion as the Magic Castle’s harried manager. The ending turns poetic realism into poetic license, and is a beautiful grace note. (Glenn Kenny)

7. “Personal Shopper”

There's a scene about halfway through Olivier Assayas' "Personal Shopper," his second collaboration with Kristen Stewart, as captivating as she has ever been (and that's saying something) where Stewart's Maureen—personal shopper for a rich woman as well as a medium, working on contacting the spirit of her recently deceased twin brother—tries on one of the dresses she has purchased for her boss. The dress is a sheer black affair, with an S&M-type harness underneath. Stewart, who spends most of the film in bulky nondescript sweaters and woolen caps, considers her reflected image with an expression impossible to name. She adjusts the harness, pulling straps forward to give her room to breathe. The boyishly beautiful Stewart suddenly transforms—naturally, without any fuss—into all things simultaneously: beautiful woman, pre-teen tomboy, fetching gamine, beautiful boy. In the background, Marlene Dietrich croons “Das Hobellied," a fitting accompaniment from one of the most famous androgynes who ever lived. It's a standout scene, one of the scenes of the year, and yet what does it all mean? In "Personal Shopper," meaning is almost beside the point. The film is an eerie ghost story, taking place in a landscape of almost total spiritual flux. It's a mournful contemplation of grief and loss, mortality flickering on the periphery, and Maureen's attempts (mostly failed) to communicate with the dead gives her a desperate urgency. Nothing is stable in "Personal Shopper"—not jobs, relationships, gender, identity. “Personal Shopper” teeters gloriously in the gap of the perpetually "in-between". (Sheila O’Malley)