1. Beyoncé: Lemonade

Directors: Kahlil Joseph, Beyoncé Knowles Carter, Melina Matsoukas, Todd Tourso, Dikayl Rimmasch, Jonas Åkerlund, Mark Romanek, and Warsan Shire

Teeming with visions of black feminist fortitude, remixed American history, and ancient sources of strength, Beyoncé’s latest world-halting opus is dense enough to warrant an entire college course devoted to unpacking its multitudes. In fact, that’s already happened: This fall, The University of Texas at San Antonio offered a multimedia class called Black Women, Beyoncé & Popular Culture that used Lemonade as an intellectual springboard. This is Beyoncé’s power. She is the world’s most awe-inspiring pop star and she’s using her mind, money, and reach to challenge, to teach. Michael Jackson, the forefather of statement music videos, revolutionized the form with ambition and imagination, but his rise as a visual powerhouse coincided with the gradual erasure of his own physical blackness; as her ideas become more intricate and grand, Beyoncé is placing her blackness—and the overarching struggle of black womanhood—to the fore.

Part of this film’s genius is how it packs all of its heady allusions and personal politicking into something that, on its surface, would make TMZ drool. But the tabloid theatrics—will the real Becky please stand up?!—essentially serve as a Trojan Horse, with Beyoncé leveraging her fame and (supposed) family drama into something much more far-reaching. She cuts a Nefertiti silhouette and transforms a historical place of slavery and suffering into a bastion of liberation (and twerking) in “Sorry”; she flaunts her Southern heritage while standing atop a drowning police car in “Formation”; she unleashes torrents of fire wherever she sets her feet. Lemonade conjures a world where women of color are omnipotent and where men are swept to the side, barely-there—it’s graduate level pop art that mulls the past while setting its sight on what’s to come. —Ryan Dombal

[Watch Lemonade in full on TIDAL.]