Mad Max: Fury Road Has any movie that we’ve waited 30 years for ever turned out this well? Not only did George Miller’s revitalization of his long-dormant franchise meet fan expectations, but it pumped new high-octane blood into the world Miller left behind back in 1985. Beautiful, loud (thanks, Junkie XL), and boldly feminist, Mad Max: Fury Road took a flamethrower to the traditional Summer of Superheroes. The season still belonged to the Avengers and the dinosaurs at the box office, but Fury Road got us excited for life post-apocalypse. —Angela Watercutter

Ex Machina Hearing that novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland was going to be making his directorial debut seemed like good news; hearing that it would be with a movie about a robot seemed...less good. Yet, the resulting tale of duplicity and existentialism turned out to be the best surprise of the year. The cast was as powerful as it was tiny, with breakout performances from Domhnall Gleason, Alicia Vikander, and Oscar Isaac. The script about a Turing Test gone awry, also by Garland, was thorny and imaginative. And the production design, which coaxed soul out of hardware and eroticism out of isolation, gave us images that endure months later and proved that you can't spell "humanity" without "AI." —Peter Rubin

Creed Attempting to resurrect the moribund Rocky franchise could have been like an Icarus moment for young director Ryan Coogler. But his vision for the story of Adonis "Donnie" Creed, Apollo's son, was the right one. Creed hits every familiar sports movie beat, but does it with flair and style that hasn’t been there since the gritty original back in 1976. Now, Stallone is getting Supporting Actor recognition for his turn as an older, wiser Rocky Balboa; Michael B. Jordan is rightly a big-time movie star; and Coogler (who made his bones with the astonishing Fruitvale Station) is in talks to direct Marvel's Black Panther. Quite the underdog story. —K.M. McFarland

The Revenant Let’s get this out of the way: this movie is rough. If you care about women, animals, the extremities of the human body, or humanity’s overall moral compass, it's pretty hard to watch. It’s two and a half hours of gritty wilderness survival in service of a vendetta (that would be the resilient Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass, gunning for the amazing Tom Hardy as John Fitzgerald), and and zero moments of levity. But Alejandro Iñárritu's latest film is also a gorgeously-shot examination of what a person would do to survive. And what that means for all of us. Painfully harrowing? Yes. Exquisite to watch? Absolutely. —Angela Watercutter

Star Wars: The Force Awakens There was a point in early December when even the die-hardest Star Wars fan began to flag. Trailer after trailer, clip after clip, we'd been assaulted with the same two dozen moments in every conceivable permutation, and it began to feel like the movie simply had no connective tissue. That changed as soon as the familiar music swelled and the iconic text crawl began. For two hours and 15 minutes, J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan forged an alloy of nostalgia and wonder that bridged old and new and turned a squadron of young actors into heroes for an all-new generation of fans. It was truly a Force to be reckoned with. —Peter Rubin

Sicario Emily Blunt claimed her action film bonafides in last year's Edge of Tomorrow, but her career-best performance came as a tough, horrified FBI agent in Sicario, a bare, chilling portrayal of the War on Drugs along the US/Mexico border. Johan Johannsson's music ranks among the best electronic-tinged scores of the year, Roger Deakins's cinematography is awards-worthy, and director Denis Villeneuve made a major breakthrough with his latest that underlines why he's been tapped for the upcoming Blade Runner sequel. We can't wait to see what he does when he goes off-world. —K.M. McFarland

The Martian Dear Ridley Scott: You had us worried there for a minute. After a couple disappointing movies (Exodus: Gods and Kings, The Counselor), we worried maybe you'd lost your mojo. This worry grew when we heard you were adapting Andy Weir’s beloved lost-in-space book The Martian. We shouldn’t have lost faith. The Martian—thanks in large part to a great cast that included Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Jessica Chastain—was exciting, nerve-wracking, and just about the best movie we’ve seen about astronauts in a hot minute. You even made potato farming on the Red Planet seem fun, if smelly. Kudos to you, sir. —Angela Watercutter

Spotlight Tom McCarthy’s film about the Boston Globe's investigation into the Catholic church cover-up of sexual abuse in the Boston Archdiocese doesn’t have the visual fireworks to compete with flashier Oscar candidates like Carol or The Revenant. But it’s a vital and compelling story, fiercely acted by the core group of Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Brian D’Arcy James. Instead of depicting the investigation as a larger metaphor for the state of America, Spotlight hews as closely to the facts as possible, making subtle nods to larger issues while keeping its focus on the central case. It’s a quietly remarkable film that will stay with viewers long after it’s over—not for its sturm und drang, but for the strength of its storytelling. —K.M. McFarland

It Follows If there was a more WTF just happened?! horror movie this year than It Follows, we don’t know what it is. The sex-is-dangerous thing has been done hundreds of times before in the genre, but writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s take on it, which turned danger into an STD, made it feel new all over again. And the creepy followers that haunt Jay (Maika Monroe) and her friends throughout *It’*s 100 minutes are so terrifyingly real they may never leave your dreams. (Neither does the movie’s Disasterpeace score.) If you only saw one horror movie this year, this was the one to see. —Angela Watercutter

Steve Jobs We’ve had a lot of movies—both narrative films and documentaries—about Steve Jobs in the last few years. Steve Jobs is the best. Anchored by an intense performance by Michael Fassbender as Jobs, Danny Boyle’s movie focuses less on trying to squeeze in every detail from the Apple founder’s life and instead paints a more abstract portrait of who he was. The movie, written by Aaron Sorkin and adapted from Walter Isaacson’s book, follows Jobs just before he’s about to launch the three most important products of his life: the Apple Macintosh in 1984, the NeXTcube in 1988, and the Apple iMac in 1998. But it’s not about the gizmos, it’s about the man—or, at least, who people thought he was. And that’s the best we can ask for. —Angela Watercutter