Jordan Peele’s Get Out got Oscar attention way back in February when it landed in US theaters as the first surprise hit of 2017. Here we are, ready to close out the year, and the satirical horror movie is still on top. By Rotten Tomatoes’s measure, it’s the best-reviewed movie of the year. Acclaimed films that followed it like Dunkirk and The Big Sick didn’t hold a candle to the refreshing, zeitgeist-hitting film.
The top 20 movies of 2017, ranked by Rotten Tomatoes
The movie-review aggregator ranked the best movies of 2017 by their Tomatometer scores, which measure the share of critics that gave the films positive reviews. The scores were weighted based on the number of reviews each title received. And films with fewer than 40 reviews were excluded from the list.
Like Get Out, many of the year’s best-reviewed movies were original concepts such as Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan’s stunning World War II epic; The Big Sick, a semi-autobiographical romantic comedy from comedian Kumail Nanjiani; and Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, a heist film set to music.
Despite some of the push back around remakes and reboots in 2017, the superhero genre also had an exceptional year. Wonder Woman, Logan, Thor: Ragnarok, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and The Lego Batman Movie stretched the boundaries of what it meant to be a superhero movie. Each had their own cultural moments. Wonder Woman was the first superhero feature led by a woman, the R-rated Logan was as much a family drama as it was an actioner, Thor: Ragnarok closed out the Thunder God’s trilogy, and Spider-Man: Homecoming was the web-slinger’s long-awaited entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Lego Batman Movie also had the best representation of the Caped Crusader this year. These movies had fantastic box office runs, too, helping offset an uncharacteristically sluggish summer in the US.
Heading into Hollywood awards season, newer, small and mid-budget movies like The Disaster Artist, The Shape of Water, and Lady Bird, which recently overtook Toy Story 2 for a Rotten Tomatoes record, are rapidly rising up the ranks of the year’s best films—and generating Oscar buzz of their own. So are indies like The Florida Project, which boasts a striking performance from a 6-year-old girl.
Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky, meanwhile, was one of the best movies that you probably didn’t see, because of its failed, low-key roll out.
Netflix also made the list of the year’s top movies with Mudbound, which follows two World War II veterans as they re-acclimate into life in their respective rural Mississippi homes. The streaming-video service picked up the film, which could be its first Oscar contender, after it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year.