This year’s selection of besties includes a number of tales about writers, forced or chosen families, and several movies with question marks in the title. That probably doesn’t mean a thing, but somehow underlines the uncertainty of our increasingly weird times.

Shoplifters
The latest from Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda somehow captures the stranger aspects of family in a tale of misfits and left-behinds who cling together on the bottom rung of Tokyo society. And it’s mostly a comedy.

The Favourite
Who could have guessed that austere Greek weirdo Yorgos Lanthimos would be a perfect match with an international cast and crew to tell a deeply funny, faux-antique story about power, money, and gender roles? The acting triumvirate of Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz, and Olivia Colman presents a challenge at awards time.

Roma
Alfonso Cuarón’s dreamlike, black-and-white evocation of a pivotal year in his Mexico City childhood is a critic’s darling, and something of a target for folks who want their politics kept clear and tidy. The relationship between the filmmaker’s family and its two Indigenous maids remains murky, just as it was in real life.

Can You Ever Forgive Me?
After starring in increasingly dire broad comedies, Melissa McCarthy pulls a blinder, in a semistraight role, as a real-life nonfiction writer who decides to get creative in all the wrong ways. Richard E. Grant is sure to nab top supporting awards as the hapless hustler who helps enable her rise and fall.

Colette
Keira Knightley deftly nails the transition from provincial dilettante to world-class writer in a cracking, if overlooked, historical tale that oddly parallels The Favourite and Forgive Me?, regarding elements of fraud, self-confidence, and the general uselessness of men.

Eighth Grade
The overly familiar coming-of-age formula is upended in Bo Burnham’s sweet-and-sour tale, with newcomer Elsie Fisher outstanding as a shy grade-eighter whose self-image is at serious odds with the brazenly confident face she wears for YouTube videos no one else watches.

Burning
Ex-Canadian Steven Yeun plays an ethereally elusive rich kid in this spectacularly clever South Korean film, which centres on Yoo Ah-in as a poor would-be writer who is haunted by the idea of being left out of upper-class privilege. He’s right to be pissed, but that way madness lies!

Transit
German provocateur Christian Petzold updates a Nazi-era masterpiece on the terror of waiting during wartime—for trouble or salvation—by moving the (in)action to today, with no preamble or explanation. Still, the story speaks for itself, and to the inability of people to recognize when and how history repeats.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
The very notion of citizenship, as represented by being neighbourly to those you know and those you don’t, is embodied by the late Fred Rogers, whose televised mission to engage with children as moral agents is beautifully captured in this heart-lifting documentary. Rogers’s basic ethos has been buried in an avalanche of “social media” garbage, but it should be revived, not least by a Tom Hanks feature now in production.

Maria By Callas
Lovers of the arts, opera, and biography in general should seek out this cleverly crafted study of the original diva, boasting full performances and stunningly colourful imagery, all bolstered by Callas’s own words, operatic in their own right.