One thing to know about Creed is that while the film is definitely a mainstream studio movie, it wasn't some spin-off idea generated by a bunch of number-crunchers in a boardroom at MGM who were looking for new ways to rejuvenate the Rocky franchise. Co-writer/director Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station) came up with the story himself years ago and lobbied to tell it, and while the movie absolutely benefits from the iconography established in the previous films (including Sylvester Stallone himself), there's also an undeniably different perspective at work here, one that's arguably just as personal as Stallone's original script that kicked this whole thing off back in 1976.

Another thing to know about Creed? It's really, really good.

Creed
Co-Writer/Director: Ryan Coogler
Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson

A remake of a 2009 Argentinian film that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Secret in Their Eyes is a competent suspense thriller with a dynamite cast. I've seen some people question the reason for this film's existence, and if I'd seen the original film, I might be doing the same thing. But since I haven't seen the first movie and therefore can't compare the two, I'm left to ponder the effectiveness of this film alone, and I found it to be a slick, well-acted murder mystery that makes good use of its stellar talent.

Secret in Their Eyes

Though it will rightfully garner some attention for Will Smith's impressive lead performance, Concussion is a largely flat procedural about the discovery of CTE, the disease caused by the sort of repeated head trauma regularly experienced by NFL players. It's clear writer/director Peter Landesman is passionate about the subject, but this poorly paced and meandering drama seems as if he set out to make a conspiracy thriller and forgot all about the "thriller" aspect. Not as revelatory as Michael Mann's The Insider, which pitted a different small-time David against a multi-billion dollar Goliath, Concussion covers a necessary and vital topic but never quite coalesces into the kind of Important Movie to which it aspires.

Concussion
Writer/Director: Peter Landesman
Starring: Will Smith, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alec Baldwin, Albert Brooks

A very funny and often surprisingly sincere send-up of Christmas movies, The Night Before is a broad studio comedy that's about more than just jumping from big laugh to big laugh. That's becoming more scarce every year as studios seem content to check off formulaic boxes, making these kinds of movies feel like they're just collections of sometimes-humorous scenes and not a cohesive part of a larger whole; maybe one of the best things that could be said about The Night Before is that it actually feels like a complete story worth telling.

The Night Before
Director: Jonathan Levine
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, Anthony Mackie

Writer/director Adam McKay is outraged that banks got away with tanking the world economy, and by the end of The Big Short, you will be, too.

The Big Short
Writer/Director: Adam McKay
Starring: Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Brad Pitt

A labor of love years in the making, Anomalisa is startlingly human for a movie comprised only of stop-motion puppets. It's a film about love, hope, fear, connection, and loneliness, and it marks a return to the cinematic territory of Charlie Kaufman, the man behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Synecdoche, New York, complete with the surreality and palpable emotion that filmography promises. This is one of the most remarkable movies of the year.

Anomalisa
Directors: Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman
Starring: David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan

By the Sea

Anchored by a tremendous lead performance from Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn is an intimate, sincere drama that manages to dodge the cliches of many immigrant stories and completely avoid cynicism. It's a very simple story of a woman torn between two worlds, but with lush cinematography, terrific production design, and impeccable acting, Brooklyn transports you to a time and place in which, for a couple of hours, nothing matters more than the happiness of its main character.

Brooklyn
Director: John Crowley
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Domhnall Gleeson

I was extremely skeptical of The Peanuts Movie when it was first announced. Could the studio that made the Ice Age and Rio movies really turn the classic Charles M. Schulz comic strip into a worthy CGI movie? Turns out the answer is yes, and The Peanuts Movie has everything you could want from a movie that follows Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Snoopy, Woodstock, and the rest of the gang.

The Peanuts Movie
Director: Steve Martino
Starring: Noah Schnapp, Bill Melendez, Hadley Belle Miller

With the "publish first, ask questions later" mentality of today's internet and the underfunding of newspaper staffs around the country, movies about real journalism are practically all period pieces now. Spotlight is no exception. The film, set in 2001, tracks the year-long investigation of the Boston Globe's Spotlight unit — a small, close-knit group of reporters devoted to deep investigative journalism — into the Catholic church's cover-up of sexually abusive priests, and it's one of the best journalism films ever made.

Spotlight
Co-Writer/Director: Tom McCarthy
Starring: Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, Stanley Tucci

Here's a little secret: most James Bond movies are pretty bad. That's not me trying to be contrarian or trying to rile anyone up, it's just my honest opinion. I think the majority of viewers (excluding true Bond obsessives who have seen all of the movies enough times to know better) have an inflated view of this series' overall quality. Until two years ago, I know I certainly did.

Spectre
Director: Sam Mendes
Starring: Daniel Craig, Lea Seydoux, Christoph Waltz

A darkly funny meditation on romance and relationships, The Lobster uses a high concept in order to explore some of the universal truths of love in 2015. It's one of the year's weirdest movies, and while it walks the line of surreality and absurdism, there's an undercurrent of sadness and heartbreak to it that grounds the story even during its most outlandish moments. The Lobster is a rich exploration of modern love, and its eccentric personality makes it feel like the work of a creative force who sees the world like no one else.

The Lobster
Co-Writer/Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring: Colin Farrell, Lea Seydoux, Rachel Weisz