In recent years, I held off on composing my annual Movies of the Year roundup until one or two January weekends had passed, hoping to catch at least a couple of those acclaimed, Oscar-friendly titles that generally get to our area just prior to the announcement of Academy Award nominees. (This year's lineup will be unveiled on January 23.) But I'm just as relieved to be bidding farewell to 2017 as you likely are – and, after a year of disappointing grosses and endless scandals, as Hollywood no doubt is – so what say we get right to it?

Among the movies of 2017, there have certainly been more objectively fun ones than Darkest Hour, director Joe Wright's Winston Churchill bio-pic that follows the British icon through his first weeks as prime minister, ending with his order for the historic World War II evacuation memorialized in Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk. But I'm not sure that any film this year has found anyone having as much fun as Gary Oldman clearly is in his role as Churchill – and blessedly, it's a performance joy equal to the considerable joy we feel while watching him.

Over the decades, the Star Wars films have boasted so many unforgettable sounds – light sabers swooshing, R2-D2 beeping, Darth Vader breathing – that it's both unexpected and rather amazing to find the signature sound in Star Wars: The Last Jedi to be silence.

Friends have asked me whether you need to have seen The Room in order to enjoy The Disaster Artist. I'd say no, though it'd most certainly help. It'd help further if you haven't also read the book. But movies and books, as we all know, are vastly different things. And as a movie – with this opinion coming from an unbridled champion of The Room – The Disaster Artist is a more-than-frequent hoot.