“The Martian,” a story about a presumed-dead astronaut left on Mars who must figure out a way to survive until a rescue mission can be launched, is a genuine and good-natured movie anchored by a Matt Damon performance full of can-do charm. It believes in itself and its characters. It is about people who love what they do and are good at it, but it is also about how being good at why being good may not be enough to get by. It is optimistic about humanity, but it still takes a clear-eyed view of those in peril.

The best thing “Brooklyn” has going for it is its classicism. There is a modern sheen to its camera work and color correction — it’s still a contemporary film, after all. However, director John Crowley and screenwriter Nick Hornby team with a superb cast to nail the feeling of the 1950s romances its central couple, Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) and Tony (Emory Cohen), would see in their various dates to their local movie house.

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, Édgar Ramírez, Diane Ladd, Virginia Madsen, Isabella Rossellini. Joy is entertaining. It has flavor and attitude and humor. It even subverts the expectations built by a century's worth of cinematic history regarding romantic relationships.

Starring: Harrison Ford, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill. [Spoiler alert for people who think knowing the premise of a movie before seeing it is somehow akin to having their first-born child stolen from them. No other major and/or surprising plot points will henceforth be ruined for you.]

Hope, the belief in potential, is part of what make people great. It makes you have faith in yourself to do something difficult, or special, or novel. It gives you the ability to bet on yourself, to think that, with a serving of good fortune, you will get somewhere in life. It, in turn, make you look on other people and see the possibility of goodness within them, and trust that they can do fascinating, worthwhile things with the time they have here.

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, Julianne Moore. The Hunger Games series, on its surface, reflects the cultural fears of a society bombarded with tracking and surveillance from every corner. Institutions that were already powerful only seem to grow exponentially, and stories like those of Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) serve as reminders that we should not allow such power grabs to occur.

Featuring: Jonny Greenwood, Nigel Godrich, Ehtisham Khan Ajmeri, Gufran Ali. Some of the most evocative images created by filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson have involved the magic hour, the two times of day right when the sun is on the horizon, right at dawn and at dusk. Adam Sandler's Barry Egan receives his busted harmonium as the sun rises in Punch Drunk Love.

Human decency is a tough thing to put in cinematic terms. In the real world, you can see it whenever donations come in after a natural disaster or in something as small as someone helping a lost child find her parents at a theme park. But dramatically, human decency tends to be poison. By making characters in a story “amenable,” as Saoirse Ronan's Brooklyn character, Eilis, is described at one point, it generally removes the easiest source of tension a story can cook up.

Writers: John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Jez Butterworth. Starring: Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Léa Seydoux, Ralph Fiennes. Few things are more promising than sitting down to a movie and immediately being presented with a knockout sequence of not only extreme technical difficulty but also one that understands the activities and proclivities of the characters it depicts.

Starring: Abraham Attah, Idris Elba, Emmanuel Nii Adom Quaye. Cary Joji Fukunaga is a budding filmmaking master. Through two excellent features, 2009's Sin Nombre and 2011's Jane Eyre, and his work helming every episode of True Detective's first season, Fukunaga has displayed a calm, measured, color-saturated coldness that nonetheless had humanity flowing through his veins.

Starring: Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Richard Jenkins, Matthew Fox, Lili Simmons. Subtlety is often a virtue in filmmaking. Restraint in an actor is usually preferable to someone going off the hinges. Deftness in shot selection and blocking can tell a story more economically than a bunch of title cards explaining the entire history of the world that led to the events depicted in the movie.

Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, Charlie Hunnam. When Mia Wasikowska's Edith Cushing says at the very beginning of Crimson Peak that ghosts are real and she is familiar with them, she's not kidding. And neither is director Guillermo del Toro. Ghosts are as much part of the movie as the ornately decorated walls and busted ceiling, the seeping floors and peeling paint, the puffy sleeves and the trailing skirts of this English manor at the turn of the 20th century.

“Y: The Last Man” was the comic book series that defined quality graphic storytelling in the 2000s. The 60-issue run by writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Pia Guerra inspired a number of stories across mediums, especially TV’s “Lost,” which Vaughan himself wrote for, and the series holds up as a gold standard of how to end a serialized story with grace.

Lookee here, folks, we got ourselves the official poster for the “will be here before you know it” “Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens.”. Prepare yourself! #StarWars: #TheForceAwakens tickets & marathon go on-sale tomorrow at Regal Cinemas. pic.twitter.com/TGIuzjOsm3. It is full of glory and more than a little informative nods to the still-mysterious story of the long-awaited sequel.

First, a message to those people, put so perfectly by Flavorwire’s Pilot Viruet: people complain about no hoverboards or teleportation but there’s a tivo app for your phone in case you can’t reach your remote so shut up. The fevered discussion about how “Back to the Future Part II” made a lot of predictions about the then-distant 2015, some of which came true and others that didn’t, is all about the surface of a movie trying to make a point about 1989 America.

“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2″ hits theaters this week, concluding a series that has shaped the zeitgeist for the better part of a decade. The “Hunger Games” books and films have spawned a cottage industry of adapting similarly themed young adult series of books to the big screen, like the “Divergent” and “Maze Runner” films.