Every Best Picture nominee at this year's Oscars, ranked from worst to best

For all his love of grotesque violence (sometimes committed against adorable kiddies and kitties, no less), Guillermo del Toro is a romantic at heart. His last film, the Best Picture winner , made that clear. Certainly, his blood runs too warm for noir, that most cynical of genres, which may explain why there’s something a little tonally off about his handsome, overlong adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel. Del Toro applies a thick coat of museum polish to the 1940s setting, his plain nostalgia for Old Hollywood extravagance undercutting the seediness of the material, which was better served by the starker black-and-white of the 1947 version. The acting, too, is uneven—Bradley Cooper uncharacteristically flat until the very end (which he then overplays), Cate Blanchett leaning too quickly and heavily into her vamping femme fatale routine to disguise the movie’s trajectory. All that said, the film is beautifully shot, the nastier twists of Gresham’s tale still sting, and del Toro has lots of fun with the swindling stuff, a.k.a. any scene where some carnival huckster is tearing back the curtain on a con.

As pure spectacle, Dune delivers. Denis Villeneuve lends his massive sci-fi opus an impressive sense of scale, reveling in the sheer grandeur of vast desert landscapes, the flying machines soaring above them, and the mighty sandworms tunneling beneath. (It’s a space opera much more David Lean than David Lynch.) What the director can’t do, however, is locate especially interesting characters or much psychological dimension in the dense, dry feudal intrigue of Frank Herbert’s cult classic. Much has been made of how this new adaptation has rendered the story coherent—something Lynch couldn’t or wouldn’t accomplish in his more hallucinatory, condensed take on the novel. But that’s mostly because Villeneuve has cleaved the thing in two, building to a glorified “To be continued…” rather than anything like a proper ending. It’s hard to feel truly satisfied by half a movie, even if the half we’ve got now contains so much awe-inspiring eye candy.

After a , two , a , a , and a paean to Alana Haim’s wonderful (and sadly un-nominated) , yours truly has probably said his piece on the discursive new coming-of-age comedy from Paul Thomas Anderson. But, okay, one more time with feeling: If I’m not quite as high on the writer-director’s vibrant flashback to the San Fernando Valley of his youth as some of my colleagues and peers are, it probably has a lot to do with the loose hodgepodge structure of Anderson’s story, which warmly zigzags its way through the various shit-kicking misadventures of a teenage entrepreneur (Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour) and his slightly older but not much more emotionally mature crush (Haim). Licorice Pizza is largely just a daisy chain of moments plucked out of time, and while some of them hit, a few of them miss, too. Still, it’s mostly the hits that have stayed with me these past few months—especially that glorious farce of an incident with Bradley Cooper’s Jon Peters, a waterbed, and an out-of-gas delivery van (whose pleasures, come to think of it, I elucidated in on this movie I like but don’t love).

Let’s take a moment to just savor the unlikely news that this year’s Best Picture lineup includes a three-hour Japanese art drama about people putting on a multilingual production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. And hey, the movie’s pretty damn good, too! Writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who’s far from a household name in the States (another element that makes the multiple nominations for his film a surprise), takes an ambiguous short story by countryman Haruki Murakami and stretches it waaaaaay out into a quietly epic portrait of trauma and grief management. Far from spinning his wheels, Hamaguchi makes expert use of the long road of extra narrative his running time permits, establishing a pleasingly meditative pace and carefully filling in details of the before and the after of a bereaved stage actor’s life. Count this critic in the small minority that thinks Drive My Car swerves a little off course in its last hour, when all the fascinatingly indirect, unspoken coping mechanisms adopted by the characters give way to an unbroken jet stream of therapeutic unburdening. But that only modestly detracts from the beauty of the journey, including an extended prologue that makes a very strong case for taking the scenic route to your inciting incident.

Jane Campion’s hypnotic Western psychodrama about an embittered Montana rancher and the family he bullies and terrorizes hinges on a big character reveal that’s a little old (cowboy) hat. Of course, the twist wouldn’t have looked so obvious 55 years ago, when Thomas Savage’s source novel was first published. And considerably less predictable than the shopworn insights into the repressed desires of macho men is the winding narrative path Campion takes to them, establishing conflicts she then complicates, until a climactic scene that hinges on motives so ambiguously seeded you can blink and miss them. The Power Of The Dog, like Campion’s previous Best Picture nominee , filters big themes through a thick atmosphere of menacing dreaminess; it belongs to a rich tradition of movies about America from non-Americans, the vague unfamiliarity enhanced by the spectacle of a Kiwi frontier playing our own. Also productively cast against type: Benedict Cumberbatch, whose apparent unfitness for the role of a flinty John Wayne type is the whole point.

We didn’t need another West Side Story. The (honored 10 times over by the Academy, a feat now impossible for the new one to match) remains a compulsively rewatchable classic, albeit one for which a few apologies about the casting are required. But in returning to the music of Bernstein, the lyrics of Sondheim, and the book of Laurents, Steven Spielberg pulls off something rather miraculous: He makes this classic of Broadway and Hollywood feel new again, even as he preserves all its timeless joy and tragedy—the very things that have kept people coming back to West Side Story again and again for decades. Spielberg’s take, with its graceful tweaks and its imaginative reimaginings (dig that keep-away game of “Cool,” dance to that walk-and-talk “America”), isn’t necessarily better than its 50-year-old predecessor. But it could stake its own claim on the dreams of musical-theater aficionados and fans of thoughtfully, lavishly mounted studio spectaculars. There’s a place for it.