My favorite movie of 2017 is Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird.” It’s an acoustic wonder in a year full of screechy electronic feedback, political, cinematic and otherwise. You’ll have to believe me when I say “Lady Bird” is my favorite almost in spite of its symbolic defiance of everything toxic and stupid in the culture right now. This isn’t a matter of a movie’s fortunate timing; it’s a matter of its quality and wit.

On Oct. 5, a month after “Lady Bird” debuted on the festival circuit, The New York Times broke the story that broke Harvey Weinstein, pointing the culture toward “a threshold of revelation,” as Tony Kushner put it in his play “Angels in America.” Think of it. In just a few short, endless weeks amid this breathless eternity of a year, 2017, we have seen and felt a shift in perception and in thinking about men, women, harassment, assault, abuse and inequality.

Now, as Kushner’s play put it, the great work begins. No matter how distracting and sleepless this year has been for millions of Americans, the movies have been pretty damn good on the high end. The year got a jolt on the front end from Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.” And now the off-screen year is concluding with “Get Out, Roy Moore.” Also there’s a really good new “Star Wars” movie, which is nice.

The day the Weinstein NYT story broke, Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project” opened in limited release. It’s about a young girl living with her careless, loving, unreliable mother in a poverty-line motel near Disney World. It’s a film about the country we live in, and the country we willfully ignore while we comfort ourselves with visions of monolithic prosperity.

In some karmic way I wonder if a nonfictional version of Moonee, the girl in “The Florida Project” played by Brooklynn Prince, might now come of age in a less predatory society, thanks to these last few weeks. It’s a leap, but the America before Oct. 5 is no longer here. There’s a chance that our movies, made by an ever-wider circle of creative artists, will reflect more of that new world in 2018 and beyond.

Here, in reverse order, are the best movies of the year:

10. “Call Me by Your Name.”Northern Italy, 1983. Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer and the secret weapon, Michael Stuhlbarg.

9. “The Florida Project.”Harsh, beautiful mosaic in the shadow of the happiest place on earth.

8. “Raw.” French veterinary college. Cannibalism. Along with “Get Out,” the sharpest social thriller of the year.

7. “Good Time.”Small-time thieves. Unnerving cinema.

6. “Mudbound.” A first-rate, full-bodied ensemble story. Mississippi in the 1940s.

5. “Rat Film.” The year’s strongest, strangest documentary. Baltimore zoning history. Chronicle of uneasy urban coexistence. Rodents.

4. “Phantom Thread.”Paul Thomas Anderson. Daniel Day-Lewis. Vicky Krieps. A rom-com with a somewhat complicated happy ending, as well as the year’s finest film music courtesy of Jonny Greenwood.

3. “Get Out.”A massive hit, a shot across the bow and Jordan Peele’s auspicious directorial debut, showcasing his own razor-sharp script.

2. “A Ghost Story.” A minuscule miracle of a movie. Man dies, but hangs around his true love, invisibly.

1. “Lady Bird.”Greta Gerwig’s heart-expanding feature debut as a solo writer-director, starring Saoirse Ronan as an Everywoman on the cusp of becoming her own woman.

11-30, alphabetical order: “BPM”; “The Big Sick”; “Columbus”; “Dawson City: Frozen Time”; “Faces Places”; “Graduation”; “I Am Not Your Negro”; “Let It Fall: Los Angeles, 1982-1992”; “Lady Macbeth”; “The Lost City of Z”; “Menasche”; “Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer”; “A Quiet Passion”; “The Shape of Water”; “The Square”; “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”; “Stronger”; “War for the Planet of the Apes”; “Wonderstruck”; “Wonder Woman”

Michael Phillips is the Chicago Tribune film critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune