Congratulations on making it through five months of 2019.

Whilst we’re not quite halfway, TIME reckons it’s worth having a look at the best movies of 2019 thus far.

The weather outside is truly awful and looks to be staying that way for the rest of the week, which means it’s the perfect ‘pyjamas and movies’ vibe.

To help you sift through the rubbish, here are our picks, with the trailer for each to help you suss things out.

The Mustang

For her feature debut, director Laure de Clermont-Tonnere drew from a real-life prison rehabilitation program in Carson City, Nevada, in which inmates train wild mustangs to ready them for sale or adoption. Matthias Schoenaerts gives what will surely be one of the best performances of the year as Roman, an angry, withdrawn prisoner who finds a sense of purpose and connection with the horse he’s assigned to train, a willful creature named Marquis. Like its stars, both human and equine, this movie has a glorious, generous spirit.

Birds of Passage

In most dramas about the drug trade, women—wives, girlfriends, mothers, daughters—tend to hover quietly in the background, often as trophies of sorts for the men who support them. Rarely are they central characters, figures who have everything to gain or lose as the result of the illicit business dealings of the men around them. But Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s spellbinding Birds of Passage, set in an indigenous Wayuu community in the early days of the Colombian drug trade and based on real events, is a drug-dynasty epic like no other.

Amazing Grace

Aretha Franklin’s live album Amazing Grace, recorded over two nights in 1972 at Los Angeles’ New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, would go on to become the best-selling gospel album in history. For years, few people knew that there was any documentary footage of Franklin’s performance at that Watts church—director Sydney Pollack had shot footage there, but the film he’d planned was never completed, because he’d failed to sync the sound with the images. The uncompleted film languished for decades, until music producer Alan Elliott managed to finish it, roughly nine years ago—only to have Franklin block its release. The Queen of Soul is, sadly, no longer with us, but our consolation for her loss is this gorgeous, stirring documentary.

Yes, bring on Aretha!

What a set of pipes.

Tolkien

You don’t have to be a Lord of the Rings nut to respond to Tolkien, Finnish director Dome Karukoski’s sensitive, handsome-looking movie about the formative years of one of the world’s great writers of fantasy literature, J.R.R. Tolkien. Nicholas Hoult gives an extraordinary performance in the title role, as a bright young man of little means…

No word on whether they talk up the fact that he was born in South Africa, but we couldn’t let it go unmentioned.

I reckon those four should see you through the week.

For the real binge watchers, we also recommend these three local documentaries (The Fun’s Not Over is superb), these two award-winning series, and something for our friends suffering from Game of Thrones withdrawals.

[source:time]