I was honored to be published for the first time in Bright Wall/Dark Room this year, as well as to continue writing for Pajiba, Chesapeake Family magazine, and Punch Drunk Critics. Pajiba in particular has been a wonderful home and I’m so grateful to be part of that amazing community.

So, without any further rambling on my part!

My favorite 10 films of 2018:

10. MANDY. "It’s Riseborough’s laugh that still haunts me, her body in that eerie red light, her hair swaying around her as she refuses to acquiesce to what Jeremiah Sand wants." Essay for Pajiba here.

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9. A STAR IS BORN. "I wept through the majority of A Star is Born, decimated a dozen or so tissues, and spent about an hour muttering under my breath, “JUST KEEP TOUCHING EACH OTHER.”" Essay for Pajiba here.

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8. SUSPIRIA. "Suspiria unsettled me thoroughly, it made me laugh and it made my skin crawl. There is so much anger here, and it explodes outward from these women, their disgust curdling into cruelty, their creativity transforming into violence." Review for Pajiba here.

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7. BLACK PANTHER. "Black Panther is a revelation, the first film from the Marvel Cinematic Universe that truly feels like an of-the-moment masterwork that also happens to be a comic book movie. The themes are multifaceted, the details are rich, the visuals are staggering. Black Panther is a radical entry in a franchise that is improved by its energy and its complexity.“ Review for Chesapeake Family here.

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6. THE RIDER. "The persistent, conventional masculinity espoused by everyone in Brady’s life is what forces him further inward, inspires secrecy, and keeps his focus narrow but all-defining: What kind of man is he going to choose to be?" Essay for Pajiba here.

5. SORRY TO BOTHER YOU. "Riley’s vision of America [is] as a place defined by a system that is fundamentally unequal and populated by people who have the ability, if they are willing, to make things uncomfortable and uncivil and possibly better." Interview with filmmaker Boots Riley and essay for Pajiba here.

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4. FIRST MAN. "Neil Armstrong loves his family, he thinks of them often during the increasingly rigorous training required of him, but his focus is singular. His focus is the moon, and Chazelle never lets us forget it." Review for Pajiba here.

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3. WIDOWS. "There can be power in kindness and in camaraderie alongside crime and corruption, and that is the nuance, the depth, and the politics Widows provides." Essay for Pajiba here.

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2. PADDINGTON 2. "How rare that a sequel improves upon its original, and rarer still is a perfect film. But ‘Paddington 2’ is both, encouraging gentleness, politeness, and decency in ways that are often funny and overall quite charming." Review for Chesapeake Family here.

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1. ANNIHILATION. Lena is both the original and the double in Annihilation, and her embrace of the uncanny oppositional qualities of the Shimmer—its unknowability and wildness, its precision and chaos—is acquiescence to the cyclical entropy of life. Essay for Bright Wall/Dark Room here.

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And some other films I loved:

THOROUGHBREDS

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE

LEAN ON PETE. “Each film makes sure to present the young men as on their own in the wilderness: Charley and Lean on Pete in the scrubby hills of Oregon, climbing dusty mountains side by side; Brady astride Apollo as they gallop through lands that once were only a fraction of what belonged to Native American tribes like the Sioux. Those images are gorgeous, but this is untenable in the New West: The prairies have already been crossed; horses can’t live forever; and the poverty that defines these lifestyles is suffocating. And both Lean on Pete and The Rider end in deeply personal tragedies that reinforce for Charley and Brady that the selfhood they’re looking for can’t be found in the cowboy narrative, and that the masculinity that defines this type of mythical figure doesn’t define them.“ Essay for Pajiba here.

DAMSEL. “So here I am, on the horse beat, to tell you that Damsel is incredibly singular, a beautifully shot, delightfully weird, and feminist as hell film that goes against all expectations. Pattinson works a lilting American accent as a spoiled dandy convinced of his own heroism; Wasikowska continues her streak of no-nonsense, self-sufficient female protagonists, upending the film’s narrative as soon as she properly enters it; and yes, there’s a mini-horse named Butterscotch, who adds a bit of whimsy to a film that is honestly gorgeous to look at and was shot mostly on location in Utah, with wide-open landscapes, a saturated color palette, and a sort of authentic Americanness. And when Damsel starts veering off course, subverting what you would assume from a movie that looks like this, is when the Zellner Bros. deliver farcical magic.” Review for Pajiba here.

LEAVE NO TRACE. “The questions Leave No Trace dedicates itself to exist in a sort of Russian-nesting-doll structure of a community; the smallest doll is one person, who is then consumed by another larger person, who is finally taken over by the largest figure of all. As a child, you answer to your parents, who answer to a larger authority, and the chain of command, the delineation of power, keeps going up and up and up, a reminder of the littleness of your life compared with the greater whole. That is our modern society, and it’s almost impossible to escape.” Review for Pajiba here.

EIGHTH GRADE. “‘Eighth Grade was “Rated R for language and some sexual material.’ In reality, that’s some cursing in the movie and some sex talk — which isn’t raunchy or filthy, but helps protagonist Kayla (Elsie Fisher) realize that she’s not ready for a boyfriend, or for sending nude cellphone pics, or for a casual hookup with someone either her age or older. That progression and growth into self-awareness and self-confidence seems really important for young viewers to see onscreen, but the film’s R-rating keeps teenagers from experiencing the film on their own.” Essay for Pajiba here.

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MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — FALLOUT. “Each Mission: Impossible franchise installment is crazier than the last, and Fallout is an enjoyable pinnacle of insanity. We've seen Tom Cruise climb skyscrapers with no support gear, jump out of airplanes, run through sandstorms, and do whatever it takes to push his body to the limit, to portray IMF agent Ethan Hunt as the sole person who can save the world from imminent destruction. Fallout is more of the same, but this franchise's pursuit of perfection makes each film feel distinct, separate, and explosively thrilling. “ Review for Chesapeake Family here.

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THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST. “Maybe you’re supposed to feel disgusted by yourself when you’re a teenager,” Cam says to Lydia, and the intent of The Miseducation of Cameron Post is captured perfectly in that line — it’s a defense of the spontaneity of youth, of the pureness of young love, of the validity of feelings that are so hated by people who want to destroy them instead of accept them. The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a love letter to the kids who needed it the most, and its final image, which Akhavan lets her camera linger on, is profoundly weighty despite total silence. No one should have to apologize for who they love, and The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a fierce attack on anyone who would tell you different.” Review for Pajiba here.

CRAZY RICH ASIANS. “Crazy Rich Asians is specific in its cultural representations and exploration of the old-country-vs.-expat dynamic but universal in its themes about romance and love, and I was not the only person sniffling away tears at an early screening I attended last week. The woman of Southeast Asian descent next to me was translating major plot points of the movie to her mother next to her; most of our aisle was taken up by an Asian family spanning three generations; and the whole theater was packed with people who had paid to see the movie a week in advance and who were into it, cheering and booing and laughing, most often at Awkwafina (because every person will leave this movie thinking to themselves, “Why don’t I know more about Awkwafina?”).” Review for Pajiba here.

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SKATE KITCHEN. ““Where’s your posse at? Don’t you guys travel in a squad? Your rowdy-ass girl crew?” Devon asks Camille the first time they speak, and his diminishment of Skate Kitchen and Camille’s defense of them is the exact area Moselle explores in her narrative filmmaking debut. These girls smoke weed together, attend raucous parties together, have sex together (yes, there’s a sort of swinger-orgy thing going on at one point), and are as devoted to skating as they are to each other — the balance of individual desire with communal loyalty is a tricky one, and one Skate Kitchen examines with empathy, familiarity, and curiosity. Skate Kitchen feels like those final summer nights before school started again, aimless and sticky and wide-open and perfect because your friends were there. It’s evocative and entrancing, and worth seeking out.“ Review for Pajiba here.

NIGHT COMES ON. “Night Comes On focuses on the challenge of trying to make sense of a situation that makes no sense at all, and its suggestion of revenge is one method, and its suggestion of love is another. How the film transforms from a movie about the former to one about the latter is on the strength of Fishback’s and Hall’s performances, and Night Comes On is a stellar debut from Spiro and one of the most deeply felt films so far this year.” Review for Pajiba here.

CREED II

THE FAVOURITE. “The Favourite is a triple-hander that relies on the trio of Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone to tell its story about power grabs and political backstabbing, but the rivalry between Weisz’s and Stone’s characters is paramount, and that comes into sharp focus when the former asks the latter if she wants to shoot something." Essay for Pajiba here.

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IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK

MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS. ““How cruel men are” is one of those lines in Mary Queen of Scots that you’ll remember because it’s so obvious and yet so true. Few movies this year make a better case for reassessing our accepted versions of history and reexamining the patriarchal truths we’ve come to accept than the impassioned, intricate Mary Queen of Scots.” Review for Pajiba here.

THE SISTERS BROTHERS

THE DAWN WALL

FREE SOLO. “What Free Solo captures is human. There’s humanity in Honnold’s admission that he’s driven by a “bottomless pit of self-loathing” and that he worries you can’t “achieve anything great because [you’re] happy and cozy”; there’s humanity in Honnold’s girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, asking whether he considers her when he’s climbing, and her unwieldy mixture of concern and pride for his El Capitan attempt; there’s humanity in Honnold’s mother saying she wishes he would stop free soloing but that she would never ask him to stop, wouldn’t want to take that feeling of purity away from him. “You are not controlling your fear, you are trying to stop outside of it,” Honnold says, and Free Solo captures the beauty and triumph of such an unimaginable feat.” Review for Pajiba here.

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WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR. “You think of Rogers as the man with the closet full of multicolored cardigans and the medley of voices used to bring life to puppets like Daniel Tiger, X the Owl, and King Friday XIII, but he also had a great strength of character and willpower to do what he did for decades, facing down decreasing public arts funding and increasingly frenzied, fast-paced children’s programming as competition. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? excels by paying homage to both of those identities, showing how the man unwaveringly stuck to his core beliefs because that’s what he thought the children he served deserved.” Review for Pajiba here.

THE OLD MAN & THE GUN. “There’s a scene early on in The Old Man & the Gun when Glover’s Teddy doesn’t necessarily warn Forrest that this life can’t last, but that he needs to be aware of himself and who he is now: “I know what I’m doing too, but I also know what I’m capable of, and these days, those are two different things.” Forrest blows him off at first, but by the end of The Old Man & the Gun, you’ll understand what a gift Teddy’s statement was, how sobering and self-aware and lovely, a reflection on a life lived and reckoned with and experienced, in happiness and in sadness, in selfishness and in generosity. What a fitting sendoff for Redford; what a phenomenal final performance.” Review for Pajiba here.

The protagonist is a privileged abuser; the narrative is needlessly drawn out; and the most interesting elements of the film are the most ignored. Good Time will undoubtedly show up on a lot of critics’ best-of-2017 lists (and is getting raves from places like The New Yorker, whose Richard Brody called it “transcendent” and gave it the headline “an Instant-Classic Crime Drama for the Age of Trump”) but I couldn’t disagree more.

Good Time focuses on the Nikas brothers, Connie (Pattinson, of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn–Part 2) and Nick (Benny Safdie, acting as well as co-directing with brother Josh, who wrote the film). The former is a slick talker, full of schemes to go along with a guileless face that is often trying to sell the stupidest of plans; the latter seems to be developmentally disabled and hearing impaired. We meet them in a scene that immediately sets up both characters: In a therapist’s office, Nick doesn’t understand the questions being asked of him, answering slowly and lethargically, but bristles when the man takes notes on his answers; Connie, who bursts in and drags Nick away, refuses to believe the therapist’s insistence that Nick needs help and shouldn’t go with his brother.

Nick’s naivete and Connie’s defensiveness are a bad combination—underlined when the film reveals that Connie previously assaulted their guardian (“Fuck Grandma,” he blithely says)—but Connie swears that he is committed to Nick: “It’s just you and me. I’m your friend,” he insists. But does a friend convince the other to participate in a bank heist (while wearing hyper-detailed masks that make them look like black men)? Or leave him behind when the cops are chasing them? After Nick is arrested, it becomes Connie’s mission to somehow come up with the thousands of dollars to bail him out—but because he is ultimately short-sighted and selfish, the night veers more and more off track.

It seems simple at first: use the money they stole to get Nick out of Rikers Island. But a huge amount of it is ruined by an exploded dye pack, and the fence Connie is using refuses to process it, leaving him about $10,000 short. The addict (an underused Jennifer Jason Leigh) who is infatuated with Connie whom he hits up for money is no help; her mother has cut off her credit cards. And then there’s a mid-film twist that seems to entirely ruin Connie’s plan to save Nick—but he perseveres anyway, corrupting and harming more and more people in his night of brazen disregard for anyone who isn’t him.

There is only one way to read Connie’s Queens quest: that it’s his unchecked white privilege that causes him to literally hurt every person of color he comes across in the film. Good Time is undoubtedly about that, because the pattern that comes up for all of Nick’s victims is the color of their skin: the teenage girl (Taliah Webster) he seduces into helping him is black; the security guard he assaults (Barkhad Abdi, of Captain Phillips) is black; the strangers whom he politely asks for favors, always expecting that they’ll help, are all black. That’s white privilege all right, but is the film criticizing it? Like, at all? Because how often the film uses Connie’s concern for Nick as an excuse for his awful behavior doesn’t seem like an indoctrination for his actions, but a sentimental explanation for them.

This reading is buoyed by the fact that whenever the film cuts to Nick in Rikers Island, he’s doing something else that shows how utterly noncomprehending of and unprepared he is for this experience—like changing the television channel and bringing on a beatdown, also by men who by far happen to be black. “Look at how much trouble Nick is in,” the film seems to be saying. “The only thing Connie can do now is save him!” How often the Safdie brothers lean on that perception of Connie’s character makes it seem like we’re supposed to sympathize with him, we’re supposed to be emotionally invested in his relationship with Nick, we’re supposed to root for him even as he does increasingly reckless things. But that’s white privilege in action yet again, and it’s nearly impossible to separate that problematic element of Good Time from any other understanding of it.

What the film needed, if that’s how the Safdie brothers wanted to position Connie and Nick in relation to us as viewers, was more scenes of the two actually spending time together. What are their days like? Where do they live? Were they close throughout childhood? Good Time wants to be a gritty crime movie, and it stays in that lane to the detriment of building a foundation for its characters. Pattinson is phenomenal, burrowing deeply into Connie’s single-mindedness, but that’s not enough. Good Time ends with the idea that “You choose your truth,” but that feels hypocritical for a movie that is rigidly, blindly unaware of the characters and the reality it is actually presenting.

RATING: 1.5 OUT OF 5 STARS

Plaza (of The Little Hours) is the titular Ingrid, a 20something just on either side of a nervous breakdown. When we meet her, she’s weeping in a car as she scrolls through social media posts of a woman’s wedding—in her bridesmaid dress and runny makeup, you would think Ingrid just got kicked out of a celebration to which she was rightfully invited. But it’s soon apparent that Ingrid isn’t really included in any social circles, doesn’t have any true friends, is isolated and secluded from the “real” world as she burrows further and deeper online, into Facebook and Twitter and Instagram feeds of people whose lives are defined by #nofilter hashtags and prayer hands emojis. 

“I'm learning how to be present ... how to listen,” Ingrid says in a flatly self-motivational tone after the opening wedding sequence, but that’s obviously and clearly bullshit. It’s unclear whether Ingrid is even capable of self-growth—doesn’t that first require some sense of self? And Ingrid, who clutches her phone when she goes to sleep, who immediately turns it on when she gets up, who scrolls through Instagram while brushing her teeth, who watches videos on the toilet, doesn’t have much of that. 

So after Ingrid’s mother dies (and Ingrid takes selfies while posing in her mother’s hospital bed), she cashes out her inheritance, shoves the $60,000 in a backpack, and hops on the road of self-actualization to California. It’s not that Ingrid wants to get away in a general sense—nope, she’s trying to get to Instagram celebrity Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen, of Captain America: Civil War) in a very real sense. After reading a magazine feature advertising Taylor as “your newest girl crush,” Ingrid becomes immediately obsessed with her—and thanks to the uber-connectedness of social media, is able to find out where she shops, where she lives, and practically everything she does.

Slowly but surely, Ingrid ingratiates herself into Taylor’s life until a sort of symbiotic friendship forms: Taylor gains an adoring clone in Ingrid; Ingrid gains someone to covet in Taylor. They chirpily tell each other they love each other and Taylor trusts Ingrid with a secret and Ingrid starts burning through her money to buy all the things Taylor (who considers herself a “photographer”) likes and recommends, even something as outlandish $1,300 lamp shade. Their dynamic, one of competition and codependence, feels simultaneously affectionate, urgent, and tainted, and of course it can’t last very long—not when Taylor’s life is revealed to be less than perfect, and not when Ingrid’s true motivations are unraveled.

It would be easy to mock these people—to poke fun at Ingrid’s desperate, selfish loneliness or Taylor’s carefully assembled, faux-aspirational lifestyle—but director Matt Spicer and his cowriter David Branson Smith don’t make things that easy for viewers. There must be some recognition and empathy from the audience for satire to really work, and Spicer and Smith understand that—they fill Ingrid Goes West with relatable moments and characters to ensure that your judgments aren’t immediate or unchangeable. 

There’s an undeniably familiar quality to all of this: to blank-faced Ingrid shoving her face with fast food while using social media to absorb the interests and desires of others; to Taylor’s husband Ezra (Wyatt Russell, of 22 Jump Street) wearily explaining his “art” (garishly neon hashtags splashed on top of thrift-store paintings) to the nonplussed Ingrid; to Taylor posting photos of her avocado toast, her doughnuts, her desert wedding, and her whole goddamn life. For viewers of a certain age, this is the crap we do, even as we’re starved for something deeper—and Ingrid Goes West presents all the shortcomings of this lifestyle while still acknowledging its surface glamour. 

The precision of Plaza and Olsen cannot be overstated. They’re so finely calibrated to their characters and to each other that they bring to mind other classic female-friendship films like Heathers, Clueless, and Mean Girls, movies that explore why and how women relate to each other in varyingly adoring and resentful ways. In his role as Ingrid’s neighbor and landlord, Dan, O’Shea Jackson Jr. is a delight in every scene, consistently adding a casual effortlessness that is counter to everyone else’s hyper-curated choices. And as Taylor’s brother Nicky, Billy Magnussen shines as a truly horrible example of nouveau-riche douchery, the kind of guy with cocaine muscles and a funemployed tan who can snuff out someone’s weakness nearly immediately and has no problem exploiting it. Seeing him and Plaza spar is almost overwhelmingly uncomfortable yet magnificently watchable. 

There is so much actually crazy stuff that happens in Ingrid Goes West that would be unfair to spoil, but the movie is so confident in its pacing and its tone that even the most insane shit seems reasonable and understandable. “What’s your story?” Dan asks Ingrid, and in the pause Plaza takes before she replies is the whole essence of Ingrid Goes West: how we craft ourselves, how we want to presented, how we yearn to be perceived. It’s easier than ever now to manufacture your own identity—and Ingrid Goes West understands how essential destruction is to creation. The two go hand in hand, just like Ingrid and Taylor, at least for a little while.  

RATING: 4 OUT OF 5 STARS

Lowery’s live-action Disney remake of Pete’s Dragon was one of my favorite films of 2016, an achingly poignant creation that underscored the exquisiteness and fierceness of nature while lightly but effectively critiquing the lazy destruction of capitalism. But his previous film, 2013’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, felt more like a derivative ripoff of other directors like Terrence Malick and Paul Thomas Anderson than a truly original work—distillation, not creation.

His latest, A Ghost Story, is more of the latter, not only because it reunites Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara from Ain’t Them Bodies Saints but also because its lofty emotional ambitions are ultimately impossibly pretentious and frustratingly unclear. Shots are gorgeously and unnervingly composed, and I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I woke up a few times the night after I saw the film, feeling as if I was being watched. But while Lowery toys with our visual cinematic expectations in memorable ways (using a 1:33 aspect ratio so the film looks more square than horizontal; adding rounded corners to the edges of the film so the presentation evokes a vintage photograph), his film is negatively affected by a drastically underdeveloped script, a narrative that rejects linearity but also stumbles when trying to explain itself, and yes, the presence of alleged sexual harasser Casey Affleck, whose off-screen crap casts a shadow over the film.

I must make this clear: The fact that Affleck plays a character who returns from the dead to follow around and spy on his wife without her knowing is goddamn uncomfortable given how much that behavior seems to align with the sexual harassment he was accused of during the filming of his faux-documentary I’m Still Here with Joaquin Phoenix. None of that derailed his successful Best Actor Oscar campaign thanks to damage control and interference from brother Ben and best friend Matt Damon, but it adds an unsettling, icky layer to A Ghost Story that I can’t imagine was intentional.

Anyway. The movie itself: C (Affleck, of The Finest Hours) and M (Rooney Mara, of Kubo and the Two Strings) are a married couple living in an old house in a sort-of-rundown part of Texas; he spends his days working on his music while she searches online for another place to live—maybe a condo in the city. The house freaks M out sometimes, with mysterious sounds, illuminations, and bumps, but C wants to stay, even as it’s evident that their disagreement about the house is one of many.

A fatal car accident that takes C’s life changes everything, though, and that’s when the titular ghost comes in: It’s C, his body fully covered by the medical examiner’s sheet that M pulled over his face, with two black holes for eyes. In this macabre spin on a children’s Halloween costume, C makes his way back home, where he devotes what seems like seconds and minutes to observing M—but in reality, days, weeks, and even months pass. And when it comes time for M to move on, C remains in the house, experiencing shifts in time and space that explore our understandings of grief, love, nihilism, and closure.

Promotional materials describe A Ghost Story as a story about “finding meaning through loss,” but what is aggressively disingenuous about that description is that the film offers very little explanation for anything—for how M and C met, fell for each other, and then grew apart; what M goes through after C’s death; why C would feel so tied to a house where it seems only sadness was experienced. Lowery is clearly fascinated by the home as a simultaneously static-yet-in-flux place, but how he guides you there is flawed. The storytelling is presented in brief vignettes instead of full scenes, and that sparse approach makes it difficult to form connections to either M or C. Lowery favors long takes of on-screen stillness—M and C holding each other in bed, C devouring a pie in her grief (a forever-feeling scene that caused two fellow press members to walk out of the screening I attended), ghost C sitting on a chair in their home, or a philosophy spouter played by Will Oldham complaining about how everything is meaningless in the face of the universe’s impending self-destruction—but that kind of hyper-focus only really works when you care about what the people you’re watching are going through. The pace of A Ghost Story is too agonizingly slow, its characters too unknown and too unsympathetic, for viewers to build goodwill.

(Oh, and are there any people of color in this sad-white-hipsters version of Texas? Not really. In the film’s most rage-inducing subplot, C haunts a Hispanic family who moves in, assaulting them and terrifying them; none of their dialogue is given subtitles because duh, they’re only around to be C’s victims. But he leaves those tedious grad students, including Oldham, alone; why wouldn’t he attack them, too? In another scene, Native Americans are heard in the distance before a white settler family, including young children, is slaughtered. So yeah, no inclusive diversity here.)

On the flip side of all this is that if you view A Ghost Story as only a collection of varyingly startling and stunning images, you’ll have a better appreciation of Lowery’s strengths. That white-sheet figure striding across a verdant green field under the wide Texas sky; a closet door creaking open in the dead of night to reveal the ghost within; the shocking, split-second decay of a young girl’s body from a bloody corpse to a sunken skeleton. There are visuals here that are uncanny and unforgettable, flawed narrative aside.

A Ghost Story gets caught in itself, though, with a third act plot twist that is disappointingly gimmicky. When coupled with so much else that is problematic, Lowery’s execution of his vision is more exhausting than enlightening. A Ghost Story aims for haunting beauty, but ends up closer to unsatisfyingly infrequent eeriness than truly memorable masterpiece.

RATING: 2 OUT OF 5 STARS

The bullshit term “fake news” is being disproved every single day with excellent journalism from our nation’s leading newspapers and documentary filmmakers, and City of Ghosts from Matthew Heineman is a moving, fantastically made example of the needed fight against willful ignorance. This may be the most impactful documentary of the year, an examination of the rise of ISIS in Syria and the attempts by civilian journalists Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently to combat the terrorist group’s propaganda and misinformation with their own footage and commentary. Prepare to be emotionally ravaged.

Heineman, who previously helmed the acclaimed 2015 documentary Cartel Land, criss-crosses Germany, Turkey, and the United States in following the members of Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), a group of citizen journalists who began videotaping what was happening in their hometown of Raqqa, Syria, when the uprising against dictator Bashar al-Assad began in 2012. When the rebellion against al-Assad created a power vacuum commandeered by the Islamic State, RBSS began documenting their atrocities, too—and their video footage and social media updates, shared with Western news media like the BBC and CNN, finally generated international attention in the nightmare that is happening every day in Syria.

City of Ghosts may honestly have the most straightforward explanation of how the Islamic State originated, operates, and maintains power that I’ve ever seen or read anywhere, and it is unbelievably shocking and horrifying. (It actually took me three hours to watch this 92-minute documentary because I kept having to pause it through my sobs, walk away for a few minutes to calm down, and then come back to it.) The documentary begins with voiceover narration from self-proclaimed RBSS “spokesman” Aziz as he matter-of-factly explains how ISIS came to be. Over footage of ISIS shooting blindfolded prisoners, decapitating others, and displaying their heads on a fence in the town square, Aziz explains how “They painted our city black and shrouded it in darkness,” causing him and his friends to create the “first screams of RBSS.”

The primary tension of City of Ghosts is that the Islamic State has put out public calls for the deaths of RBSS members, making their advocacy and activism not only dangerous for the journalists in Syria (there are 17 RBSS correspondents inside the country as of the documentary’s filming), but also for those who have left Syria and maintain RBSS externally. The aforementioned Aziz is the face of RBSS, and with his flat-brim baseball hat, black windbreaker, and black backpack looks more like a hardcore-listening 20something than the de facto leader of this group. In Germany, he lives in a small apartment, with a stack of photographs of relatives and friends who have died either in Syria or when trying to flee. Also in Germany are brothers Hamoud, a photographer and cameraman, and Hassan, whose family inside Syria has been systematically murdered by ISIS for retaliation. “ISIS doesn’t represent the Islam I know,” says Hamoud, whose mouth spontaneously bleeds because of anger and stress. “In the end, we are Muslim.”

The three of them are in constant contact with other RBSS members in Gaziantep, Turkey, on the border with Syria. Their closest friend and colleague is reporter Mohamad, who fled Syria with his wife (“Fancy outfits ... we bought them in vain,” he says to her as they look over their few belongings) and who used to be a high school math teacher before joining RBSS. After one of his students was arrested, “I couldn’t stay silent anymore.” Mohamad spends his days coordinating with reporters inside Syria, battling crappy telephone and Internet connections and constantly telling their contacts to stay safe during government air strikes and at ISIS checkpoints—friends have been killed in both Syria and abroad. “Either we will win or they will kill all of us,” says Aziz, and the frankness and acceptance with which he says that is sobering.

Heineman has truly astonishing access: He visits with RBSS members in safehouses and in hotel rooms, watches as they contact sources and upload videos and news stories (“When they taught that class, I skipped it,” Mohamad admits when a colleague points out that his accent symbols are incorrect in a Microsoft Word file), and accompanies them to a funeral for a murdered colleague in Turkey (“You deserve Syria, you deserve freedom,” cries a mourner as she kisses the assassinated man’s face) and to a far-right, anti-immigrant protest in Germany. The company that created the “FUCK RFGS” cellphone case I saw a woman carrying at the protest can go fuck itself forever.

The information City of Ghosts includes from ISIS is also appalling, and it helps to have Aziz, Hamoud, Mohamad, and the other RBSS members put it into context. Watching ISIS members force Raqqa civilians, at gunpoint, to chant “Allah Akbar” for them to use in their propaganda videos; a child decked out in ISIS gear flashing peace symbols out the window as their pickup trucks roll into Raqqa; the music video juxtaposing the executions of prisoners with crooned lyrics about how “our maidens await” ISIS martyrs in paradise; a warning video to RBSS with pictures of their assassinated friends and the threat “Know that your work in journalism doesn’t protect your blood.”

City of Ghosts is impossible to watch but also absolutely necessary to watch because none of our feelings during the documentary—our disgust, our sadness, our empathy—compare with what Aziz, Hamoud, Mohamad, and the other members of RBSS are living every single day. That they have to watch ISIS videos announcing new executions with the morbid curiosity “Do we know them?”; that they have to adapt to all-new lives in Germany, a place where they can throw snowballs at each other in the streets but still need police protection; that when they watch air-strike footage sent by sources, they recognize their own homes in the wreckage. “I don’t remember the last time we were all together,” Aziz says. That one quiet admission is as jarring, harrowing, and unforgettable as anything else in City of Ghosts—one of the best films of 2017, and one of the most vital documentaries I’ve ever seen.

RATING: 5 OUT OF 5 STARS

“What in the actual fuck?” is something I have written down in my Valerian notes, and I don’t exactly know to what scene I was referring because I honestly could have been referring to any of them. There are a lot of problems here: an excess of derivative-looking CGI; a script that is almost unbelievably bad; leads Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne play characters with barely any personality development and even less romantic chemistry; and the much-hyped Rihanna cameo is barely 10 minutes long and defined entirely by its clunky dialogue. Awkward lines like “I’m also here for a noble cause: It’s called the law” and “It’s a drag when you don’t have an identity to call your own” aren’t the outliers; they’re the painful norm.

Based somewhat on the popular French comic books Valérian and Laureline, which ran for nearly 40 years, Besson’s film mixes in commentary about our current international political climate, with very on-the-nose lines about illegal immigration, terrorism, border safety, xenophobia, and refugees. That is all stuff I care about! I think I generally agree with Besson politically! But there is no nuance to any of his ideas, no subtlety in his messaging. The villain is a war criminal who doesn’t care about the millions of people he has murdered. The heroes are wide-eyed (white) kids who don’t want to follow the rules. There is no middle ground: no understanding of how that bad guy would draw followers to himself and would be protected by the system that created him, or how the idealism of those heroes would be endangered and stifled by the bureaucracy in which they operate. Valerian operates so much in extremes that it loses all impact.

In the year 2550, much of the life in space is centered in the Alpha space station, home to 1,000 planets, thousands of citizens, and hundreds of languages. Alpha is maintained by the World State Federation, which sends its agents all around the galaxy; two of the most infamous are Valerian (DeHaan, of The Amazing Spider-Man 2) and Laureline (Delevingne, of Suicide Squad). The former is a smooth-talking, almost reckless soldier who identifies as a “galaxy-hopping bad boy” and is in full-on lust with Laureline, his Ivy League-trained, super-intelligent colleague. “I only work with my partner; we’re a team,” he’s fond of saying. Even if it seems like Laureline can’t stand him, he proposes to her because THIS MOVIE IS CRAZY.

That proposal hangs out for the length of the film, after a dream in which Valerian sees a planet full of glimmering, androgynous, Avatar-like cat people and their troughs of incandescent, iridescent pearls, destroyed by spaceships falling out of the sky. With that dream lingering in his mind, Valerian and Laureline are then tasked with recovering a “converter,” a small animal that can reproduce any material that is placed inside of it (and then poop it out, of course), and bringing it to Commander Arün Filitt (Clive Owen, of The Confirmation) on Alpha.

When the commander is placed under their protection, Valerian and Laureline start to sense something fishy (“It’s our mission that doesn’t make sense, sir”) and begin their own investigation into what seems like a massive Federation cover-up. Chased throughout the corners of Alpha, evading underwater monsters and sketchy pimps in nightclubs, and finally discovering a secret at the center of the space station, Valerian and Laureline try to right a wrong—even if that means abandoning their orders.

Valerian is the kind of movie that relies on increasingly nonsensical set pieces to get from one plot point to another, so the first few scenes are its strongest. The best is the opening, which demonstrates the evolution of Alpha: multiracial and multiethnic groups of humans in space interacting with creatively designed, somewhat bizarre-looking aliens (sliminess is a guarantee), all with a common goal of exploration and cooperation. The first major action sequence, in which Valerian and Laureline track down the converter on a desert planet that is revealed to be a massive bazaar, is thrilling and imaginative. Valerian shooting magnetized beads at baddies to weigh them down so they stop chasing him is an ingenious trick, and the entire sequence has a grungy, steampunk feel to it that is enthralling.

But with each plot twist, the movie loses more and more charm. By the time Laureline is shoving her head in a mind-reading octopus’s butt, or Valerian is sitting down to watch Rihanna’s CGI-heavy burlesque show while Ethan Hawke’s sleazy nightclub owner is maniacally laughing in the background, or when the final big bad is spouting off about immigrants being a “bunch of savages,” it’s all just too much.

It doesn’t help that DeHaan and Delevingne are utterly lacking in chemistry and fail to inject steady energy into their performances, or that the entire narrative feels indebted to the same evil-military-industrial-complex of Avatar, which in and of itself was jacked from FernGully: The Last Rainforest, or that the love story between Valerian and Laureline seems more like sexual harassment than romance. Everything is slightly off, and combines into a movie which is most consistent in its lack of cohesiveness.

In Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Besson has made an unsteady film that doesn’t find balance anywhere—not in its flimsy characters, its ludicrous script, or its repetitive visuals. Maybe there was a good idea here somewhere. But it’s buried under so much intolerable foolishness, it’s nearly impossible to find. 

RATING: 1.5 OUT OF 5 STARS

A little bit of ‘90s nostalgia is never a bad thing, but a narrative has to have more—more than just a general vibe of “Hey, remember high-waisted jeans and payphones?”—to resonate effectively as a film. That is the problem with Landline, the latest from director Gillian Robespierre, working again with Jenny Slate after their previous dark comedy Obvious Child. Slate is charmingly awkward, the rest of the cast is stellar (particularly Edie Falco and John Turturro), and the script is often sharply poignant. But Landline never really clicks together, relying so often on ‘90s-themed backward-gazing that its family drama fails to set itself apart.

Landline is set in Manhattan in 1995, beginning after Labor Day, when summer is beginning to change into autumn and the idyllic, lazy days of vacation transition back into methodical drudgery. The Jacobs family may be returning together from a family vacation at Lake Louisa, but they all seem to be going in different directions.

Father Alan (Turturro, of Transformers: The Last Knight), a copy writer unfulfilled by his job at McCann Erickson, is intently working on the plays he writes for pleasure. Mother Pat (Falco), a high-powered executive, is tired of carrying all the responsibility for raising their teenage daughter, Ali (Abby Quinn) who is sneaking out at night, going to clubs, doing drugs, and having sex with her boyfriend. And other daughter Dana (Slate, of Despicable Me 3), always the uptight, by-the-rules one, is chafing in her engagement to nice, boring guy Ben (Jay Duplass, of Paper Towns), especially when she runs into old college hookup Nate (Finn Wittrock, of La La Land).

Every Jacobs is trying to figure out who they are individually and how they fit into their family dynamic, but things turn upside-down when Ali finds a floppy disc of poetry that Alan has written to a mysterious “C.” The poems are erotic—“nipples dance ... like raindrops,” one line reads—and Ali, equally aghast and disgusted, leans harder into her bad choices after finding out. She does heroin, she sleeps with her boyfriend, and she runs away, ending up back at the Lake Louisa house one night when Dana is unexpectedly there, too.

“You are such an irritant!” Dana yells at Ali; “You are like the embodiment of constipation!” Ali screams back; and although the two can barely stand each other, it’s Dana who Ali turns to with the news of Alan’s affair. And so together, the pair try to figure out what to do: Tell their mother? Follow around their father and try to discover the identity of “C”? Or learn how to be sisters even as their identities change, with Ali struggling with responsibility while Dana becomes increasingly reckless?

So much of Landline’s family drama feels typical, and that expectedness is unfortunately an obstacle for the film’s wonderfully inappropriate script. Dana, Ali, and Pat are all whip-smart and hilariously vulgar (the film opens with a scene where Ali says to Dana during a car ride, “I can see your boyfriend’s cum stain,” to which Pat gently corrects her, “You can see her fiancé’s cum stain”), and Landline does an effective job depicting the relationship of these three women—Dana with all of Pat’s innate sense of anxiety and worry; Ali with her deadpan humor and button-pushing. But Alan’s storyline is the most obvious, and while Falco and Turturro have a believably lived-in chemistry, their narrative arc is familiar to the point of dull.

The same goes for Dana’s storyline, which parallels her father’s in certain ways—but Landline never takes the next step of having the characters confront each other on their poor choices. Is the film suggesting that infidelity is common enough to be rote, or that Dana is mirroring her father without even knowing it? And if so, what does that mean about her narrative development, or his? Landline raises those questions without answering them, instead choosing to focus on subplots in which Dana pierces her eyebrow ring as an act of mini-rebellion and talks so dirty that she freaks Ben out. Those character details give Slate opportunities to work her raunchy-cute dynamic, but they sidestep narrative issues present in Landline.

Still, at 93 minutes, Landline doesn’t stretch its story too thin or attempt to do too much. The story it tells is undoubtedly jazzed up by ‘90s nostalgia (references to Blockbuster Video, record stores, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s power suits, Must See TV, and PASTE magazine abound), but the performances are good enough to make Landline a worthwhile detour back in time. “She cut off an entire penis, you should say her name right,” Dana advises Ali as they have a stream-of-consciousness conversation about Lorena Bobbitt, their father’s affair, and what will happen to their family. It’s that dark humor that buoys Landline above its otherwise overly recognizable narrative.

RATING: 3 OUT OF 5 STARS

“Dragonstone” is spotted throughout with moments that force an examination of the past and a reminder of characters long since gone. Jon Snow and Sansa Stark speak of their father Ned, beheaded all the way back in season one, and brother Robb, murdered by the Freys, Boltons, and Lannisters at the Red Wedding. Arya Stark mentions Robb’s pregnant wife, Talisa, before she poisons “every Frey who means a damn thing.” Jon’s memories of ill treatment at the hands of Sansa’s and Arya’s mother, Catelyn Tully, come to the surface when he tells Sansa “I will not punish a son for his father’s sins.” When Meera Reed introduces herself to Dolorous Edd at the Wall, what is unspoken is that she is the only companion Bran Stark has left—her brother Jojen and Bran’s protector Hodor have both been killed by White Walkers and wights, as was the Three-Eyed Raven.

Jaime Lannister chastises twin sister Cersei about their dead children, Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen; in a cameo, Ed Sheeran sings a song about Shae, the whore Tyrion Lannister loved and murdered when he found her in bed with his father, Tywin, who he also then murdered; the Hound Sandor Clegane is confronted with the corpses of a father and daughter he effectively left to die when he stole from them; Euron Greyjoy boasts about the brother he murdered, Balon, the father of Theon and Yara Greyjoy; Daenerys Targaryen, returning to her family seat at Dragonstone, must confront the infamousness of her father the Mad King Aerys as she attempts to reclaim the Iron Throne. Practically every forward action in “Dragonstone” is haunted by something that came before; no family, no hero, no villain is exempt. It’s only fitting that Game of Thrones starts off season seven acknowledging this much interior complexity for its characters, even as they still do dumb shit (Jon and Sansa, STOP SQUABBLING) and seem stuck in certain situations beyond their control (good to know Citadel training is so primarily poop-focused).

Game of Thrones has always had a problem—or perhaps disregard for—cohesive timelines, and “Dragonstone” is no different. How much time has passed since the sixth season finale, “The Winds of Winter”? For some subplots, it’s only days (Arya, while wearing Walder Frey’s face, mentions that it’s their second feast in a “fortnight”), whereas for others, it seems far longer (it had to take weeks, if not months, for Euron Greyjoy to build a new fleet to replace the ships Theon and Yara stole when they made their alliance with Dany). Nevertheless, there are two diverging concerns here: Northerners, including Jon and Sansa at Winterfell, Edd and Bran at the Wall, and Sandor and the Brotherhood Without Banners on their way to the Wall, are consumed with the upcoming war against the Night’s King (I absolutely will not call him the Night King, as the show so stupidly insists on doing), whereas down South in King’s Landing, Cersei is obsessed with solidifying her power in the face of a unified threat from Dany and the allied Greyjoys, Martells, and Tyrells.

“I’m the queen of the Seven Kingdoms,” Cersei tells Jaime, but he corrects her with “three kingdoms at best.” Cersei may dream of a dynasty for them, but it’s clear they’re finally getting what they wanted in the worst way—the only two Lannisters who matter in the world, left alone in what seems to be an empty castle in a city overflowing with shit, surrounded by enemies and false friends. The end is near for House Lannister, and maybe we’re beginning to see the Valonqar prophecy, that a little brother would kill Cersei. Maybe it’s not Tyrion, but Jaime, whose “Cersei, what the fuck did you do?” face is working overtime these days. He was a Kingslayer once—why not a Queenslayer, too?

Sibling power struggles apply to the Starks as well, even if Jon and Sansa don’t know they’re really cousins (R+L=J!). What is Sansa’s motivation here? She’s been shaped by Cersei and the creep-creeping Petyr Baelish more than she would like to admit; Jon points out to her the things that Ned hid from his daughters, but it’s Catelyn’s frosty treatment of Jon that seems to resurface in Sansa as she questions his judgment and undermines his priorities. She clearly knows what Littlefinger wants from her—Sansa’s tone of disgust when speaking with Brienne is unmistakable—and I wonder what that pairing will produce in the future. Cersei is without the network of spies coordinated by Littlefinger and Varys; could Sansa send the former to King’s Landing to spy for them? Would Sansa betray Jon? There are already secrets and lies between the two, and each are making mistakes. Never forget how Sansa treated Jon back when Ned and Catelyn were alive—as if the bastard was below her in every way. Dynamics like that don’t ever really change.

And finally, there’s Dany, returning from Slaver’s Bay—I wouldn’t necessarily say triumphantly, given the chaos she left behind—with an army of allies in tow to fight for her birthright. The woman who was sold by brother Viserys into a marriage she was too young to want, forced to adapt to new cultures that trafficked in sexism and classism, and who nurtured the only children she would ever have, the dragons who brought magic back into the world—it’s easy to root for Dany as the hero we all think should end up on the Iron Throne. She’s sitting on an island full of dragonglass, she’s the fire to counteract the Night’s King’s ice, it all syncs up. But as Sandor said to Beric Dondarrion, “There’s no divine justice, you dumb cunt.” In a world where everyone wants vengeance, is there room for justice?

That’s the question I think Game of Thrones will be tackling this shortened season, and it’s finally time for some answers. See you mid-season—we'll do this again four episodes in, and at the end of the season, too. 

Odds and ends:

+ I know that everyone has been quoting Arya’s lines “Leave one wolf alive and the sheep are never safe” and, of course, “When people ask you what happened here, tell them the North remembers, tell them winter came for House Frey,” but something she said earlier stuck with me: How she murmured “Yes, yes … cheer,” when the Freys were all congratulating each other on the Red Wedding. It was the sinister, mocking tone of that line that resonated most for me.

+ A storm is blowing in with the Night’s King and his army, and oh yeah, they have three giants. I guess that wildling song Ygritte used to sing, “I am the last of the giants,” doesn’t apply to the undead.

+ ALL OF THE BLESSINGS upon Lyanna Mormont of Bear Island, the best child in all of Westeros: “I don’t plan on knitting by the fire while men fight for me … and I don’t need your permission to defend the North.” Sit DOWN, Lord Glover.

+ Sansa did some annoying things this episode, but I think every women in the world felt a kinship with her when she replied “Would that be so terrible?” to Jon’s “How should I be smarter—by listening to you?”

+ OH HELLO, EURON GREYJOY POST-MAKEOVER. Motherfucker is fine as hell now, like a mall-goth Pacey Witter. I am down. Also, “Here I am, with 1,000 ships and two good hands,” may have been the best line of the episode.

+ Jim Broadbent is a welcome addition to this cast. Welcome, Jim Broadbent.

+ Every so often, the writing gets a bit anachronistic, and I think Sandor’s barb to Thoros of Myr falls into that category: “You think you’re fooling anyone with that topknot?” felt too modern-casual to me. But his whole storyline this episode, and his conversations with Thoros and Beric both (“It’s my fucking luck I end up with a band of fire worshippers”) reminded me how much I missed the Brotherhood Without Banners.

+ Reminder: Thoros, Beric, and the Hound are all on Arya’s kill list, along with Cersei, the Mountain, and Melisandre.

+ “Has she come yet? The Dragon Queen. Daenerys Stormborn.” Way to give me chills, Jorah Mormont.

+ Oh, and most importantly: WHERE THE FUCK IS GENDRY?

An adaptation of the 14th century Italian novella collection The Decameron, The Little Hours does everything in extremes: Nuns curse and fight; priests get drunk and break their vows; noblemen describe in grisly detail grotesque battle scenes. Practically everything here is meant to offend. If you can give yourself over to that intensity, you’ll be amused—survive the first five minutes and you’ll enjoy the remaining 85.

Set in the Garfagnana region of Italy in 1347, The Little Hours primarily focuses on three nuns serving in an isolated convent: Sisters Alessandra (Alison Brie), Fernanda (Plaza), and Genevra (Kate Micucci), who have varying levels of friendliness with each other. Genevra is an uptight tattletale, but she trails in Fernanda’s shadow. Fernanda is apathetic and rude, but has an eye always on Alessandra. And Alessandra, the daughter of a merchant who sends money to the convent, gets out of manual labor like washing clothes and tending to animals, but is relied on to produce embroidery that Father Tommasso (John C. Reilly) and Sister Marea (Molly Shannon) sell for extra funds.

The Sisters’ varying frustrations with each other and with convent life overall are intensified when Tommasso arrives back from a failed trip selling Alessandra’s fabrics with hired hand Massetto (Dave Franco), who the Father presents as a deaf-mute. But in reality, Massetto is a runaway from a nobleman, Lord Bruno (Nick Offerman), who captured the young man sleeping with his wife and who swore to kill him. To protect his identity and keep him safe, Tommasso encourages Massetto to lie—but his presence in the convent ratchets up the simmering tension already present.

Alessandra finds herself attracted to him—could they end up married? Fernanda thinks she can use him—will he respond to a love potion? And Genevra, rattled after a sexual encounter she didn’t expect, doesn’t understand why Alessandra and Fernanda are both acting so weird—what about Massetto could possibly be so interesting?

The Little Hours feels like an elongated skit (which makes sense, since the original story was in a novella format), and that scant story both works for and against it. On the one hand, the lack of narrative gives Plaza, Brie, and Micucci room to be bizarre, petty, and vengeful, and the simple juxtaposition of their conservative nun habits and raunchy, modern language is consistently funny. Their tirades are often uncomfortable and inappropriate (“Hoarding all the food, huh, like a fucking Jew!” yells Alessandra at the farmer who grows vegetables for the convent), and Franco does a good job being constantly aghast at what these “nice”-looking girls say and do.

But on the other hand, the second half of the movie becomes so sex-filled that the humor takes a backseat, and the script only digs into droll vulgarity again when the Sisters are brought before Fred Armisen’s Bishop Bartolomeo to discuss their sins. Watching Plaza apathetically add “just the tone of my voice” to her list of wrongdoings is perfectly in character, but it comes after about 15 minutes of Franco-centered makeouts and not enough jokes.

The Little Hours obviously doesn’t have wide appeal, but the film is strongest when it really pushes forward its agenda of aggressive, irreverent comedy. The pansexual revelry is certainly part of that, but it’s never as funny as when Plaza, in her first moment of astonishingly anachronistic behavior, yells at a man gently greeting them, “Hey, don’t fucking talk to us! Get the fuck out of here!” That casual, self-possessed crudeness is the best part of The Little Hours, irrespective of the film’s barely there plot.

RATING: 3.5 OUT OF 5 STARS

The film is a fictionalized, timeline-tweaked version of Nanjiani’s relationship with real-life wife Emily V. Gordon; the two wrote the movie together, one of many creative partnerships on which the two have collaborated. While Nanjiani plays himself in the film, Zoe Kazan plays Emily. The two of them have undeniable, revoltingly cute chemistry, and you’ll fall in love with each of them in turn.

The story is told mostly from Nanjiani’s point of view: Kumail (Nanjiani, of Flock of Dudes) is struggling to make it as a stand-up comic in Chicago, sneaking in short sets when club owners let him, working on new material in between Uber shifts, and hitting on girls with a cheesy move that involves writing their name in Urdu. His Pakistani heritage is obviously part of his identity—he’s working on a one-man show about his immigration experience—but he and his parents, father Azmat (Anupam Kher, also Jess’s dad from Bend It Like Beckham!) and mother Sharmeen (Zenobia Shroff), differ drastically in terms of religious adherence and familial expectations.

For Azmat, it’s how Kumail presents himself—“You should be stylish like your father … just observe me”—whereas for Sharmeen, it’s not only that Kumail hasn’t yet taken the LSAT, but that he has shown zero interest in the Pakistani-American women she keeps inviting over. “I wonder who that could be,” she says whenever there’s a knock on the door, but every woman is there at her invitation, and none of them interest Kumail. Each photo gets tossed in a box in his barely furnished room in his crappy apartment, the subject of the portrait never to be thought of again.

The only woman who really captures his attention is Emily (Kazan, of What If), a graduate student in psychology who calls him on his terrible Urdu move and opens up her life to him. But she’s white—and for Kumail’s family, dating isn’t even allowed, let alone with someone who isn’t Pakistani. “It’s like he’s dead, or worse,” Kumail notes of a cousin who married a European woman. It’s just not done, and so Emily must remain a secret, until a deadly infection forces her into a medically induced coma and throws Kumail into contact with her parents, Terry (Ray Romano, of Ice Age: Collision Course) and Beth (Holly Hunter, of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice).

They’re angry, confused, and afraid, and Kumail’s presence isn’t helping things. He is the person who broke their daughter’s heart, and yet his continued appearance at the hospital is perplexing and inexplicable. And yet, Kumail can’t think of being anywhere else or doing anything else—a realization that affects not only the trajectory of his career, but his relationship with his unsuspecting parents, too.

As a first-generation Iranian-American whose cultural heritage overlaps so much with Kumail’s—Shia Muslim faith; arranged marriage as the only kind of marriage; familial expectations that only allow medicine, law, or engineering as viable career choices—I can confidently say that no movie has ever captured the nuances of my identity like The Big Sick. I have had these arguments with my parents; I have cried those tears of loneliness and frustration; I have realized that it may be impossible for the choices I’ve made to be approved of by the people I want to love me the most. It is extremely cathartic and moving to see those experiences given attention, humor, analysis, and affection in The Big Sick—to have Muslim and Middle Eastern lives, with all their distinctions and complexities, reflected and developed on the big screen.

The Big Sick succeeds because the multifaceted portrayals of Kumail and his parents are joined by some career-high performances from Romano and Hunter. The former is in peak dad mode, with a kind of gentle cluelessness that shows when he asks Kumail “So, uh, 9/11?” and a wary devotion to Beth that demonstrates decades of marriage. And Hunter is, quite honestly, perfect—she’s ferocious and loving, compassionate and stubborn, and her late-night chat with Kumail about how her family rejected Terry at first is wistful and contemplative. An Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress wouldn’t be out of the question.

There are so many other things The Big Sick offers up to audiences—welcome humanity and understandable anger from those girls Kumail keeps rejecting because he’s too nonconfrontational to stand up to his mother; cutting-yet-comical commentary on the treatment of Muslims and Middle Easterners in post-9/11 America; a winning tug-of-war between Kumail and Emily as they date, with zingers from her like “I love when men test me on my taste”—and very little of it isn't enjoyable. Maybe the movie goes on 10 minutes too long; maybe a few of Kumail’s comedian friends aren’t developed enough. But those are seriously minor issues in an otherwise best-of-2017 film. “Can you imagine a world in which we end up together?” Emily asks Kumail in a pivotal moment. I’m so happy that we can.

RATING: 4.5 OUT OF 5 STARS

We are conditioned now to get hyped at everything, but Baby Driver legitimately earns that awe, with masterfully designed chase scenes, Ansel Elgort’s light-on-his-feet grace, and Jon Hamm’s unhinged villainy. And that goddamn soundtrack! The Beach Boys! The Damned! T. Rex! Golden Earring! Queen! Simon and Garfunkel! Young MC! Barry White! Every choice in Baby Driver reflects that a real living human person made it, not a conference room of cynical decision makers trying to figure out exactly how focus groups would react to every single thing. Baby Driver is more personal than that, and that intimacy—one that manifests for its characters in greed, desperation, love, and hatred—is its greatest strength.

The film focuses, of course, on its title character: Elgort (of The Fault In Our Stars) is a getaway driver named Baby (“B-A-B-Y,” he spells with smirking charm) with cheeks like a baby’s butt, smooth and youthful and seemingly innocent. For years, he’s been under the thumb of criminal mastermind Doc (Kevin Spacey, of Horrible Bosses), enlisted as the wheels for bank robberies, heists, and other not-so-legal endeavors throughout Atlanta. By day he waits for communication on his burner phone, and when he’s summoned, he arrives with his white earbuds dangling from his ears and his plastic sunglasses on, listening to Doc and his plans but never really registering a reaction.

It’s a blankness that drives other people insane—but Baby knows what he needs to do to get the job done. He comes to life primarily behind the wheel, with his songs cued up on his iPod and his eyes staring straight ahead, and even Doc’s crew, like the sensually threatening Buddy (Jon Hamm, of Keeping Up With the Joneses) and Darling (Eliza Gonzalez, of Jem and the Holograms) and the this-close-to-unhinged Bats (Jamie Foxx, of Annie), acknowledge that he has skill.

He’s never messed up, and he only has “one more job” until he’s “all paid up” with Doc for a slight from his childhood. And when that’s done, maybe Baby can pursue another life: one where his mixtapes transition into a music production career; where he can pay for his foster father Joseph’s (CJ Jones) healthcare with clean, not dirty, money; and where he can build a new future with pretty diner waitress Debora (Lily James, of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) by his side. It all sounds promising. But when has “one last job” ever worked out for anyone?

There is a kinetic quality to Baby Driver that can’t be captured in a review, no matter how many details you work into a description of a chase scene or a romantic meet-cute or a bloody shootout. But let it be said that Wright has a sense of fluidity and composition that makes Baby Driver feel like everything that is happening onscreen is actually happening in the real world, a groundedness that has been sorely lacking in summer blockbusters like Fate of the Furious, The Mummy, and Transformers: The Last Knight. Those were franchise pictures more interested in furthering a story than actually telling one. Baby Driver leans into its own narrative with adrenaline and zeal, and you’ll feel it.

As fantastic as it is that this whole damn thing is set to a soundtrack, attention must also be paid to how hard this movie hits emotionally: Baby blasting music through their sound system speakers so the deaf Joseph can feel the vibrations and dance along in his wheelchair is a tear-jerker of a moment; a tense face-off between Buddy and Bats shows the toxic masculinity festering inside each of them; an admission by Doc to Baby about his childhood will make you feel sympathetic for even the most ruthless of men. As fully as Wright ramps up the intensity of this genre-shaking film, he makes room for moments of honesty and truth, too.

Baby Driver isn’t perfect: Foxx’s character, although clearly meant to be aggressively annoying, nevertheless becomes too grating after a while, and it would be nice if Baby’s adored Debora had slightly more characterization. But those flaws are tolerable given that Wright has otherwise created one of the most dynamic films of 2017. My sympathies to the lady who sat next to me and hated it. But for the rest of us, Baby Driver is cinematic summer salvation.  

RATING: 4 OUT OF 5 STARS

Set in what seems to be the present day, triple threat Will Porter (Dan Stevens, of Beauty and the Beast), a physicist, Air Force pilot, and NASA astronaut, is hired by the mysterious, powerful Alterplex Energy. Advertisements for the energy company pop up throughout the movie, promising a “clean and simple way of converting mass into clean energy” that will “power the world for millennia to come.” Their solution is something called an “energy tower,” a huge structure they’ve built in whatever country they’re in (the U.K. or somewhere in Europe, I assumed, because Will and his family are clearly American and moved there for his Alterplex job) that, when launched, will create this clean energy solution.

But what actually is the tower? What does it do? How does it work? Why does Alterplex Energy need its own army of security forces? Why are there eco-rebels intent on dismantling Alterplex Energy’s work? What government is involved in this? Those are questions that the movie delays answering, instead jumping right into another mystery: Will waking up in what seems like a mirrored version of that world, one where the tower is already active, the city seems abandoned, and the streets are filled with dead people. “The jump was most likely successful, but I can’t confirm,” Will says. “I need to verify if this is really the Echo.”

How all these things link together—these two worlds, the jump, the Echo, the tower, and Will’s role in it all—are slowlyunraveled throughout Kill Switch, which cross-cuts between those Alterplex commercials and various timelines to tell its story. Most everything centers around Will, and the primary supporting characters are the Alterplex representative who recruited him, Abigail Vos (the wonderfully alluring and threatening Bérénice Marlohe of Skyfall, who does the best with the limited role she’s given) and former Alterplex security member Michael (Tygo Gernandt), who is shocked to see Will alive.

Writer and director Tim Smit (stylized as TimSmiT in the end credits) is adapting the film from his own short What’s In The Box?, using a script from Omid Nooshin and C. Kindinger. Smit’s use of visual effects is probably the best part of this. The icy-blue energy shooting out of the tower is a threat that hangs over everything, and how the world where Will wakes up is stylized—with hovering, insect-like drones and giant wormholes opening up in the sky, dropping ships and trains to the city below—is fine sci-fi stuff. And while the video game-style POV is obviously not everybody’s thing, the movie smartly uses the protagonist’s computer screen for humor, like flashing the text “CONCUSSION DETECTED. CONTACT YOUR LOCAL HEALTH OFFICE” every time after Will is shot at, smacked in the face, or otherwise harmed.

But the story of Kill Switch falls apart practically immediately. There are some brief mentions here of the science behind the film’s concept—duplicate matter theory and string theory both get shout-outs—but the script doesn’t do enough to explain the motivations behind Alterplex Energy and why they would place Will in the position that they do. What they hire him to do seems to change midway through the film, and there isn’t much explanation about what Alterplex thought would happen if their plan were successful—instead of being a failure, which is the purpose for the movie. It’s a kind of circular narrative logic that means the movie doesn’t make much sense.

That sketchiness means that the action of the movie needs to be stronger than the plot, but there isn’t that much exciting stuff for Will to do, no particularly thrilling violent exchanges or intense action sequences (which Hardcore Henry reveled in). For the most part, Will reacts to what happens around him, and that means that the viewer invited to take part in his POV will feel somewhat stagnant, too. And it’s a flaw of Stevens’s performance that during the POV scenes, he never seems to react quite appropriately to what’s going on around him—his voice acting often falls flat, not demonstrating the kind of panic or desperation that someone who wakes up in an alternate dimension would most probably be feeling. There’s a distance between his voice performance and the visual world of Kill Switch, and the first-person sequences suffer for it.

It probably goes without saying that the concept of Kill Switch would be better served as a video game than a movie. Exploring an altered version of our world, diving into city streets and underground tunnels, evading murderous drones, and working against the evil of a greedy corporation would probably make for solid hours of gameplay. But in the limited version of this story that plays out in the film, Kill Switch isn’t nearly as exciting as it could be.

RATING: 2.5 OUT OF 5 STARS

The latest film from director Colin Trevorrow (who previously made the good Safety Not Guaranteed and the needless Jurassic World, and who helms the upcoming Star Wars: Episode IX), The Book of Henry is written by thriller author Gregg Hurwitz, and you can probably blame both men for the script’s massive tonal shifts and overall discordant feel. Nothing about The Book of Henry makes sense in relation to anything else; no two elements seem to be at home in the same film. There is a vintage, cozy kind of small-town aesthetic here that doesn’t jibe with the story’s very dark turns. There are characters whose personalities and motivations don’t make a coherent whole. And there is an onslaught of emotional manipulation that makes the film feel spectacularly disingenuous—brain tumors, child abuse, deadbeat dads, and uncaring adults are all weapons the film wields to try and make you care. It is brazenly deceitful.

The film focuses on the titular Henry (Jaeden Lieberher, of The Confirmation), an 11-year-old genius who basically runs his family’s household. His mother Susan (Naomi Watts, of Allegiant) is a constantly-running-late waitress who spends her days playing video games and her nights getting a little too tipsy with friend and coworker Sheila (Sarah Silverman, of Wreck-It Ralph). The extent of her mothering is urging Henry to “pick up a bad habit or something” and tucking him into bed each night. But she adores him, as does his younger brother Peter (Jacob Tremblay, of The Smurfs 2), who constantly seeks Henry’s companionship and approval.

It’s Henry who does the finances, using a payphone outside school to trade stocks while waiting for Susan to pick them up; Henry who protects Peter from the schoolyard bully; and Henry who is 100% certain that their next-door neighbor, police commissioner Glenn (Dean Norris, of Secret In Their Eyes), is abusing his stepdaughter Christina (Maddie Ziegler), on whom Henry has a crush. But these idiotic, irresponsible, totally unbelievably written adults just won’t listen to Henry! His principal won’t do anything, the child abuse hotline won’t do anything, and Henry is damn mad. “When someone hurts someone else, I think it is our business,” Henry says, and so he goes about scribbling in his red notebook a plan that he won’t share until the time is right—which is right around when the film throws out its first twist.

To give away more would veer into spoiler territory, but suffice to say that the film works itself into a pretzel to complicate matters that would be pretty easily solved if any of these characters actually talked to each other. Henry angrily complains about how “Violence isn’t the worst thing in the world, [it’s] apathy,” but in servicing that superficially empathetic declaration, he and Susan make an increasingly ridiculous series of decisions that defy any kind of interior film or exterior real-world logic. Instead of talking to each other, or to other people in their community, or to Christina herself, they surge forward into a plot that unravels so spectacularly by the conclusion that it is truly a colossal waste of time.

And honestly, Henry has some real jerky tendencies, often using his intelligence to disrespect and undermine others. He may say “I prefer precocious” as a descriptor, but he truly kind of sucks. He calls adults by their first names, he mocks his mother, he belittles her best friend (calling her “fashion roadkill”), he refuses to believe that anyone could know more about anything than him. He is essentially the nightmare child that Chris Evans hoped his niece wouldn’t be in Gifted, but no one calls Henry out on any of it.

Instead, he is celebrated, exalted, and admired, and that is infuriating given that Christina—the character around which everything that happens in this movie actually circles—has no personality whatsoever. She has maybe 10 lines of dialogue, and she certainly is never directly asked for her opinions, reactions, feelings, or thoughts. Because Ziegler is an accomplished dancer (yes, you recognize her from those Sia music videos), the character has a climactic ballet performance, but that is not enough to make up for a preceding hour of ignorance. The movie only uses her as a victim, as someone who is injured so that we can learn more about characters like Henry and Susan, and that is terrible.

The only strong points here are the production aspects by the likes of production designer Kalina Ivanov, set director Joanne Ling, and costume designer Melissa Toth, who create the comfortably disheveled world of the Carpenter home, and the performances, from Watts especially. Now settled firmly into her put-upon-mom phase (see: Allegiant, St. Vincent, The Impossible), Watts has great chemistry with Lieberher and Tremblay, even though the script forces her into the role of an incompetent mother more interested in single-shooter video games than understanding how online banking works. Even as the movie gets unbearably absurd and does wrong by all of its characters except for Henry, Watts is a steady, committed presence.

(Aside: How have they managed to stay alive this long if Susan is such a crappy mother? Has Henry been investing in stocks and balancing her checkbook since infancy? The movie makes a half-hearted joke about Susan receiving alimony payments, but the actual details of the Carpenter household are less interesting for the filmmakers than the idiotic plan Henry cooks up.)

Obviously, I could rant about practically every aspect of this film for a very long time, and that is because The Book of Henry is a mess. In a way, I almost admire it, almost in shock that it’s getting a theater release from Focus Features and that it snagged an up-and-coming director like Trevorrow. But at the same time, this movie is so deceitfully aiming at a certain kind of viewer—the kind who would consider Henry’s erasure of his mother’s decision making charming rather than pretentious, and who would laugh at ayoung white child rapping “shiznit” instead of finding it unbearably twee—that I’m also not surprised at all. The Book of Henry will find an audience. Please don’t let it include you.

RATING: 0.5 OUT OF 5 STARS

Into that “Oh hey, something finally new!” feeling of relief arrives Black Butterfly, a drama that Lionsgate is marketing as a “psychological thriller.” It has flaws—the ending is, honestly, rage-inducing—but at least it’s trying something. Antonio Banderas and Jonathan Rhys Meyers lean into the film’s intimate premise and ratchet up the tension and anxiety quite well; this is an ideal VOD offering that relies more on twisty plotting and layered dialogue than bombast. Up until the conclusion, it will reel you in.

Black Butterfly focuses on Paul (Banderas, of The 33), a writer living on a secluded property outside of Denver. His beautiful home is falling into disrepair, littered with liquor bottles and trash. He doesn’t have any cash flow to pay for his groceries. His wife has left him, he’s not selling any work, and everything that once seemed so promising in his life has become total shit. Paul is the kind of man who is polite in one moment and then filled with anger the next, the kind of person used to getting what he wants and unable to understand why he’s not anymore.

Into his orbit enters Jack (Rhys Meyers, of The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones), who intervenes on Paul’s behalf at a local diner, defending Paul from a man he had previously screwed over; only a few words from the rangy, edgy, intensely eyed Jack scare away the man. Paul offers Jack a ride and a place to stay for a few days, and almost immediately the drifter seems to take over parts of Paul’s life. He goes swimming in the pond on the property that Paul ignores. He starts fixing up the house, breaking out Paul’s tools and poking around his shed. And he starts needling Paul about his failing writing career and his persistent drinking, in one breath criticizing him (“We’re all free men, we choose what we want. You did this to yourself”) and in another offering to help edit his work (“I’ll give you the opinion of the common man”).

What is Jack’s endgame? When the two enter into an agreement that Jack will help Paul get his act together, elevating his writing to a fraction of the success he previously enjoyed, what they actually start wrestling over is the “story” of their lives. In a “story” version of their reality, would Paul the writer really offer Jack the drifter a place to say? Would Jack the drifter believably pull a gun on Paul the writer? Would Paul’s will be strong enough to survive Jack, or would Jack overwhelm Paul with his grasp of the unexpected (like putting a knife to Paul’s throat while he sleeps) and his brusque truths about Paul’s shortcomings?

For the most part, Black Butterfly zigs and zags nicely. Banderas adds depth to what could be a generic washed-up drunk, and he has flashes of menace that are unexpected and welcome in his depiction of Paul. Rhys Meyers, meanwhile, goes hard into the on-edge persona he’s cultivated over the years, and while his American accent is completely dreadful, his physicality and his unwavering eye commitment make for a believably creepy performance. And when the film begins unraveling what you thought you saw vs. what may have actually happened, it lives up to the thriller label. It’s not as strong as other recent genre offerings like Prisoners or Secret in Their Eyes, but the testosterone-fueled competition between Jack and Paul is done well enough.

At least, it’s done well enough until the very end. The final few moments of this film are truly infuriating, undermining all the thought-provoking meta developments of the preceding 90 minutes. Black Butterfly was a solid genre offering until the last few seconds, which plummet its quality and throw into question everything you just watched. Why director Brian Goodman and screenwriters Justin Stanley and Marc Frydman made that choice is impossible to understand. (Is it a tongue-in-cheek mirroring of Paul’s own strange choices? Eh.) Black Butterfly had a good thing going otherwise, a welcome break from the barrage of summer blockbusters that entertainingly toyed with your preconceptions before pissing you off.

RATING: 2.5 OUT OF 5 STARS

So how does the man whose impressively rapid healing power practically makes him invincible spend his days? By working as a chauffeur, picking up douchey fratboys who chant “USA! USA!” out of the sunroof and drunk bachelorettes who flash him through the partition. Every few days or so, he crosses the border to Mexico, a few bottles of illegally bought pills in hand, to a couple of rusted-out, beaten-down buildings in the middle of the desert. They look abandoned, but they actually house the most powerful brain in all humankind—now ravaged by disease.

Professor Charles Xavier (Stewart, of X-Men: Days of Future Past) is either subdued by those shadily obtained drugs, begrudgingly given by Caliban (Stephen Merchant, of Hall Pass), Logan’s partner in hiding Charles, or remembering moments of his prior life—even crap like Taco Bell jingles. “What did you do? Why are we here?” Xavier demands of Logan, but the reality is that it’s what Charles is capable of that has people in the know terrified. His brain has already been declared a weapon of mass destruction, and with seizures so powerful that they can essentially stop time, his body is no longer his own.

Xavier is a man lost in space and time—just like Logan, whose body, after all these years, finally seems to be failing. “You’re sick, I can smell it,” says Caliban, who can sense the existence of other mutants, and who understands (as Logan does) that the adamantium that once made him so powerful is now making him purposeless. His body takes longer to heal. His hands, where his claws come out, are infected with pus. And his eyesight—well, the man needs reading glasses, just like most other senior citizens.

But things change when Xavier announces that he can feel a new mutant, a sensation he hasn’t experienced in decades. Coincidentally, that feeling occurs soon after a Mexican nurse tracks down Logan, begging him to protect a little girl named Laura (riveting newcomer Dafne Keen), with vengeful eyes and a walk like a prowl. The woman wants Logan to take Laura from Mexico to Eden, a protected place in Canada. “She’s a mutant like you,” Charles says, and it’s that sense of camaraderie—or is it something more?—that inspires Logan to finally, begrudgingly agree, setting them on a road trip through the United States.

They’re not alone, of course: They’re being trailed by the mysterious Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook, of The Host), with a hipster haircut, a stylish overcoat, and a bionic arm, working on orders from the corporation Transigen. He has the kind of drawling Southern accent that sounds utterly charming as he threatens your very life, and with similarly enhanced mercenaries in tow, he’s intent on getting Laura back in the company’s clutches. Why he wants her so badly, and why Charles is so convinced that the girl is a symbol of promise in this utterly hopeless time, become the driving forces of Logan.

It is kind of insane, actually, how casually inclusive and confidently socially conscious Logan is. In Trump’s America, Logan is the movie we need, a film that turns Wolverine from a typical X-Man hero into the kind of explicit social justice warrior these characters were meant to be: He transports an illegal Mexican immigrant across the United States; he assists a black family in protecting their water source against a bunch of white racists; he illegally obtains drugs for a man who can’t afford them on his own (we don’t know what kind of healthcare plan Charles has!); and he fights against a corporation whose main public face is a Southern white guy with military experience who clearly has no qualms hurting children. I mean, COME ON.

It’s not just the broad narrative that raises Logan to such an intensely high level, but the little details that begin with that opening “Fuck” and progress forward: the conservative news pundit dismissively spitting “Why are we still talking about mutants?”; the heartbreaking quality of Charles muttering to Logan, “I always know who you are, sometimes I just don’t recognize you”; the posters of Abe Lincoln and Sitting Bull on the bedroom wall of one of Laura’s friends; the samurai sword and dog tags in Logan’s possession (nods to The Wolverine); Logan’s face when he hears the sound of children’s laughter, a reminder of what once was at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, all those years ago. All of that intention adds up to a well-considered, meticulously planned whole, a narrative that knows exactly what it is trying to accomplish—and goddamn, does it deliver.

What Logan leaves you with is the idea that “a man has to be what he is”—that there’s no escaping identity, no running away from who you are. What nature creates is right and worth defending, even if it means with bloodshed and destruction and sheer will. Some things are that important, and Logan delivers that viscerally and remarkably. You’ll feel it, and you won’t be able to forget it.

RATING: 4.5 OUT OF 5 STARS

This month has, surprisingly, actually been pretty great for trailers and teasers. The early months of the year, January and February, are usually the dregs of cinema -- the time of year we get subpar fare like xXx: The Return of Xander Cage and The Great Wall -- but they're also when trailers start showing up online for would-be blockbusters due to be released in the summer or early awards contenders for the fall.

So far this month there have been a slew of trailers that have me marking down release dates on my calendar, and I've compiled my fab five here -- including the return of Sofia Coppola, various indie horror flicks, and what could quite possibly be the first good Terrence Malick movie in years. Let's run it down.

THE BAD BATCH

Ana Lily Amirpour did something literally no one else has done with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a black-and-white Western-style story about a vengeful feminist vampire in Iran; all in Farsi, with a genre-spanning soundtrack that pulled from both popular Iranian music and Western rock, the movie was a stylistic marvel (and it's streaming on Netflix, so you have no excuse not to watch it). For her follow-up, The Bad Batch, Amirpour has gathered an intriguingly strange cast -- Jason Momoa, Keanu Reeves, and model-turned-actress Suki Waterhouse -- and this trailer is raising all kinds of questions. Cannibals? Yes! Keanu's weird mustache? OK! A thumpingly electronic soundtrack? Let's do this shit! So strange, so good, excuse me while I coo over Momoa's chest. 

THE BEGUILED

Sofia Coppola might be the most underrated director of the past decade. She's never gotten her due, and so often her films are ignored or dismissed for being about girlhood, femininity, and the experience of growing up -- subjects too often unexplored in mainstream cinema, but which I loved in Somewhere and The Bling Ring. So I'm intrigued by how she'll navigate all that in this remake of The Beguiled, about a Union soldier (Colin Farrell's fine self, only getting more handsome as he ages) who is taken in by a house of Southern women, including Nicole Kidman and repeat Coppola players Elle Fanning and Kirsten Dunst. They all want him, but their competition with each other seems to eventually turn -- why else would Farrell scream "You vengeful bitches!" Man, I'm so excited.

IT COMES AT NIGHT

Sorry, I'm too terrified to actually say anything about this trailer for It Comes at Night except for ... holy fucking shit. 

SONG BY SONG

I haven't liked anything Terrence Malick has done since The Tree of Life. Pretty much as soon as the director who once took years upon years to make films got prolific, I just wasn't interested anymore -- not in To the Wonder or Knight of Cups. But Song to Song looks legitimately good, following Rooney Mara and Ryan Gosling as they fall in love, Michael Fassbender as he encourages them to start making money off their music, and Natalie Portman as she gets tangled with Fassbender -- who might also be harboring a desire for Mara, too. It all seems kind of Closer, as seen through the Austin music scene, filtered through Malick's legendarily gorgeous cinematography, so here's hoping it won't suck. 

THE LOST CITY OF Z

"Are you insisting that these savages, they are our equals?" Look, I'm not going to pretend that my interest isn't piqued because of Charlie Hunnam, BECAUSE IT IS. HE IS SO ATTRACTIVE, YOU GUYS. But The Lost City of Z looks like it could be a fairly interesting would-be Aguirre, the Wrath of God, about a man consumed by the desire for a discovery that may not exist, and I'm fine with that. Aguirre is the kind of movie you only need to see once because it's such a nihilistic slog, but maybe I can wander down this road again with Charlie Hunnam's pretty face as my guide. 

But every so often there's a movie that inspires such frenzy in my reporter's notebook that I have to go back over my pages and re-read my initial impressions just to capture the absurdity of it all. Case in point: The Great Wall.

For fairness's sake, I will admit that I kind of liked The Great Wall! I gave it a somewhat positive review in Chesapeake Family today, and the reality is that it's stunningly beautiful and patently ridiculous, and I wish Matt Damon weren't in it. He legitimately serves no purpose ... and some excerpts from my reporter's notebook may capture why. 

Here they are: some snippets from my four pages of notes for The Great Wall. All exclamation points, question marks, underlines, misspellings, and other very-hyped reactions are what actually went into my notes while watching the movie that gave us such gorgeous imagery -- fire lanterns floating through the sky; color-coordinated warriors running down the wall to fight the monsters -- and yet also limply served up Matt Damon's very-sad-looking manbun.

Some of this stuff makes very little sense out of context, but it's also so weird that it could be like a strange, stream-of-consciousness poem you didn't know you needed that takes you through my feelings as the narrative progressed and Damon felt more and more superfluous. And if you want more coherent thoughts, check out my review.

Matt Damon is a hairy bandit? 

What is Matt Damon's accent??

Guy in a turban is the first to die, obvi

"Someone can tell me what I just killed" a stony gargoyle-looking arm! 

"Gents in front of us"

Beautiful armor designs! Bright capes and mirrored enamel! Armor like tiger, bird, etc., scarlet, cerulean, burnished gold

Beautifully choreographed drum-beating -- like a dance

WHAT ARE THE DEMONS? 

Crane Corps, basically like spear maidens, on the edge of parapets

"They look nervous" Thanks, Pedro

What are they, like basically giant iguana demons with gross jaws and eyes? One girl torn apart! You see a stack of girls who have died! 

Queen is a huge raptor Dilophosaurus hybrid

Ruffs become like umbrellas! They communicate through shock waves! 

Green blood like Nickelodeon slime

Fought for Spain, Francs, Pope "many flags" 

Scottish? Irish? What is this accent???

He explains a whale to them ... 

Steampunk-style ear trumpets! 

Now it's time to fire up zeppelins! 

So many people die

This is actually super effective 3D

No kiss!!!!!

Now, to be fair, you probably know everything you truly need to know about John Wick from the mind-boggingly good 2014 film, but it’s this particular scene in John Wick 2, about midway through the film, that reinforces the kind of guy this is. He’s cornered the person he’s being paid to kill. He lets them know what’s about to happen. Things don’t quite as he planned. And in the last moments of that person’s life, he holds their hand as they die—and then shoots them in the head for good measure.

Wick will provide you with a moment of compassion, but he’ll also finish the job. He is horrendously efficient and terrifyingly good at killing people—with guns, with knives, with cars, and especially with his own two hands—but his own experience of loss has affected how he interacts with others going through the same thing, even when that person is mourning the impending end of their own life at Wick’s command. Let us never forget that the entire premise of John Wick begins with life cruelly, unnecessarily taken, with a wife’s time stolen by disease and a puppy’s potential ended by Theon Greyjoy, that goddamn idiot. John Wick knows everything there is to know about dying. Just like Maeve in Westworld, he’s fucking great at it.

John Wick 2 picks up almost immediately after the first John Wick ended, with the assassin who is, in fact, back, tracking down his beloved car and using it to smash to bits the Russian gangsters who continue coming after him. As in, he literally keeps driving his car into people. Peter Stormare’s face when he realizes that Wick has arrived to reclaim his Mustang Cobra is a thing of beauty, a slack-jawed acceptance of the devastation and bloodshed that he is powerless to stop.

Wick being back in the game, even if to exact revenge against Reek, Reek, It Rhymes with Weak, changes things—and Stormare’s character isn’t the only one who knows it. Word has also reached Santino D’Antonio (played by Riccardo Scamarcio, who curiously looks exactly like a young Javier Bardem), who engineered Wick’s prior retirement; now that Wick is active again, Santino wants a favor. And because of the sort of blood oath that Wick agreed to when Santino coordinated his retirement, he owes the preening Italian crime lord—and just for good measure, D’Antonio destroys Wick’s gorgeous home to underscore the point. Wick will do this final job for Santino, or Wick will be disgraced among the assassin community he’s lived in for so long. And in this world, where Wick has been known for years as Baba Yaga—the boogeyman—to renege on a promise would look very bad indeed.

So Wick gets pulled again into what he thought he left behind: consulting Winston (Ian McShane), the owner of the assassins’ Continental hotel, for advice; traveling to Rome for his assignment; striding into the backroom of a sweatshop to have his measurements taken for a new suit; meeting with the Sommelier (excellently played by Peter Serafinowicz, having a grand old time), who hooks him up with some new guns while throwing around wine terms in an extended gag that I could have watched for two more hours. And all the while, he’s trailed by Santino’s personal bodyguard, Ares (Ruby Rose), who keeps her eyes on him, the implied threat clear—if he doesn’t do the job just right, he’ll have to answer to her.

In a loose way, John Wick 2 recreates some of the setpieces from its predecessor, but it does pursue the “bigger, bloodier, louder” vibe that so many sequels do. Wick seems to kill something like a bajillion people, and the shootouts are longer, more ruthless; you’ll get weirdly used to brain splatter after about 30 minutes. A chase through an Italian mansion’s catacombs is an insane whirlwind of perspectives and long takes; a final fight in an art installation that is essentially a house of mirrors is thrillingly vicious. If there’s one flaw, it’s that some of the original John Wick’s gracefulness seems sacrificed for extended sequences that prioritize the body count above all else, but still, this is a movie that trusts Keanu to step up, to throw around his body and exert his physicality over nearly everyone else. He does a damn fine job.

What I wanted at the end of John Wick 2 was more—more of Common, who plays an assassin that clearly has history with Wick and who seems to be the only character who can really go toe-to-toe with him; more of Laurence Fishburne, who plays the Bowery King, a character who organizes what seems like an army of informants all over New York City; more of the mythology and the world-building that these films have done so well. Luckily for all of us, it seems like a John Wick 3 is in the works—perhaps after Keanu and I take our honeymoon. We are very busy people.

RATING: 4 OUT OF 5 

To that group we can add Sacha from Long Way North, the independent French animated film that has quietly been rolling out in U.S. theaters over the past few weeks. The beautifully hand-drawn animated style, with its color saturation but rejection of heavy outlines for a more natural look, is one of the film's greatest wonders. Although the story is kind of simplistic (Sacha's grandfather, Oloukine, goes missing trying to reach the North Pole; she wants to find him and restore honor to her family), the visuals are stunning.

But the draw here for young girls will be Sacha, who is determined, resolute, and just bratty enough to be likable. The 15-year-old flees her wealthy aristocratic family when they seem willing to bury her grandfather's memory for their own political gain, and filmmaker Rémi Chayé does a good job peppering in little details about Sacha that will make viewers respect her quest. 

Small movies like these need all the support they can get, which is why you should seek out Long Way North. Need 5 reasons why you should see this with your daughter, niece, goddaughter, or whoever else? Let's list them in the form of the film's most impactful scenes. (And, if you want to read my whole review for Chesapeake Family, you can do so here.)

Reason 1: How willing she is to break up a ball in her honor to call out the Czar's grumpy nephew on his shit 

Seriously, she disrupts HER OWN PARTY to give him crap about his disregard for her grandfather. That takes guts! It also causes a rift between her and her parents that is quite dramatic, so thanks for nothing, Czar's crappy nephew. 

Reason 2: She runs away from all this old-school Russian opulence -- balls! fancy jewelry! this great balcony! -- to follow her principles

OK, so maybe that's not the best thing for a teenager to do. But when it's to find your lost grandfather, we can allow some wiggle room, right? 

Reason 3: She takes to hard work like a champ -- from peeling potatoes to sassing crusty sailors

Sacha spends part of her journey at a small inn near a port, where she trades work for a place to stay while she waits for a ship to agree to take her to the North Pole. She wakes up early, she peels potatoes effortlessly, and she commands a room of doubtful seamen into agreeing to join her quest for Oloukine. Sacha's got grit. (Uh, this may be some kind of veiled commentary on how labor is purpose ... but we'll leave that vaguely Marxist undertone out of this.)

Reason 4: When a cabin boy with a crush on her reaches out a hand to help her climb up the ship's sails, she refuses -- grabbing the rope on her own instead

Who needs boys when you have yourself? Or, when you have this great dog? Either option sounds good to me. Look at how cute this dog is! Let's encourage kids to be friends to animals before we indoctrinate them regarding romantic love, don't you think? 

Reason 5: She reaches the end of her quest -- and keeps looking toward the future

I won't spoil Long Way North for you, but I will say that the movie doesn't end in the "happy" way you would expect for a children's film, and that's a respectable choice. Instead, the movie lets Sacha complete her journey and gain wisdom and closure along the way, allowing her to close the chapter on this one part of her life. That's a strong message to send, and one that will encourage young female viewers to look toward the future, too. 

The film takes some surprisingly hard turns (there are more than a couple of shots fired), but what it captures about being a black teenager in America is sometimes quite powerful. Although some cinematic tricks are overused, like slow-motion party sequences and an imaginary astronaut that appears in pivotal moments for the protagonist, Kicks ultimately feels like a quite honest portrait of a particular time and a particular place. Despite some shortcomings, its genuineness is paramount. 

Focused on the young Brandon (Jahking Guillory) in the East Bay city of Richard, California, the film follows him as he scratches together enough money to buy a pair of Jordans, only to have them stolen by the older Flaco (Kofi Siriboe). With his silver grill -- complete with pointy fangs -- and supporting crew, Flaco isn't one to be messed with, but after years of being bullied for his smaller size and long hair, Brandon is done taking other poeple's shit. 

Still, he needs help, and that comes at first in the form of his best friends: the muscular lady's man Rico (Christopher Meyer) -- "Guys don't fuck with him, but girls do," Brandon says -- and the chubby, aspiring musician Albert (Christopher Jordan Wallace), who talks constantly about sex in the way that only a virgin can. Their days are usually the same: hang out at the basketball court, try to woo girls (who are invariably called "bitches"), mess around with recording music in makeshift closet studios, stealing 40s from the corner store, and riding around on their bikes. It's a teenage existence that seems simultaneously low-tech (cell phones and laptops are rarely used) but grown-up, with excessive drug use and sexual activity as the norm. 

But things change when Brandon buys a pair of red and black Jordans -- gleefully and triumphantly flinging his old, outgrown, dirty white sneakers onto the lines above -- and then almost immediately is beat up and embarassed by Flaco. Determined to get his shoes back, Brandon goes on the offensive: attacking one of Flaco's minions, learning that Flaco lives in Oakland, and traveling there to reconnect with his Uncle Marlon (Mahershala Ali), who went to prison years before on a drug charge but who understands the neighborhood in a way Brandon doesn't.

For Brandon, the solution seems easy: receive intel and help from Uncle Marlon, find Flaco, and get his shoes back. But he doesn't consider the intangibles, either, or how quickly the situation escalates. He doesn't realize that Uncle Marlon will flatly refuse to help him, or that he has a gun that Brandon can steal. He doesn't know that Uncle Marlon's two sons, Brandon's cousins, will offer to assist, taking him to a local hang-out and resulting in someone's death. And he doesn't understand how deep he's going to get, or how Uncle Marlon's advice will haunt him: "You got a problem, handle that shit yourself." 

The greatest moments of Kicks are in its details, which display a deep understanding of the film's own characters and the culture in which they live. Brandon gets a lot of this attention, like his wary face when a shoestore employee tells him the sneakers he likes "don't make kids' sizes"; his constant dreams about being chased, a nighttime ritual reliving his years of getting bullied; and the floral slides he picks from his mother's closet when his Jordans get stolen. There are also a number of memorable lines in the often-vulgar script, with Albert getting the most hilariously gross lines, like "You gonna put it in her bootyhole?" You understand how these three teenagers would be friends with each other, and how their crystallizing identities would come into conflict easily and often. 

The world is further sketched out with the film's use of music (songs by Nas, Kendrick Lamar, and Tupac) and its dedication to its subject -- every time a character is introduced, we get a long glimpse at their shoes -- but there are elements here that are clearly better than others. Ali, in particular, is excellent as Marlon, a man who has seen the worst of the world and understands that the path Brandon is pursuing is the wrong one. When, late in the film, Brandon returns to him, Marlon's matter-of-fact "You probably still gonna die" is both guiltily funny and unbelievably sad, and he adds a maturity that the film needs. 

Even at 87 minutes, though, Kicks feels somewhat fluffed. Is this enough of a narrative to last a full movie? Its details are ultimately more impactful than the main story; a few party scenes go on too long, and the film's constant sexism -- practically every female character is here for sexual objectification -- is grating. 

Yet its great triumph is how it makes you realize that a child like Brandon could very easily become an adult like Flaco, and how the idea that "your foot game is everything in this world" is part of a larger web of influences that can go dark very, very quickly. For a movie ostensibly about shoes, Kicks plunges into the depths of urban masculinity memorably and well. 

RATING: 3 OUT OF 5 STARS