The rebooted Planet of the Apes series has been a surprisingly strong and thoughtful blockbuster treat, an unlikely trio of popcorn flicks that pose deeper questions amidst the requisite scenes of violence and destruction. Since its inception in 2011 with Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the trilogy has evolved along with its titular primates, picking up with War for the Planet of the Apes this summer. Grim and relentless, War combines aspects of The Great Escape with films that deal with genocide for an experience that may be a little too heavy for its own good.

Much of the story follows Caesar (Andy Serkis), the chimp protagonist from the prior films, as he wanders through a frozen, mountainous wasteland with a group of other apes in search of an Army base. Fueled by revenge, Caesar is looking for a nameless colonel (Woody Harrelson) who is not only dedicated to wiping out the apes for good, but runs a concentration camp on the backs of simian labor. Along the way, Caesar and his friends encounter a young human girl who is stricken by a sickness that makes her mute, and they take her along with them. But the journey is only half the story. When the Colonel enslaves Caesar, War for the Planet of the Apes becomes a brutal struggle for survival, one that many of the story’s principal characters won’t survive.

But what is the movie ultimately driving at? Is it that the militaristic apes have essentially become humans with their warlike nature? Not really. Caesar and his group simply want to be left alone for a chance to live in peace. The film begins with an explosive battle scene where Caesar proves that he still believes in mercy. However, that decision ultimately costs him some apes that are dear to him when the Colonel infiltrates Caesar’s hideout and shoots his son and wife.

For its first two acts, War for the Planet of the Apes is a stirring, even deeply affective, meditation on freedom and identity. Along the way, Caesar and his friends encounter Bad Ape (Steve Zahn), a broken-down chimpanzee taking refuge in an abandoned ski lodge. Even as the film’s comic relief, Bad Ape’s story as a former zoo animal beaten by his human handlers is colored by a tragic tone. Yet, when the film leans on jailbreak clichés in its final act, War for the Planet of the Apes gives up and surrenders to the clarion call of summer blockbuster mediocrity.

In many ways, this new trilogy bests the original Apes films by adding heavy doses of realism. Harrelson’s ham-fisted performance may rival Charlton Heston’s teeth-gnashing, scenery-chewing from the original, but the motion-captured apes look amazingly real and convincing, much more so than Roddy McDowall in a chimp suit. However, there is no lightness this time around. War is hell, so they say, but besides some laughs at the expense of Zahn’s character, we may as well be watching Schindler’s List. That is all fine and good, but don’t try to blow away such a glowering version with explosions and slow-motion escape sequences at the end.

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Films about struggling with some form of mental illness can be difficult to execute, because the typical Hollywood instincts for what constitutes a satisfying character arc tend to do a disservice to the messy, laborious and rarely three act friendly journey to real life wellness. Drawn from her own experiences battling an eating disorder, former Buffy writer/producer Marti Noxon’s directorial debut To the Bone sidesteps this problem by not seeking out a storybook happy ending. Instead, Noxon chooses to document a chapter in her protagonist’s road to betterment, creating a captivating framework to explore the psychology behind anorexia, bulimia and other EDs from a place of brutal honesty.

This isn’t clear from the outset, though. For the first few scenes, there’s cause for concern that To the Bone is going to be one of those interminable films that tries to mask difficult subject matter with a hipper-than-thou sense of detachment. Ellen, the young woman played by Lily Collins, faces the world with such a thick veneer of eye rolling dissatisfaction that the film takes on the same sharp tongued, irritating tone. Her sharp personality makes the film curl around her like a security blanket. But this cloying, clever aura is a smart bit of misdirection. Noxon introduces us to Ellen and lets us see her as she presents herself, too cool for school and utterly in control.

Control is the key. Ellen herself loves to say she’s got it all under control, with her encyclopedic knowledge of calorie counts and her obsessive rituals of bedtime curl ups and maintaining 100% purview on maintaining her wisp of a figure. Her initial introduction on the last day of an in-patient therapy stay plays like the entirety of Girl, Interrupted distilled to the digestible size of a tweet. It’s only after we see her interact with her stepmother Susan (Carrie Preston) and stepsister Kelly (Liana Liberato) that we begin to see cracks in the narrative she clings to. The thrust of the film concerns her working with Dr. Beckham, a no-nonsense practitioner ably portrayed by Keanu Reeves. Beckham has her in a new in-patient program where she shares a house with five other women and a particularly twee young British man, where the film’s somewhat cutesy tone rears its head again.

However, Beckham’s methods call for an attempt at family therapy, where Ellen has to share a room with Susan and Kelly, as well as her biological mother Judy (Lili Taylor) and her girlfriend Olive (Brooke Smith). Up until this point, the family dynamics behind Ellen’s backstory feel pretty rote; her father is always busy with work and her stepmother is almost comically clueless, while she just seems to want to go back to live with her mom who supposedly gets her. The therapy session crumbles those preconceptions, subverting audience expectations and proving that even her queer, artsy matriarch sees her as more of a problem to be solved than a person. The progression of understanding Ellen moves for the audience at the same pace of her beginning to understand herself.

While the movie isn’t afraid to show the nitty gritty of eating disorder culture, it doesn’t dwell heavily on the saddo porn aesthetic. There’s some discomfiting, potentially triggering imagery, but it all serves the dramatic whole rather than fetishizing the trauma. This stylistic choice is particularly welcome, given the mid film twist about Ellen and the aftereffects of the art she’s been making for years. There’s half an attempt at a love story between Ellen and Luke (Alex Sharp), the lone male at Beckham’s program, but it serves Ellen’s arc more than the usual injection of unnecessary romance.

To the Bone doesn’t break new cinematic ground, but it’s a laudable, affecting piece of drama that finds the right way to say some powerful things that could prove useful for any viewer struggling at the moment, whether with an eating disorder or any other mental health issue. Now, that “right way” is largely by holding its protagonist accountable and forcing her (and in turn, the audience) to accept some hard truths. It also helps to have Keanu fucking Reeves providing those difficult maxims in his trademark, soothing tone. In the end, we never see Ellen get some recognizable happy ending, but we see her decide that maybe she deserves one, and that’s a good start.

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We don’t need any more art about what it’s like to be an artist. Why champion the pursuit of a bohemian lifestyle when so few voices push against it? The creative class has seized the narrative to the point that popular consciousness aligns us to their side by default. Still, legendary Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s latest film Endless Poetry doesn’t really care if we need it. It’s two-plus hours of surreal, full-tilt self-deification, all about the courage and strength of spirit it takes to become an artist—and it’s an absolute wonder.

Much of the film’s charm lies in its brazen unselfconsciousness. It is a balls-to-the-wall fulfillment of Jodorowsky’s vision, made with such confidence, momentum and skill that it transcends its lack of necessity and insulates itself against accusations of navel-gazing Jodorowsky knows it’s solipsistic, he knows we’ve heard his messages a million times before, and he doesn’t give a flying fuck—he’s going to tell us again, and he’s going to make it impossible for us to look away.

Like a more colorful 8 ½, Endless Poetry recounts Jodorowsky’s personal history and interrogates his contributions to the cinematic pantheon through a hyper-stylized, transparently artificial lens. Adan Jodorowsky, Alejandro’s real-life son, plays a version of himself for much of the film, and his other son Brontis plays Alejandro’s father. Jodorowsky’s decision to keep this story in the family lends the film a sense of authenticity, but in a very different way than the presence of Trey Edward Shults’ real-life family makes Krisha feel authentic. Far more than the savage, sterile beauty of something like El Topo, this film employs Jodorowsky’s considerable gifts in order to evoke feeling. It’s an emotional, sensitive, human experience, the kind where it only makes sense to have real men play their real fathers.

Typical of Jodorowsky, the film looks at the myriad stories being told within a single image; every frame of Endless Poetry really is like a painting, not just in form, but in purpose. His compositions utilize every inch of visible space to tell a self-contained story. The larger story, though, goes something like this: young Alejandro (Jeremiad Herskovits) lives with his parents (Pamela Flores and Brontis Jodorowsky) who run a shop in Santiago. His father is ruthless, his mother is tender, and he ends up running away from them and their insistence he become a doctor to pursue a life of poetry and art. He crosses paths with such Chilean writers as Enrique Lihn and Nicanor Parra, who becomes a mentor. Alejandro joins the circus, learns about loss and jets off to Paris when things get dicey in his native Chile. The film lurches forward patiently despite its manic tendencies, really taking time to tease the emotional depths out from all of its fairytale settings.

Many of Jodorowsky’s decisions grate on paper but gel onscreen. Sara, Alejandro’s mother, sings all of her lines, a perpetually overwhelmed opera performer stuck in a domestic melodrama she can’t escape. Alejandro’s father appears in one early sequence as a massive floating head that taunts his son at the dinner table for reading flowery verse. Rather than build period sets, we see costumed stagehands set up an early-20th century Santiago over the present-day cityscape, pulling down two-dimensional renderings over storefronts to highlight the inherent theatricality of making a movie about oneself. Those same stagehands show up throughout, in bodysuits, to carry off items that characters discard.

All of this works for two reasons. One, Jodorowsky knows what he’s doing tonally: the film is funny but avoids camp, it’s grotesque but avoids exploitation, and it’s moving without becoming maudlin. Two, we care about the things that happen onscreen. Pretty pictures and wacky ideas can’t hold a candle to personality, and Jodorowsky’s characters have it. Every eccentric that jets across the screen feels rooted in reality, and we want to know why they are the way they are. This goes double for flagrantly two-dimensional characters like Alejandro’s father: somehow by flattening them, Jodorowsky makes us wonder how they got so flat.

Endless Poetry affirms the important struggle of The Artist without insisting that he is the world’s noblest character. It’s openhearted and inventive, easy to watch and thrilling to behold, and it asserts its urgency by acknowledging its place.

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It’s a particular challenge for documentaries about climate change to get an audience’s attention. Besides persuading those who don’t believe it’s happening, filmmakers must present a scientific argument in layman’s terms. Throughout Jeff Orlowski’s riveting film, Chasing Coral, scientists equate the widespread bleaching and death of coral reefs to mass deforestation. It may be easier to imagine destroyed trees than it is to think about what’s going on in majestic underwater environments that most people can’t visit. Yet in addition to making you want to immediately book a vacation to Hawaii, Chasing Coral presents a convincing argument for the preservation of coral reefs, and that Earth’s rising temperatures – courtesy of greenhouse gases – threaten to ruin the nation’s biggest ecosystem. A story of passionate pioneers who love reefs becomes a clarion call for change and one of the year’s most essential movies.

If you know nothing about coral reefs other than their beauty, prepare for an eye-opening experience. Blending the approachability of a Bill Nye episode with all the terror of An Inconvenient Truth, Orlowski and crew make you care about their subject. The film’s first half lays out the basics about what coral is, a fact not known by one of the film’s main characters, Richard Vevers. Coral is a living, breathing organism all its own, whose food supply, power and protection makes a home for millions of different animals. They build their own environments and habitats like an organic high-rise. Everything within the colony works together to feed and sustain the structure in a way that’s a prototype for humanity. As it’s bizarrely summed up, no two corals are the same, and yet they are the same.

Chasing Coral’s motley cast of characters are as unique and wondrous as the coral they’re in love with. And make no mistake, the group are dyed in the wool “coral nerds” whose enthusiasm is infectious. Their broad grins endear them to viewers and invest us so that we feel the disappointment when they discover the horrors of dying coral. Rattling off coral species like they’re American states, Zach Rago, described as a coral lunatic, is the nerd whose journey to save the coral transforms him. His house is filled with reefs that lack fish. “It’s amazing to think about how massive it is, and it’s all alive,” he excitedly declares.

He’s not wrong. Outside of their ability to be self-sustaining, as a way of combating coral bleaching some reefs produce fluorescent “sunscreen” in vivid shades of blue, violet and yellow. To see it is spectacular, but it comes at the expense of knowing it’s a defense mechanism.

Chasing Coral’s primary motivation is to show the impact of coral bleaching, a bizarre phenomenon where wide swaths of coral up and die. In just 30 years over 50% of the world’s coral has died via this process, with the effects of bleaching leaving nothing behind but the organism’s skeleton. Watching Rago hold rotting coral “flesh” that sloughs off underwater drives the point home, once again, that these are living beings. Much of this results from minor rises in ocean temperatures that would be the equivalent of a fatal fever in humans. The issues inherent to the level of coral destruction is profound. Several prominent cancer medicines come from coral reef organisms, and reefs protect ocean communities from major tidal waves as well as aid those who survive off a diet of seafood. The fear is that in 25-30 years all the coral in the world will be bleached.

The scientists’ excitement notwithstanding, the film employs other techniques to prove to the audience that coral is a living organism. The aerial and underwater photography here is on par with BBC’s Planet Earth, although it is disheartening it is to see before and after shots of reefs once teeming with fish now reduced to looking like a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The world of a coral reef “isn’t a silent world at all,” a scientist says, so hearing fish swim around these reefs is a potent reminder of how much of a living, breathing thing coral is and what’s being destroyed.

But the film is as optimistic as its human subjects are enthusiastic. Orlowski treats coral bleaching with all the respect and reverence of watching someone waste away from a preventable cancer. He’s determined to save it – “you do what you have to do” – and with the help of Rago the two travel to the Great Barrier Reef to show the effects of coral bleaching. Their stamina is astounding as they make two-minute videos of coral up to 25 times a day to prove to naysayers that climate change is a reality. By the time they complete their footage, which shows massive deterioration in just a two-month period, the young man is completely demoralized. It’s up to Rago, and the audience, to save the reefs.

Coral reefs are as important to the environment as trees, and to lose them would be the equivalent of losing a quarter of our oceans. Chasing Coral eschews the usual scare tactics in favor of showing the spectacular beauty of its subject. That may be all an audience needs to convince them to make a difference.

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Danny Boyle’s 21st century films feature an eclectic mix of subject matter that nevertheless has tended toward a theme of perseverance or survival. Whether his protagonists elude zombie-like hordes (28 Days Later), cut off their own pinned limb (127 Hours), rise from abject poverty in an Indian ghetto to achieve a gameshow windfall (Slumdog Millionaire) or change the world through a singular innovative vision (Steve Jobs), Boyle’s more recent films often present us with figures, real or imagined, who overcome almost impossible odds. And yet he rose to acclaim in the ‘90s by applying his vivid visual style and kinetic storytelling to madcap tales of scheming, selfish people who screw each other over for money.

A suitcase full of cash has often served as the impetus for cinematic mayhem, and in Boyle’s directorial debut, Shallow Grave, a trio of irreverent flatmates have one fall into their collective lap when a new tenant promptly overdoses in his bedroom. Edinburgh residents Alex (Ewan McGregor), Juliet (Kerry Fox) and David (Christopher Eccleston) are first depicted as irreverent and cruel in their various interviews of potential flatmates, messing with the parade of prospects for their own entertainment until they settle on the short-lived Hugo (Keith Allen). Despite their respectful professions—Alex a journalist, Juliet a doctor and David an accountant—the group is immature and brash, but the gravity of their situation sets in as they realize that, in order to keep all of Hugo’s dough, they’ll have to dispose of his body.

They decide the best way to conceal their involvement and prevent identification is to remove the corpse’s hands, feet and teeth. Though Juliet has likely cut into her fair share of cadavers during medical school, she doesn’t volunteer, and the group draws straws. David, the most squeamish of the bunch, picks the short one, and he ultimately does the messy work with a hand saw and sledgehammer. He’s forever altered as a result. With the body buried in the woods, Juliet dumps the appendages in the hospital’s incinerator, and she and Alex attempt to continue on as before, goofing off together, albeit with a bit more money in their pockets to fuel impulsive shopping sprees. The traumatized David, on the other hand, grows increasingly paranoid as the police begin poking around due to a break-in one floor below. To keep a closer eye on the money, he retreats to its hiding place in the attic and begins drilling holes in the floor to surveil the actions of his friends below.

This comes in particularly handy when two toughs invade their home to forcefully retrieve the ill-gotten cash, which Hugo unsurprisingly hadn’t acquired honestly. After lying in wait and dispatching the intruders with a hammer, David and his flatmates have two more bodies to deal with, and their attempts to outwit each other and walk away with the money—complete with flashes of seduction and jealousy—reach a breaking point as investigators discover the grave in the woods. With a screenplay by John Hodge, who would go on to write Boyle’s subsequent ‘90s films Trainspotting and A Life Less Ordinary, Shallow Grave hinges on the common trope of the double-cross. David stabs Alex, pinning him to floorboards, but he’s stabbed in the throat by Juliet before he can land a death blow. With a plane ticket for South America in hand, Juliet doesn’t rescue Alex but instead pushes the knife deeper into his shoulder and departs with the cash, only to discover that Alex has pulled a fast one on her and swapped the money out with stacks of shredded newspaper.

Boyle’s clever camera angles and stunning use of color are present throughout Shallow Grave, and the combination of both is perhaps most effectively wielded as, with a vibrant red pool stretching out on the floor beneath him, Alex smiles and the camera pans down under the floorboards where his blood drips onto the hidden cash. Elsewhere, Boyle uses the building’s spiral staircase not only as a cumbersome obstacle to impede three people secretly moving a body, but also for its dazzling, prison-like visual effect in the shadows cast by its railing. Though Boyle’s camera peers down the spiral staircase, evoking a sense of Hitchcockian vertigo, he often frames shots looking upwards at other people, as with Alex lying on the floor staring up at Juliet both in playful and violent scenarios, or with a torture victim peering up through the transparent icebox door at his two attackers looming overhead. And Boyle keeps the camera at ground level as David stands in the titular hole and frantically carries out the grisly task of dismembering the corpse, a shot which obscures the gore from view and allows the viewer to instead focus on David’s traumatizing labor.

Shallow Grave marked McGregor’s feature film acting debut, and he’s certainly framed as our anti-hero, a character who is neither undone by the stress of the situation nor particularly malicious compared to his flatmates. But despite strong performances from McGregor, Fox and Eccleston, Hodge’s script doesn’t give us much insight into their humanity. They start as cruel and obnoxious and end as violent and unhinged. Hodge’s script for Trainspotting would go on to give us characters with far more complexities and dimension. Nevertheless, Boyle’s unique style arrives fully-formed with this directorial debut, and he’d only improve upon it (despite missteps like The Beach along the way) in the decades to come, even if he’d subsequently shift his narrative focus from ragtag bands of schemers to survivors and inspiring underdogs.

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There’s a semi-sweet romance at the heart of Michael Mailer’s Blind, one that, if given more room to bloom could sustain a genuine, watchable drama. Unfortunately, this film pads the runtime with a bunch of uninteresting bullshit that suffocates the otherwise solid chemistry between Alec Baldwin and Demi Moore. It’s a shame, because the two aren’t bad together, but nothing on the page or in the production serves them well at all.

Moore stars as Suzanne Dutchman, the rich housewife whose husband, Mark (Dylan McDermott), is a ruthless crooked businessman. He gets arrested for shady dealings and for her unknowing part in his schemes, she makes a plea deal and is sentenced to community service. That comes in the form of reading to the blind, where she meets Bill Oakland (Baldwin), a novelist turned English professor who has assistants at this center read his students’ stories to him. At first, they fail to get along because, well, Suzanne is a wisp of a stereotype and Bill is a poor man’s version of Jack Nicholson’s character from As Good As It Gets. In all seriousness though, the two grow fond of one another, but just as they’re close to consummating this mutual appreciation, the only witness in Mark’s case dies and he’s set free, creating a love triangle.

Now, the premise isn’t terrible. Suzanne is a woman who has her entire world ripped away from her and in that fragile state, she meets a charming curmudgeon who is the antithesis of her psychotic husband. Were the film primarily focused on Suzanne and her inner life, this would be a fascinating character study and a sharp vehicle for Moore to remind audiences why she became such a big star in the first place. She’s clearly got a lot left in the tank and has just been waiting for the right role to come along. This just isn’t it. The script, from Mailer’s younger brother John Buffalo Mailer, couldn’t possibly be less concerned with Suzanne, or women in general really.

Before the inciting event that gets the plot going, we’re treated to plenty of screentime for Mark and his borderline abusive relationship with a new protégé, and when we’re introduced to Bill, he gets a mirroring mentorship with a young fan of his. On the one side, we’ve got McDermott as a rageaholic yuppie douchebag taking a sparring session with his assistant too far for sport, while on the other, you’ve got to watch a young black man clean Baldwin’s toilet while he regurgitates pseudointellectual bullshit that would have been deemed too on the nose to be in Finding Forrester.

Seriously, at one point in this film, a character tells Bill he just needs a change of scenery and he deadpans, “I’m blind. The scenery never changes.” It’s not played as a joke, either. Measured by the dramatic silence surrounding its awkward delivery, this is supposed to feel profound. The film is beautifully photographed, if blandly composed, but what holds it back is an overwrought screenplay that more closely resembles an SNL parody of prestige picture storytelling than a legitimate film you’re expected to take at face value. There are fleeting moments of poignancy, like the shame Moore telegraphs when she first arrives at the center for the blind and is referred to by her docket number and not her name, but those brief bits of subtlety are drowned out by repeated scenes of McDermott (delivering fine work with a pointless character) auditioning for a larger movie about wall street narcissism.

By the time the romance really begins to gel, the movie throws Mark back into freedom to keep our lovebirds apart, but there’s no drama to be wrung from this development. It just kills time until they eventually get together, rather than doing anything interesting or engaging with this roadblock. Blind may be marketed like a love story, but it’s constructed like a shitty, first draft of a novel where no one has taken the time to focus on what matters. It’s a real tragedy for Moore, in particular, who shows she can still go, and Baldwin, who oddly doesn’t seem to mind how far beneath him this material really is.

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Usually there’s some kind of artifice in the movie musical. Yes, people spontaneously singing and dancing should be artifice enough, but that’s usually accompanied by bright lights, primary colors or astounding locales. On occasion, such as with Chicago, the filmmakers go out of their way to create a device to make the singing and dancing make sense; we’re seeing things through Roxy’s perspective (even when we aren’t). Even almost-best picture winner La La Land starts immediately with some singing and hoofing on the 110/105 interchange.

One of the delights of Footnotes, written and directed by Paul Calori and Kostia Testut, is that you forget you’re watching a musical for the first five minutes or so. In that time, we meet Julie (Pauline Etienne) as she’s about to learn from her boss that she didn’t pass her trial period at the French equivalent of a Payless shoe store. As a consolation prize, the manager hands her a pair of red tennis shoes for her service. The store, the firing and the shoes are all foreshadowing for the rest of Julie’s story.

Not one to be held down by the misfortune that plagues her, a montage of shitty jobs and classified ads follow her firing. She is successively let go of each. As she’s pushing her motorbike out of a parking lot, Julie starts to sing. C’est magnifique. From the low-budget dramedy aesthetic, a low-budget musical is born.

Julie then finds herself face-to-face with Françoise (Clémentine Yelnik), the force of nature who runs the shipping and receiving department for the Jacques Couture shoe factory. The factory keeps the town of Romans afloat. In aged “historical” footage, the devotion to craft shown by the workers in this factory is displayed. They are more artists than engineers in creating women’s footwear. Initially 15 men, they are credited with the creation of the stiletto heel (feel free to use this plot point for any upcoming papers pertaining to patriarchy or the male gaze in international cinema for film class this semester). Decades have passed. The “geniuses” are dead and women run the factory, constructing the elegant Couture brand. Françoise is old and needs a replacement. And the thing she has that Julie wants more than anything is a permanent contract. All Julie has to do is pass her trial period (and we know how that has gone so far).

Now for a quick paraphrase of Pulp Fiction:

“You know what they call downsizing in France?”

“No. What do they call downsizing in France?”

“Upgrading.”

Julie barely has her coveralls buttoned when word reaches the ladies on the factory floor that an upgrade is coming. This being France – a country where laborers are accustomed to fighting for their rights – the women organize a protest. A strike follows. Julie is just trying to keep her head down, but her manager has his eye on her and wants her gone. Love complicates matters further (as it always does) when Julie cautiously swoons for a devilishly handsome, lonesome trucker named Samy (Olivier Chantreau).

It is not for us to spoil the outcome here other than to say that, while Footnotes is a small movie, it is also a sweet movie with quite a bit to say about the quality of craft, corporate loyalty, worker’s rights, gender politics and women’s bodies…but in a fun way. The musical numbers never reach the heights of singing in a downpour or in a traffic jam, but the songs are charming as are the performers. There are no sweeping crane shots or aerial views of Julie pirouetting on the plains, just bowling alleys, factories and offices with stucco covered walls. Somehow, Footnotes makes these locations feel as grand as the Alps, which was kind of the point.

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Twenty years removed from its original release, Chasing Amy feels at once outdated and relevant in 2017. The romantic comedy, still considered to be director Kevin Smith’s best film (whatever that’s worth), aimed to be equal parts charming and nasty, political and sexual, and it’s largely successful in that regard. For all his deficiencies as a filmmaker (and they’re on full display here), he’s never struggled with characterization. The characters in Chasing Amy are blunt and to-the-point, but they have qualities and behaviors that elude and confuse them in ways that deepen their personalities and open their psyches for the audience. The conviction with which Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams) resolutely shouts, “I am fucking gay! That’s who I am!” is not only undoubtable, it’s moving and powerful. But just a few seconds later, when she leaps into the arms of Holden (Ben Affleck) and kisses him passionately in the middle of a tumultuous thunderstorm, we’re convinced of that, too. Has Alyssa’s lesbianism washed away with the falling rain, or is there something more complicated, more deeply human at work?

Smith, to put it politely, hasn’t exactly spent the last two decades convincing us he’s cinema’s most profound thinker, but Chasing Amy’s narrative—which, for the uninitiated, follows the complicated platonic-turned-romantic relationship between Holden, a straight graphic novelist played by Affleck, and Alyssa, a gay (?) graphic novelist played by Adams—displays a certain kind of sensitivity that belies the gleeful idiocy of his more, uh, faithful films. That said, his perspective was still that of a Straight White Dude seemingly dumbfounded by the idea that a woman could possibly enjoy sex and relationships without the presence of a male counterpart. Smith’s true mouthpiece in the film likely isn’t Holden but rather Holden’s best friend and creative collaborator, Banky (Jason Lee), a character that might be considered a prototype for Trump-era misogyny if he didn’t prove that sexist Reddit bros have been around since long before Reddit even existed. Banky does seem to experience his own kind sexual awakening at the end of the film, but the effect is more punchline than catharsis.

Nevertheless, the film resonates. Movies about lesbians aren’t quite as rare today, but they remain few and far between and usually belong in the world of big and sometimes controversial dramas directed by prestigious male auteurs like Abdellatif Kechiche (Blue is the Warmest Color) and Todd Haynes (Carol). From an industry perspective, female-directed films about queer identity have remained the same small-scale indie projects that occasionally experience relatively minor acclaim—you can draw a straight line from Rose Troche’s Go Fish (1994) to Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior (2014). As time has moved on, films with LGBT themes have begun to navigate the wider spectrum of sexuality. A film like Tangerine (2015), director Sean Baker’s daring micro-budget drama about African-American transgender sex workers in Hollywood, reflects a generational shift in ideas concerning gender and identity as LGBT cinema looks to pivot toward intersectionality.

Looking back at Chasing Amy’s sexual politics, one could make the argument that it was about the consequences of the binary; that it was actually about the fluidity of the queer experience and the danger of limiting any individual to rigorous social and sexual parameters. The film’s third act arrives with the revelation that not only has Alyssa had heterosexual encounters in the past, but they were of a nature that makes the impossibly insecure Holden feel emasculated. (The revelation takes place while the couple witnesses a fistfight during a hockey game and coincides with a literal punch to the gut, perhaps the most breathtakingly dense attempt at symbolism in Smith’s career, and that’s saying something.) In a less talked about but no less telling scene, Alyssa’s lesbian friends treat the news of her heterosexual relationship as an act of betrayal. Such issues remain ongoing and are deeply entrenched in the self-loathing indentured by seemingly endless cases of homophobia, toxic masculinity and bigotry.

More than anything, though, the climactic scene shatters the notion that people can only swing one way sexually, or they’re limited to the behaviors that would be thrust upon them by a society that fundamentally misunderstands or misrepresents them. What ultimately tears the couple apart is an inability to accept the different stations of sexual identity, a problem pushed beyond repair after Holden’s disastrous idea to solve it. Chasing Amy illustrates the way anxiety, fear and mistrust can overwhelm love and exploit empathy, and in the final scene, Smith, who, as previously mentioned, has at least always done right by his characters, allows Alyssa and Holden the space to restart and reassess, one of the few onscreen break-ups that doesn’t feel at all tragic. In this regard, Chasing Amy is more than just a product of ‘90s independent movies with an LGBT bent; in its own weird way, it’s sort of timeless.

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Paul Le Mat’s naturalistic performances in Jonathan Demme’s key early films nicely sum up the director’s worldview. Big-eyed and enthusiastic, perhaps a little naïve and with a big, generous heart, Le Mat plays horndogs with human flaws who are generally good and ordinary everymen. In Handle with Care, he was the gentle, grounding force of a subculture of lonely CB radio enthusiasts. In Melvin and Howard, Le Mat plays a man down on his luck who does something unusually open-hearted; he gives a disheveled old man a ride in his truck and closes their brief encounter with the corniest and most sincere gesture: a tentative, but earnest thumbs up.

Jason Robards plays that disheveled old man: eccentric businessman Howard Hughes, who was at the time one of the wealthiest men in the world. The screenplay by Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) dramatizes the story of Melvin Dummar, a Utah gas station owner who gained notoriety when he was listed as one of the beneficiaries on a handwritten will allegedly left behind by Hughes after his death. The will was thrown out of court as a forgery, but the document’s legality is beside the point of the movie; this is about two figures at seemingly opposite ends of the American Dream who come together for a moment as unlikely friends.

The film was originally set up with a different cast. Universal Pictures wanted Gary Busey to play Dummar and objected to Demme’s choice of Roberts Blossom, who played Le Mat’s father in Handle with Care, to play Hughes. The studio got half their way and it may have been the right choice all around.

Melvin and Howard opens with a long shot of desert where Hughes is on a motorcycle gleefully thrilling in the vast American landscape until he takes a spill; it’s a madcap intro that sets up a metaphor of economic struggle. Driving in the middle of the night, Dummar comes upon the injured old man and offers him a ride. What follows is the film’s celebrated opening sequence, which observes Hughes and Dummar riding along in a truck for 18 pages of dialogue. Hypnotic shots of asphalt echo Two-Lane Blacktop, Easy Rider and other American road movies while forging its own human path—not of counterculture, but of connection.

When the old man tells Dummar that he’s Howard Hughes, Dummar shrugs it off. Regardless of who the old man is, Dummar treats him with compassion—and the opportunity to share. To his passenger’s initial objection (Hughes protests that he doesn’t like music anymore), Dummar sings Hughes his original song, “Santa’s Souped-Up Sleigh,” for which he paid $75 for a company to put his words to music.

The whole movie is in this sequence: Dummar’s modest and naïve ambitions, his eagerness not just to help out an injured stranger but to share his dreams. When the duo nears Vegas at dawn, each opens their window and breathes in the desert air. These men from opposite ends of the tracks come together and share a vision of a beautiful, natural country that’s like no other. Even rolling into the glitz of Vegas, which at the time may have represented the epitome of artifice, it seems like the fanfare for a uniquely American commerce that has long since disappeared.

The extended car trip, and the role of identity and possible deceit, connects Melvin and Howard to our previous survey subject: Abbas Kiarostami set so many scenes on the road and in cars that one wonders if he was a fan of ‘70s American road movies.

Originally attached to Mike Nichols, Melvin and Howard handed over the reins from one American renaissance filmmaker to a new generation. The film has perhaps not aged as well as Handle with Care, which never loses its gentle tone. Melvin’s obsession with game shows and his turbulent relationship with Lynda (Mary Steenburgen, who won an Oscar for her performance) occasionally leads to moments of farce (recalling the Vegas sequences of Crazy Mama) that distract from the tender drama at the film’s center. Such is America. Dummar himself becomes lost in the media frenzy that follows in the wake of what would be called the “Mormon will,” in which Hughes reportedly left $156 million to Dummar and an equal sum to the Church of Latter-Day Saints.

Melvin and Howard won Oscars for best screenplay and Best Supporting Actress, but in the fray of winning and financial turmoil, the movie isn’t a horse race. As it ends, Melvin is resigned to the fact that he will never see those millions, and he is okay with that; at least he got to sing his song to Howard Hughes.

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Girls Trip is a brash, gross, lewd, sexually forthright and occasionally violent film. It’s also absolutely wonderful. Bolstered by excellent performances, particularly by relative newcomer Tiffany Haddish in a star-making turn, Girls Night succeeds because of the appeal of the film’s central foursome and their warm, believable friendship. That, and some incredibly original dick jokes; you’ll never look at a grapefruit the same way again.

The ladies at the center of Girls Trip are the “Flossy Posse,” which consists of successful self-help author Ryan (Regina Hall), gossip website guru Sasha (Queen Latifah), nurse and mother-of-two Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith) and bad girl Dina (Haddish). Though they made the transition from best college friends to best adult friends, the Flossy Posse haven’t seen each in five years when Ryan is chosen as the keynote speaker at the annual Essence Festival in New Orleans. Eager to reconnect with her pals, Ryan invites them along.

If Girls Trip were simply a ladies’ version of The Hangover then hilarity would ensue and that would be that. But Girls Trip is both a celebration of friendship and of African American womanhood, and as such it is a deeper, kinder and more nuanced experience than the Hangover films as well as lady-laughers like Bridesmaids and The Heat. Director Malcolm D. Lee proved with his The Best Man films that he knows how to portray friendship, and he continues that here. Ryan and Sasha’s relationship is crumbling due to an aborted business deal, overworked Lisa hasn’t had sex in years, and Dina is prone to violent outbursts, one of which gets the posse kicked out of their luxury accommodation. And none of those are even the film’s central drama, which involves Ryan’s strained relationship with her retired NFL-star husband, Stewart (Mike Colter of “Luke Cage”), though that plotline unfortunately plays out predictably.

Outside of Ryan and Stewart’s friction, the men are simply here to look good, a great reversal from the majority of mainstream comedies. Colter, Larenz Tate and Kofi Siriboe are present for sex appeal alone, allowing the audience to focus on the ladies and their relationships. The women, for their part, take this opportunity and run with it. Hall is excellent in the central role, playing Ryan’s high-strung business side and hair-down party girl side with equal tenacity, and its wonderful to see the veteran actress in a real starring role. Pinkett Smith plays against type as the buttoned up Lisa, and her desperate need to get some gives her some of the film’s most well-earned laughs. Haddish is the real breakout, however, playing the “wild” friend with even more comic abandon than Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover and Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids. What makes Haddish so effective is that she balances Dina’s outlandish behavior with genuine warmth. Dina never comes across as a caricature. Instead, even after jaw-dropping antics, her most notable characteristic is that she’s a fiercely loyal friend.

Though Queen Latifah is her reliable, imminently watchable self here, the character of Sasha is one of the Girls Trip’s rare misses. Latifah is given very few chances to stand out, which is a big missed opportunity considering the talents of the Grammy-winning, Oscar-nominated performer.

Aside from that problem and the predictability of the film’s dramatic arc, Girls Trip gets nearly everything right. Highlights include a smart script by Kenya Barris (“Black-ish”) and Tracy Oliver, and excellent use of it central location. Girls Trip was filmed on-location during the Essence Festival in New Orleans, which provides the opportunity for an amazing number of effective celebrity cameos, including quick appearances by Ava DuVernay, Mariah Carey and others. Several celebrities have larger roles, nearly all of which are used to great effect. “Top Chef” and “The Chew” star Carla Hall hosts a wonderfully awkward cooking demonstration; Sean “Diddy” Combs improvised a scene during his actual Essence Fest performance, bringing Haddish’s Dina onstage and dancing with her; William Levy shows up as Sasha’s illicit, hallucinated fantasy; and Ne-Yo performs alongside Tate’s Julian at New Orleans’ famous House of Blues.

But these cameos are just icing on the cake. Come for the girl power, stay for the belly laughs, callbacks to previous films from the stars’ careers, a kick-ass dance-off and many other surprises that are best discovered spoiler-free. Though Girls Trip is unapologetically a film for African American women, it’s an experience that anyone can enjoy, provided they have a high tolerance for laughs.

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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets can claim a certain immunity against accusations that its far, far away galaxy-building hews too closely to Star Wars; George Lucas borrowed liberally from the space opera of Valérian and Laureline, a French comics series which predated his original film trilogy. Director Luc Besson uses every inch of goodwill in that regard (our heroes even end up escaping into a garbage chute at one point), as he creates a visually dazzling spectacle populated with strange creatures that would fit right in if they saddled up to the bar at the Mos Eisley Cantina. Armed with a hefty production budget—much of which was, remarkably, crowd-funded, making this the most expensive indie film of all time—Besson spares no expense in production design, so much so that actual plot is largely beside the point.

In the distant future, Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne) make their way to Alpha, a gargantuan space station where all the intelligent lifeforms from the “four corners of the universe” converge to share knowledge and culture. These two soldiers of the United Human Federation are tasked with retrieving an extremely valuable stolen creature, the last of its kind, from a slightly Hutt-esque space pirate (voiced by John Goodman). After slipping into a parallel dimension to snatch it, they bring the cute little guy to the intergalactic metropolis, which operates under Commander Arün Filitt (Clive Owen), who never seems especially trustworthy even before he’s promptly kidnapped. Further complicating matters is that Valerian—a supposed ladies’ man whose early, out-of-the-blue marriage proposal to Laureline is rebuffed—has a weird vision about an apocalypse on a once-utopic beach planet populated by a group of mystic aliens who harness the power of magic pearls and who seem to be tied to a dark force that the military claims has infiltrated Alpha and is growing like cancer.

With a glut of splashy chase scenes interspersed with sequences of heavy-handed exposition, and with only marginally interesting characters blurting out stultifying one-liners (“Help me find Valerian or this bullet will find you” not even being the worst of the bunch), Valerian grows tedious long before its two heroes inevitably save the day and bring their tempestuous Han-and-Leia-like courtship to fruition. DeHaan and Delevingne seem miscast and display no believable chemistry, appearing wooden when acting alongside the likes of Ethan Hawke (as an eccentric space pimp) and even Rihanna (a shape-shifting dancer who helps them on a rescue mission). And despite the film being propelled to some measure of success due to its impressive visual effects alone, the humans onscreen routinely end up looking somewhat silly in their elaborate costumes when appearing next to the far more impressive alien eye candy.

If it wasn’t for the original French comics, neither Star Wars nor Besson’s own The Fifth Element would exist in their current forms. It’s a pity that, without offering stronger writing or compelling characters, the film adaptation collapses under the weight of its own world-building. A city of a thousand planets shouldn’t end up feeling so hollow and lifeless.

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Christopher Nolan has taken us into the mind of an amnesiac, through the dark streets of Gotham City, rocketing into outer space and even into the multi-faceted recesses of the dream world. However, in many ways, Nolan has made his best film in Dunkirk, one rooted entirely in reality using the second World War as a milieu for a fast-paced suspense ride. No war has fascinated filmmakers as much as World War II, a time and place explored and picked over by directors ever since it came to an end in 1945. Shot in 70mm with a cast of hundreds, Dunkirk tells the story about the evacuation of scores of British soldiers from France in 1940, near the beginning of the war, after being overwhelmed by German forces. Focusing on multiple stories at the same time, on the land, sea and air, Dunkirk eschews character development and dialogue for non-stop action, a lean film comprised of one action set piece after another. Light on gore, but heavy on tension, Dunkirk allows Nolan to cast off most of the expositional problems that plague many of his films, allowing the audience to enjoy it as an action movie at first blush, but providing enough depth and mystery that there is likely much to discover upon multiple viewings.

The film’s narrative structure takes time to unfold as its three stories seem to occur simultaneously. The first story concerns two young soldiers (played by Fionn Whitehead and Damien Bonnard) as they try to escape the beaches of Dunkirk, fighting through hordes of other soldiers desperate to flee before a German Stuka bomber appears and drops its load on them. The only problem: the English Channel separates them from England. In the second story, a father and son (Mark Rylance and Tom Glynn-Carney) travel from England to Dunkirk in their private boat to rescue the stranded soldiers. Along the way, they pick up a soldier (Cillian Murphy) who survived a German torpedo, and whose PTSD may jeopardize their mission. In the third and final story, we follow a pair of RAF pilots (Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden) as they chase down those Stuka bombers intent on killing as many British soldiers as possible.

All three stories contain breathtaking sequences that hold on with a vise-like grip and do notrelent until the film’s final moments. Nolan has filmed many suspenseful sequences before, but in Dunkirk he has moved ahead technically, creating the most beautiful and convincing moments of his career. Instead of a Saving Private Ryan gore-fest, Nolan goes for more intimate moments where we share the confines of a Spitfire cockpit, or we’re locked in a flooding hold of a doomed destroyer or the crumbling jetty with nowhere else to go but ocean, even if Britain is only 30 miles away. Gone are the overcooked ideas that sunk Inception or the gooey love story in the middle of Interstellar. Dunkirk is all show and no tell.

While Nolan’s ensemble cast (also featuring Harry Styles and Kenneth Branagh) do well with minimally written roles, Dunkirk belongs to cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema who shot the movie in 70mm. Though my screening was digital, I can only imagine how amazing the film looks in its intended format. With its aptly muted color palette Dunkirk looks fantastic. A good deal of the movie takes place on or over the open sea, the blueness of the water belying a risk of drowning. In fact, in more than one claustrophobic sequence, many of Nolan’s protagonists escape from German bombs and bullets only to face down the sea.

With Hans Zimmer’s ominous score propelling the action, Dunkirk is a step ahead from his near-masterpiece Interstellar in its refusal to sermonize or fall into pedantic claptrap. Nolan’s vision of Dunkirk is a cold one, where survival comes from sheer luck as much as ingenuity. God has nothing to do with it. In many ways, Dunkirk could have played better as a silent film filled with grunts, screams and sighs rather than some of the rote dialogue Nolan gives his characters. And much like in Terrence Malick’s otherwise fantastic Thin Red Line, the wattage of the more famous actors distracts somewhat from the full experience. All except Hardy, who spends most of the film with his face covered (a trend for the actor), emoting with his expressive eyes. But that’s a minor quibble. Nolan has managed to make a masterpiece in a genre crowded with masterpieces, one that will likely be held up as one of the best ever about World War II.

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In the most striking scene from Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante’s notorious Cannes winner Heli, a man held captive by a violent drug cartel has his genitals doused in gasoline and set on fire. The horrific moment is tempered by the director’s casual approach; he films the scene like it’s the sort of thing that happens every day, which somehow makes it that much more gruesome. In his latest feature, the horror-melodrama-sci-fi hybrid The Untamed, Escalante applies this visual stoicism to a cosmic scenario. As in Heli, he uses the concept of a nuclear family to explore the underlying insidiousness of contemporary Mexican society. But rather than folding under the pressure of the drug war, the characters here are undone by their burning sexual attraction to a tentacled space creature. With a serious mind and an even more serious camera, Escalante seeks to explore the balance between desire and suffering, but the literal-mindedness that defines his style also undermines the inherent pleasures of the genres he’s utilizing.

The film’s closing credits offer special thanks to the recently deceased filmmaker Andrzej Zulawski, a necessary tip of the hat given that The Untamed borrows key plot points and images from Possession, the Polish filmmaker’s most famous work. Nobody who’s seen Zulawski’s feverish horror film could mistake the elements that Escalante borrows here, most notably the writhing, wriggling squid-like monster sequestered in a deep, dark chamber that becomes the instrument of sexual agency for all who succumb to it. The creature can provide euphoric pleasure, but like something as profound and equivocal as desire, it also has the capacity to inflict horrible pain. The uncertainty of which it will be—euphoria or pain—appears to be part of the thrill for the characters, even if such dogged single-mindedness is anathema to both compelling drama and actual human behavior.

The characters in question are a tight-knit group: Alejandra (Ruth Ramos) has two precocious children with her churlish and blue-collar husband, Ángel (Jesús Meza); her brother is the openly gay Fabián (Eden Villavicencio), who’s having a heated affair with Ángel behind her back. Fabián is a nurse and one day he befriends the lonely Verónica (Simone Bucio), who comes to the ER with a gaping wound she claims she got from a dog-bite. Verónica, however, is an early convert of the squid creature, which is locked away and looked after by a pair of mystic healers deep in rural Guanajuato. Her once joyous encounters with the creature have taken a turn for the worse, but that doesn’t stop her from sharing her secret with Fabián and Alejandra, the results of which are by turns tragic, transcendent and deadly.

The fact that there isn’t much of a range between all the tragedy and transcendence and death denies the material some much needed distinction – not to mention inner meaning. The creature is said to provide either pain or pleasure, but there’s no real connection between this idea and the film’s depiction of domestic life and sexual violence. Alejandra’s toxic marriage to the violent, unfaithful Ángel, who takes out his guilt and self-loathing on a complicit Fabián, is set apart from the film’s fantastical aspects and is more illustrative of Mexico’s sexual and social discrimination. The film is bluntly sexual and graphic in nature, but contrary to its title, it does little to subvert any long-held notions of desire or sexuality. Additionally, the body horror doesn’t add any symbolism to the proceedings, and Escalante seems to actively avoid the most tantalizing aspects of his science-fiction premise aside from the opening shot of a hulking asteroid spinning through the cosmos, later implied to be the very vessel that brought the alien squid to our world.

Indeed, there’s not a lot of poetry in The Untamed. But what it lacks in lyricism it makes up for in visceral impact, which ultimately provides its own kind of catharsis. There are arresting and oddly beautiful images of human limbs intertwined with fleshy tentacles, plus a surreal moment of what can only be described as a multispecies animal orgy that takes place in the charred earth where the creature was discovered. In these moments and others, elements of the otherworldly and supernatural bleed into Escalante’s carefully orchestrated realism, creating a sense of the inhuman slowly creeping into our plane of existence, akin to the weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft. The genderless, pansexual creature at the center of it all is kept disturbingly unfamiliar, a product of both its own low-lit surroundings and, more crucially, our own increasingly frazzled imaginations. In a film starved for nuance and ambiguity – not to mention a heartier affinity for the genres to which it nominally belongs – perhaps it’s only appropriate that the most intriguing story takes place in our mind.

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Gillian Robespierre’s last teaming with Jenny Slate, Obvious Child, was an acerbic comedy that at the same time was an achingly honest portrayal of Gen-X romance and the emotional toll of abortion. It was serious but not overly dour. With Landline, Robespierre and co-writer Elisabeth Holm explore the infinitely complex world of infidelity in a generational tale of a mother and her two daughters. As a sophomore feature, it patently expands her scope of character and narrative and tests her ability to juggle an ensemble cast and multiple storylines. While not as funny or original as her debut, Landline shows the director’s commitment to tackling taboo subjects and humanizing them through messy, lived-in characters all through the lens of female leads.

Set in 1995, the film first introduces us to Dana (Jenny Slate), a recently engaged 20-something having a quarter-life crisis about what her future. She’s the Type A older sister to Ali (Abby Quinn), a teenager ready to have sex for the first time with her high school boyfriend. When Ali finds erotic love poems written by her father, Alan (John Turturro), about “C,” she suspects that he is cheating on their mother, Pat (Edie Falco). The sisters band together to uncover the truth before their mother finds out. The sticking point for both of them is that Dana, in her pre-marriage anxiety, ran into Nate (Finn Wittrock), an old college fling, and has been cheating on her fiancé, Ben (Jay Duplass). In Ali’s starry-eyed view of love, she accuses them of being a “family of cheaters.”

Yet Alan is the picture of a Nice Guy, an ad man who still clings to his dream of being a playwright. His wife and daughters have always humored him, but based on their reactions during a reading of his new play, have never enjoyed his work. As opposed to Pat, a no-frills businesswoman, he’s meek. Their relationship seems strained from the beginning of the film, but we still see glimpses of their lasting connection. To its credit, Landline challenges viewers with cheaters who are, at heart, good people and toys with that contradiction. And that, in effect, is what plays on Dana’s mind – that she is also an adulterer and can’t judge her father too harshly.

The film struggles in its very ensemble and multi-plot structure, which tends to make it feel as if these characters are cobbled together from other films – and ones that many have seen before. Pat, Dana and Ali’s stories converge around Alan’s infidelity, but the latter two, specifically, are distinct within Landline, working so hard to portray a period and life-stage realism that they at times detach themselves from the overall narrative.

Landline was inspired by Robespierre and Holm’s own parents’ divorce, and perhaps that’s why the film feels like it sticks far too closely to the familiar. Obvious Child was a groundbreaking take on a divisive subject; Landline truly doesn’t bring much of anything new to dysfunctional families and infidelity. At best, it portrays a family – and, in Alan and Dana, a father and daughter – that through similar experiences can come to an emotional understanding. Such an understanding doesn’t preclude them from disapproving or being hurt. There’s an undercurrent of commentary on gender norms vis-à-infidelity, but the film’s reliance on stereotypical characters overwhelms its strengths.

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It’s been 18 years since The Blair Witch Project ushered in the popularity of the found-footage horror film. At the time, small handheld camcorders felt like the scourge of privacy; someone always seemed to be filming something because of the ease and relative cheapness of the mini-DV tape. That a group of young people would inadvertently film their own demise was a disbelief easily suspended.

With such projects requiring only microscopic budgets and offering the potential for big returns, producers couldn’t help but to continue Blair Witch-ing the horror-loving audience. The knockoffs are difficult to count at this point, and for every Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity there seem to be a dozen films like Unfriended and Quarantine. The Gracefield Incident is the latest effort to fall into the latter category.

Mathieu Ratthe, the writer/director/star of this film, takes a novel approach to the subgenre’s prerequisite of finding a plausible reason for continuous recording. His character, Matt, loses an eye in car crash that occurs because he and his wife, Jessica (Kimberly Laferriere), were making a video journal for their unborn child while driving to the OBGYN. The accident also causes Jessica to suffer a miscarriage. Months later, Matt, a media professional, inserts a camera into his prosthetic eye. At first, it seems like he’s trying to perform some kind of penance by documenting his recovery from grief, but that’s giving this affair a little more credit than it deserves. The found-footage format requires that a camera is always rolling, so Ratthe made his hands-free.

A news broadcast that Matt is barely paying attention to describes the destruction of a satellite by a UFO. There’s even a bit of footage. You’d think a first contact scenario might be a bigger deal to Matt and his friends as they pile into Matt’s SUV to drive to an isolated cabin in an area of Quebec called Gracefield, but the group is more focused on celebrating a birthday and getting Matt and Jessica to get over their pain. Why four other people would want to let Matt drive after causing the accident that cost him his eye and unborn child is anyone’s guess. Maybe he was the only one with a valid license. Another plot point revolves around his bad driving and poor decisions, making one wonder if the working title was Please Take the Keys from Matt.

What follows is a pastiche of more successful movies. Ratthe borrows liberally from The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity with a smattering of Signs and Close Encounters of the Third Kind thrown in for good measure. The cabin turns out to be more of a gated manse owned by Matt’s boss, who bought the place because it’s near Bigfoot sightings. That’s right, the boss tracks Bigfoot. Unfortunately for Matt and his friends, sasquatches come from another world and they have retrieved a meteorite that belongs to it. Like every other character in this movie, alien Bigfoot makes inexplicable decisions. There is no reason it couldn’t have just taken what it wanted 20 minutes into this endeavor and saved us all the trouble of watching the rest of the movie.

The biggest crime The Gracefield Incident commits is tedium. Clichés flow like light beer. Long stretches of running and shouting outdoors, indoors, in the woods, in a cave and in a cornfield burden the movie’s 89-minute runtime, making it feel so much longer. The lack of narrative logic is surpassed only by the lack of tension or any inventive or frightening moments. The only thing The Gracefield Incident provokes is the certainty that when it comes to found-footage horror flicks, the thrill is long gone.

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Sadly, it is noteworthy when a film stars two actresses over the age of 60. But more diverse casting doesn’t always translate into good cinema. Writer/director Martin Provost is known for his biopics Séraphine and Violet, so his original screenplay for The Midwife is a slight change of pace, yet still manages to keep his focus on the lives of enigmatic women. Whereas those films highlighted individuals, The Midwife‘s greatest asset is the interplay between headstrong midwife Claire (Catherine Frot) and the force-of-nature Béatrice (Catherine Deneuve). The film may struggle with pacing and overall plot, but the presence of a French icon and her fraught chemistry with Frot make up for its faults.

Claire herself is an intriguing blend of maternal sweetness and stubborn hardlining. Scenes of her deftly delivering newborns pepper the film, and Provost even chooses to make this our first impression of the character. Her selfless work life somewhat carries through into her anti-social personal life, with Claire’s only hobby being gardening in her small allotment. She eats her own fresh vegetables, has a bit of a drab fashion sense and is sensible to a fault. And for all the children she helps bring into the world, she has just one child of her own – a son, Simon (Quentin Dolmaire), who is currently in med school and preoccupied with his newly pregnant girlfriend.

The arrival of Béatrice, however, brings out another side of Claire, one that holds grudges and struggles to empathize. A former mistress of Claire’s father – who ran off one day with a large chunk of cash and barely a goodbye, to which Claire attributes her father’s suicide – Béatrice and her flippant attitude, reaching out to simply catch up with an “old friend” (nevermind the fact that Claire was a child then), needless to say is unwelcome. But Provost inserts some extra drama into their reunion, namely that Béatrice has a brain tumor and has returned to Paris to seek treatment. The situation weighs on Claire personally and professionally. As someone in the field of medicine (and just a decent person), she wishes Béatrice well and is compelled to help. Their personal history, however, makes Claire willing to help only to a point.

But, in the original French, “sage femme” has more than one meaning. Claire is a midwife, yes, but in their own unique ways, both Claire and Béatrice are “wise women,” with Claire certainly becoming even more wise as the film progresses. Béatrice pushes her buttons, and she, in turn, pushes away before eventually giving in. This is where Provost’s script falters; much of Claire and Béatrice’s interactions take place over repetitive lunches and dinners that Claire begrudgingly joins, and the two frequently hit on a sore spot from the past or Béatrice’s self-centered pattern of behavior in the present becomes too much to take silently. For all of Claire’s uptight tendencies, she’s not wrong in her assessment of Béatrice; and Béatrice is a flighty person going through a very scary time. But, even then, Provost uses her condition at will, as a convenient device to bring the two women together rather than a true plot point or decisive moment in Béatrice’s life. That in itself may rub viewers the wrong way.

The impetus of the film is not that two strong-willed women reunite over a traumatic event and grow to forgive each other but that Béatrice and all of her rootlessness and spontaneity rub off on Claire and breathe new life into a stagnant one. Neither may be wildly original premises, but the latter comes across as a simplistic, contrived end to a authentically messy tale. If Provost’s script can’t quite live up to their caliber, Frot and Deneuve both lift the material, the former balancing Claire’s personality dichotomies well while the later thoroughly enjoys taking a turn as a carefree lush who has lived life to the fullest.

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Black Girl, Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 debut feature film, demonstrates first-hand the demoralizing effects colonialism has wreaked on those on the wrong side of the equation. To the French nationals in the film, Senegal is not only a business opportunity but an exotic playground where customs, clothing and attitudes have been reduced to exist merely for their pleasure.

According to critic Ashley Clark, Sembène is considered “the father of African cinema,” and Black Girl is one of the first films from that continent to be seen in Europe. The lack of African films up until then is the result of Le Décret Laval, a 1934 decree that banned Africans who lived in French colonies from making films. Lifted in 1960, it took years for these countries to develop any sort of film industry. Sembène, a writer with Marxist leanings, adapted his own short story into the swift (Black Girl clocks in at less than an hour) and devastating tale of a Senegalese woman who comes to France to work for a white family.

Diouna (Mbissine Thérèse Diop) arrives in a port city in the south of France when the film begins. Sembène puts us directly in her head via voiceover as she asks, “Has anyone come for me?” Soon, her boss (Robert Fontaine) arrives and spirits Diouna to the apartment where she will serve his family. The first thing we see as Diouna enters the apartment is an African mask on the wall, an early clue from the director that Diouna’s new employees see her in a similar manner, a fetishized token plucked from less than civilized land, now on-hand to do their bidding.

Via flashback, Sembène shows us how Diouana came to be in the employ of the unnamed French family. In Senegal, working for white folks is a status symbol, he tells us. While in Senegal, Diouana’s main concern is caring for her employers’ young children. When she is invited to France, the Madame (Anne-Marie Jelinek) has Diouana believe that her job will not change much there. However, upon arrival, the children are mostly not around and Diouana is expected to cook, clean and wait on the family and its friends. Diouana fantasizes of enjoying the same luxuries as the French: shopping, walks on the beach and dinners at fancy restaurants. Instead, she is forced to cook for the family’s racist friends, so-called “cultured” French folks who gawp and stare as Diouana serves them Senegalese food. One man, so taken by her, forces a kiss on the horrified Diouana, claiming that he has “never kissed a Negress” before.

Sembène fills out Diouana’s backstory, showing her life in Dakar before she becomes subjugated by her employers. Diop, a non-actress, embodies Diouana’s sorrow, one that leads her to a very dark place by the time the film ends. We learn, via flashback, that she had given Madame the mask on the wall as a gift. By the time she reclaims the mask, we are led to believe that Diouana may actually be claiming her independence. Sadly, the oppression is too heavy, and by the film’s end Diouana has nowhere left to go.

Black Girl is just the beginning of Sembène’s anti-colonialist films. In its coda, the remorseful patriarch of the family goes back to Senegal to return the mask to Diouana’s family. He inadvertently gives the mask a power and life of its own, one that will come to symbolize Africa rising up to its oppressors and reclaiming its voice. With Black Girl, Sembène takes the first giant step in reclaiming and creating an African cinema that is rich as the continent’s other artistic heritages.

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We, the film loving audience, have become inured to startlingly detailed animation. Whether we’re watching the latest product from Pixar or a completely CGI character like lead ape Caesar bound about in an …of the Apes extravaganza, we are now accustomed to the minute level with which animators can render. The amazing has become standard, and we consume it lazily.

From its opening frame, The Girl Without Hands by French animator Sébastien Laudenbach seems intent on challenging this standard. Hand painted and wildly impressionistic, it is like watching a Monet painting given dimension and movement. The lightest etching suggests landscapes, castles and ominous forests. Characters emerge and retreat from small details on a monochromatic frame between huffs of their breaths. Every image vibrates from a literal editing effect and a figurative sense of invention. Characters convey emotion, though their bodies are only hinted at, their faces often limited to eyes and mouths. Purposefully spartan, the visuals demand consistent attention. To drift would mean to miss something important, as the film pulsates like it is being created in front of you.

Based on the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm of the same title, the story concerns a miller who makes a deal with the devil to end a drought and become wealthy. For compensation, the devil wants what stands behind the mill. The miller mistakenly thinks that the only object of value there is an apple tree, but that is the place his young daughter goes to climb and dream. She is there when the miller makes his bargain. When the devil comes to collect years later, the girl is too pure for him to take. She must be unclean, so the devil demands that she cannot bathe.

The miller keeps her in the apple tree, unwashed and filthy. Demonic dogs guard her and devour her mother when the old woman comes with a bucket full of water to clean her daughter. Her body sullied, the devil is ready to take her, but she cries into her hands. Her tears maintain her purity, and the devil orders the miller to cut off her shimmering hands. The girl offers them to her father willingly, and the old man takes her hands with a swing of his axe. The devil still can’t take the girl because her wholesome tears have stained her body and vows to come for her again at another time, planning to collect interest on his wares. The girl abandons her father, leaving him alone in his resplendent mill.

Mutilated, she fumbles through the dark forest and nearly drowns in a river. A goddess dwells in the depths and asks the girl if she wants to live or die. The girl adamantly wants to live. The goddess saves her and shows her the castle she is near. She tells the girl that she is blessed and the prince who lives in the castle waits for her. Drawn by the glow of the goddess, the prince and his gardener find the girl. The prince and the girl fall in love in an instant, but are years away from a happily ever after. There’s a child to bear, a war to wage and the devil always lingering on the outskirts, waiting to collect his due.

Disney has been making some of it billions recently by focusing on the agency of its princesses. Anna rescues Elsa from the evil prince. Moana restores Te Ka’s lost heart. Princesses are proving more than capable of saving themselves and the world. The Girl Without Hands is very far removed from being a polished Disney film but treads some of the same thematic ground. It is ultimately the story of a girl who is victimized by patriarchy (her father, the devil) and is then rescued by a prince who binds her with golden hands. When the prince proves incapable of protecting her and her child, the princess must find the will to do so within herself. She must stop being handless and become differently abled.

“I like the idea to propose a film for kids that is not for them, but they can reach it,” explains Laudenbach. “A film for kids, for me, should not be at the same level, but a little bit higher. Because kids need to understand and to learn.” As with all children’s films, The Girl Without Hands has a lesson to teach: the journey to empowerment is grueling and painful. It is the perfect moral for this gorgeous, untidy work of art.

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As this year’s Comic Con comes to end, it seems appropriate to revisit one of the films that helped transition the convention (for better or worse) from a celebration of geekdom into a requisite stop for any studio or filmmaker releasing a film or television show with even the faintest of fantastical subtext. That film is Twilight, whose stars caused near riots at Comic Cons, unleashing a stampede of “Twi-hards” and “Twi-Moms” on unsuspecting cosplayers. Twilight, however, was never truly accepted by the geek community and certainly wasn’t accepted by mainstream film critics. The film’s legacy, therefore, has been in a sort of limbo. Though it was beloved by its intended audience (teen girls), launched a wildly successful film franchise and set several great careers in front of and behind the camera into motion, Twilight is at best a punchline when it comes to discussions of film in both geek and cinephile circles.

To be blunt, much of the criticism leveled at Twilight reeks of sexism. Twilight is a film for women by women. Its central character is a rather average young woman whose primary motivation is sex. Historically, sexual forthright or even curious women haven’t fared well onscreen. Those who aren’t raped, murdered or committed are typically dressed and delivered for male eyes, all heaving bosoms and raspy whispers. Twilight’s Bella, as written by Stephenie Meyer, adapted by Melissa Rosenberg, directed by Catherine Hardwicke and portrayed by Kristen Stewart, is smart, quiet and dressed in layers because of the Pacific Northwest setting. Her bosom doesn’t heave because she’s in flannel and turtlenecks. She doesn’t whisper; instead, she stutters with teenage confusion. When Bella finds a target for her untested teenage sexuality, she isn’t interested in his personality or his heroic qualities. Instead, she’s turned on by his looks and his car. Oh, and his sparkle, which drove vampire purists mad with rage.

Twilight’s primary virtue is its script, adapted by “Jessica Jones” showrunner Rosenberg, which is much better than the book. In addition to streamlining the tale and eliminating some of the weirder plot twists, Rosenberg also develops Bella and her agency. The book’s Bella is very passive and almost entirely unaware of her power over the vampires. The film’s Bella is more direct. She is the aggressor between herself and Edward, and her interest in him is fairly straightforward: she wants sex. She stares at him hungrily across the school cafeteria, she laments his lack of a bed when she visits his bedroom and she requests that he make her a vampire like him. If the exchange of blood wasn’t enough of a metaphor for sex, Edward’s refusal to “change” Bella is due to his fear of endangering her mortal soul, a threat that has been thrown at nearly every sexually curious teenage girl ever.

Hardwicke understands teenage girls, as she beautifully showed in her earlier film Thirteen. That film achieved more critical acclaim than Twilight in part because it had a grown-up conduit for adult viewers to latch onto in Holly Hunter’s character. Twilight features no such character; it is a tale about teenagers and for teenagers. While Hardwicke makes moves to embrace the genre aspects of Twilight by including schlocky vampire-hunting scenes throughout and with wire-assisted stunt work, she mostly keeps her eye fixed on Bella and Bella’s desires. Twilight features no smart monologues and no adult conflict. Instead, it features kissing, brooding, gossip and bickering. Bella’s narrow-minded pursuit of vampire booty is admirable, not only because of how rare it is for a Hollywood movie to allow its heroine to exert sexual agency but also because it is exactly what most teenagers would do when confronted with a sexy vampire love interest.

In addition to launching the careers of Rosenberg, Stewart, Anna Kendrick (who plays Bella’s delightfully snarky frenemy Jessica) and Robert Pattinson, Twilight was beloved by fans, as evidenced by the opening weekend box office of its sequel, which was double Twilight’s already impressive opening. Though the Transformers series confirms that box office numbers don’t reflect quality, Twilight’s box office success does point towards audience satisfaction, with each film making more than its predecessor at the worldwide box office. The series made over three billion dollars in total.

One thing that rubbed wrong about the remainder of the series was that Hardwicke was shoved aside (and labeled as difficult for demanding more time to prepare) in favor of Chris Weitz, David Slade and Bill Condon. Even in an environment as seemingly as progressive as Twilight’s production, a woman needed to “behave” in order to keep her job. Eerily, that mimics the reception of Twilight as a film. Movies about women are fine; so long as they act the way men expect them to act.

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The most notorious film of Jonathan Demme’s career, Swing Shift was infamously hacked to pieces at the behest of both Warner Bros and Goldie Hawn, who found the director’s original cut too serious and broadly focused. The crux of both versions is the same: meek and obedient housewife Kay (Hawn) sees her husband, Jack (Ed Harris), off to war following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and while he is away she takes a job as a riveter and begins to fall for co-worker Lucky (Kurt Russell). Eventually, Jack returns on leave, only to discover what has transpired in his absence, and Kay must navigate the fallout of her situation as well as her evolving sense of self and increasing sense of independence.

The first half of the film remains mostly intact from Demme’s original vision, albeit with editing that throws off the fast rhythm of the workprint. We still get, though, a glimpse of Jack and Kay’s conservative life, loving but informed by his chauvinistic attitude. Demme’s style is on heavy display in early scenes of Kay looking for work at a local factory, standing in line with a group of women who, as the camera moves past them, reveal so much about themselves in only a few lines, such as Jeannie (Holly Hunter) poring over a letter from her deployed husband or Annie (Sudie Bond) mentioning that she’s used to farm work. Their lives contrast hilariously with an orientation from a condescending manager who tells them that women are suited to rivet work because they “are used to repetitive tasks,” a remark met with no audible reaction but a host of poker faces from women trying to hide pithy smiles or more hostile eyerolls.

We also still get the budding friendship between Kay and her neighbor, Hazel (Christine Lahti), a wannabe singer dismissed as a tramp by Jack. Initially hesitant to interact with the woman whose husband insulted her daily, Hazel eventually warms to Kay’s sweet, friendly demeanor, and in turn Kay uses Hazel as a catalyst to manifest her own growing frustrations with her pre-war life. Both women find themselves on a path toward self-actualization through work, and their relationships with the respective men in their lives mark an interesting contrast. Whereas Kay quickly stirs to the freedom offered by Jack’s deployment, Hazel’s seemingly standoffish attitude masks a loneliness exacerbated by the callous way she is treated by her beau, Biscuits (Fred Ward).

Things start to fall apart in the theatrical cut when Kay begins to be seduced by Lucky. The re-cut draws out Lucky’s attempts to woo Kay to preserve her sense of propriety, but this has the effect of making her seem like a wall beaten down by a storm, with Lucky coming across as almost predatory for refusing to acknowledge her protests of being married. The theatrical cut even doubles the amount of time that Lucky has tried to ask her out, overdubbing a line about him asking her for three months to make it five. As intended, Kay finally lets her feelings for Lucky be known after seeing him perform jazz at a company jamboree, and he takes her home and invites himself in. In the theatrical version, however, numerous attempts are made to prolong this moment, including moving a scene of Kay freaking out about their tryst from after their hook-up to before, changing its meaning from a moment of paranoia and shame to one of resistance, yet another scene that makes Lucky look like a complete creep and negates their later romance.

The net effect of these changes makes Kay more broadly sympathetic only in the most regressive sense, chaining the film’s throwback period design to an equally old-fashioned sense of morality. More importantly, it spoils the truly remarkable performance that Hawn gives. In the workprint, Hawn fits Kay within her usual type as the innocent naïf whose pluck sees her through uncomfortable situations while also keeping the character’s evolution grounded. Kay’s arc may be linear but the character isn’t, and Hawn flecks moments of independence and decision with small hesitations and tremors of fear, Kay pulling back as if dipping her toe into a bath that was too hot. We’re given Kay as a complete human being, whose desires and hang-ups hold equal attention and render her progress with messy realism. Here, however, Kay simply comes across as scrambled, with the reordered scenes actively forcing her to retread every single step. It’s one thing to stumble along the way to change, another to just be whatever the scene calls for in that moment. This Kay has no sense of self.

That addled personality contributes to the theatrical cut’s chaotic, half-assed second half that undoes the carefully laid character arcs in favor of simplistic resolutions and conflicts. Jack’s return, in particular, is a farce in the theatrical cut, with him immediately guessing that Kay is having an affair (in the original cut, she confesses on a beach after first standing up for both herself and Hazel) then moping in several added scenes that exist solely for Kay to prostrate herself for forgiveness, further sanding away the character’s complexity but also rendering the final stage of her arc nonsensical. Mere minutes after these displays of weepy remorse, she jealously attacks Hazel and Lucky for shacking up, her understandable jealousy nonetheless conflicted by how completely she seeks to reconcile with her husband.

Enough of Demme’s spark remains in the released version to make Swing Shift entertaining, and there are still glimpses of his wide-ranging curiosity and human interest. Yet in restricting the focus as much as possible onto Kay, the theatrical cut ironically reduces her, makes her a character rather than a person. The true cut of the film would stand out as one of Demme’s finest works, suggesting a rich political and social commentary beneath a non-judgmental multi-character study. As it is, the film is an occasionally enlivening misfire, one that might have set Demme back artistically had he not released a masterpiece a mere fortnight later.

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