Not every new movie gets Deadpool-level marketing. Here are six under-the-radar movies that are new to theaters, rent, or home video right now, and that you may want to seek out.

1. Cemetery of Splendor

Strand Releasing

There are two close-ups in Cemetery of Splendor that feel so startlingly intimate, they hit you like a punch. One is of Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas), a housewife who volunteers at a hospital filled with soldiers overcome by a mysterious sleeping sickness. The other is of Itt (Banlop Lomnoi), the patient she's been visiting and has befriended during his scattered waking hours. Until they're shown up close, you never realize that the film has held them at a medium distance, but that's how bewitching the atmosphere of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest film is. It conjures up a world in which the magical and the mundane are mixed, and in which the past lurks unignorably beneath the present. In one scene, a medium named Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram) takes Jenjira on a tour of the palace that's since been replaced by a hospital and that's about to be replaced again by something more modern; it's as though the ghost of the building is still standing tall. The languidly paced movie requires some surrendering to, but it's well worth it.

Where to watch it: Cemetery of Splendor is now playing in New York, with more cities to follow.

2. Frankenstein

Xavier Samuel, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Danny Huston in Frankenstein.

Alchemy

Candyman director Bernard Rose has witty ways of modernizing Mary Shelley's novel in Frankenstein. His version of the monster, Adam (Xavier Samuel), is born from a 3D bioprinter, the work of a pair of married scientists (Carrie-Anne Moss and Danny Huston). The two are pleased with their creation, whose superhuman strength and healing abilities have made him almost indestructible, until mutations turn him from physically perfect to grotesque and they try to euthanize him. Instead, Adam escapes and ends up in Los Angeles's homeless population, a malformed adult with the mind and impulsiveness of a toddler.

Rose's ambitions are sometimes outpaced by his materials in Frankenstein, a movie whose visuals and effects can't always keep up with its story. But in telling an iconic horror tale through the experiences of its monster, it builds dread — not through what's lurking in the dark, but with our fears about the harm Adam may cause without meaning it or because he simply doesn't understand. Rose doesn't force his monster into a metaphor for anything; he just brings the narrative into the present day and allows it to resonate as one about the people who are shunted to society's outskirts and treated as less than human — even when one of them isn't human at all.

Where to watch it: Frankenstein is available via digital rental/purchase as well as on Blu-ray and DVD.

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Christian Bale in Knight of Cups and Bobby Cannavale in Vinyl.

Melinda Sue Gordon / Broad Green, HBO

In Knight of Cups, Christian Bale's character is a successful screenwriter who never seems to get around to writing anything. He does, however, spend time in picturesque contemplation in the desert or on a beach, takes rides in his convertible, and goes to parties.

There's an impromptu soiree he attends early on in the film, the sort of shindig that can only exist onscreen — because even the most meticulously doormanned real-life event will never look as good as it does through the scope of Emmanuel Lubezki's matchless cinematography. It's at a rooftop bar, and there's a pool and a dazed-looking model drooping in silver body paint and angel wings. The floor is covered in glitter. Rick (Bale) gets so trashed that he sprawls across a bench like a child being tumbled into bed by an invisible parent. Then the film leaps forward a few hours, when most of the attendees have left, and Rick is alone, staring out over the city, pensive — he hasn't left the party, but the party's left him.

Knight of Cups

Broad Green

Knight of Cups is a Terrence Malick movie and, like other Terrence Malick movies, it is lyrical, unbearably lovely, and not terribly concerned with straightforward storytelling. The characters speak in voiceover more than they do to one another; the film is one long, experiential montage set to classical music more than it is a series of chronological events. Knight of Cups is about how Rick visits and revisits a series of current and ex-lovers, friends, and family members played by the likes of Cate Blanchett, Freida Pinto, Wes Bentley, and Natalie Portman, among others, each of whom corresponds to a tarot card and each of whom tells Rick about himself and his quest for meaning in bursts of abstract prose. It's an ecstatic fantasy about feeling malaise in a Los Angeles in which all doors are open to you.

The rest of the movie is — like that shot of Rick après-party on the roof — full of equal parts beauty and bullshit, reveling in a heavily romanticized version of Hollywood superficiality while indulging a character who just can't figure out what he wants, and who bears wounds from an estranged father and a brother who died, keeping him from making connections. This doesn't stop him from trying various women on for size as possible salvation. "You don't want love. You want a love experience," one girlfriend, played by Imogen Poots, murmurs to summarize the emptiness of their relationship. Knight of Cups might be described, similarly, as an angst experience, delivering a simulacrum of a man's search for meaning as he soaks up the delights of the plush purgatory Malick makes L.A. out to be: an endless corridor of cocktails, palm trees, and lithe ladies. It's not exactly the director's Entourage, but it might be his attempt at a BoJack Horseman.

Vinyl

Macall B. Polay / HBO

Or maybe it's his Vinyl. Malick's movie is dreamy and disconnected while Martin Scorsese's HBO series is amped up and motormouthed. But they're both auteur projects about a particular flavor of dissatisfaction that almost no one has the opportunity to sample: the unplaceable ache of having everything except fulfillment. Knight of Cups' Rick and Vinyl's record exec Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale) aren't the first fictional characters to feel sad in positions of showbiz power — and they won't be the last — but these explorations of their dissatisfaction are particularly nettling because there's so little about their grandeur that feels earned. Richie is disaster with a good ear, and Rick may or may not be a good writer, but whether they deserve their plum gigs is beside the point. They could share a self-pitying shuffle from their sweet perches, which are separated by a continent and a few decades but both surrounded by other people who seem to actually know what they want and what they haven't been able to get. What to give the guy who has it all? Apparently, an extravagant ode to how hollow they feel inside as they rattle around their airy condo or Greenwich house, gazing at the women who are failing to make them whole inside.

Those women in Knight of Cups — Poots' manic pixie dream girl, Teresa Palmer's stripper with a heart of gold, and Blanchett (a standout) as Rick's physician ex-wife, among others — serve as mirrors in which Rick observes his own restiveness. But in Vinyl, a series overstuffed with acting talent and grindingly short of worthy ideas, there are actual full-fledged other characters, and almost any one of them would be a more interesting center than Richie. These include Juno Temple as the punk Peggy Olson to Richie's Don Draper; or Ray Romano as Richie's aging head of promotions; or Ato Essandoh as the blues artist Richie picked up and then betrayed early in his career. Then there's Olivia Wilde as the former Warhol girl whom Richie married, a woman dealing with the fact that being a suburban homemaker can be just as thankless as being a muse.

Vinyl and Knight of Cups.

Macall B. Polay / HBO, Broad Green

In the pilot, they all get dragged into the maelstrom of Richie's midlife crisis when he decides against selling his label, an exchange that would have made him and his partners very rich while allowing them to offload a floundering company. He screws his partners over without asking after coming out of an eventful night with a renewed fervor for rock and roll that's only partially fueled by all the cocaine he's been hoovering. He's eager to excavate his old dreams, everyone else's desires be damned, indifferent to just how many people in his orbit haven't had a shot at their own.

While Richie sneers down at the prospect of terminally square German investors buying his company for gouts of money and frets over "selling out," Rick wanders the lobby of a sleek skyscraper listening to a man in a suit talk about how he's going to make Rick rich and then some. "Is there anyone you want to sit in a room with?" he asks. "Is there anyone you want to know?" Outside, another man in another suit compares his life to "playing Call of Duty on 'easy' — I just go around and fuck shit up," a declaration of privilege so on the nose it's almost wince-worthy, even in a movie in which wealth is just another thing these character need only say "yes" to. But the question's inescapable: If these men are living life like they have the cheat codes, why are theirs the stories that we're watching?

Knight of Cups

Broad Green

In the end, it's not oblivious navel-gazing that makes Vinyl and Knight of Cups' stories tiresome. It's the way that they reinforce the importance their main characters have already assumed for themselves. Knight of Cups starts with the Hymn of the Pearl, a parable from the Acts of Thomas (from the gnostic Bible) about a prince who's sent on a quest to retrieve a pearl but instead forgets who he is and why he's on a journey in the first place. In the film, Rick would be that prince, awakened from his complacent haze by an earthquake — the earth literally shaking him into awareness. In the TV show, Richie gets his own local disaster as personal epiphany when he survives a building collapse during a particularly dizzying New York Dolls show. He emerges from the rubble in a shot that feels like a nod to the end of Scorsese's own After Hours, eventually making his way back into his office bloody and dusty and claiming to have been mugged by God — though, in Richie's words, "I took his wallet instead."

These characters are not actually touched by the divine, but they accept these larger moments as signs meant for them in the same way they take for granted their access, power, and wealth. There's a chilly realism in that, even with the hallucinatory touches both Scorsese and Malick drop in to depict their protagonists' unmoored inner selves (like the vision of Janis Joplin belting a song alongside Richie's frustrated howl when his office catches on fire, or when an actress in full Marie Antoinette garb walks near Rick through a "city street" of a studio backlot). Why would Rick or Richie have any reason to doubt their places at the center of their respective universes? They're not the most compelling people onscreen, and yet they're the characters these self-serious stories are focused on. Everyone else is left on the sideline, hoping that someday they'll get a chance at the spotlight.

John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead in 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Michele K. Short / Paramount Pictures

Cloverfield was a found footage film about a gargantuan, spindly limbed monster ravaging New York. The 2008 film was also, sidelong, a movie about 9/11 — not the causes or the consequences, but the visceral awfulness of being in the middle of an assault on the city, frantically trying to discern what's happening, where to run, and whether your loved ones are safe. Its shaky-cam style evoked the videos shot on the fly by eyewitnesses that have become our usual first look at disasters in the years since 2001. Its characters were just ordinary people who didn't defeat the creature, or figure out its origins, or make smart decisions in their attempts to stay alive. Cloverfield dealt in a recent American trauma the way its kaiju classic predecessor Godzilla evoked Japan's fears about nuclear weapons in the wake of World War II.

John Gallagher Jr. and Winstead in 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Michele K. Short / Paramount Pictures

The monster in 10 Cloverfield Lane — a clever, modest thriller being positioned (a little cynically) as a sort of follow-up to that first film — offers a different kind of real-world resonance. The monster's name is Howard, and he's played with ominous conviction by John Goodman.

Howard is the man responsible for building the well-stocked bunker — a sterile, florescent-lit space filled with humbly homey trappings — in which most of the movie takes place. He's a former Navy guy and a current doomsday prepper who claims there's been some kind of major attack, and that everyone outside is dead. He insists that he's saved the lives of the two people he's taken in, and that it'll be at least a year or two until the fallout settles and it's safe to leave.

The big questions in 10 Cloverfield Lane are whether Howard is delusional or lying (not the same thing) in order to Kimmy Schmidt his two younger guests, and whether there really is trouble outside. Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has plenty of reasons to doubt his trustworthiness. She's in the process of fleeing an unhappy relationship when she's sideswiped by a car on a quiet Louisiana road; when she wakes up, she finds herself chained to a wall in an unfurnished room in his shelter, informed by her apparent abductor Howard that the world has ended and that she's only alive thanks to him. Howard, who's held on to artifacts of his departed daughter like he's eager for a replacement, frees Michelle from her chains but not the bunker. She's down the hall from Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), the only other resident, who's curiously unbothered by his living situation — because, as we soon learn, he not only chose but fought to come inside, for reasons that suggest Howard was right about at least a few things.

Goodman in 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Michele K. Short / Paramount Pictures

10 Cloverfield Lane — which was helmed by Dan Trachtenberg and (like Cloverfield) produced by J.J. Abrams — is a nimbly directed three-person show that often comes across like a very dysfunctional family drama, the characters falling or forcefully placed into the roles of father, daughter, and boy next door. However, it's the relationship between Michelle and Howard in which the armrest-clutching tension builds, falls, and builds again. Winstead is a remarkably present actor, and Michelle is established as a gratifyingly level-headed and aware character from the start: For example, in a pre-bunker moment, she cautiously eyes an approaching car while fueling up at a gas station — just like, you know, a real woman traveling alone at night would. The result is the rare thriller protagonist whose every decision feels reasonable even though the situation she's navigating is a mire of questionable truths and conflicting evidence (what are those rumblings overhead?) which leaves her constantly uncertain about what to believe.

And what to believe about Howard? As good a heroine as Winstead's Michelle is, it's really Goodman's character who sears through the movie, a combination conspiracy theorist and ironhanded host. 10 Cloverfield Lane positions Howard as an extremist who's quietly thrilled that the moment he's been preparing for has arrived, and that he has a captive audience to tell "I told you so." He's introduced through a rumbling down the hallway like a giant — fee-fi-fo-fum — while the camera focuses on his stomping feet first, then the gun on his hip, and then ultimately settles on his glowering face as Goodman plays up the slouching ballast of his body. He's the man who's been muttering about invasions all of his life, finally sure that he's been proven right, a petty tyrant tending his windowless domain with a self-satisfied air, ordering Emmett and Michelle down to dinner and dictating appropriate conversation for the table.

Goodman, Winstead, Gallagher in 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Michele K. Short / Paramount Pictures

Like the resentful outcast Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens, or super-powered men's rights activist Kilgrave from Jessica Jones, Howard comes across as a warped, mutated version of someone who crawled off a Twitter block list. He's a paranoid, don't-tread-on-me nightmare, the concentrated embodiment of the sentiment that "they" are coming for us (and in Howard's case "they" could be anything from the Russians to the Martians) and that everyone who hasn't been stockpiling goods and weapons deserves what they get. "You people," he sneers at Michelle when he senses that she thinks he's crazy. "Crazy is when you build your ark after the floods have already come." Howard hasn't just been preparing for Armageddon but longing for it to come along and prove him both right and necessary, the unquestioned king of the underground lair he's built for himself. He reminds Emmett and Michelle repeatedly that they owe him gratitude, and when Michelle does thank him, he can't help but break into a self-satisfied smile — one of Goodman's more chilling choices.

Long before 10 Cloverfield Lane gets to the issue of whether or not there are monsters above ground, it's evident that Howard is monster enough below it: a figure of frustrated, resentful masculinity (he alleges, offhand, that his ex-wife turned his daughter against him) finally crowned with the authority he feels has long been denied him. While the original Cloverfield deliberately positioned its cast of twentysomethings to be dwarfed by a largescale disaster, 10 Cloverfield Lane is rewardingly claustrophobic, keeping its focus tight on the characters and their cramped space while whatever disasters there are loom outside the bunker. Inside of it is someone who is sure he's just been handed the ultimate proof that he knows what's best for everyone — and he has a gun. Given that reality, who wouldn't start to think about making a run for it, even if there may be nowhere safe left to go?

Mark Strong and Sacha Baron Cohen in The Brothers Grimsby.

Columbia Pictures

Anthony Horowitz, the latest author to be tasked with generating new James Bond novels, caused a furor by saying he thought Idris Elba was too "street" to play the famous fictional spy. But he was quick to say he'd prefer Adrian Lester, another black British actor, because "it’s not a color issue," he insisted.

Maybe not, but it is an issue of class, which Horowitz spoke around using terms like "rough" and "suave." Bond might be imperfectly aristocratic — when Vesper Lynd reads him in Casino Royale, she guesses that he didn't come from money — but he's learned to fake it, with the suits and the sangfroid, in a way Horowitz seemed to feel Elba, despite being suave as hell, could not.

Columbia Pictures

Which is what makes the joke at the heart of Sacha Baron Cohen's new comedy The Brothers Grimsby such an enjoyable one, even when the film as a whole weaves between being just hilariously foul and incoherently sloppy. It takes fellow Bond deconstruction Kingsman: The Secret Service's class consciousness to more outrageous extremes. The movie features a sleek, Bond-ish agent named Sebastian Butcher (Mark Strong), who to his horror is plunged back into contact with his gritty past and the brother, Nobby (Baron Cohen), he hasn't seen in years.

The film's warped version of former fishing town Grimsby is a place of grayish houses and shipping cranes full of people who are on the dole and equally addicted to soccer and alcohol. It's a vision of the working class out of an alarmist scold's fondest dreams where people there name their many children things like "Django Unchained" and "Skeletor" and have home kebab machines. Once they're reunited, Nobby — with his misspelled, patriotic tattoos; his Liam Gallagher haircut; his equally cartoonish girlfriend (Rebel Wilson); and his inability to maintain any kind of filter — clings insistently to Sebastian like a recurring rash.

Columbia Pictures

If Sebastian — with his tasteful clothing, velvet voice, and workplace flirtation with the Moneypennyish Jodie Figgs (Isla Fisher) — recalls the iconic Bond who gallantly devoted his life to awesome adventures and international seductions for queen and country, then Nobby is a reminder that no one really conveniently springs fully formed from a national imagination.

The Brothers Grimsby, which was directed by The Transporter's Louis Leterrier, doesn't just obliterate Sebastian's dignity again and again with gross-out set pieces involving elephant uteruses (elaborately, idiotically hilarious) and the sucking of poison out of body parts (gay panicky until it fully commits). It's about how the only difference between the patrician secret agent and his forever drink-clutching football hooligan sibling are the advantages the former got when he was adopted by a London couple, and that "suave" and "rough" are designations as arbitrary as chance.

Midnight Special.

Ben Rothstein / Warner Bros.

Here's a list of just some of the wonderfully strange, evocative images offered up in the first half of Jeff Nichols' sci-fi thriller Midnight Special:

• A man standing in a motel room in which the windows have been blacked out with cardboard peels tape off the peephole in order to peer outside.

• A boy wearing goggles and safety headphones uses a flashlight to read a comic book under a sheet.

• A congregation in conservative dresses and work clothes recites a list of numbers in unison during a sermon in a florescent-lit room with no windows.

• A driver puts on night-vision goggles to drive without headlights on a road in the dark, all the better to remain undetected.

• A man crouches over a child at night, the two linked by a beam of light emanating from the child's glowing eyes.
  

If there was an award for the movie whose still images were most likely to be used as inspirational jumping-off points in a creative writing exercise, Nichols' mildly disappointing latest would win it, easily.

Midnight Special is a film that sweats and strives to evoke the wonder of vintage Spielberg without the sentimental side. When its mundane settings — the road-worn cars and humble houses in which so much of the film takes place — rumble with the activation of otherworldly forces, it feels like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. When 8-year-old Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), the boy everyone is after, is pursued by government agents, it recalls E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, with the kid serving as a mixture of Elliott and E.T. And it's at least as solid a tribute to Steven Spielberg as J.J. Abrams' uneven simulacrum Super 8, which reached for the same childlike combination of awe and uncertainty and had the advantage of the participation of Spielberg himself as a producer.

Ben Rothstein / Paramount Pictures

But Midnight Special is better matched up with another recent release, 10 Cloverfield Lane — they're both movies that suggest a larger warped universe while practicing economy of scale and relying on directorial deftness over effects. These are movies that are both made on the relative cheap — 10 Cloverfield Lane for $15 million, Midnight Special for $18 — and that are more ambitious in world-building than in what they actually show. Like 10 Cloverfield Lane, Midnight Special gets a lot less intriguing when it reveals what's really going on, though for the former, that's a forgivable issue related only to the final act. Midnight Special, on the other hand, reveals all sorts of marvelous, enigmatic imagery, only for all the eerie resonance of those early scenes to snap together into a story that's curiously unengaging for one about a kid with powers and his dad out on the run from fanatics and the NSA.

Midnight Special is the fourth film from Nichols, a director whose career contrasts the grand with the workaday. Family feud drama Shotgun Stories led to the tremendous Take Shelter, in which a family man's anxiety expressed itself in apocalyptic dreams, and then on to Mud, in which two kids stumble across a drifter who promises adventure but who's actually fleeing more prosaic problems. Like his past films, Midnight Special stars Nichols' trusty muse Michael Shannon as Roy, a man who fled the cult in which he and his ex-wife Sarah (Kirsten Dunst) used to live, only to return to take back his son, Alton. Shannon, alternating between tender and desperate, is mostly paired with Joel Edgerton, who plays Lucas, the childhood friend he's recruited for help.

Warner Bros.

It's the sort of cast that can do a lot with very little, and Midnight Special throws the audience into the story when Roy is already on the run, Alton sick and also capable of inexplicable things. There's a sympathetic NSA analyst, played by Adam Driver, on the side of the men in black, while the cult, "the ranch," is under the leadership of Sam Shepard. In limited screen time, they all turn their characters into figures who feel like they have full lives stretching out behind them, even if they're not the sort you feel all that inclined to be invested in emotionally.

For a movie that doesn't exactly fess up in its ending, it might seem like a strange complaint to say that there's not enough mystery in Midnight Special, but that's its problem — its broad motivations are all put in the open. It's not a metaphor for anything. 10 Cloverfield Lane was a paranoid drama embedded in the promise of a sci-fi premise. Midnight Special is a chase movie in which everything and everyone is as they seem, even if what they are is possessed with inexplicable capabilities. It summons a shrug more than it does astonishment, but at least it looks good on the way.

Glen Powell, Wyatt Russell, Blake Jenner, James Quinton Johnson, and Temple Baker in Everybody Wants Some.

Van Redin / Paramount Pictures

The best player on the 1980 Texas college baseball team lovingly depicted in Everybody Wants Some is a senior named Glen McReynolds, a guy who looks like he walked right off a faded Topps card and into a keg party. Played by former Teen Wolf star Tyler Hoechlin, Glen has the bulgiest muscles, the most luxuriant mustache, and the shit-eating grin of a guy who's sure he's going to go on as a pro athlete, that his life is going to become even more sweet than it already is. He's introduced by almost caving in a kitchen ceiling with the waterbed he's been setting up in the room above. He grinds every newcomer — including freshman main character Jake (Blake Jenner) — into the dirt to establish his dominance, and he handles losing very, very poorly. He's the distilled essence of sporty douchebaggery.

Paramount Pictures

But during a lazy afternoon hang-out around the baseball team houses (a pair of much-abused buildings donated by the city to house its players), Glen proposes a bet: wielding an axe as a baseball bat, he can cut a baseball in half midair. The teammate who takes up his wager tosses the ball, and as Glen hefts the axe above his shoulder and whirls it around, the movie slows down as if — like everyone else there — it can't help but admire the easy certainty with which he pulls of this feat of strength and accuracy. Glen may be a asshole, but he's enthralling in his physical magnificence, and in that moment, you can't help but like him, even as he smirkingly offers to go two out of three.

The same could be said for most of the characters in Richard Linklater's resplendently baggy comedy, who are a collection of unapologetic bros from an era before that term was quite so loaded. They're the big men on campus, on the sports team with the best record at school; the film takes place in the three days before class starts, when they have nothing to do but spend time together before heading out to get laid. In between talking about athletics and talking about sex, they haze one another and turn everything — from knuckles to Ping-Pong — into a competition. They drift through the three rambly, story-light days over which the film exists in a cloud of booze and testosterone and, despite all of this, the end product is somehow still an experience you want to crawl inside.

Paramount Pictures

Jake, Glen, the wisecracking Finnegan (Glen Powell), the tie-dyed Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), the tightly wound weirdo Jay (Juston Street), and other teammates like Roper (Ryan Guzman), and Dale (J. Quinton Johnson) are, in 2016, an almost unfathomably unfashionable slice of the student population to make a movie about. They joke about "cockgobblers" and how emasculated the only dude with a girlfriend is as they scramble to find rooms in which to bed the night's conquests. Their lives are pretty much ongoing dick-measuring contests. Only one of the characters, Finnegan, a roguish charmer, appears to have given any thought to life after baseball. They throw the kind of rowdy parties that might be incredibly fun, but at which you'd keep a really close eye on your drink.

Paramount Pictures

Everybody Wants Some has been billed as a spiritual sequel to Linklater's 1993 Dazed and Confused, one of the greatest high school movies ever made. But that 1976-set comedy laid out a whole ecosystem of queen bees and coffee shop philosophers, rebellious football players and twentysomething holdouts trolling for teenage girls. Everybody Wants Some feels, at least at first, like a follow-up centered only on the equivalent of Affleck's preening Fred O'Bannion and his pals, high-fiving over the beatings they hand out to 14-year-olds — not the misfits and the losers, but the alphas and the bullies. And then, gradually, it reveals itself to be a sort of bro reclamation project. It doesn't soften the hyper-macho atmosphere of the baseball houses, but it does drain it of toxicity by affirming the bonds underneath, built by the constant ragging.

Everybody Wants Some's Jake is the successor of Mitch, the babyfaced, half-formed hero of Dazed and Confused; he arrives at college (and the '80s) broad-shouldered and confident after what was clearly a stint as a high school A-lister. It takes a few beats to see that underneath the swagger, he's another Linklater philosopher prince, a seeker of meaning and haver of long, pot-fueled conversations. Jake's open to people, and through his eyes we see the baseball players go from a brawny blur of jocks to a group of differentiated characters shoving and elbowing their way toward being a team. Over subsequent evenings, they sample different subcultures — the disco club, the country bar, a punk show, and a theater kid party — and if their motivation is to pick up chicks, the result is a buffet of possibilities, this feeling of worlds being open to visitors, whether for a jubilant line dance to "Cotton-Eyed Joe" or a minute in a mosh pit. It suggests identity is ultimately to be tried on and possibly discarded during the self-discovery of college: Everything isn't beautiful, precisely, but nothing hurts.

Paramount Pictures

There's plenty of entitlement in assuming you'll be welcome wherever you go, but Everybody Wants Some is disarmingly forthright about how good its characters have it, with regard to their popularity, their desirability, and their privileged treatment by the school. And there's only one, lone moment that suggests there is any negative associations to being a jock: Beverly (Zoey Deutch), the winsome performing arts major who catches Jake's eye, is surprised to learn that Jake's on the baseball team, and he asks if her shock is because she expects athletes to be stupid... and that minor ding comes because she's already impressed by him. These characters are freed from present-day concerns about crippling college loans and, for that matter, the conversation about consent — the sex they have is portrayed with an idealistic enthusiasm on the part of all parties involved. College, as one character notes, is a place for equal opportunity sluttiness.

Has anyone ever loved college as much as Richard Linklater? In Dazed and Confused, it's the promiscuous paradise Don and Slater are holding out for, and it's where the last scene in Boyhood takes place, Mason going for a hike on mushrooms with his new roommate and two pretty girls, independent life sprawling out in front of him like the view. Everybody Wants Some, for all its careful vintage details — the short shorts and the soundtrack, the arcade games and the hairstyles (both head and facial) — isn't nostalgic for a era so much as it is for that particular moment in life when everything seems possible, and when classes are the least important part of school. It's a time so idyllic that at least one character overstays his welcome trying to hide in it a little longer. It's hard to fault him when the film itself has an ease that's addictively cozy, whether its characters feel familiar or far removed. They're an endearing bunch of — well, bros. In Linklater's dexterous hands, it doesn't feel like such a bad word.

Henry Cavill in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Warner Bros.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice turns Lex Luthor into a tech bro. Played by Jesse Eisenberg, this new version of Superman's archenemy is a twitchy fast-talker in a graphic tee and blazer, with shoulder-length hair (yes, they're some luxuriant locks), shooting hoops in LexCorp's in-office basketball court while plotting how to disrupt superheroics using the scraps of Kryptonite he's been buying up. He's positioned (at least at first) to be Mark Zuckerberg as a supervillain: He treats government regulations as a jumping-off point for negotiations rather than as rules to be followed, making grand pronouncements about superpower humans as "the basis for our myths" while he bargains for special access to Kryptonian tech under the table.

This take on Lex is — like the placement of Gotham and Metropolis as Oakland–San Francisco sibling cities — provocative...or it would be, were it better developed, if it didn't turn out to be a surface-level reworking of your standard-issue megalomaniac. Eisenberg's performance has the trappings of a techno libertarian tweaked into exaggerated comic book nastiness, with none of the follow-through. Lex ultimately plots to take down Superman due to daddy issues and something-or-other about God, but mostly because taking down Superman is what Lex Luthor is supposed to do.

Jesse Eisenberg

Warner Bros.

Like so much of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which was directed by Man of Steel's Zack Snyder, the blatant millennial-fication of Lex Luthor is an intriguing tease to some grander reading that simply isn't there. The film is a lumbering, glum, cool-toned behemoth that labors to lay groundwork for a DC cinematic universe while setting up two famous characters on a collision course, and lobs out big ideas like an underprepared undergrad sweatily pitching off-the-cuff thesis topics. Superman (Henry Cavill), the movie submits, is a messianic figure, a giver of hope, floating beatifically midair with his cape flapping around him while supplicants reach out in tears, more important as a symbol than as a man of individual actions. Superman is also a little like America in terms of international intervention: He requires you to trust that his actions are all in the interest of the greater good — because what are you going to do, fight the guy? It's fine when he's saving people from a flaming building, but when he crashes (in what Deadpool has dubbed the "superhero landing") into a tense situation in Africa involving Lois (Amy Adams, given a gratifying amount to do), his interference sparks unforeseen consequences.

Ben Affleck

Warner Bros.

Batman (Ben Affleck), on the other hand, takes the micro to Superman's macro, as a self-appointed answer to Gotham's governmental failings, policing the streets in a way that doesn't have to reckon with inconvenient rights and processes. He's rage disguised as righteousness, a one-man militia in bulky Bat-armor, righting the wrongs that the cops can't manage to keep up with. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice begins by running us through young Bruce Wayne's oft-documented parental trauma once more before catching up with him as an embittered, incredibly ripped fortysomething who's maybe losing his grip a little, living down the road from the burned remains of Wayne Manor with his butler-turned-co-conspirator Alfred (Jeremy Irons). This road-worn version of Batman is vengeful and exacting, unafraid to kill, and inclined to literally brand the criminals he catches with his logo, a mark that (we're told) dooms them when they go to prison.

Batman's a vigilante and Superman's a god, which is the basis of their disagreement, though, lord almighty, does the movie take a long time laying that out. In the hour-and-a-half lead-up to the promised showdown, disagreements between the two simmer and build and are partially articulated during a cocktail party encounter between Bruce and Clark Kent in which they politely snipe at each other about superhero puff pieces and "civil liberties being trampled." What neither arrive at (though they should) is that Batman and Superman actually both do what they want and answer to no one, and that they should stop talking since, incredibly, they both lack self-awareness. The film doesn't find space to fill their characters out in more than broad swaths, but manages to make them both unappealing, having a superheroic pissing match that turns into literal grappling over the moral high ground. It's an unusual achievement in a superhero, if not the one that Snyder and writers Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer were likely aiming for: making two iconic characters look like political candidates in a race in which there's no desirable winner.

Ben Affleck

Warner Bros.

In an early sequence — one of the best in the movie and definitely the most evocative — we see the World Engine battle from the finale of Man of Steel from the ground, as Bruce races through the streets of Metropolis just in time to see his own building crumble, with some employees still trapped inside. From Superman's perspective, it was a fight to save humanity from extinction. From Bruce's point of view, it was a melee unfolding with no concern for collateral damage, one that costs people's lives for whom he feels directly responsible. The mid-city, havoc-wreaking brawl seems like it would tee the movie up to grapple with the notions of "the greater good" versus innocent lives lost versus "Why couldn't you have fought over the goddamn ocean or something?" But it doesn't: Instead, the scene is used in order to get Batman thinking that, if there is even the slightest chance of Superman breaking bad, he's got to go.

Gal Gadot

Warner Bros.

It's a false opposition, these two points of view that have been placed counter to each other. They're just guys scrimmaging over whose version of saving the world is better, when, natch, their goals are compatible. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is grimly self-serious; at one point, it even summons Superman for a congressional hearing. But the film is not morally complex, especially when it comes to the idea of self-appointed heroes — it's all for the rights and the responsibilities of the superheroic class to help out as they see fit, no matter how many panic dreams (or are they visions?) Batman has of a scary Supes gone rogue. If the two superheroes want to have a fight in the middle of an urban center, well, that's what's going to happen, and that's how Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice brings the action back around without any apparent irony. This time the battle's in Gotham, where the urban decay works in the combatants' favor by giving them unpopulated acreage to destroy. And this time, Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) is there to help the whole movie, and she steals it just by virtue of looking like she's having a good time, whether she's trading barbs with Bruce at a posh party or grinning at a lumpy monster inserted into the final act of the movie to enable a big, calamitous finish.

In 2005, Christopher Nolan, who's an executive producer on this film, made Batman Begins — a very good superhero movie! And in 2008, he made The Dark Knight — a very good movie, period, which changed old-fashioned perceptions of what could be achieved in the genre. But it created a model of what an "important" superhero pic looks like, with which Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is hopelessly enamored, despite the fact it doesn't come close to pulling off the same tricks in trying to pass off dourness as intelligence. Talking heads debate evolution and myth on television; the public turns on a dime, from venerating Superman as though he liberated a nation to burning him in effigy. And Bruce, having devoted his life to punishing wrongdoers, decides his best legacy might as well be a murderous one. None of it adds up to anything except a world in which superheroes are unavoidable — smashing through buildings and setting up sequels by watching sneak previews of future Justice League colleagues. Why pose big questions when no one wants to hear the answer?

Time to see whose real or pretend instrument-playing was most impressive.

Ethan Hawke in Born to Be Blue, Don Cheadle in Miles Ahead, Tom Hiddleston in I Saw the Light.

IFC Films; Sony Pictures Classics; Sony Pictures Classics

As the anger and distress over the upcoming Nina Simone biopic have affirmed, once again, just because a person has had a movieworthy existence does not guarantee they'll get the movie they deserve.

But somehow, sometime during the century-plus in which films have existed, biopics have become shorthand for important cinema, and everyone who's anyone eventually finds their life being reshaped into a sometimes good, sometimes horrendously cliché-ridden movie. This is especially true in the fall, when Hollywood lightly turns to thoughts of Oscar, and a bunch of biographical flicks come out in hopes of scooping up award nominations. (Reliably, they do — of the 2016 Best Actor nominees, four of the five, including winner Leonardo DiCaprio, were playing people who really existed.)

Well, it's spring now, comfortably clear of awards season, which means that the three biopics arriving in theaters this March and April — all stories of musicians who battled substance abuse — weren't deemed worthy of an Oscar push. That doesn't mean they're not worth the time, but they are a mixed bag, each trying to go against the grain of the Walk the Line tradition.

Here's a look at Ethan Hawke's Born to Be Blue (now in theaters), Tom Hiddleston's I Saw the Light (now in theaters), and Don Cheadle's Miles Ahead (in theaters April 1), placed in order from weakest to best.

3. I Saw the Light

Sony Pictures Classics

The performance: Tom Hiddleston, despite protests from certain parties who would have preferred an American in the role of country legend Hank Williams, puts on a presentable Southern accent and does his own singing.

The person responsible: This one is on Marc Abraham, who's better known as the producer of films like Children of Men and Bring It On, but who's gone for staid biopics in his two turns behind the camera as a director. After making his debut with 2008's Flash of Genius, about intermittent windshield wiper inventor Robert Kearns, he started developing Williams' life into his second directorial effort and wrote the script as well. Talking about why he was interested in making the film, he said, "I love sad stories. I always say, 'You can't get sad enough for me.'"

The skinny: Tall, angular Hiddleston looks great in Hank Williams' double-breasted suits and rolled-up shirtsleeves. He's even better with a hat perched at a jaunty angle or pulled down low over his eyes while sleeping off a hangover on the way to a gig. I Saw the Light has all the makings of an A+ photo shoot, one that could come packaged with an accompanying soundtrack, in which Hiddleston does some convincing yodeling on tunes like "Lovesick Blues."

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Not every movie gets a superhero-level massive release. Here’s what’s worth seeking out in limited release, rent, or home video right now.

1. April and the Extraordinary World

GKIDS

Twin Eiffel Towers stand above the sooty skyline of the alt-history version of 1941 Paris in which April and the Extraordinary World takes place. A Staten Island Ferry–sized cable car runs through the towers and it will get you from the French capital to Berlin in a mere 82 hours, a steampunk version of high-speed travel.

In this retro-futuristic animated epic, the planet has become an environmentally devastated place that's permanently at war and runs on charcoal, the important scientists having all mysteriously disappeared before they could help usher in helpful developments like oil-fueled engines and electricity.

April and the Extraordinary World, directed by Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci and adapted from a Jacques Tardi graphic novel, is a sci-fi adventure with an divinely Gallic slant. It zooms in on a family of chemists, some of the few left, who are in hiding, working on a serum with the potential to save, or maybe destroy, the Earth. When the police pound down their door, they get scattered, leaving daughter April to fend for herself, with only the company of her talking cat, Darwin, and a determination to continue the work that her parents started.

While the film, which is composed of appropriately old-school cel animation, tells a rollicking, sometimes barbed story about oppressive governments, secret labs, selfishness, and the point where science meets ethics, it's the world-building that really delights. April and the Extraordinary World is set in a universe in which a house can roll down armor and walk into the Seine, and rats can be loaded up with cameras and used as spies. While the English-language dub of the film features the voice talents of Susan Sarandon, J.K. Simmons, Paul Giamatti, and Tony Hale, if you opt for the original French (both versions are being released), you'll get Marion Cotillard voicing April and Jean Rochefort as her grandfather.

Where to see it: April and the Extraordinary World is now playing in select theaters.

2. Baskin

IFC Films

Part art film slow burn and part extreme splatterfest, Baskin is best enjoyed as a movie that features the memorable image of a man gouging out someone's eyeball with a knife and then French-kissing the bloody socket. Even though it does not, perhaps, add up to a coherent whole, Baskin, the feature debut of filmmaker Can Evrenol, certainly operates according to its own rhythms.

In the opening scene of this rare horror movie from Turkey, a group of cops sit around an otherwise empty restaurant betting on football and exchanging anecdotes about encountering unanticipated penises on the sex workers they've hired. Meanwhile, the owner of the place and his son prepare a meal from mystery meat delivered, ominously, in a bucket. Long takes and moody lighting stoke dread long before anything spooky happens in Baskin — they're just five swinging dicks telling dirty stories and menacing the waitstaff. It's like the opening scene in Reservoir Dogs, if you felt like the characters could be hacked to death by a mysterious hooded figure at any time during their monologues on Madonna or tipping.

And then the policemen go off to answer a call in the middle of nowhere and find themselves in a nightmarish scenario involving dark rituals, dismemberment, and frogs, and all their swagger quickly dissolves.

Evrenol digs his gore, which arrives with a real Silent Hill vibe, but it's the skillfulness of his filmmaking that sets Baskin apart, especially in the way the youngest of the cops, Arda (Gorkem Kasal), keeps slipping back into memories of a recurring nightmare he's had since childhood. The expressionist weirdness of the dream seems to slowly infect everything that follows, until the tenuous reality of the movie trembles and collapses.

Where to see it: Baskin is now playing in New York and Los Angeles. It's also available on VOD.

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The tense, terrific debut Krisha is no Home for the Holidays.

Like most movies set at Thanksgiving, Trey Edward Shults's directorial debut Krisha is about a dysfunctional family gathering to eat and air out past grievances over the holiday. Unlike most movies set at Thanksgiving, Krisha, which is now playing in limited release, is suffused with dread from the moment its main character — an addict who is trying hard to hold on to her sobriety — shows up at the door. It's the rare drama with all the sickening suspense of a horror movie, sustained by an exceptional lead performance and a director who puts us in the head of a woman who desperately wants to hold things together for one evening. Here's a look at some of the ways Krisha melds genres.

1. Krisha opens with a woman staring at the camera. Staring down the camera, really, looking right at the audience with a combination of challenge and fear, while the score screeches balefully. She's the title character, and, like most of the people who appear in the movie, she's played by one of writer-director Trey Edward Shults's relatives — his aunt, Krisha Fairchild.

In the next scene, in the bright light of a Texas day, we get to see Krisha in a less abstract fashion: a sixtysomething in flowing, hippie-ish garb, the black sheep of a family nervously reunited after a decade-long absence during which she was dealing with addiction. But floating context-free against the dark in that first scene, with the lighting emphasizing her haunted eyes and every hard-won line on her face, she's totally unsettling, a witch in the night.

This may be a movie about a fractured family coming together for a holiday, the setup of just about every Thanksgiving feature ever made, but Krisha makes clear in that first shot that its characters aren't going to simply hug things out over helpings of green bean casserole.

A24

2. Krisha's missing half a finger. It's an injury that's never explained, though it happened recently enough for her to wear a bandage, which she at one point removes in order to rub cream onto the nub. The missing digit itself is not nearly as ominous as the fact that no one in the family asks what happened — whether it was due to an accident or illness, or if she's in pain. Either they all know what happened and it's too uncomfortable for anybody to bring up, or the wound is so in line with what they'd expect out of Krisha that it's not even worth comment.

Either possible scenario illuminates Krisha's past in ways that require no dialogue, in ways that are just as eloquent as the box of prescription meds (labeled "KEEP OUT") that she plunks in the bathroom. They allow scenes in which she dices ingredients for the stuffing for the turkey — the sounds amped up, the slices made percussive by the editing — to become something totally nerve-racking. Krisha isn't careful, with herself or with other people, but she is trying, trying so hard.

A24

3. The camera stalks Krisha through the house. The house, spacious and suburban, is the only location in which Krisha takes place, over one unbearably claustrophobic day. Everything about the filmmaking reflects its main character's turbulent interior. Krisha is so twitchy that someone grabbing Tupperware from nearby plays like a jump scare. The sound of a blender and the shouts emitting from family members watching a ball game on TV blare like alarms, like chaos threatening the cool Krisha insists she's embraced. The bickering of a couple and some good-natured arm wrestling are cut together to feel like the start of a fight that never happens.

The movie creates a sense of agitated anxiety to match Krisha's own. She yearns so badly for things to go smoothly that she basically wills disaster into existence. And the camerawork from cinematographer Drew Daniels is relentless, hunting her down like the doom she suspects is inevitable, tracking down dark hallways and traveling low against the ground like a restless animal, closing in on her like the eyes she imagines are always on her. In the conversation she has with Trey (played by Shults himself), above, the camera slowly closes in on her as she tries to create a bond with him; she seriously miscalculates, and she's left alone in the frame, devastated.

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Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe in Swiss Army Man.

A24

Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are filmmakers and music video directors. They are not trolls.

That may feel like a strange point to have to make about a duo whose feature film debut not only screened at Sundance in January but also won the directing prize. But that's what happens when your absurdist buddy movie begins with a suicidal, shipwrecked guy (Paul Dano) riding Daniel Radcliffe's corpse back to the mainland, courtesy of the dead dude's flatulence that powers them through the water like a Jet Ski. People start to think that you're playing some sort of extended prank on the audience, and, as was widely reported, some of them walk out.

But that's what makes Swiss Army Man one of the festival's most famous and infamous screenings ever.

Some of the audience members who didn't leave the theater, however, were moved to cry — because Daniels, as the pair is professionally known, managed to make a gross-out magical realist wilderness saga that deals with themes of loneliness and depression and body shame. In their hands, Manny, which is the name the dead body offers up when it starts talking, turns into a combination life coach/multi-tool/compass/water bottle helping Dano's Hank survive, journey home, and perhaps overcome the repression that's been holding him back.

It's less about fart jokes than it is, as Kwan puts it, about "fart drama."

The first time Swiss Army Man screened, for what's traditionally a more staid crowd down in Park City, Utah, a woman rushed the stage afterward to talk to Kwan and Scheinert about what it meant to her. "She was like, 'I'm not supposed to be on stage right now, I know,'" Scheinert explained. "'But I just wanted to tell you, I have one friend, and he can fart in front of people. And I have another friend who can't, and he would be so much happier if he could.'"

Daniel Scheinert and Dan Kwan.

Alison Willmore

During the fest, the filmmakers shared a swank Deer Valley house with Dano, Radcliffe, their co-star Mary Elizabeth Winstead, various other producers, crew members, significant others, and a dummy version of Manny used during filming, his hand revealing the small size of Radcliffe's extremities. Kwan and Scheinert decided to do this interview in the house's sauna, initially as a joke: The racquetball court, which the house honest-to-god also contained, had terrible acoustics, and also the sound guy had been camping out in there. But like Swiss Army Man, the concept went from goof to warm, fuzzy feeling quickly, because sitting there in that wood-lined room, fully clothed and flatulence free, was the first time I hadn't felt cold since arriving in Utah.

Kwan and Scheinert, who are 28 and 27, respectively, met in an animation class at Emerson College, where they discovered they shared first name and sensibility. As Daniels, they've made shorts and music videos marked by a playfully anarchic spirit, taking high concepts to some hilariously low places. In their 2014 short "Interesting Ball," they appeared as themselves in one of several surreal plot strands, with Scheinert offering a sincere testimonial of best friendship while slowly getting sucked inside Kwan's asshole. In their music video for DJ Snake and Lil Jon's massive hit "Turn Down for What," which has over 383 million views on YouTube, standard-issue sensuality gets warped into the preposterous and the grotesque. It's partying as an infection, with Kwan and a collection of dancers wreaking havoc with body parts that acquire a life of their own.

The music video for "Turn Down for What."

Columbia Records

So bodies aren't exactly a new interest. "We wanted to make them gross and celebrate them," Scheinert said of Swiss Army Man. "Celebrate them for the freedom they unleash, not the sexuality they represent." Kwan added, "It is fun to intellectualize these stupid things, but I do think it does call to attention the fact that we are just bodies — these weird, physical things that we have no control of, and we are often ashamed of, and our brains are extensions of that."

Swiss Army Man may have its fart jokes, but it's sincere in its central question: If you don't feel free to fart in front of your best friend, even if he's a dead body who may or may not be a hunger pang delusion, then how are you ever going to be comfortable opening up about anything else? Or, as Scheinert put it, "There's no heartbreak without the farts."

The movie's confounding combination of the wacky and the sincere is one he chalks up to being part of the internet generation. "It's hard to be affected anymore. It's hard to make someone laugh and even harder to make someone cry. That's important for us as filmmakers — to be able to push people into very earnest places," Scheinert said. "[But] because we're so self-conscious about being earnest, we have to bury it in something that feels like it undercuts it."

Radcliffe and Dano in Swiss Army Man.

A24

Kwan and Scheinert can be looked at as successors to David Fincher, Michel Gondry, and Spike Jonze, who established themselves as virtuosic music video mavens before going on to film careers. But, Scheinert pointed out, the types of movies those directors went on to make, the Being John Malkoviches and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Minds that were obvious influences on Daniels, "fell by the wayside."

"I feel like there's something of a bummer going on in the film industry that has gotten rid of the niche they used to live in, of the late '90s and early 2000s," Scheinert said. "Like, Oh, people with crazy ideas can get enough money to go for it."

Instead, people with crazy ideas go to Sundance, which has been a learning process for Daniels. "The nice thing about shorts is, you come up with a concept, you push it as far as you can go, and then you let it go," Kwan said. "With this film, we just weren't allowed to let it go, and it was really frustrating, actually. We'd have to take a step back and be like, 'This is a mess. OK, let's figure out what it all means now.'" But, he allowed, "My favorite filmmakers never really know what they're doing until the end. So that was at least a little bit encouraging."

And in the meanwhile, they've gotten two famous actors to go gleefully outside of their comfort zones in a way that certainly helped the film get picked up by A24 for a planned theatrical release this summer.

But, Scheinert said, "This isn't just like a celebrity doing a fun indie on the side. This is crazy, for everybody involved."

So, maybe a little like a prank after all? "I'm slowly realizing we accidentally pranked people twice," Kwan added. "The first prank was, we made everyone think this was a Sundance drama, starring two actors you love."

"Then they showed up, and there was so much farting. Now people keep coming, and they're expecting all these farts," Scheinert chimed in.

"Instead, they are moved by it," Kwan said. "They have some sort of emotional or philosophical experience, thinking it's going to be a fart. To me, that's the most important prank, right there: people having very low expectations of something, and just being completely blown away."

George Clooney in Hail, Caesar!

Alison Cohen Rosa / Universal Pictures

Hollywood has never been a warm and well-behaved place, but there was a time when that was the story it used to tell. Studios created stars and essentially owned them, hiring up-and-comers and inventing an image for them, making them over, changing their names to more glamorous (and, sometimes, less ethnic) ones, setting them up on dates with other celebrities, and doing their best to make their scandals disappear. Basically, it was: Baby, you're a star — now sign this morality clause and agree you'll never be seen in public without a full face of makeup.

This degree of submission to someone else's branding efforts can feel far removed in our current world, in which Kanye West is free to proclaim directly over Twitter that he's not into butt stuff. But there's definitely a retro kick to be gotten from the gap between who these performers actually were, and the glamorous personas that were hawked to the public. It was an era in which everyone was in some sort of closet.

Scarlett Johansson in Hail, Caesar!

Alison Cohen Rosa / Universal Pictures

Hail, Caesar! revels in that gap, in Scarlett Johansson as a picture-perfect Esther Williams-style aqua musical star who, once out of the water, has the "fish ass" of her mermaid costume pried off while smoking and matter-of-factly discussing who the studio should arrange for her to marry now that she's pregnant. It delights in George Clooney as a philandering drunk of an A-lister who's utterly unfazed to find himself waking up in a stranger's house, even after he's told that he didn't black out; he actually was drugged and kidnapped. And it takes joy — so much joy — in scene-stealing Alden Ehrenreich as a drawling cowboy savant who gamely goes along with the Capital Pictures' recasting of him as a dramatic actor, despite being desperately uncomfortable when taken off a horse and placed in a drawing room set.

The Coen brothers' new comedy isn't quite an homage to 1950s Hollywood, but it's not a spoof of it either — it strikes that tone of crisp drollness that's their specialty and that some people misread as aloofness or contempt. But it's not. It's the distance needed to admire the absurdities of the world they've created, one of a slightly askew major studio churning out hopeful alterna-hits like the Western Lazy Ol' Moon, the upper-crust drama Merrily We Dance, and the title picture, a Biblical epic through which Clooney's character, Baird Whitlock, swaggers in a toga, playing a Roman changed by an encounter with Jesus. The studio vets the religious themes in an early meeting with a rabbi, an Eastern Orthodox patriarch, a Catholic priest, and Protestant minister — a brilliant, breakneck scene involving both differences in belief systems and thoughts on the plausibility of the chariot scene.

Channing Tatum in Hail, Caesar!

Alison Cohen Rosa / Universal Pictures

It's such a funny, showy sequence that it feels like it has to be a high point until Johansson, as DeeAnna Moran, rises like a goddess from the midst of a circle of synchronized swimmers and an animatronic whale for her big number. And then there's the sequence in which Ehrenreich's character Hobie Doyle arrives on the set of his new role, and plummy-voiced director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) attempts, repeatedly, to coach him through the line, "Would that it were so simple." And, of course, there's Channing Tatum as Burt Gurney, a Gene Kelly-type tapping and leaping his way through a song and dance about sailors heading out to sea that, were it real, would have been a Celluloid Closet centerpiece.

Hail, Caesar! does feel more like a collection of fantastic bits than a cohesive whole, but its overstuffedness is part of its design — there's no bigger picture to grasp, though as Capital Pictures' fixer Eddie Mannix (a real person amid the movie's series of stand-ins), Josh Brolin strives mightily to find meaning in this strange universe. The last film the Coens made about the old-time movie business, Barton Fink, portrayed Hollywood as this purgatory in which its title playwright became trapped. But for tireless Eddie, who frequents confession enough that his priest suggests he take a break, the big question is whether he should take an offer to leave. He's being courted by Lockheed, with the promise of shorter hours, better pay, and a chance to do "real" work rather than spend his days covering up the indiscretions of the commodities the rest of the world calls movie stars.

Josh Brolin in Hail, Caesar!

Alison Cohen Rosa / Universal Pictures

But isn't that real work? Maybe Hail, Caesar! is a conflicted case for movies in their forever awkward place, straddling business and art — selling entertainment as well as the fame, two different flavors of life as people would like it, not as it actually is. Everything in Hail, Caesar! is transactional, including the deals that the twin gossip columnists played by Tilda Swinton make about the stories they're going to publish. There's even a Communist conspiracy out of Joseph McCarthy's wet dreams that's all about reaffirming that this is work, and that workers need to be treated well.

It's work that doesn't stop at the door of the soundstage, as we're reminded when Hobie dutifully turns up at the doorstep of fellow actor Carlotta Valdez (Veronica Osorio), who he's been told to take to his latest premiere. She's the only person of color in an unmissable and not historically inaccurate sea of whiteness, a Carmen Mirandaesque talent who does an impromptu demonstration of how to dance with something heavy on your head. Carlotta's been assigned a stereotypical image in the same way that Hobie has, and, frankly, a more burdensome one. But at dinner together, they're wonderfully, unglamorously themselves, two people who've traveled a long way and signed on to a sort of devil's bargain. Because that's how you become famous.

Then again, as Baird admits to his kidnappers, he's awfully well taken care of, manipulated image or not. It's where that Coen distance comes in handy, because Hail, Caesar! manages to relish the glossy, strange past without coating it in the uncomfortable romanticization.

Brianna Hildebrand, Ryan Reynolds, and Stefan Kapicic in Deadpool.

Twentieth Century Fox

The best joke Deadpool makes at the expense of superhero movies is in its opening credits. As the camera glides through a frozen scene of car-flipping chaos, onscreen text announces that the movie stars "God's Perfect Idiot" (Ryan Reynolds, face fluttering by on the cover of a People magazine, as the title character, aka Wade Wilson), "A Hot Chick" (Morena Baccarin as his girlfriend Vanessa Carlysle), and "A British Villain" (Ed Skrein as Ajax). It's directed by "An Overpaid Tool" (Tim Miller). It suggests you be ready for "A Gratuitous Cameo," which turns out to be an appearance from Stan Lee — we are in Marvel territory, after all, and some things are unavoidable.

It's a bold beginning for what is, after all, the latest superhero saga (and the first of a planned seven due out this year) — one that openly breaks down the reigning blockbuster genre into some of its most interchangeable component parts. It's the promise of a film that's self-aware and that therefore knows better, though only the first part of that suggestion turns out to be true.

Skrein in Deadpool.

Joe Lederer / Twentieth Century Fox

Deadpool, written by Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, in keeping true to its fourth-wall-breaking, wisecracking, sword-wielding mutant main character, makes countless self-referential jokes about its own existence. It acknowledges Reynolds' previous turn as a version of Deadpool back in 2009's unfortunate X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It gibes about Hugh Jackman and how confusing X-Men movie continuity has gotten. It mentions franchises and sequels and the studio only being able to afford two X-Men for Deadpool (that would be Colossus, voiced by Stefan Kapicic, and Negasonic Teenage Warhead, played by Brianna Hildebrand).

It's fun for a while, and then it all becomes deeply disheartening, because calling attention to the more businesslike mechanics of superheroics isn't subversive when you're also playing right into them. Pointing out the symptoms of superhero fatigue isn't the same thing as overcoming it.

Deadpool is the peak instance of the mainstream movie trend of tipping a hat to studio cynicism without really departing from it. Take, for instance, the hilarious barrage of increasingly halfhearted sequel concepts at the end of 22 Jump Street, the deliciousness of which was only slightly decreased by the news a few months later that a third film was actually in the works. Then there was the Jurassic World moment when the teenage lead took a phone call while, behind him, the T. rex tore apart a goat — a centerpiece scene from the 1993 movie turned into a backdrop as a nod to the need to keep jaded audiences entertained with ever-bigger action sequences. There was also Ant-Man's whole Hope van Dyne storyline, which was like a built-in apologia about how the reasons for not having a female lead in a superhero movie are dumb. But we didn't get a female lead in the one we were watching anyway.

Reynolds and Baccarin in Deadpool.

Twentieth Century Fox

But Deadpool is on a whole other level — a movie that puts its audaciousness in the forefront, even if it's only mutated-skin-deep; a movie that makes space for violence, sex, and swear words, but never bites the hand feeding it by diverging from formula. Early in the film, Wade pauses the action to tell the audience, mid–skewering someone, "You're probably thinking, My boyfriend said this was a superhero movie!" before assuring everyone that he's no hero, and that this, in fact, is a love story.

It's a self-congratulatory bit that rings phony twice over — first in its creaky assumption that the women in the crowd wouldn't be there of their own volition, and second in pretending that beneath the R-rating, Deadpool's story isn't a standard-issue supe one of getting powers, fighting bad guys, and winning (back) the girl. Sure, he kills people, but they're all evil and mostly faceless — there's none of the discomfort of honest-to-god moral ambiguity.

But at least he has a good time doing it. Deadpool is the kind of role Reynolds, who's often miscast, was meant to play — one in which his unshakable smirking edge works with the character rather against him. Reynolds is at his best playing smartasses with hearts of gold, and he makes Wade's compulsive motormouthedness tolerable for longer than it should be, especially when playing off T.J. Miller as Wade's bartender friend and sidekick Weasel, the only character in the movie who can keep pace with him.

Reynolds and Leslie Uggams in Deadpool.

Joe Lederer / Twentieth Century Fox

Baccarin can't, though it's not her fault — her character is a Disney version of a sex worker who falls in love with the one trick we see her turn and who makes all the right pop culture references. "It's like I made you in a computer!" Wade exclaims at one point, which, of all the calling-bullshit-on-itself-before-anyone-else-can moments in the movie, is the one that stings the most — the open labeling of the romantic lead/MacGuffin of this self-proclaimed love story as a shrugging fantasy. She's as much an accessory as the red suit Wade sews for himself.

Superhero sagas aren't, in general, built to be daring. There's no benefit — not until the current model stops working. They're commodified and expensive — even if Deadpool's budget is reportedly lower than the norm — and they have to serve many masters, guided more by the vision of executives focused on global markets and planning years out than they are by filmmakers trying to make a good standalone picture. This doesn't mean there isn't room to take chances, just that there's little motivation for it — and what Deadpool sells is a very safe form of acting out, all surface with a timid center, the movie equivalent of a kid who wears a T-shirt with a swear word on it to school in giddy anticipation of what Mom will say when they get sent home. The satisfaction it offers lasts as long as it takes to consider how, when a character flips off the camera, he's also flipping off the audience.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Kyle Mooney in Zoolander 2.

Paramount Pictures

Zoolander 2 is a dirge in the form of a halfhearted comedy, and it's Benedict Cumberbatch who makes that most clear.

In one of the more memorable of the sequel's many celebrity cameos, Cumberbatch appears briefly as a genderqueer supermodel named All who has taken Derek Zoolander's (Ben Stiller) place as the hottest thing in fashion since the title character stepped out of the scene. The actor dons long hair, fur, and painted nails, his sharp-planed face made extra alien by the removal of his eyebrows. While Derek has matter-of-factly described himself as "good-looking," "really, really good-looking," or "ridiculously good-looking," All resembles the imposing ruler of a dystopian ice planet who would never deign to be described by terms so mundane. All prefers the pronoun "we" and is "not defined by binary constructs." Naturally, the first thing Derek and Hansel (Owen Wilson) do is ask if All has a "hot dog or a bun," a "wiener or a vaginer."

Derek and Hansel are idiots. That was the central joke in Zoolander back in 2001. Fifteen years later, it's nominally still the joke in Zoolander 2. The two male models emerge from tragedy and self-imposed exile into a world where All is the most in-demand face in fashion and no one is impressed by their dated stylings, which bewilders them.

Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson in Zoolander 2.

Philippe Antonello / Paramount Pictures

At least in that first film, Derek and Hansel were more than just fools. They
were comedy loopholes, a way for a team of straight guys to mine laughs
from an industry dominated by beautiful women and gay men, by allowing themselves to be the main targets. Stiller sidestepped a lot of stereotypes and garden-variety punching down by making himself the butt of the joke, an oblivious "good-looking" doofus who never comprehended the extent to which the universe accommodated him until he encountered the possibility that the spotlight was moving on. And having Stiller and Wilson, two men whose attractiveness is decidedly not of the perfectly symmetrical, high-cheekboned variety, play these roles amplified the absurdity of how their characters were lauded.

But Zoolander 2 — which Stiller directed and co-wrote with Justin Theroux, Nicholas Stoller, and John Hamburg — can't bring itself to really skewer its main characters for their vapidity anymore. It has too much sympathy for their fears — of being out of the loop, keeping up with changing times, and getting left behind. Self-deprecation is easier when you're the one on top, but the fashion industry in the sequel is expressed through bits about how baffling its biggest trends are — the eco-friendly hotel made of shit, the terminally ironic hipster designer (Kyle Mooney) who talks about his love of how terrible everything is, and the thudding spoof of fashion's fondness for androgyny and gender fluidity that is All.

That Cumberbatch sequence manages to crystallize all of Zoolander 2's off-target fumblings in one easy moment. It's a messy scene in which the joke quickly slides from Derek and Hansel's cluelessness to squirmy panic, right before the three are due to hit the catwalk at a show. Sensing discomfort, the designer hones in on Derek's awkwardness, calling it into question, demanding proof of his acceptance: Does he have a problem with All? Wouldn't he be happy if his kid brought home someone like All to marry? Not that All is looking for a relationship, because All "just married hermself."

Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell in Zoolander 2.

Wilson Webb / Paramount Pictures

Both Zoolanders include multiple gags about their main characters' inclusive sexuality by throwing them into orgies with men, women, little people, and older folks, all of varying ethnicities. But the punchline there is Derek's and Hansel's (mostly Hansel's) well-practiced adventurousness — their desirability is absolute and understood, and what's funny is who they choose to sleep with when everyone is there for the taking. The scene with All tries uneasily to contend with an idea of beauty that isn't directly measured by who its main characters — however cosmopolitan — might want to fuck. It's a concept the movie can't get its head around. Instead, on the runway, Derek and Hansel find themselves in shirts reading "OLD" and "LAME," being whipped by a winged All swooping in from above like a figure out of the anxiety dreams of anti–political correctness trolls.

Zoolander earned its cult status by figuring out a way to make its satire absurd and sharp but never mean. It still resonates, as last year's comparisons of Yeezy Season 1 clothing line to Mugatu's Derelicte collection prove. That first film is more on point, a decade and a half on, than Zoolander 2, which feels like the product of people peering in from the outside at something they no longer understand — not fashion, but comedy about a universe in which they're no longer the center.

Anya Taylor-Joy in The Witch.

A24

Robert Eggers is ready to make witches the stuff of horror movies again. And it's no easy task.

“The witch today is a shitty plastic Halloween decoration,” the filmmaker explained over drinks in his Brooklyn neighborhood. "She isn't scary."

But of course, it’s more complicated than that. Like many other creatures of the night, the image of the witch has been reclaimed and reworked for contemporary times. She's grown into a symbol of feminine power, a figure unfairly maligned, misunderstood, and, at the worst, burned for her perceived failure to conform to harsh societal standards.

Eggers’ directorial debut The Witch, in theaters Feb. 19, never sets aside the misogyny and paranoia that made something like the Salem Witch Trials possible. But it also tries to get inside that distant mindset, to understand what it was like to be a 17th-century Puritan who was certain that the devil and sin were lurking behind every action and that becoming a witch was as simple as letting your guard down. The Witch is a deeply unsettling attempt to channel some centuries-old fears.

Robert Eggers

A24

“When I went into this, I did not understand what the stakes were,” Eggers said. “I was trying to understand why people were killing women. People understood the real world and the fairy tale world to be the same thing. They believed these women were fairy tale ogresses doing horrible things. We needed to see that and understand it."

Which is why, not long into The Witch, in the midst of a game of peekaboo, a baby goes missing from the care of his teenage sister Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy, a standout among an excellent cast). He's there one moment, giggling in the grass, and then — boo! — he’s gone, snatched up by a wizened woman scurrying through the woods back to her hut. And to be clear, this is not a movie in which suspense hinges on whether or not the baby will be retrieved safely. We see it all.

Though it has its share of gore and jumps and is simmeringly creepy as hell, The Witch is not a typical horror movie. It's better described, as Eggers puts it, as an “inherited nightmare," an excavation of old dread. It begins with a family of English immigrants — patriarch William and his wife Katherine (Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie, both Game of Thrones alums), and their children Thomasin, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson), and baby Samuel — being banished from their New England colony for quarreling with the church leadership.

In a clearing by a forest, they build a farm and carve out a semblance of intensely pious civilization there in the wilderness. But it doesn't take long for those lives to fall apart, and for the starving, grief-stricken family members to start looking suspiciously at the looming wilderness, the oppressive darkness, the animals, and one another.

The Witch

A24

Eggers' background — he worked in theater before he got into film, as an actor, then as a director and a designer of sets and costume — comes through in The Witch. The movie is marked by the kind of rigorous attention to historical detail of someone for whom the smallest parts are as important as the whole, insisting the past be treated not as a fuzzy concept but as vivid, foreign territory.

Eggers, who grew up in New Hampshire but now lives in East Williamsburg with his wife, jokingly attributes the period fidelity to being a “snobby hipster bastard,” but he's selling himself short. Anyone who can deliver an endearingly enthusiastic explanation about the various strains of Puritanism, complete with the phrase “Thanksgiving motherfuckers,” is, in the best way, a nerd.

The Witch

A24

"We had a screening for some historians, and that was the part of the film that they were the most impressed with — they thought it was true to the worldview," the thirtysomething filmmaker said about The Witch’s representation of Puritanism. "It was the ultimate thing for me." Eggers' accuracy is the product of long research, reading diaries from the time, and watching documentaries about modern-day religious communities like the Amish and Mennonites as well. And it's the aspect of the film that turns out to be just as disturbing as the dark things lurking out in the woods — this idea of a life bound by impossible rules, in which damnation is a constant, immediate terror that keeps children up at night and sets a mother to anguished, howling prayers for the soul of her unbaptized infant.

It's why, when things start crumbling, eyes turn toward Thomasin, who gets blamed for things that aren’t her fault by others who know better. “She ain't no Puritan — she's us,” Eggers said of Thomasin, audience surrogate in the form of a blossoming girl with a streak of rebellion and an inability to be as submissive and severe as her community demands. In the time and the place in which she lives, turns out she’s a figure almost as alarming as a witch out in the wild.

Taron Egerton and Hugh Jackman in Eddie the Eagle.

Larry Horricks / Twentieth Century Fox

At the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards became a star — not because he was good at ski jumping, but because he was, by the admittedly high standards of the games, fucking terrible at it.

Edwards was a downhill skier who'd switched sports only two years earlier because he wouldn't need to fight for a place on the U.K. ski jumping team, as the U.K. ski jumping team did not exist. Most competitive ski jumpers train seriously from when they are children, but Edwards started in his twenties. He weighed 20 pounds more than the average competitor, wore thick glasses, and was prone to pratfalls. He became a crowd favorite despite (or due to) coming in last in both the 70-meter and 90-meter ski jumps, but has, until now, also come up short in the race to the Cineplex.

The Jamaican bobsled team, also 1988 Olympic long shots, became the basis of Cool Runnings back in 1993, while Edwards' story has languished in development for years. First Steve Coogan was set to take the role, then Rupert Grint, before dreamboat Taron Egerton put on vintage specs and a hint of baby fat to play the man one journalist reportedly labeled a "ski-dropper."

Hugh Jackman and Taron Egerton in Eddie the Eagle.

Larry Horricks / Twentieth Century Fox

And watching the candy-sweet Eddie the Eagle, which was directed by Dexter Fletcher and written by Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton, you can see why Edwards' tale took longer to bring to the screen. The Jamaican bobsledders, like other underdog favorites including Equatorial Guinean swimmer Eric Moussambani and American Samoan sprinter Trevor Misipeka, were people who'd come from outside the traditional systems of their sports. Edwards, for all that the movie plays up his ungainliness, was already a competitive athlete — it wasn't greatness in his sport that he was after, but a more general moment in the Olympics spotlight, a motivation that's a little less winsome. He's being sold hard here as an inspirational figure, but it's not a role he seamlessly fits into.

In fact, Eddie the Eagle floats various morals we're supposed to take from its story. At one point it's about chasing dreams, no matter what, and then it's about how Eddie wants to prove himself to his doubters, including his pragmatic father (Keith Allen). Then it's about being a working-class interloper in an upper-crust sport, and then it's about guts — "I'd rather be a sober fool than a drunken coward," Eddie yells at his reluctant, alcoholic, former champion of a coach, a fictional character named Bronson Peary, played by Hugh Jackman. Then, it's about reclaiming the Olympics for the amateurs, and then, right at the end, it's suddenly about having a pure relationship with a ski jumping that has nothing to do with competing.

The overkill indicates an awareness that none of these would-be messages ring true — Eddie's spending money his parents don't have on implausible goals; his fellow athletes are scoffing bullies from no obvious background other than Norway and a meaner part of England; his brave choices could be equally described as stupidly dangerous; "amateur" isn't synonymous with lacking skill; and ski jumping isn't even his first pick.

Jackman and Egerton.

Larry Horricks / Twentieth Century Fox

What Eddie is — which Eddie the Eagle resists fully acknowledging — is a viral star before the age of the internet, a man whose real talent is winning over the crowd. His excitement over landing his first jump in Calgary, dancing for the cameras and flapping his arms, is perfectly GIFable. His determined face, chin forward, as he heads down the jump looks eerily like that of Success Kid. He becomes a press conference darling — "he's a PR dream," the U.K. publicist trumpets — while other members of the team get shunted to the side, because he's the one who makes for better copy.

When Eddie's told he'll be forgotten once the games move on to the bigger 90-meter jump, he decides to compete in that event as well, despite never having done one before. It's supposed to be a triumphant moment, but instead it feels callous — "I didn't come here as a novelty act," Eddie tells the press. But of course he did, or, in less cynical terms, he came as a human interest story, a meme, a young man who, via outdated rules, wormed his way into the most competitive sporting event in the world, all the while insisting it wasn't about who won or lost.

Someone with a gift for puncturing his characters' own grandiosity, like Coogan, might have found tragicomedy in Eddie, but Egerton plays him totally straight, with a Forrest Gumpian air of innocence that feels, at the end, like a bit of a put-on. Edwards wasn't a fool, and he rode out his unexpected renown by releasing two songs in Finnish (which he didn't speak), participating in reality shows, and appearing in ads, like plenty of other Olympians trying to wring as much as possible from every-four-years fame.

As Eddie is scorned by Olympic officials for not being the highly trained type who attracts sponsors, it's hard not to think about how he's actually got a more developed personal brand than anyone else on the team. Who needs a medal when you can be a star?

Best Picture

Photo illustration by Jared Harrell / BuzzFeed News; Photos: Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox(2), Open Road Films, A24 Films

Nominees
The Big Short, produced by Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, and Jeremy Kleiner
Bridge of Spies, produced by Steven Spielberg, Marc Platt, and Kristie Macosko Krieger
Brooklyn, produced by Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey
Mad Max: Fury Road, produced by Doug Mitchell and George Miller
The Martian, produced by Simon Kinberg, Ridley Scott, Michael Schaefer, and Mark Huffam
The Revenant, produced by Arnon Milchan, Steve Golin, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Mary Parent, and Keith Redmon
Room, produced by Ed Guiney
Spotlight, produced by Michael Sugar, Steve Golin, Nicole Rocklin, and Blye Pagon Faust

Will win: Thanks to the current batcrap crazy presidential primary, this year’s Academy Awards are only the second most confounding horse race in the country right now. There is, of course, the spectre of #OscarsSoWhiteTheSequel, a story which in all likelihood will outlast any of the winners at this year’s awards. With an impressive — and, for some, impulsive — degree of urgency, the Academy’s subsequent efforts to diversify its membership will no doubt have some kind of impact on the makeup of future nominees, and future winners. One can only hope, however, that at least one extraordinary aspect of this year’s Oscars season won’t change: It has been delightfully difficult to predict who will win Best Picture.

In truth, the Best Picture category has been tricky to call for a few years now — 12 Years a Slave and Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) were far from slam-dunk frontrunners going into their respective Oscar telecasts. But those years were nothing like this one, in which three movies have each won one of the three guild awards that usually predict the Academy’s top prize: The Big Short, a dramedy about the 2008 financial crisis, won the Producers Guild Award; Spotlight, a drama about the Boston Globe team that exposed the Catholic Church’s systematic cover-up of pedophiles in the priesthood, won the SAG Award for Best Ensemble; and The Revenant, a period epic about Leonardo DiCaprio battling a bear, nature, and Tom Hardy, won director Alejandro G. Iñárritu his second Directors Guild Award, after nabbing it last year for Birdman.

That means that The Big Short, Spotlight, and The Revenant all have a nearly equal shot at taking home Best Picture — although, each movie also has its caveats, too. The Big Short is a contemporary dramedy that depicts an international news story while routinely breaking the fourth wall. That’s a rare kind of movie, period, but the last Best Picture winner to come even close to fitting that description was Annie Hall 40 years ago. Spotlight, meanwhile, is a kind of mirror image to The Big Short: It approaches its ripped-from-the-headlines story with a subtle, sober, straightforward realism — so subtle, in fact, that the film’s impact may feel muted in the face of its more outlandish competition. And as Kyle Buchanan explained at Vulture, The Revenant also has Oscar history against it: The last film to win Best Picture without a screenplay nomination was 1997’s Titanic, and The Revenant is no Titanic. Plus, no filmmaker has ever directed back-to-back winners of Best Picture.

And, besides, with a field this wide open, who’s to say whether the delirious action fantasia Mad Max: Fury Road, the sob-inducing interior drama Room, or the tremendously satisfying sci-fi adventure The Martian couldn’t score a shocking upset victory? Remember, Crash won Best Picture — anything could happen! (For those of you who loved Brooklyn and Bridge of Spies, though, let’s just be content that they’re nominees, because that’s likely all those movies are going to be.)

The Big Short

Paramount Pictures

But this is, ultimately, a predictions post, and I’ve got to pick a movie to win. So, gritting my teeth, I choose The Revenant. It has the most nominations, with 12, indicating the widest Academy support. It also won big at the BAFTA Awards, another strong Oscar bellwether. Its lead actor is a shoo-in (finally), and the Academy has liked to pair Best Picture and Best Actor in the past. And as an epic period drama, it is also the most Best Picture-y movie among the nominees. And yet, if The Revenant does win, it will be almost certainly by the slimmest of margins. According to Vegas, it is the odds-on favorite, but if you’re placing any Oscar bets this year, don’t be too shocked if a lot of people lose money on this category. —Adam B. Vary

Should win: Look, Mad Max: Fury Road is, no question, my favorite movie of 2015, a blistering blast of maniacal action, deceptively rich characters, and flamethrower guitars that still has me staggering like I stumbled out of a bar expecting to see the moon, only to find the sun had risen. But it would feel like such an anomaly for the Oscars, who reaffirmed their fuddy-duddiness in grand fashion this year, to go with a gloriously anarchic action flick that surely bewildered plenty of the Academy’s voters. I’m just tickled to see George Miller’s movie up there at all.

The ideal Best Picture winner would have been Creed, Ryan Coogler’s deftly directed, quietly revolutionary rebooting of the Rocky franchise that’s far deeper in viewing than it is in logline — but it wasn’t even nominated in this weird, embarrassing Academy Awards iteration. So instead, I’d give the prize to Spotlight, Tom McCarthy’s ode to journalism at its most effective and least glamorous, a movie that is uncool in all the best ways. It’s got a star-filled cast but is a true ensemble picture, its characters laboring toward a common goal that doesn’t stop them from sometimes jostling against each other along the way. And, at a time when movies have been flogging “chosen one” fantasies like they’re the only option in cinematic escapism, Spotlight is a story that’s markedly all about work, about collaborating, knocking on doors, making calls, putting together spreadsheets, and doing things right. It’s a testament to not skipping to the end, to how interesting and essential process can be, especially when the journalistic process ends up exposing decades of systemic abuse and changes the world’s relationship with a massive institution. It’s the perfect Oscar movie because it mostly eschews obvious Oscar-y moments and still manages to feel urgent, significant, and moving. —Alison Willmore

Leonardo DiCaprio

20th Century Fox

Spotlight

Open Road Films

Nominees
Lenny Abrahamson, Room
Alejandro G. Iñárritu, The Revenant
Tom McCarthy, Spotlight
Adam McKay, The Big Short
George Miller, Max Max: Fury Road

Will win: If Ridley Scott had been nominated here, then he would have easily been a favorite to win his first directing Oscar, as much for his career and the high esteem he holds in the industry as for his fine work on The Martian. I could easily see the same kind of argument for George Miller, in large part because his work on Mad Max: Fury Road feels like a true culmination of his career.

But Alejandro G. Iñárritu won the DGA Award, and in the previous 10 years, the DGA winner has also earned the Best Director Oscar every year save for one, when Ben Affleck won for Argo after the Academy didn’t nominate him at all. There is no denying the astonishing technical craft behind The Revenant, either, so expect him to make Oscar history as the third back-to-back winner in the Best Director category since Joseph L. Mankiewicz won for 1949’s A Letter to Three Wives and 1950’s All About Eve, and John Ford won for 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath and 1941’s How Green Was My Valley. (And to be clear, A Letter to Three Wives and The Grapes of Wrath did not win Best Picture in their respective years, so should The Revenant win Best Picture this year, Iñárritu would still be the only filmmaker to have directed back-to-back winners of Oscar’s top prize.) —A.B.V.

Should win: Now, this is the prize that should go to George Miller — who, incidentally, is already an Oscar winner. Here’s how varied the Aussie filmmaker’s career has been: Of the past four Academy Award nominations Miller’s gotten, the one he went on to win was for Best Animated Feature in 2007, for the adorable penguin musical Happy Feet. A trophy for the very lovable but not the least bit adorable Mad Max: Fury Road wouldn’t just look terrific/hilarious next to that, it would also be well-deserved, because the movie is a mind-boggling directorial achievement, a monument to visual storytelling.

If you’ve ever needed proof of the value of practical effects in the era of omnipresent CGI, you need only look to Mad Max: Fury Road’s wild stunts, automotive and otherwise, which have a heft to them that has everything to do with the fact that they involve actual bodies flying through the air and actual armored, spike-adorned vehicles churning through the dust. Then there are the performances Miller allows to glimmer through the earth-rending pursuit scenes with surprising nuance: the haunted look in Charlize Theron’s eyes that telegraphs Furiosa’s years of trauma; the ways in which the wives, introduced as a collection of objects of lust in diaphanous outfits, quickly distinguish themselves as stubborn, angry, frightened individuals; and the near wordless understanding that forms between Furiosa and the hero of the title while on the run, two platonic, hyper-competent soulmates meeting at the end of the world. It’s not a grand romance — it might be something better. —A.W.

The Revenant

20th Century Fox

Nominees
Cate Blanchett, Carol
Brie Larson, Room
Jennifer Lawrence, Joy
Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years
Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn

Will win: There was a fleeting moment when Charlotte Rampling was seen as a real contender in this category for her exquisite and devastating performance in 45 Years. Then she made some really unfortunate comments about #OscarsSoWhite — about which she expressed regret, and for which she apologized — and her chances at the Oscars evaporated in a storm of angry tweets and think pieces.

Cate Blanchett won Best Actress for Blue Jasmine too recently, and some — wrongly! — think her performance in Carol is too similar. Jennifer Lawrence’s strong performance in Joy is that deeply flawed movie’s only nomination (and likely wouldn’t have happened if the Academy had refused to buy into the awards season fiction that placed Alicia Vikander's and Rooney Mara’s leading performances in The Danish Girl and Carol, respectively, in the Best Supporting Actress category instead). Saoirse Ronan does miraculous work in Brooklyn, but she has been a perpetual runner-up all awards season.

And that’s because Brie Larson has won just about every award she could for her complex, impossible-to-forget performance in Room. She’s been a grounded, gracious presence throughout the awards circuit. Expect her to win. —A.B.V.

Should win: The Best Actress race is so much stronger than Best Actor this go-round that it deserves a special salute. As with the other acting categories this year, this isn’t exactly a diverse group — age makes Charlotte Rampling, who’s 24 years older than the 46-year-old Blanchett, the closest thing to an outlier — but it’s a goddamn talented one, regardless. Any of these women would be a respectable winner, even if Jennifer Lawrence is good despite Joy rather than because of it. But it’s Brie Larson who deserves to come out on top, for all of the pain and love she puts into the character of Joy Newsome, a young woman refusing to buckle under the weight of having her life stolen from her.

Larson transmits the soul-deep exhaustion and distress her character feels to the audience while keeping up a steady, smiling front for her son (Jacob Tremblay), who’s never known life outside of their prison and has no idea what he’s been denied. She embodies both a fierce parent and a frightened young woman who was only a teenager when taken. Jack and his Ma may be in their situation because of their captor, but the existence they carve out for themselves is defined by them, not by him, and that’s thanks to the ways in which Larson’s character has seized the narrative. She willed the film’s fragile, self-contained universe into being. —A.W.

Sylvester Stallone

Warner Bros. Pictures

Nominees
Bryan Cranston, Trumbo
Matt Damon, The Martian
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
Michael Fassbender, Steve Jobs
Eddie Redmayne, The Danish Girl

Will win: Barring catastrophe — like the world ending — Leonardo DiCaprio will finally, finally, finally win his first Academy Award. It helps that his competition this year is less than robust, in that none of the other nominees had to wear a hideous beard for nearly a year, eat raw bison liver, and strip naked and step inside a disemboweled horse carcass for warmth. So you might as well start planning your Leo-wins-an-Oscar memes now, because this is happening. —A.B.V.

Should win: This set of nominees — four of whom are playing versions of real people, which speaks to how staid the category is this year — is so boring, I almost don’t want to pick a winner. But since that’s the point of this post, I’ll give Michael Fassbender the edge for Steve Jobs, a movie that was universally shrugged off as a Social Network retread. I liked it more than most, and Fassbender’s moody, mercurial portrayal of a genius did something that none of the other performances here attempted: He challenged the audience to figure out if they really wanted to root for his character. —A.W.

Mark Rylance

DreamWorks Pictures

Mad Max: Fury Road

Warner Bros. Pictures

Nick Wilde (voiced by Jason Bateman) and Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) in Zootopia.

Disney

There's this scene in Zootopia, the new Disney movie, in which Officer Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), a peppy rabbit rookie cop, and Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), the charming fox and small time con artist she's recruited to assist her in a missing persons case, are standing over Deputy Mayor Dawn Bellweather's (Jenny Slate) computer. As Dawn tries to help them track down a lead, Nick becomes entranced by the sheep's fleecy updo when it's right at eye level. In an encounter that deliberately evokes one of black hair and the obliviously boundary-free people who feel entitled to help themselves to a feel, Nick reaches out and pats Dawn's fleece gently, then digs his fingers in it until an outraged Judy scolds him to stop.

"You can't just touch a sheep's wool!" she hisses.

Zootopia takes place in a universe populated entirely by highly evolved animals who wear clothes (except for the naturists among them), have jobs, and live together in civilized, not quite perfect harmony. The city of the title is an ingeniously realized metropolis of artificial microclimates (desert, tundra, rainforest) and different-sized streets and services that manages to be visually delightful while leaving unanswered trickier questions, like just what the carnivores eat now that everyone gets along.

Disney

It's a world in which race does not exist. But species certainly do, and they provide a fuzzier, cuddlier way for Zootopia to get at some thorny issues of prejudice and profiling. On a broad, kid-friendly scale, the movie does this through the developing of Judy and Nick's cross-species friendship and how they overcome the assumptions placed on them and that they hold for each other — a story about acceptance and the damage caused by prejudgments. But Zootopia is filled with more specific references that signal its aims unmissably to older viewers, from the moment Judy, who becomes the first rabbit to graduate from the police academy courtesy of a "mammal inclusion initiative," firmly informs someone that "a bunny can call another bunny 'cute,'" but that it's really not OK for other animals to do it.

Zootopia, which was directed by Byron Howard and Rich Moore, with Jared Bush co-directing, isn't the best animated feature Disney's made. Its main narrative — a city-hopping (LOL) rabbit–fox mystery involving a dozen or so disappearances, organized crime, and a possible conspiracy — feels too heavy for its bright and bouncy tone, like it's a darker structure that's been, Roger Rabbit style, shoved into Toontown. Judy and Nick are a deftly created mismatched duo who, poignantly, took opposing lessons from similar, formative childhood experiences with bullying. But the other characters are hit or miss — the sloths working at the DMV allow for a sequence that's a paean to comic timing, but a mob boss voiced by Maurice LaMarche as a Godfather reference feels cheap, an easy, Shark Tale-level joke wedged into a movie that's supposed to be better than that.

Disney

But that's the thing about Zootopia. It's from the venerable Walt Disney Animation Studios, a brand that's made a decades-long fetish out of fairy tale and talking animal timelessness, but the issues it wants to tackle stop not all that far short of conversations central to Black Lives Matter. It's torn between classic animated film instincts and more urgent ones. No one gets killed by a cop in Zootopia, but the city becomes gripped with police-incited paranoia about the predator minority, overcome with suspicion that they really are inherently more dangerous, a population that can't be trusted and that everyone else needs to be protected from. There's a scene in which one character instinctively flinches from another, and, for a small moment, it's a shocking betrayal. Zootopia is a place where anyone can be anything, as Judy idealistically trumpets, except when you're reminded that everyone's already assigned you qualities based on what species you were born as.

In times like that, Zootopia feels boldly and almost jarringly ambitious. Take the early instance in which Judy praises Nick for being "articulate," a word whose loaded sting is met by Nick's butter-wouldn't-melt smile. "It's rare that I find someone so non-patronizing," he replies with peak-Bateman, get-a-load-of-this-asshole evenness. The movie, to what is (for the most part) its benefit, isn't one in which the characters or species are meant to correlate to real world groups. Judy, Nick, and the other Zootopia characters might reference things like how the mayor hired someone to secure "the sheep vote," but they're channeling aspects of a conversation about race, not standing in directly for parties within it. The voice casting — from Goodwin and Bateman in the main roles to Shakira, Idris Elba, J.K. Simmons, Nate Torrence, Tommy Chong, and Octavia Spencer in supporting ones — seems deliberately chosen to avoid having any one character fall into easy associations.

Disney

Zootopia never tries to be that neat, though there is a point at which its metaphors get a little too messy. When a movie that references relevant topics of racial discussion then flips into a plot about the nefarious triggering of uncontrollable biological instincts in unwilling Zootopian citizens, it's a briefly uncomfortable turn. Animals have inarguable biological differences that they've been able to mostly put behind them in Zootopia, but humans being divided up the same way is the stuff of pseudo-scientific racism, no matter how unintended the parallel.

The movie manages to recover, and becomes a story in which its characters learn, grow, and become better anthropomorphized creatures — you know, as they should in a Disney movie. And though Zootopia doesn't have the emotional heft of the finest of these animated affairs, it has a gutsiness that's impressive, awkward beats and all.

For most of the slowly shifting history of Disney animation, straightforward representation has been offered — different cultures, different settings, different princesses. But Zootopia is a movie about representation, and what it means to face expectations that have nothing to do with your actual identity. Talking animals have come a long way.

Alex Proyas’s fantasy of ancient Egypt is 2016’s first big bomb. Sometimes it’s a glorious trainwreck — and sometimes it’s a genuinely infuriating one.

1. Gerard Butler just goes with the Scottish accent.

Most of Gods of Egypt's cast members decided that mortals and deities in a fantasyland version of ancient Egypt would speak with the English-ish accent that period pictures use to signal they're set in the past. The notable exceptions are Chadwick Boseman, whose god of wisdom Thoth opts for an excruciatingly unidentifiable but still vaguely theatrical cadence, and Gerard Butler, who decides his own Scottish brogue will do just fine for his god of the desert Set, regardless of what the rest of the cast is up to.

There's something magnificent about the scene in which Set wades through the worshipful crowd at the coronation of a new god-king, opens his mouth, and lets out an apology for being late that makes it sound like Butler just wandered into the scene by accident. It's so "fuck it," he might as well be wearing jeans. He clearly felt that megalomaniacal living gods with daddy issues who can transform into dog-headed metallic forms can talk however they want. And who would argue the point?

Lionsgate

2. The actors playing the gods have all been sized up by 80%.

Gods of Egypt reportedly cost $140 million, but can look startlingly cheap. The CGI is omnipresent and rickety, and some of the sets have the stageyness of a '50s biblical epic. But every once in a while, there's an effect that evokes the more charming hokeyness of the 1981 Clash of the Titans — and that effect is that all of the gods are several feet taller than all of the mortals. It's consistently silly looking, like Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Horus (god of the sky) and Elodie Yung as Hathor (goddess of love) were just sized up in Photoshop. But it's also more memorable than the blur of impossible computer-generated cityscapes.

Lionsgate

3. The Earth is flat.

(Call B.o.B!) Director Alex Proyas isn't some movie noob — the man directed the 1994 goth kid classic The Crow, the solid Will Smith effort I, Robot, and the sci-fi noir mindfuck Dark City, a film that came out a year before The Matrix in 1998 and comes close to beating the Wachowskis movie at its own game. And while Gods of Egypt is a trainwreck, the feverish inventiveness of the imagery in Dark City occasionally glimmers through, like in the scenes in which we see that the world in which the movie takes place is flat, an archaic idea of the layout of the universe brought to evocative life.

Lionsgate

4. Geoffrey Rush lives on a space boat and fights a chaos worm.

So yes, sometimes Gods of Egypt has fascinatingly go-for-broke visuals. Other times, 1997 Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush, in liver spots, white robes, and a French braid as sun god Ra, glowers on his boat in space between breaks fighting chaos, as represented by a toothy cloud worm.

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Chris Rock makes his unfortunate Asian child-labor joke at the 88th Academy Awards.

Adam Taylor / ABC

Chris Rock is responsible for one of the most brilliantly uncomfortable things that's ever happened at the Academy Awards.

It was a sketch he did when he hosted for the first time in 2005, the one in which he went to the Magic Johnson Theatre in Crenshaw, Los Angeles, to ask moviegoers there about what they had seen versus the titles that had been nominated. "You often hear that Hollywood is out of touch with the rest of the country, so I decided to get out of Hollywood and talk to regular people about the movies," he said.

But the bit had nothing to do with how much more liberal the filmmaking industry is than, say, Middle America, an assessment that most of the attendees in what was then the Kodak Theatre would be perfectly fine with. Instead, it showed how little the films being celebrated as examples of Hollywood's best self connected or mattered to black audiences just a few miles south.

When asked about Sideways and eventual winner Million Dollar Baby, the interviewees (save a cameoing Albert Brooks) all shrugged before expressing their fondness for Chronicles of Riddick and White Chicks. You could sense everyone in the Kodak Theatre squirming at the reminder that the niche biopics and issue films that tend to win prizes are also failing to serve other audiences. It wasn't just the whiteness of the awards that Rock perfectly skewered (and 2005 was a far better year for diverse nominees than 2016) — it was their cultural irrelevance. If anything near the billion people everyone says watch the Oscars really did, it wasn't because of how invested they all were in the fate of Finding Neverland, Rock noted.

Chris Rock interviews moviegoers in Crenshaw at the 2016 Oscars.

ABC

People today continue to be largely indifferent toward movies like Finding Neverland, but they do care about a nominee whiteout at the Oscars that sparks a national conversation about representation in movies in general and, especially, the movies for which people win awards.

Maybe that's why Rock revisited the sketch at this year's ceremony. Going back to what's now the Rave Cinemas Baldwin Hills to ask theatergoers about Spotlight, Brooklyn, and #OscarsSoWhite was still very funny, but less pointed, the acid subtext of that first go-round now the central focus. Rather than highlight how narrowly aimed the average awards-bait movie is and let that speak for itself, Rock asked explicitly how they felt about the "Oscar controversy." There was still a lady who’d never heard of Bridge of Spies and accused Rock of making the title up to mess with her, and it was delightful. His joke to her about how, if there were riots, “this was the time to get that TV," was less so — one of a few times in which he grouped offense with opportunism.

Everyone expected Rock to blow up the Oscars, to obliterate the artifice and prejudice of cinema's big, back-patting night out. A lot of people seemed to be counting on it, in fact — for Rock would rain cleansing fire on the ceremony that would allow the academy to move past this year's embarrassment. But Rock arrived not as a destroyer but as a deliverer of both fierce truths and calculated skepticism, and he even ultimately surrendered to the inertia of a ceremony that never feels less than endless. His most vibrant moment was his fiery, messy monologue that took aim at the academy (the "White People’s Choice Awards") and its long history of failing to recognize people of color. Rock also mocked Will and Jada Pinkett Smith for boycotting, and himself for saying yes in order to not "lose another job to Kevin Hart."

Leonardo DiCaprio gets his win for The Revenant.

Adam Taylor / ABC

In the best part of his opening, Rock was open and bitingly accurate about Hollywood being racist — "sorority racist," the kind of racism in which "the nicest, white people on Earth," these well-meaning liberals, still fail to hire black casts and crew. But he also took on #AskHerMore, insisting that "everything’s not sexism, everything’s not racism," while brushing off systemic reduction of women to their fashion choices and appearance.

Though he made an earnest plea that "we want opportunity — we want black actors to get the same opportunities as white actors," Rock would later make a lousy, lazy crack involving stereotypes about Asians, who've gone even more woefully unrepresented at the awards than black people. He finished up by saying that anyone who was upset about the joke should tweet about it on their phone made by Asian child labor.

Yes, it was a mixed bag.

Everyone is complicit, Rock suggested, and outrage can come with an agenda, whether it be a chance at a new TV, an opportunity to grab headlines (honestly, what did Jada Pinkett Smith do to deserve the accusation of sore-loserdom?), a way to make your organization look penitent for diversity issues that will almost certainly crop up in a few years, or the chance to guilt a celebrity audience into buying tens of thousands of dollars' worth of Girl Scout cookies. When Rock brought on Stacey Dash — the Clueless star who made a heel turn to Fox News commentator, as the "new director of our minority outreach program" — the joke was the "job" had gone to someone who recently said that BET and the NAACP Image Awards should be eliminated because they are "segregation." But when Dash stood up there smugly wishing the crowd a "happy Black History Month," it was hard not to think that he'd also rewarded her with exactly what she wanted — her biggest platform yet.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy accepts her Oscar for A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness.

ABC / Image Group LA

Rock's mix of urgency and cynicism surely has something to do with his lines about how the black community "had real things" like lynching to protest decades ago and ongoing race-based police brutality today. In that formulation, movies and movie awards aren't "real." But Rock, who's directed a sharp film about representation and the Hollywood system himself, knows it's not nearly that simple.

Movies are both commerce and art, frivolous and essential, a billion-dollar industry that shapes our outlook as well as a source of mindless entertainment. Mad Max: Fury Road costume designer Jenny Beavan may have gotten played off with "Que Sera, Sera" when she tried to talk about polluting the atmosphere, but Best Documentary Short winner Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy noted that the Pakistani prime minister has vowed to change the law on honor killing after seeing her film A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness. Sam Smith floundered in his attempt to salute the LBGT community, but Joe Biden and Lady Gaga brought issues of consent and college sexual assault to the stage along with a group of survivors.

Oscar season goes on forever — there are outrageous snubs, the ceremony's often tedious, and some incredibly eye roll–inducing stretches can be made to connect movies to real world causes. But the awards remain entertainment's biggest stage, the warped mirror in which Hollywood tries to see itself, and that has pull that's impossible to shake off, no matter how flawed the process. Even someone who sees through it, like Rock, still shows up — because it's a job, and because there's still hope for things to change for inside, no matter how slow the process.