10 raisons de ne pas passer à côté. Attention: BEAUCOUP DE SPOILERS!

Sa représentation des femmes sur le petit écran.

Je n'ai jamais rien vu de tel que Big Little Lies à la télé auparavant. Mais avant sa première diffusion, j'ai eu au moins trois conversations avec des journalistes télé qui montraient du dédain pour la série parce qu'elle portait sur un groupe de femmes riches.

La télévision prestigieuse dans sa forme actuelle a largement ignoré les histoires axées sur les communautés féminines, Desperate Housewives et Sex and the City traitaient des problèmes et des amitiés des femmes très tôt dans le nouvel âge d'or de la télé, et Orange Is the New Black et Jane the Virgin continuent de s'en charger. (Gilmore Girls, qui n'a jamais été considérée comme faisant partie de l'âge d'or, est une autre exception.) Mais en y réfléchissant, on se rend compte qu'il est très rare de voir un groupe de femmes discutant de leurs vies dans une scène. De nos jours, les enjeux sont tellement élevés à la télé, presque personne ne parle de sa vie! (les docteurs de Grey's Anatomy le font parfois, mais ils sont inévitablement interrompus par une urgence chirurgicale).

Big Little Lies avait quelque chose de différent à offrir, comme la scène finale de la mini-série le montrait de façon presque humoristique. Bien que la trame nous conduisant vers la la petite sauterie sur la plage n'était pas une utopie féministe –étant parsemée d'attaques verbales, de compétitivité et de jalousie, il est possible pour les femmes de se réunir pour essayer d'améliorer leurs conditions. Ou pas, en fait. Je serais aussi contente de regarder des séries sur des femmes qui se réunissent pour essayer d'obtenir quelque chose de pire!

—Kate Aurthur

HBO

Son jeu d'actrices-teurs.

L'une des choses que j'ai préférée dans Big Little Lies, c'était de regarder les personnages écouter quand les autres parlaient. C'est un genre de jeu plutôt ingrat. En général, on a juste droit à un plan très rapide de quelqu'un acquiesçant de la tête.

Dans Big Little Lies, par contre, l'écoute est un aspect tellement important de l'histoire. La façon dont Madeline (Reese Witherspoon) absorbe les explications factuelles de Jane (Shailene Woodley) sur son viol, dont Celeste (Nicole Kidman) perçoit les omissions de Perry (Alexander Skarsgård) quand il raconte les violences qu'il lui a fait subir lors de leur première session de thérapie, la façon aussi dont Jane reçoit l'évaluation positive de Ziggy (Iain Armitage) faite par le psychologue pour enfants, tout cela compte beaucoup. Et dans chacune de ces scènes, Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman et Shailene Woodley atteignent peut-être le sommet de leur carrière d'actrice.

Tout comme à peu près tous les acteurs dans cette série! Adam Scott permet à Ed, le mari de Madeline, d'être blessé, irritable, et assez insipide tout à la fois. Ainsi, on peut comprendre pourquoi elle serait attirée par lui mais sans être exaltée pour autant. Alexander Skarsgård parvient à éviter que Perry ne devienne un méchant sans profondeur, sans jamais se départir de la monstruosité de ses actes. Même Zoë Kravitz a su apporter de la consistance à Bonnie, le personnage le plus éclipsé de la série, surtout quand on pense à son passé bien trop pertinent dans le roman de Liane Moriarty. (Dans le livre, Bonnie a été maltraitée par son père.)

Ce sera amusant, peut-être un peu réducteur, de regarder les Emmys se démener pour déterminer comment nommer toutes les interprétations exceptionnelles de Big Little Lies. Pour la seule catégorie de meilleure actrice dans une mini-série, ça risque d'être la folie. Pour l'instant, cependant, nous pouvons nous contenter de nous délecter d'une série qui a permis à tant d'individus talentueux d'avoir autant de liberté pour insuffler toute cette vie à ces personnages compliqués, captivants et profondément humains.

—Adam B. Vary

HBO

Sa représentation de la menace sourde mais omniprésente des hommes.

Si Big Little Lies vous hante, ce n'est pas juste parce qu'elle démarre après la mort d'un personnage. Cette sensation grandissante est palpable, et elle est due, du moins en partie, au rôle des hommes dans cette série sur les femmes.

Bien que la misogynie ne soit pas le thème explicite de Big Little Lies, la menace que représentent les hommes pour les femmes est présente dans tout le récit, culminant dans chaque scène entre Celeste et Perry. Mais elle est aussi présente lorsque les yeux d'Ed s'attardent sur Abigail (Kathryn Newton), sa belle-fille adolescente, un acte jamais discuté, et quand il regarde Bonnie faire du sport, puis remarque qu'il «adore la sueur sur les femmes». Elle est présente dans la façon dont le mari de Renata (Laura Dern), Gordon (Jeffrey Nordling), menace Jane, et dans la sensation menaçante lorsque Joseph (Santiago Cabrera), l'ex amant de Madeline, lui crie dessus, s'approchant d'elle en colère quand ils sont seuls. Elle est aussi présente quand Madeline est seule dans sa voiture et s'effondre en larmes en apprenant que Jane a été violée. Elle est même présente avec les enfants: la façon dont Amabella (Ivy George), la fille de Renata et Gordon, rentre à la maison avec des traces de morsure, mais a trop peur de dire qui lui fait du mal à ses parents.

Big Little Lies montre ce que tant de femmes apprennent avec l'expérience. Ce n'est pas un problème qui puisse vraiment être réglé en sept épisodes d'une heure d'une série HBO, mais l'épisode final de Big Little Lies recentre l'un de ses grands thèmes de façon réellement émouvante: tout au long de l'épisode, on peut voir les décisions à la fois subtiles et vitales que les femmes peuvent prendre pour les autres quand elles sentent que quelque chose ne tourne pas rond. On le voit dans la façon dont Madeline s'implique pour défendre Jane quand Gordon la menace et dans le langage corporel entre Renata et Celeste lorsque cette dernière fuit Perry et que Renata est témoin de la scène. On le voit dans la façon dont Bonnie suit Celeste des yeux quand elle sent que Perry est une menace.

Et, bien sûr, toute cette tension se manifeste littéralement quand Perry attaque sa femme et que toutes les femmes la défendent. Car, bien que la série comporte des moments amusants avec ses mamans aisées, elle prend vie à travers le langage commun qui s'apprend en résistant aux menaces constantes des hommes. Quand on pensera à Big Little Lies d'ici quelques années, on verra toutes ces femmes réunies sur la plage, en tout cas, c'est comme ça que je m'en souviendrai.

—Alanna Bennett

HBO

Sa psy.

Mes parents, à présent retraités, ont passé une bonne partie de leur vie adulte à travailler en tant que professionnels de santé en psychiatrie (ma mère était assistante sociale en clinique et mon père psychiatre). Certains de leurs patients connaissaient des difficultés semblables à celles auxquelles fait face Celeste dans Big Little Lies. Mais jusqu'à Chat échaudé... l'épisode dans lequel le médecin de Celeste, le Dr Reisman (Robin Weigert), guide prudemment sa patiente pour qu'elle puisse faire face à la réalité des violences qu'elle a subies de la part de son mari Perry. Je n'avais jamais vu aucune série ni aucun film qui montre avec autant de délicatesse ce que vivaient mes parents chaque jour au travail.

Bien trop souvent, on se sert des personnels soignants comme prétexte pour entrer en conflit, en les faisant briser des frontières éthiques sans le moindre remords ou avoir des attitudes déraisonnables qui vont à l'encontre des intérêts de leurs patients. Je comprends —cette façon de les dépeindre est propice aux effets dramatiques. Mais comme toutes les autres facettes de Big Little Lies, lors des sessions de Celeste avec le Dr Reisman, cette série a plutôt choisi de rechercher l'aspect dramatique de notre existence, tout simplement. Encore plus que dans l'ancienne série de HBO In Treatment, diffusée dans les années 2000, cette série met le doigt sur la précision doublée de l'empathie avec lesquelles les psys aident leurs patients peu à peu, parfois laborieusement, à se dégager des traumatismes épineux qui pèsent sur leur vie. Je n'ai jamais rien vu de tel, et après cette scène de l'épisode, j'étais tellement submergée par l'émotion que j'ai dû mettre la série sur pause le temps de me remettre.

—ABV

HBO

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2's cute Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel).

Marvel/Disney

At various points during Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) wields a gun the size of a tree trunk, Yondu (Michael Rooker) slaughters dozens upon dozens with his whistle-controlled arrow, and high priestess Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki) presides over a legion of pilots controlling droids like the manager of a deadly arcade. But no weapon can compete with the small, shining eyes of Baby Groot, a creation whose immaculately crafted adorableness could level cities and sink small-to-medium continents.

Holy fuck, is Baby Groot cute.

He’s somewhere between a kitten, a toddler, and a collectible figurine that’s been brought to life. His minuscule smiles are irresistible, but his miniature scowls are just as winning. The fact that Baby Groot is a transparently ruthless merchandising opportunity in no way diminishes his “awww”-inducing capabilities, resent them as you eventually might — he even pukes delightfully. With exacting awareness and only a slight edge of shame, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 deploys its newfound mascot whenever the movie, a much shaggier and less honed creation than the first, needs a boost.

Gamora (Zoe Saldana) + gun.

Marvel/Disney

It’s Baby Groot who opens the film, dancing to ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky” under the opening credits while the rest of the Guardians battle a squid monster in the background, pausing occasionally to make sure their tiny charge isn’t eating something he shouldn’t. Having heroically sacrificed himself to protect his friends in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, the reborn trisyllabic tree creature (voiced by Vin Diesel) has been transformed from the group’s muscle to the shared child they take turns parenting. He’s not just around because of his highly designed lovableness — he’s a symbol of the message Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 sells hard but doesn’t entirely seem to be buying itself: that its collection of oddballs share a deeper connection than friends, that they’re family.

It may seem strange to note that James Gunn's sequel is as reminiscent of the latest installment of the Fast & Furious franchise as it is the first Guardians of the Galaxy, which is still the best thing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And not just in their shared bold assertions about familial strength. The Guardians are, like the Fasties, a ragtag group of former criminals who’ve found themselves semi-accidentally on the side of saving the day.

They, too, enjoy the company of Diesel, they travel through space (where Fast & Furious is clearly headed, don’t @ me), and they enlist their most enjoyable former foes as allies. They’ve also acquired a kid, and unlike the letdown that was The Fate of the Furious, they didn’t have to fridge a female character in order to add him to their mix, just revamp an existing (vegetal) one.

Drax (Dave Bautista) + squid monster.

Marvel/Disney

Unlike the recent vehicular extravaganza, however, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 carves out a lot of downtime between set pieces. The Guardians movies have an effervescent sense of freedom and a personal stamp like none of the other MCU installments to date — they’re distinctive and largely self-contained, unfolding far away from the crisscrossing dramas of the series’ other characters. But Gunn’s decision to further break from expectation and have Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 be as much an intergalactic hangout dramedy as a rollicking space adventure, while surprising, doesn’t end up doing justice to the characters.

The film instead plays like a grand version of the sort of sitcom episode in which it looks like someone might leave the show, and then of course they do not. Testing the strength of the Guardians’ connections would come across as more meaningful if it felt like they’d actually spent enough time together to cement them.

What triggers this trauma is an encounter from Peter Quill’s (Chris Pratt) past. The mysterious long-lost father Quill’s been wondering about turns up and reveals himself to be the godlike Ego (a forever-welcome Kurt Russell). Ego, who claims to have been searching for his son for years, is a sentient planet who sprouted a human-shaped tendril to explore the galaxy and ultimately romance Quill’s mother in 1980 Missouri.

Nebula (Karen Gillan), Gamora, Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), Groot, Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), and Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

Marvel/Disney

They cross paths when the Guardians are fleeing a job gone wrong, and before you know it, Ego’s teaching Quill about his heritage and helping him exorcise his abandonment hang-ups with a game of power-enabled catch. Peter’s home! Or not — but Ego is never a convincing threat to Quill’s recently assembled family of choice.

That Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 attempts to tell a funny, heartfelt story about identity, loneliness, and belonging by way of a planet that has a face on it is ambitious. And it’s not because of Ego’s weirdness that it doesn’t work — it’s because of the overwhelming way the film goes back to the well for its various character arcs, as well as the music choices it leans so heavily on.

The first Guardians of the Galaxy was an ensemble movie, a getting-the-team-together story, but at its core was Quill running away from his mother’s death as a boy. He kept running until he was light-years away, disappearing impossibly into a space opera that could have been lifted from the ’80s pop culture he adores. It was self-referential escapism that blended its central character’s realistic childhood trauma with the goofy galactic dirtbag fantasies he managed to manifest in miraculous ways.

Kurt Russell as Ego.

Marvel/Disney

It was a sci-fi story orbited by rings of earthly detritus, most significantly the mixtape filled with ’60s and ’70s tunes that form the soundtrack, but Quill had no interest in going back. Why would he, when his existence as a pirate-turned-superhero had turned out so cool?

In flipping from that deftly handled maternal grieving to a dose of daddy issues, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 goes from being a story about emotional avoidance to one that hinges on a character who just feels emotionally stuck. Pratt’s reliably charismatic, but he’s coasting on his appeal in this installment, plodding through beats that you can see coming from the stratosphere. Gamora, too, feels like she’s in stasis, in both her not-quite-romance with Quill and her combative relationship with her sister Nebula (Karen Gillan).

The lab-engineered raccoon, Rocket (Bradley Cooper), acts even pricklier than usual in a backhanded request for reassurance. But the brawny literalist Drax (Dave Bautista) gets a better showcase, positioned as an observer of the other characters, offering filterless and often inadvertently insulting thoughts to whoever he’s with, and playing especially well off Ego’s naive servant Mantis (Pom Klementieff).

They’re all convincingly wounded and unfulfilled alone, the Guardians. What they’re not is conclusively better together, at least until Yondu arrives to give the film the jolt of momentum and genuine feeling it had been missing. Rooker’s bright blue, extremely dangerous, disgraced Ravager is an unexpected figure of emotional significance.

Yondu (Michael Rooker) and Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper).

Marvel/Disney

With his air of weathered cynicism, he helps Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 finally locate the sweet spot between outrageous and sincere it’s spent the previous hour-plus searching for. Yondu’s not nearly as nuclear-level cute as Baby Groot — he’s not cute at all, he kills so many people, and also has a worrying habit of (maybe) joking about eating children. Which makes his place as the gradual MVP all the more telling. His presence kicks the idling movie into gear, and into a final third act for which all of the previous meandering can be forgiven — and the talk of family finally accrues the weight the film has been trying to put on it.

Julian Assange in Risk.

Praxis Films

There’s a scene early in Risk, documentarian Laura Poitras’s new film about Julian Assange, in which the WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief is given a lecture about the language he uses to talk about women. One of his colleagues urges him to sound less hostile when making any public statements about the allegations of rape and molestation made against him by two Swedish women. He's told he needs to acknowledge that claims of sexual assault should be heard and taken seriously while stating that in his particular case, he is innocent.

Assange insists he understands. And then he goes on to speak “privately” about how the whole thing is a “mad feminist conspiracy,” a “thoroughly tawdry radical feminist political positioning thing.” “She started a lesbian nightclub in Gothenburg,” he says of one of his accusers, as if that were somehow proof of her untrustworthiness. The trouble, he goes on, is that there are two accusers running a “tag team” against him, which makes them harder to discredit. If there were one, he says, she could simply be characterized as “a bad woman.”

It’s not just Assange’s misogyny that makes these moments such a shiv to the gut — it’s the deliberation there, the flatly expressed understanding of utilizing how easily narratives are manipulated against women who make charges of rape, their sexual histories and habits leveraged against them. It’s such an ugly moment from the embattled activist that you wonder why he allowed it to be captured on camera, something Poitras herself muses in the film’s voiceover, in which she reads from her production diary. “Sometimes I can’t believe what he lets me film,” she says. “It’s a mystery to me why he trusts me, as I don’t think he likes me.”

Praxis Films

Poitras, in turn, spends Risk considering and then reconsidering whether she likes or trusts Assange. She clearly respects what WikiLeaks has stood for; the film, which is in theaters now and will air on Showtime this summer, is not one to look to for an in-depth debate on the ethics of publishing classified media, even with the added complexities of last year's hacked email leaks and whether that data came from a Russian state source (something Assange has denied). Poitras started shooting Risk back in 2010, the year of Cablegate and the Collateral Murder video, of Assange’s heyday of digital-activist rock-stardom. When the film premiered at Cannes in 2016, it reportedly played as more directly on the side of its subject — Variety’s Peter Debruge questioned whether it was “a work of journalism or a glorified fan film.” But then she continued working on the movie, recutting it as late as April to reflect the events of the US presidential election, her ambivalence about her subject, and their deteriorating relationship.

The reworked result is not a fan film at all — it's sour-stomached with conflict, an engrossing document of both Assange’s public arc and Poitras’s personal one, as she wrestles with her feelings about his work versus who he is as a person — as she puts it, his “contradictions.” It’s hardly a unique dilemma. Women have had to reckon with admired men who mistreat women since the dawn of time. But Poitras’s struggle to emphasize the right of WikiLeaks to exist and publish while depicting Assange’s astronomical self-regard is a particularly wrenching one. After all, Poitras herself is a significant figure in the fight for transparency and accountability in the era of mass surveillance and the war on terror.

It was Poitras who was kept on a watch list for six years without explanation, detained and interrogated whenever she crossed the US border, after making her Oscar-nominated 2006 Iraq War film My Country, My Country. It was Poitras who flew to Hong Kong with journalist Glenn Greenwald to meet with Edward Snowden after having been contacted by the NSA leaker anonymously online. The remarkable result, the nonfiction film as dystopian thriller Citizenfour, went on to win the Oscar in 2015. (In Snowden, the much staider Oliver Stone-directed biopic that followed, Poitras would be played by Melissa Leo.) It was Poitras who achieved what fellow filmmaker Alex Gibney could not with his 2013 We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, in getting allowed access to Assange and the actual operations of WikiLeaks’ staffers and allies.

Praxis Films

Consequently, Poitras was able to capture some key moments in Assange’s storied last seven years, with a noticeable gap in the middle. We glimpse Assange in a country house in Norfolk in 2011, coolly telling a US official that it is their problem, not WikiLeaks’, that the password for one of the organization’s “insurance” files has been exposed, and that the 251,287 classified diplomatic cables within are about to hit the internet. And we actually see his escape to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he sought asylum and where he’s now been holed up for almost five years in order to avoid extradition to Sweden, something he believes would be followed by extradition to and prosecution in the US. A disguise is involved, as is a motorcycle, Assange zipping away like something out of the Bourne Identity after his appeal is dismissed in the UK courts.

There’s a lot of high-stakes drama — and yet at other times, Risk recalls not the spy genre so much as it does “American Bitch,” the biting two-hander episode of the last season of Girls in which Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath meets with Chuck Palmer (Matthew Rhys), a famous novelist she idolized who’s been accused of preying on college-aged women for sex while on book tour, and who wants a chance to defend himself. “Ego, yes. But also brave. He's managing his image, but also being vulnerable,” Poitras observes in voiceover, aware that she and Assange are engaged in a duel over depiction not dissimilar to the one Hannah gets locked into with Chuck, one in which strategic shows of soft underbelly get offered up in exchange for sympathy.

One of the more telling Assange moments involves, of all people, Lady Gaga, who arrives at the embassy for a visit and to interview the man, declaring his embassy living space like “college” and asks him questions about his favorite food and if he ever feels “like just fucking crying.” It’s a funny sequence, but it’s also telling, the way that Assange rejects Gaga’s attempts at humanizing him — calculatedly taking the opposite tactic of his approach with Poitras, playing another sort of game. “What does it matter how I feel?” he asks the pop star, and it comes across not so much as out of a desire to minimize himself, but to treat global problems as his own, as if he were not also a man with a body and an ego, emotions, and appetites.

Throughout Risk, Assange comes across as dedicated in his commitment to cause, but he also shows a disturbing ability to treat what he believes is best for the world and what’s best for himself as interchangeable. While he describes both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as bad directions for the US to take, he groups Clinton’s opposition to WikiLeaks with his characterization of her as a warmonger before noting that there’s interesting stuff to be dug up on her, unlike the lesser-known element that is Trump. He half-jestingly mentions his “god complex” and holds forth about the importance of acting globally when asked if what he’s up to isn’t also about personal power. There’s even a wince-worthy line in which he jokes about how he should arrange to have a “sex scandal every six months,” since that’s what really put him on the map. In the film's most striking visual, Poitras catches Assange exiting a courtroom in an overhead shot in which, swarmed by cameras, he resembles a movie star.

Praxis Films

It’s claims of sexual mistreatment that seem to have been part of the reason for the shift in Poitras’s film over the past year — not those attached to Assange, but to Jacob Appelbaum, another prominent cyberactivist, representative of WikiLeaks, and the former public face of the Tor Project. Appelbaum's work is periodically showcased throughout Risk. He valiantly holds Egyptian telecom representatives to account about their acts of censorship during the past regime on a panel on Cairo and travels to Tunisia to provide encryption training. And in June 2016, Appelbaum was accused of sexual and emotional abuse by a collection of people, some who shared their stories anonymously and others who did so under their actual names. They were soon joined by others.

The charges, which Appelbaum has denied, sent shock waves through the community, and while he described them as a “calculated and targeted attack,” he also stepped down from Tor. It’s in detailing the allegations that Poitras discloses that Appelbaum is someone she was briefly romantically involved with, and that he acted abusively toward someone she knew after they separated — a quiet, upsetting revelation. The echoes of Assange and the pattern suggested cannot be ignored, a reminder that no social movement is immune to this kind of toxicity, that power cloaked in idealism can still be misused, and that this dynamic is further enabled by organizational tendencies to downplay anything perceived as potentially harming a cause.

As Risk hurries toward its revamped ending, it solidified into a film not just about Assange’s contradictions, but the contradictions inherent in these prominent men who devote their lives to making the world better while apparently not feeling the same obligations toward individuals around them. Risk's strongest point is in its insistence that portraying one need not come at the expense of the other, that misogyny and acts of alleged abuse are in no way negated by some grander-scaled pursuit of justice. Otherwise all that focus on the big picture starts to seem like a convenient way to minimize things like assault charges, things that aren't getting in the way of work that needs to be done, but are an example of just how much more we need to do.

Casting JonBenet

Michael Latham / Netflix

The opening shot of Casting JonBenet offers up a surreal, unsettling visual. The camera rests on a row of carefully arranged empty chairs, holding still for a few long, quiet seconds. Then, in a flurry of puffed sleeves and ballet slippers, a group of blonde girls rush in from outside the frame to take those seats. Each one is dressed in a replica of the red, white, and blue costume JonBenét Ramsey wore in one of the pageant photos that was widely circulated after her unsolved murder, at age 6, in 1996.

Eight child actors hoping to play the dead girl giggle and chatter excitedly onscreen before the scene cuts abruptly to one of them approaching the camera for an interview. “My name is Hannah, and I'm auditioning for the role of JonBenét Ramsey,” she announces, then asks, guilelessly, “Do you know who killed JonBenét Ramsey?”

Director Kitty Green does not know. Her intent is not to unveil new information about what happened that Christmas in 1996 in the Ramseys’ Boulder home. Nor is she interested in doing a traditional investigation and rehashing of the 21-year-old cold case in her documentary, which premiered on Netflix on April 28.

Casting JonBenet

Netflix

Casting JonBenet isn’t just a part of the current wave of true crime fare unfolding in movies and on TV — it’d be more accurate to say that the film is also about the genre of true crime itself, about the kind of transgressions that capture the national imagination and lead everyone following along at home to develop strong opinions and theories as to who did it, and why. It's about our obsession with certain unsolved mysteries that are writ large by the media — though “our” implies an inclusivity that the film doesn’t share, with its tendency to throw its interviewees under the bus in order to underscore its points.

To make Casting JonBenet, Green put a call out for Colorado-based actors to play the major figures in the case. In addition to the murdered JonBenét, there are her parents, John and Patsy; her brother, Burke, who was 9 at the time of her death; suspects John Mark Karr (who falsely confessed to the murder) and a neighborhood seasonal Santa Claus; and the local police chief. But the re-enactments these actors are trying out for, which primarily unfold on a soundstage version of the Ramseys’ house, are a means rather than end. It's their audition tapes that form the main part of the film.

In their tryouts, these dozens of would-be Patsys, Johns, and others become stand-ins for the public’s memory and perception of the case, which offered a perfect storm of awfulness, wealth, whiteness, child beauty pageant strangeness, and uncertainty to command outsized and lasting attention.

Casting JonBenet

Michael Latham/Netflix

The would-be actors are prompted to share their theories, their knowledge, and their feelings of connection to the case, volunteering judgments on the character, the guilt or the innocence of various members of the Ramsey family, imagining sometimes lurid scenarios of what went down. One interviewee believes Patsy didn’t look convincingly grief-stricken to be without blame, while another, who experienced the murder of a loved one as a child, defends Patsy by saying there’s no predictable way to react to such a loss.

There are a few who think John did it, and more who target Patsy, while others suspect the couple were covering up for an accident involving Burke. Some blame the errant Santa, though the Santas, in turn, insist that’s preposterous because they’re too carefully screened.

The kaleidoscope of testimonials emphasizes the degree to which all of the interviewees, and the public at large they're supposed to be representing, project onto these incidents based on their own experiences and backgrounds. It underscores how presumptuous it is to believe that these real people and their real tragedy are at all knowable from afar.

Speaking to Vox about her film, Green noted the challenge of explaining her project to its participants, many of them non-pros who describe their day jobs or pull up their other performing experience. “Before we dressed them all up,” she said, “I'd give them a 15-minute spiel about how I envisioned the film coming together. Which is difficult, because it's not like any other film, so it's not really easy to describe!” But while Green’s tail-swallowing deconstructive set-up is definitely unlike the average documentary in terms of form, it’s not unique either. Casting JonBenet is one of few recent, boundary-pushing docs that have put the run-up to re-enactments front and center, using the acting process as a vehicle for investigation, introspection, or to prod at the audience.

Kate Plays Christine

Grasshopper Film

Its closest sibling in are-you-not-entertained provocation is Robert Greene’s sharper Kate Plays Christine from last year, which centers on actor Kate Lyn Sheil’s preparations to play Christine Chubbuck, a Florida news reporter who killed herself on air in 1974. But there’s also My Scientology Movie, which opened in theaters in March, with TV host Louis Theroux auditioning actors as part of his look at the notoriously litigious church, selecting from them stand-ins for two people he knows he'll never get access to — Scientology leader David Miscavige and famous member Tom Cruise. And Alex Sichel’s 2015 A Woman Like Me incorporates self-aware re-enactments in still another way. Sichel, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, hires Lili Taylor to play Sichel’s fictionalized self in scenes that are brighter and more theatrical — approaching death in a way she was able to control and script, unlike in real life.

Re-enactments have been a part of documentary since the early days, when Robert J. Flaherty had his Inuit subjects use spears to hunt a walrus instead of the guns they normally would in his 1922 Nanook of the North. Over the years, as the form has changed and grown, they've shifted from being treated as potentially deceptive to being a tool to get at a larger truth. Errol Morris, whose landmark 1988 The Thin Blue Line features the most famous use of re-enactments in the medium, wrote in 2008 about how objections to re-enactments imply that on-the-ground footage is innately factual, when it too is subjective. “There is no mode of expression, no technique of production that will instantly produce truth or falsehood. There is no veritas lens — no lens that provides a ‘truthful’ picture of events,” he insisted. “The engine of uncovering truth is not some special lens or even the unadorned human eye; it is unadorned human reason.”

Stories We Tell

Roadside Attractions

In the era of fake news and reality shows that are mille-feuilles of real, staged, and staged-but-then-becomes-real, we have an ever more complicated relationship with the idea of “the truth.” It’s only made the documentary form more interesting and daring, embracing animation and artificiality, theater and experimentation.

Films like Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell and Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing challenge, in different ways, the accounts we accept and why. Meta-documentaries like Casting JonBenet go a step further than calling attention to the stretchy subjectivity of memory and perspective. They raise the question of what, exactly, we in the audience hope to get from watching them.

That’s why these films focus on the ramp-up to a re-enactment rather than the re-enactment itself, which is secondary — the process is the point, not the end product. The shaggy My Scientology Movie isn’t the first or the most informative movie about Scientology, and Theroux is aware going in that getting attacked by the organization is likely to be the only form of contact he’ll successfully make with it. And so its use of actors seems mostly to emphasize the impossibility of the project: “We can’t get the real Miscavige, but we can create our own,” Theroux announces.

Chubbuck, the real figure Sheil studies and attempts to embody in Kate Plays Christine, is less known, and so for long stretches Sheil’s research into her life serves an informative purpose for viewers as well as an exploratory one for her. The more she wrestles with the role, trying to get into the headspace of someone who was depressed and lonely, and who remains famous only for how she died, the more the crux of Kate Plays Christine becomes not who Chubbuck was but what is gained from trudging back through her life this way other than grim voyeurism. When Sheil breaks the fourth wall at the end to castigate the audience, it’s a jarringly derailing moment, because that point was so clearly and more deftly made by everything that came before: Why is this something we want to see?

Casting JonBenet

Netflix

And why do we want to see a film about a dead little girl? Casting JonBenet culminates in a sequence of all of its actors on the soundstage together — fighting in the bedroom, crying on the stairs, a dozen possible versions of what happened unfolding in parallel, none of them any more certain than the others. It’s a virtuosic series of images, almost as striking as the one on which the film opens, and yet it suggests collaboration in a way that doesn’t really square with what came in between. In between, these actors — accommodating and eager to please because they’re trying to land roles — spilled details about their own painful personal histories, expounded on sometimes ugly impressions of the Ramseys, and had their side gigs presented as quirky details. Aware of it or not, they became the real subject of the movie.

There’s a resonant point to be made with their interviews, about the queasiness that can lurk there in the gawking at true tragedies, in the tendency to treat them as puzzles to be solved or as fuel for self-righteousness, or to turn them into a dark kind of entertainment. It’s a timely one, too, when the true crime genre is so resurgent and has been given a classy overhaul. But the way the auditions gets diced up into what are often instances of vanity, misogyny, and rubbernecking is inescapably glib — like the film is pointing a finger rather than holding up a mirror to habits the audience should see in ourselves, like it’s scolding rather than revealing.

Casting JonBenet’s inventive structure was crafted to instruct viewers to consider whether there’s something exploitative about our obsession with true crime. But in doing so it creates entire new issues about why we’d want to watch — not just an investigation of a tragedy, but also this self-referential meditation on it. Its participants sit in judgment of the Ramseys, and we in turn are set up to sit in judgment of them, a wheel within a wheel too many.

Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn in Snatched.

Justina Mintz / 20th Century Fox

Emily Middleton, the thirtysomething New Yorker that Amy Schumer plays in Snatched, is a gross miscalculation of a character. But that realization takes a while to settle in. From afar, Emily looks like she might be a variation on the comedic persona Schumer has honed and weaponized in her standup and on her TV series, Inside Amy Schumer. You know the type — the Schumerian hot mess, the one who shuts the bar down, who’s unruffled to find herself waking up next to a stranger, who’s ditzy and lazy, and who parties and selfies as hard as she can to escape her feelings of inadequacy.

When Emily describes her plans for her upcoming Ecuadorian vacation to someone, they consist of how she hopes to transition from poolside cocktails in the day to red wine and then scotch at night. But after she’s divested of her retail job and her musician boyfriend (a welcome cameo from Randall Park) in quick succession, she’s left with no one to take with her on the nonrefundable trip.

No one, that is, except for her divorced, anxiety-ridden mother, Linda (Goldie Hawn, making a questionable choice for her first role in 15 years), a necessity the film treats as deeply embarrassing. And so the two women travel to a resort, and soon find themselves kidnapped and held for ransom, then figure out a way to flee their captors and end up getting lost in the Amazon.

It’s a misadventure in which Hawn acquits herself better as the neurotic straight woman than Schumer does as, basically, an asshole. Snatched, which is directed by 50/50’s Jonathan Levine and written by Katie Dippold (of The Heat, Ghostbusters, and this legendary tweet), is a talent-packed, terrifically unfunny movie that, more than anything else, underscores just how difficult it is to translate Schumer’s sharp-elbowed stylings to the conventions of a movie.

Justina Mintz / 20th Century Fox

This was a challenge for her first big-screen leading role in Trainwreck, too, a better film that reveled in her character’s sloppy, standards-defying splendor only to then “solve” her with monogamy and sobriety. Snatched does much worse by having Emily let it all hang out without a hint of the savage self-awareness or sly feminism with which Schumer, not always perfectly, infused her show. Emily is Schumer’s vapid white girl schtick shorn of any of the underlying commentary, the movie treating her terribleness as endearing, right on through the two people she accidentally murders (lol!).

That Snatched plays those incidents for uncertain laughs is an indication of how unsure it is of who it’s making fun of. It makes a joke about Linda’s xenophobic fears by having her mishear a “welcome” cocktail as being full of “whale cum” and react in horror, but it also affirms them by having her and her daughter abducted by a group of glowering South American stereotypes who prey on female tourists. Their leader, the crime lord Morgado (Óscar Jaenada), lambasts the Americans who come to his country only to stay in the resorts, but Snatched presents itself as one big warning against leaving those luxury confines.

It’s on a day trip in the company of a suave but possibly sinister Brit (Tom Bateman) that the women get grabbed, and in their subsequent escape, they trek miles through the wilderness, get infected with tapeworms, and almost fall off a cliff. Meanwhile, Ike Barinholtz, as Emily’s agoraphobic brother, tries to annoy the State Department into helping out, and Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack get underused as a pair of platonic (they insist) fellow vacationers with a particular set of skills.

More than anything else, Snatched feels like an exhausted dead end for a type of comedy that Schumer and Lena Dunham, in particular, became famous for in the last decade — a comedy that consists of pitilessly self-lacerating white-women-behaving-badly scenarios that leans into its characters’ uglier tendencies while also inquiring into the standards by which those characters get judged.

Justina Mintz / 20th Century Fox

It’s a type of comedy that has had a marvelous capacity to enrage, either because its depictions of obliviousness, immaturity, and narcissism get misread as endorsements, or because its performances of calculated awfulness have a way of triggering misogynistic reactions in people who prefer women onscreen to be likable and free of bodily functions. At its best, their work pushes at chauvinistic expectations of female behavior and appeal while also attempting to acknowledge and mock the privileges their characters do enjoy and never want to think about.

But there’s never any of that cuts-both-ways balance to Snatched. Its setup implicitly excuses both Linda’s soft racism and Emily’s adult toddler routine, running only with the white-women-behaving-badly part of the equation before segueing into an arc of sincere and unearned self-actualization. It melds Ecuador and Colombia into one crime-ridden jungle backdrop against which its main characters can reconnect and air their grievances — because maybe Emily’s problem isn’t that she’s selfish, it’s that she never got enough encouragement from the lonesome mother she contacts only when she needs things.

The film’s nadir involves Linda and Emily stopping by a village where Emily joins in on the day’s work by — and this part isn’t a joke — taking a bucket another one of the locals has walked all the way over to her, then pouring it into a well while being praised by Linda for helping. Upon learning that the women do all the work in the community, Emily raises her eyebrows in a very I could teach these ladies something way.

If it weren’t played totally straight — if Emily didn’t, end up doing nonspecific volunteer work abroad — it would be a fantastic, biting bit. Imagine: His American gal gets carried half dead out of the jungle with killers on her trail, and upon waking, proceeds to self-righteously lecture the indigenous strangers who saved her life about gender. That’s the kind of scathing angle you can almost imagine being an Inside Amy Schumer sketch — the kind that would be ruthless about the character she’s playing in the film.

Katherine Waterston as Daniels in Alien: Covenant

Mark Rogers / Twentieth Century Fox

Katherine Waterston plays a character named Daniels in Alien: Covenant, the second in director Ridley Scott’s series of Alien prequels that began with 2012’s Prometheus. Daniels is a new character with some familiar touches: She’s a crew member on the Covenant, a spaceship containing terraforming equipment and 2,000 colonists suspended in hypersleep, bound for a planet on which the workers and passengers hope to establish a unspoiled home together.

“Like pioneers,” she says, citing her husband's description of the future they've embarked on. The crew consists mainly of couples, on a journey only meant to be one-way — though their shared dream starts going terribly wrong almost immediately.

Nevertheless, Daniels persists, through a briskly brutal personal tragedy and having her opinion overruled by the ship’s freshly minted captain, Oram (Billy Crudup), in what turns out to be a fateful decision to set down early and suss out whether a suspiciously perfect planet that’s much closer than their original destination could be a place for them to settle.

Oram (Billy Crudup)

Twentieth Century Fox

Competent, capable with heavy machinery, crop-haired, and continually overruled by querulous men? Daniels bears all the marks of being Alien: Covenant’s knockoff of Ellen Ripley, the action lead played by Sigourney Weaver in the first four Alien films and a landmark heroine against whom few have measured up.

The less-than-distinctive Daniels doesn’t come close to Ripley’s iconic arc as an inadvertent warrior, in the same way that Noomi Rapace’s Dr. Elizabeth Shaw fell short when she was set up to invite the same comparison in Prometheus.

But the more Alien: Covenant unfurls of its great, grim story, the more these evocations of a stronger, more compelling character start to feel intentional, like it’s a feature and not a bug. Like, maybe Daniels isn’t as compelling as Ripley because she was never meant to be, because she’s not the hero of this story. Maybe it’s not the humans, flailing their way through the discovery that the misty, pristine-looking planet they stumbled upon is actually a very bad place on which to land, to whom Alien: Covenant belongs.

Alien: Covenant — written by John Logan and Dante Harper — is, like all of the Alien films, a survival saga about a tenacious individual dealing with a rapacious life form intent on spreading itself across the universe. But at its center isn’t Daniels but David, the android aesthete introduced in Prometheus and played again in Alien: Covenant by an extraordinary Michael Fassbender.

Twentieth Century Fox

It’s David who dramatically turns up on the new planet, revealing himself to have been stranded for years after he and Shaw made their way there in a borrowed spaceship at the end of Prometheus, camping out in the ruins of an Engineer city. If anybody is an answer to Ripley in these prequels, it’s David. And the invasive species — well, that would be us.

Scott’s 1979 haunted-house-in-space movie Alien and James Cameron’s brawnier 1986 Aliens (and their less reliable follow-ups) are movies about human perseverance in the face of a perfect predator, a nightmare creation capable not just of killing but of implanting itself in someone — of turning a living body into an incubator and a carrier of what’s essentially a weapon. These films were celebrations of the strength of this regular woman and her ability to be not impervious to terror, but able to act in spite of it.

They made you invest in their collection of mostly doomed characters, something Alien: Covenant and, in a less clear way, Prometheus never ask of the audience. Alien: Covenant characters are also mostly doomed, destined to get offed in vividly disgusting ways, but they’re treated, almost impatiently, as fodder.

Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that they’re considered at a curious, cruel remove, like a kid burning ants with a magnifying glass. In Alien: Covenant, all the displays of emotion typically used as a way to bring us closer to the characters onscreen instead play as distancing irritants. The crew members’ insecurities, fears, and love for one another seem to inevitably drive them into unsound decisions, like dragging an infected colleague back to the ship for treatment.

Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland and Michael Fassbender as David

Twentieth Century Fox

The film's main plot begins with a baker’s dozen or so of the crew, with Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Danny McBride, Amy Seimetz, and Jussie Smollett among the actors playing them, and the die-off starts almost immediately, not all of it due to extraterrestrial causes. They’re forever courting oblivion with their bold acts of faith, their insistence on taking care of the hurt instead of leaving them behind, and their poorly timed canoodling. Their messy humanity comes across as so inefficient.

From the point of view of a synthetic — a humanoid robot — like David, it is. And it is, tellingly, David with whom Alien: Covenant begins, in an Earthbound flashback in which Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) awakens his newly created synthetic and tells him about his desire to find meaning behind mankind’s creation. David responds that he doesn’t share these questions, given that his creator is in front of him, and that he isn’t able to share Weyland’s experiences with mortality either.

Karine (Carmen Ejogo) and Faris (Amy Seimetz)

Twentieth Century Fox

“You will die, I will not,” David says, a factual observation, but nothing the god complex–suffering Weyland Corp CEO wants to hear. Displeased, he demands David bring him some tea — a reminder that David was built in some ways to be superior to mankind, but also to serve and not outdo it.

And yet David is still too close to human — “too idiosyncratic,” in the words of Walter, another android played by Fassbender, who takes care of the crew on the Covenant. “You disturbed people,” Walter tells David in one of their scenes together, which are consistently the best in the film.

Walter is a more recent model of synthetic who has intentionally been made more robotic — he grinds his vowels a little, in one of the more convenient ways of telling the two apart. Walter is David, lessened, reined in, neutered in order to be less threatening to the species that created him. David — grandiose and effete and quite possibly a little mad from his experiences of use and isolation — has no such limitations.

Prometheus netted Scott criticism for his shift from a story about monstrous extraterrestrials to one about mythology and the origins of mankind (with the occasional monstrous extraterrestrial); he appeared to be attempting to respond to questions no one seemed to be asking. But the stronger, bleaker Alien: Covenant clarifies Scott’s grander vision for these films, and in particular his themes about the relationship between creators and the created.

Twentieth Century Fox

Prometheus and Alien: Covenant are films about faith, both by way of the religiousness expressed by characters like Shaw and Oram, and via Weyland’s more science-filtered insistence that there must be a purpose to humanity — and a way to extend its existence. Weyland in particular is so presumptuously certain that his makers would welcome and assist him that he doesn’t really hear the point that David makes to him in Alien: Covenant’s opening sequence: that David has already met his maker, and that it wasn’t all that fulfilling.

There are no benevolent gods in Alien: Covenant, and no answers coming — at least not from the Engineers, that enigmatic, highly advanced race shown to have been responsible for humanity’s development in Prometheus. There’s only creation, which is an act of individuality and of ego. Maybe it’s because Alien: Covenant is the work of an older filmmaker revisiting his past, but there’s an embittered, amusing outrageousness to both Alien: Covenant’s terrible beauty and the way Scott flips around his established classic, with its admired heroine, surrounding it in a context of epic human effrontery.

It’s an Alien movie for our times, one in which mankind isn’t just under the thumb of an oppressive corporation but sowing the seeds of its own destruction on a more sweeping scale. When a xenomorph, in its classic form, finally does make an appearance in Alien: Covenant, we see it not from a horrified human perspective but from the clinical point of view of a synthetic. It’s a forebear of doom, but it also feels like a dark moment of triumph.

Team Roseanne at the ABC upfront presentation.

ABC/ Paula Lobo

In late-night, being politically engaged and enraged has allowed the once faltering Stephen Colbert to challenge Jimmy Fallon in ratings, and on streaming, series like The Handmaid’s Tale and Dear White People have garnered significant attention for tackling issues of gender and race.

But, at least for this forthcoming season — the first since President Trump was voted into office — network TV appears to be heading in the other direction, toward the safety of the already known or the feels-like-you-already-know-it.

At least that’s what was suggested by the first round of new shows announced in the past week. The big networks — ABC, CBS, The CW, Fox, and NBC — all held their upfront presentations in New York City this past week, glitzy annual events where new series and fall schedules are presented to advertisers, who are treated to footage and appearances from talent.

What was unveiled were programming choices that seemed designed to evoke the familiar — sometimes literally. One of the biggest surprises the week had to offer was that the previously announced Roseanne return would go to ABC for an eight-episode season to air in 2018. “There’s really no one better to comment on our modern America than Roseanne,” ABC president Channing Dungey said in a statement about the show, expressing the kind of “now more than ever” sentiment with which all kinds of content has been anointed ever since Trump’s win.

The Will & Grace gang gets back together.

NBC

In this case, though, it's not clear exactly what Dungey meant by that. No one better because the original Roseanne, which ran from 1988 to 1997, was progressive in its tackling of issues like LGBT representation and abortion? Because it’s a portrayal of the white working class that became so central to the election? Because of Barr’s present-day stance as someone who made a Green Party presidential candidate bid and who told the Hollywood Reporter that "we would be so lucky if Trump won. Because then it wouldn't be Hillary”? Or is it just because we’ve heard from Barr before? As with all network presidents, Dungey is unlikely to give a clear answer (particularly in the wake of all the flak ABC got for canceling the conservative-leaning Last Man Standing).

But she did did share, in a conference call with press, that what “the mood of the country has told us is that television is a little bit of an escape,” which speaks to the nostalgic tendencies seen all around. Roseanne isn’t the only show arising from the grave — Will & Grace is also back this fall with its original cast, a fact heralded with a video that confusingly suggested that Eric McCormack’s Will and Debra Messing’s Grace existed in the real world, while Karen (Megan Mullally) and Jack (Sean Hayes) somehow did not. Then there are the reboots and remakes, like The CW’s Dynasty, a new take on the ’80s Aaron Spelling primetime soap, and CBS’s S.W.A.T., based on another Spelling show, as well as the 2003 movie of the same name it inspired.

There are prequels like Star Trek: Discovery, which will stream on CBS’s digital subscription VOD service CBS All Access, and Young Sheldon, which will follow the long-running Big Bang Theory it plays off of, exploring the childhood of Jim Parsons’ persnickety genius Sheldon Cooper.

Freddie Highmore in The Good Doctor and Matt Czuchry in The Resident.

ABC / Fox

And then there are the shows that merely feel like something we’ve seen before. Seth MacFarlane’s Fox sci-fi satire The Orville is reminiscent of Galaxy Quest, while NBC’s Rise, with Josh Radnor and Moana's Auli’i Cravalho, looks like a more serious Glee. The Fox airline comedy LA to Vegas has Dylan McDermott doing what appears to be a Will Ferrell impression, while ABC’s The Gospel of Kevin comes across as a sibling to Joan of Arcadia, Eli Stone, and My Name Is Earl in its regular-joe-gets-a-divine-mission setup. There are two medical series about brilliant doctors who have a harder time socially: One, ABC’s drama The Good Doctor, which stars Freddie Highmore as surgeon with Asperger’s, is actually from the creator of House; the other, Fox’s The Resident, is just House-like, with Matt Czuchry as a tough truth-teller mentoring an idealistic newcomer (Manish Dayal).

Mark Feuerstein’s autobiographical CBS sitcom 9JKL resembles Everybody Loves Raymond. ABC’s Deception (magician) and CBS’s Instinct (writer/professor) fall into the well-established formula of unlikely consultants helping to catch criminals — see The Mentalist, Castle, Lucifer, and on and on. And in the most centrally backwards-looking (but intriguing) concept of them all, Justin Theroux and Jimmy Kimmel will have a live ABC special in which stars read classic TV scripts from the likes of Norman Lear and James L. Brooks.

This is not to say these shows, considered on the very early basis of their network-provided cutdowns and loglines, look bad. In fact, the most-watched trailer from the bunch, for Fox’s X-Men drama The Gifted, manages to give off a serious whiff of Heroes while also looking like a promising small-screen superhero saga. But there’s a general conservatism in the announced aims of so many of these new series — not politically so much as in terms of ambition.

Shemar Moore in S.W.A.T.

CBS

While hardly daring, steering into strengths may be the smartest move for networks that haven’t been able to compete with the freedoms of cable and streaming. Especially at a time in which ratings are lower than ever, the TV equivalent of comfort food has a powerful pull.

Of course, there are still the odd blips in the lineup of shows with potential to do more than offer entertainment and escape — like ABC’s The Mayor (Brandon Micheal Hall), which flips the script on the idea of a Trump-style outsider winning a campaign by having a struggling rapper find himself in office after a publicity stunt goes a little too well. Or The CW’s Black Lightning, with its superhero turned principal turned superhero battling gang violence. And then there’s that S.W.A.T. reboot, which in its surprising trailer acknowledges that the whole cops-kicking-ass premise of the original hasn’t aged so well, and gives glimpses of a police shooting of an unarmed black teenager and a protagonist (Shemar Moore) focused on rebuilding trust with the community.

Of course, it also involves running around with massive guns and shooting what looks like a rocket launcher. You can’t go too far off book, after all — you’ve still got to give the people what they want.

Kathryn Hahn in I Love Dick.

Amazon Prime Video

Jill Soloway’s I Love Dick feels like something beamed in from an alternate reality in which Hillary Clinton is president.

Which is probably a reflection of when it was made — the rollout of the series straddled the 2016 presidential election like a pair of proudly unshaven legs. The pilot premiered on Amazon, already home to Soloway’s acclaimed Transparent, in August of last year, and it was ordered to series in September, when the potential for the country to be getting its first female president seemed very real. But by the time the first season was unleashed online earlier this May, Donald Trump had been in the White House for months, and the mood has become very different.

I Love Dick, which creators Soloway and Sarah Gubbins adapted from Chris Kraus’s experimental novel of the same name, is a series out of time — a heady, horny comedy about gender and authorship arriving at a time in which people seem more inclined to relate to the dystopian oppressions of The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s a celebration of “weird girls,” to borrow the phrase from an episode title, who’ve grown into unquestionably ascendant adults.

Sylvere (Griffin Dunne) and Toby (India Menuez).

Amazon Prime Video

“We are not far from your doorstep,” the ambitious Toby (India Menuez) — who received a Guggenheim for her work “look[ing] at hardcore porn without judgment, so I reduce it to its shapes” — cautions the title character (Kevin Bacon). Dick is a rugged area art star, a renowned sculptor of minimalist works that Toby sums up as “everything anyone has ever wanted from a late-20th-century alpha-male artist and scholar.” She doesn't need to point out how many years removed we now are from the 20th century.

The whole series, which is fueled by the all-consuming crush that married filmmaker-in-crisis Chris (Kathryn Hahn) develops on Dick and starts chronicling in a series of letters, is built on the certainty of the gradual toppling of patriarchy. That’s something that not only comes across as unhappily premature in the shadow of Trump and Mike Pence, it also plays as downright wistful. Which is why, maybe, I Love Dick ends up being comforting even though it aims to be challenging.

The episodes, almost all of them directed by women (among them Andrea Arnold and Soloway herself), spike clips of video art into scenes and splash intertitles from Chris’s letters on screen. The best installment is a nonlinear one in which four of the female characters take the viewer on a tour of their formative experiences with desire while staring down the camera. But all of that formal and thematic boundary-busting takes place under the unspoken assumption that a degree of space and safety have been secured for its characters to hash out the intricacies of their feelings about being the subject of art versus being its creator, about what constitutes good and important art, and about who gets to play gatekeeper in that.

Devon (Roberta Colindrez) leads a rehearsal.

Amazon Prime Video

At a moment when subjects like masculinity, femininity, and authority all but demand a hard edge and shriek of urgency, I Love Dick is forthright but ultimately gentle in the way it takes them on — like it can afford to be, like a major milestone has been passed, like forward progress, however slow and imperfect, is an inevitability. It is the strangest sort of escapist television.

That’s true of the way it treats the art world it inhabits, too, one that’s allowed to be silly but that is taken very seriously. Its artists can be pretentious, self-important, flaky, and awful, but there’s never any question of whether art itself has value and relevance. Art can change the world in I Love Dick, even if that world is restricted to the bubble of Marfa, Texas, a bohemian oasis with complicated class dynamics. Or, in the words of Sylvere (Griffin Dunne), Chris's writer husband whose research fellowship at the local art center is the reason they're in town, a place “both dumpy and hip.”

It’s a place that, at the series’ start, is in the thrall of Dick, the professor-prince who quickly becomes the focus of Chris’s all-consuming obsession. But it doesn’t stay that way, thanks in part to how Chris, who's “straddling 40ish” and questioning her career and romantic choices, ends up unleashing her debilitating-crush-as-midlife-crisis on the community and unsettling its power structures.

Hahn as Chris.

Jessica Brooks/Amazon Prime Video

By the season’s end, men are joyfully submitting themselves to being the stuff of genderqueer artist’s Devon (Roberta Colindrez) work, in front of a cheering, hooting female crowd, while gallery curator Paula (Lily Mojekwu), finally free to choose the art she wants, ecstatically takes down paintings and slaps aspirational Post-its in their place that read “Kara Walker” and “Laura Aguilar.” I Love Dick is generous with its male characters in the way that feels directly related to its conviction that the supremacy they have — apologetically, obliviously, or gladly — enjoyed is slipping from their hands. It takes place in the twilight of machismo.

Or maybe it’s better put as the liberation of machismo, since we see it wielded just as comfortably by Devon, who admired Dick’s cowboy swagger, then borrowed and adapted and embraced it. Chris appropriates and lays claim to something traditionally male, too: the idea of a muse. “There are 500 times as many female nudes in art history textbooks as there are female artists,” Toby observes at one point. Chris seems intent on making up ground and turning that ratio around. She utilizes Dick — that Marlboro Man of MFAs, with a penis for a name, with his sculpture that’s a literal brick (“I love a straight line,” he says, “a straight line is perfection”) — as not only an object of desire but also a source of inspiration. He fuels the outpouring of love letters, profane and profound in their rawness, that she ends up posting around town.

I Love Dick

Amazon Prime Video

Chris’s lust is not just symbolic — it's very genuine, and I Love Dick has gotten attention for the way it translates that giddy lechery in its gaze, the ways its lens glides along the planes of Bacon’s face and body like it has nerves and they’re all lit up, for its incredible fantasy of Bacon sensually shearing a lamb. But Chris's lust can’t be separated out from the feverish creative spell with which she’s gripped — the writing she’s doing is both addressed to Dick (“Dear Dick: Game on”) and not about him at all. Her desire and how it makes her feel is an end unto itself — “I don't care how you see me. I don't care if you want me. It's better that you don't. It's enough that I want you,” she writes.

He’s distressed and undone to find himself placed so unwittingly in her spotlight. “She has violated my privacy!” he yelps at one point, a strange sort of protest, since Chris knows nothing at all about him, and since her work is all about how she feels and what she knows she’s projecting on him. Though Dick, grudging, agrees the writing’s good, he adds, “So what? It's still fucked up.”

Maybe it is, and maybe what’s most disturbing to Dick is how little agency in or ownership he has over this art that invokes him while belonging to someone else — the muse’s lament. But Chris writes because she’s driven to create, not because she wanted to humiliate him, despite their first encounters. It’s the moment Dick first looked at her, rather than the other way around, in which her life went off the rails, when everything temporarily went quiet in the embrace of his ever-so-valued attention.

Then at dinner, later, Dick dismissed Chris's work without ever having seen it. Not just her work, but that of her entire gender. “I think it's really pretty rare for a woman to make a good film because they have to work from behind their oppression, which makes for some bummer movies,” he drawls, daring her to get angry, leaving her spitting names (Jane Campion! Chantal Akerman!) in her own flustered defense, trying not to let him see how badly he’s skewered her current insecurities.

Dick (Bacon), Sylvere (Dunne), and Chris (Hahn) at dinner.

Patrick Wymore/Amazon Prime Video

From then on, Chris is consumed, wanting to fuck and to fight Dick, to gain his approval and to devour him whole. But in the end, she gets the best revenge by not thinking about revenge at all. Instead, she makes something real and good and marked by a whole other sort of authenticity than the kind Dick signals with his hand-rolled cigarettes and his refusal to explain his art. When looked at from the heart of 2017, that may be the show’s most plaintive aspiration of them all, the part that’s most out of sync with the sometimes merited and sometimes pandering go-girl defiance that has marked other recent series with overtly feminist bents, your Jessica Joneses and Girlbosses.

Chris’s desire to prove herself to Dick shifts to the understanding that, actually, she doesn’t need to, that she doesn’t require his validation or a spot in his prestigious, sparsely attended gallery — that rather than battling him to be seen, she pins her letters to public walls. She makes a sort of peace with Dick, allowing him to emerge from object to flesh-and-blood person who’s acutely aware that his moment is over — in some ways, it’s her biggest power move of all. But it’s a microcosmic shift dependent on the idea that the larger world has changed, which is why I Love Dick's freaky, free-dancing looseness has ended up unintentionally shot through with sadness. The world can change, but as everyone’s been reminded, it’s also capable of changing back.

Gal Gadot as Diana in Wonder Woman.

Clay Enos/Warner Bros.

Wonder Woman does not go undercover easily.

In what’s maybe the most gratifyingly funny interlude in Patty Jenkins’ new film, the Amazon — real name Diana (Gal Gadot) — tries on a series of 1910s-London-appropriate outfits at the behest of Steve Trevor (Chris Pine, really as charming as he’s ever been), an American spy working for British intelligence who’s attempting to get his new colleague to do some blending in.

Diana submits herself to the doomed exercise with anthropological curiosity, hoisting up ruffled skirts to see how they perform during kicks, dismissing a high collar as itchy and confining, and finally emerging in an outfit that was clearly intended to come off as prim, but instead looks fabulously bluestocking chic. Steve retaliates by reaching for the go-to accessory of all superheroes in preposterous normcore disguise — glasses. “Really? Specs?” his beleaguered secretary Etta Candy (Lucy Davis) groans. “And suddenly she’s not the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen?”

Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) and Diana (Gadot).

Clay Enos/Warner Bros.

Diana is a battle-trained, semi-divine, and, yes, statuesquely lovely princess from a mystical island inhabited only by female warriors. There is no hiding her light under a barrel in Wonder Woman, an endearingly earnest film whose biggest surprises come from how much it diverges in tone and style from the earlier superhero installments with which it shares a fictional world.

In playing catch-up with Marvel’s inescapable franchise of linked movies, DC made the pragmatic choice to skip right from Man of Steel to the big stuff, to supergroup movies Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad — cynical, aggressively dark productions plagued with confounding motivations, odd tonal choices, and too many characters to service. It was in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice that Gadot’s Wonder Woman was introduced, in a set of appearances that included a scene in which she sits at a laptop and effectively watches teasers for future DC Extended Universe installments.

Elegantly done it was not, though Diana and her niftily cello-forward musical theme made an impression in even squandered screen time, there amidst the brooding men and their memories of their mothers. She seemed to enjoy herself, something neither the recent, world-weary conceptions of Batman or Superman could say.

What’s striking about her turn in the spotlight in Wonder Woman, beyond its milestone status as a female-centric studio superhero feature directed by a woman, is the movie’s sense of elated lightness. Aside from the clunky framing device featuring a present-day Diana working at the Louvre, Wonder Woman is freed up to tell a straightforward origin story that takes its title character from a childhood on the Amazon island of Themyscira into the tail end of World War I.

Antiope (Robin Wright)

Alex Bailey/Warner Bros.

It’s a saga, written by Allan Heinberg, with a decent sense of humor, which any story prominently featuring Zeus and a Lasso of Truth demand. Wonder Woman is as outlandish as she is awe-inspiring, and everyone she comes into contact with from the outside world regards her with the appropriate mixture of admiration and disbelief.

That includes Steve, the first man she’s ever met and her eventual romantic interest, who brings that outside world right onto Themyscira’s unspoiled beaches when his plane plummets into the waters nearby, with German forces in pursuit. A fight between the interlopers and the Amazons, led by General Antiope (a brawny, braid-sporting Robin Wright), provides evidence of the women’s leaping, archery-enhanced prowess as well as the ugly power of guns.

It’s enough to spur Diana to act against the wishes of her mother, Queen Hippolyta’s (Connie Nielsen), and leave the island with Steve to fulfill what she believes is her duty and destiny: to kill Ares, the Greek god of war. Ares, she’s convinced, is the cause of the all-consuming conflict Steve’s described to her — World War I. She believes the only reason "the war to end all wars" could be happening is due to Ares' influence, and that once she defeats him, the violence will be over.

DC’s Wonder Woman, like Marvel’s Captain America, was a character originally conceived during World War II, both of them brawling with Nazis and sporting outfits that evoked the American flag. Wonder Woman’s shift to the first World War feels like an attempt to create some distance from the unavoidable Captain America: The First Avenger comparisons evoked by the plunking of another superhero into period battle, finding comic book–worthy foes hiding amidst the historical ones.

Sameer (Saïd Taghmaoui), Steve (Pine), Diana (Gadot), Chief (Eugene Brave Rock), and Charlie (Ewen Bremner).

Clay Enos/Warner Bros.

Like Captain America, Diana is an idealist who’s strong in her convictions but also inexperienced, driven by an untested certainty that she knows what’s right. For someone who's just stepping off the isolated island on which she grew up for the first time, she's recklessly sure she knows what's best for everyone else, that all it will take is the destruction of the right bad guy — whether it’s the German Gen. Ludendorff (Danny Huston), his poison gas-manufacturing chemist Doctor Maru (Elena Anaya), or someone else.

War has yet to be eradicated from either the movieverse or the real one, so it’s not news that the situation ends up being more complicated than she assumed. Which comes as a shock to no one but Diana herself, after she finagles a way out to the front with Steve and his trustiest mercenary friends — the silver-tongued Sameer (Saïd Taghmaoui), the Scottish sharpshooter Charlie (Ewen Bremner), and the Native American smuggler Chief (Eugene Brave Rock). They’re a seen-it-all crew who, of course, reveal their hearts of gold right when Diana’s confidence is shaken and, along with it, her conception of mankind as fundamentally good unless tainted by forces of evil.

Diana (Gadot) and General Ludendorff (Danny Huston).

Clay Enos/Warner Bros.

Diana, with her fantastical Hellenic backstory, has less explicitly patriotic roots than the military-created Captain America, but in Wonder Woman she serves as an affecting riff on American ideology anyway: She’s a well-intended but naive interventionist, an outsider crashing into a political quagmire she doesn’t really understand but is certain she can fix anyway, sure the solution is as simple as the correct baddie getting killed off.

That’s why, perhaps, her first appearance on the battlefield is so moving (while her climactic conflict is bigger but comparatively underwhelming): Stepping out onto no-man's-land in full regalia and facing down enemy machine guns in order to free an occupied village, she could be a fantasy of the US as we’d like to imagine ourselves — larger than life, always able to ascertain the truth, and driven by a desire to help that is pure and conveniently unambiguous (no endless counterinsurgency campaigns for her!).

It’s the kind of sequence that can give you goosebumps and provoke a few tears — Wonder Woman emerging from the trenches to save the day. She has the staunchness of someone who sees the world in neat black and white...until she’s forced to consider whether she still feels invested in a humanity capable of doing harm without the influence of a god. Naturally, that god does eventually turn up, because a movie like this needs closure, even if the lesson its heroine learns is that there’s no such thing.

Who knows how Diana will handle it when the Nazis — in whose shadow she was created — come along, or what she does during the murky global conflicts that follow World War II. Fortunately for her, for now, the DCEU is intent on skipping forward to the present day to Justice League, and then Aquaman, and on and on to the less defined future, presuming the world doesn’t end. Because of Wonder Woman, the film and the character, that grand corporate plan doesn’t seem quite as hubristic; she doesn’t feel like another bewilderingly warped, barely recognizable take on an iconic character. She feels like a genuine superhero, intent on protecting those in need — you can tell, even when she’s wearing glasses.

1. Bank employees get led out in cuffs in Abacus: Small Enough to Jail.

The Sung family in Abacus: Small Enough to Jail.

PBS Distribution

Only one US bank ended up indicted for mortgage fraud in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that crashed markets and set off a global economic downturn. It wasn't JPMorgan Chase or Citigroup or another widely recognized name — it was Abacus Federal Savings Bank, a small institution servicing primarily a Chinese-American clientele. In May 2012, the family-run affair, with its roots in Manhattan's Chinatown and a mortgage default rate that was a fraction of the national average, drew the attention of the New York County District Attorney's Office.

The idea of a movie about a bank's prosecution might not exactly sound riveting, but Abacus: Small Enough to Jail director Steve James (the documentarian responsible for Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters) manages to present the case like an epic David-and-Goliath struggle. And, in a rare instance these days, it's not the bank that comes out looking like the villain.

James presents, instead, a multilayered and quietly enraging story about immigrants being treated as easy targets. The film explores how Abacus's attempts to bridge cultural gaps for a sometimes insular community left it vulnerable to a DA's office that sensed the potential for (and PR to be found in) a win against a financial institution, if not one of the apparently untouchable major ones.

The most eloquent image it puts onscreen is one that was actually staged for the press: a group of the bank's employees being paraded in linked handcuffs, hiding their faces from the cameras. It's a scene that, as interviewee and journalist Matt Taibbi notes, resembles "this almost Stalinist-looking chain gang." One of the people in handcuffs puts it more simply: "It is a humiliation."

How to see it: Abacus: Small Enough to Jail is now in limited release and is making its way to theaters around the country.

2. A train ride turns incredibly tense in The Age of Shadows.

Um Tae-goo as Hashimoto and Song Kang-ho as Lee Jung-chool in The Age of Shadows.

CJ Entertainment America

Like last year's The Handmaiden, The Age of Shadows is a thriller set in an oppressive but gorgeously rendered Japan-occupied Korea in the 1920s-'30s. It's also packed with twists and tension (while coming up short on the startling explicit sex — sorry); but in its case, all that intrigue is for the sake of the nation.

Most of the characters in The Age of Shadows are resistance fighters plotting against their foreign oppressors by way of a plan to smuggle explosives in from Shanghai, a calling that comes with a high risk of death, torture, or imprisonment. The film's most fascinating figure, however, isn't a rebel — he's an opportunistic police captain named Lee Jung-chool (the great Song Kang-ho) who was once resistance-adjacent but has since turned his loyalty, and his investigative services, over to the Japanese.

Resistance fighter Kim Woo-jin (Gong Yoo) believes that Jung-chool, having been turned once, could be turned again, and their canny, calculated back-and-forths become the film's backbone. But it's action that director Kim Jee-woon (of A Bittersweet Life, I Saw The Devil, and the Arnold Schwarzenegger film The Last Stand) is renowned for. And that's exactly what he provides in a series of stunning set pieces that make up for any espionage incomprehensibility, from an opening involving a police chase over rooftops to a chaotic train station shootout. The train ride becomes the film's highlight, a brilliant sequence in which characters try to hide amid passengers, goods are smuggled, loyalties flip, and everything goes fabulously to hell despite everyone's best efforts.

How to see it: The Age of Shadows is new to DVD and Blu-ray, and is also available for digital rental and purchase.

3. George Lazenby gets laid on the studio's dime in Becoming Bond.

Josh Lawson as George Lazenby in Becoming Bond.

Hulu

The only consolation for losing one James Bond in May is getting such a rollicking tribute to another one, George Lazenby, in the form of Becoming Bond, Josh Greenbaum's
Hulu original documentary. Lazenby, an Australian model with no acting experience, was famously chosen to replace Sean Connery in 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Even more famously, Lazenby would play the iconic spy only once, brashly walking away from a multipicture deal to become an entertainment history punchline.

In Becoming Bond, he walks the audience through all this and more, starting with his working-class upbringing as a mechanic turned salesman, through the loss of his virginity, his romance with an upper-crust woman, and his eventual, incredible finagling of the world's most coveted role. Greenbaum makes the very smart decision to stage Lazenby's stories, Drunk History–style, with a cast that includes Josh Lawson as the man himself, as well as appearances from Jane Seymour, Jeff Garlin, and Dana Carvey.

The approach provides some distance from Lazenby's sometimes unfortunately of-its-era treatment of women, and emphasizes the hilarity of this bluff, oblivious, hard-partying Aussie stumbling into stardom. In the best scene, Jake Johnson shows up at Lazenby's door with a woman the soon-to-be-Bond cheerily and unquestionably begins banging, only to be informed later that the strange setup was staged by the studio to confirm his sexuality. Lazenby, unfazed by that and by seemingly everything else, shrugs and goes on.

How to see it: Becoming Bond is streaming on Hulu.

4. A traveler realizes she's trapped in Berlin Syndrome.

Andi (Max Riemelt) and Clare (Teresa Palmer) in Berlin Syndrome.

The most painful scene in the abduction drama Berlin Syndrome isn't the one in which Australian backpacker Clare (Teresa Palmer) first finds herself locked in the isolated apartment belonging to her fling Andi (Max Riemelt). That first day she plays off as an accident, the man she went home with forgetting to leave her a key after he heads off to work. It's the second day in which she understands that it's intentional — that the handsome German she met on the street and ended up postponing her trip to be with is dangerous. She doesn't want to believe it, which is what makes the realization so slow and sickening — she keeps up a charade of everything being fine for as long as possible, until the urgency of her situation can no longer be ignored.

Berlin Syndrome is the rare abduction drama directed by a woman — filmmaker Cate Shortland, of Somersault and Lore. And that's something you can feel in all of its choices, including the way it keeps Clare at its heart even when it follows Andi into the outside world he's denied her. The film never turns Clare's fear or suffering into spectacle — it's about her experiences, about how she rebels against and then tries to manipulate Andi's obsession and desire for a simulacrum of a normal relationship to her advantage. The result is an effective but never exploitative play on what plagues every solo female traveler — that you want to be open, to meet strangers and experience new places, but that that same trusting approach to exploring can also leave you horribly exposed.

How to see it: Berlin Syndrome is available for digital rental and purchase.

5. Tracy Letts sings in The Lovers.

Michael (Tracy Letts) and Mary (Debra Winger) in The Lovers.

A24

The Lovers starts like a French adultery farce that's been dropped into the most unromantic of suburban California settings. The cars are sensible, the couches are dumpy, the jobs involve seas of cubicles — and yet the orchestral score swoons when Michael (Tracy Letts) and Mary (Debra Winger), two halves of a long-wed couple, meet up with their respective lovers. Mary is seeing Robert (Aidan Gillen), a writer, while Michael is dallying with Lucy (Melora Walters), a hot-tempered ballet instructor. Both Michael and Mary insist, separately, that their marriage is over and that they're ready to leave, to commit to their new partners — until an unexpected evening spent together results in the two rediscovering a sexual spark.

If this all sounds high-concept — a marital affair in the midst of two extramarital ones — well, The Lovers does play as a little schematic as first. But Azazel Jacobs' movie is worth sticking with as it builds into something more bitter and complex about the nature of love, about how it can abide in ways that have nothing to do with the ebb and flow of passion or of even being able to stand one another. The Lovers features impressively frank lovemaking between characters of an age at which they're usually consigned to onscreen sexlessness. But its rawest scene actually involves a song, performed by Letts after a visit from the couple's son (Tyler Ross) and his new girlfriend (Jessica Sula) has brought all sorts of long-simmering anger and disappointment to light. It's a familiar tune that's transformed into something heartbreaking, carrying the weight of years — or just the weight of a decades-long relationship.

How to see it: The Lovers is now in theaters in limited release.

6. Survivors cry about wanting to go home in Seoul Station.

Seoul Station

FilmRise

Before South Korean filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho made the 2016 zombies-on-a-train thriller Train to Busan, he was known for his work in animation. So it's not so odd that his prequel to that breakout hit, Seoul Station, is animated. But what is startling is that it's even darker than the live-action film it precedes, in terms of both its ravenous undead action and its pointed social commentary.

The movie takes place in a Seoul teetering unknowingly on the verge of apocalypse, and it centers on characters who've been relegated to society's outskirts — in particular, on a teenage runaway who's forced into sex work, the father and ne'er-do-well boyfriend looking for her, and a group of homeless men living in the train station.

Maybe it's the abstraction of animation that allows Seoul Station to get away with being so bracingly harsh — either way, it works from the beginning. In the dark suspense of the opening sequence, a homeless man with a developmental disorder tries and fails, repeatedly, to get help for his bitten friend. Even when that friend lurches back to life with alarming appetites, the city's residents remain skeptical about claims of an infection, finding it easier to look away or to blame the aberrance on homelessness rather than believe something has gone terribly wrong.

By the time the body count picks up, it's too late to do anything but run, or cry about wanting to go home, which is exactly what two characters do in the movie's most relatable moment. It's a plaintive, hopeless desire that gets turned into a very grim joke in the film's final setting, achieving the kind of ending that makes you think, Hey, maybe it's the zombies we should be rooting for.

How to see it: Seoul Station is available for rental or purchase on iTunes.

Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) in The Mummy.

Universal Pictures

Tom Cruise’s new movie The Mummy has something to sell you. And it is not Tom Cruise, who is still gamely devoted to giving the people what they want, whether that means hanging from airplanes, or grinning his way through press tours, or looking spookily untouched by time at the age of 54. Cruise is a star of the old guard, but stars old and new just don’t open movies the way they used to (not even the Rock is reliable).

Watching Cruise fit himself into a prefab brand like the one The Mummy is part of brings back the sensation of seeing Will Smith as a mere part of the Suicide Squad ensemble last year. It’s the bemused realization that while the age of the A-list actor has passed, the era that’s succeeding it — the age of the franchise — has yet to fully sort itself out.

And a franchise is what The Mummy is peddling — the “Dark Universe,” which is the name Universal Pictures has given to what has hubristically been planned as a potential 10-plus film series reinventing the studio’s library of classic monsters, from The Wolf Man to The Phantom of the Opera. Already in the hopper is a 2019 remake of Bride of Frankenstein, with Bill Condon directing, Javier Bardem playing Frankenstein’s monster, and Johnny Depp on board for the eventual role of the Invisible Man.

Which means that as the first Dark Universe installment, The Mummy, which was directed by Alex Kurtzman, is effectively a $125 million pilot. It’s tasked with hawking what Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe) refers to as "a new world of gods and monsters," with said monster-gods being targeted by or allied with Prodigium, the secret evil-fighting organization that Jekyll runs. And hawking a whole cinematic universe turns out to be an especially tough ask when The Mummy can’t even conclusively hawk itself over the course of its labored 107 minutes.

Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis) and Nick Morton (Tom Cruise).

Universal Pictures

What The Mummy does have to offer is Kingsman’s striking dancer-turned-actor Sofia Boutella as the title character, a strategically bandaged undead Egyptian princess whose powers come from a deal she made with the god Set, and whose sparse lines at least spare her having to deal with much of the film’s clunky dialogue. Annabelle Wallis fares far worse as Jenny Halsey, Cruise’s archeologist love interest, a character charged with getting rescued, populating some strikingly awkward reaction shots, and making irrational swings in behavior as needed to guide the plot along. (The film's third woman appears in a flashback, and dies almost immediately.)

Jake Johnson is underused as a comic sidekick with a twist borrowed from An American Werewolf in London, and Courtney B. Vance is even more so as a military type. Crowe, as the Dark Universe’s Nick Fury equivalent, flounders mightily with a character who’s meant to be a brilliant mastermind, but whose decisions are baffling, right down to the way he times the injections that keep his Mr. Hyde side at bay.

And then there’s Cruise as treasure hunter/grave robber Nick Morton, sparking to life only in the action set pieces in which he fights off zombie attackers while driving, and gets tumbled around a crashing airplane like socks in a dryer. Otherwise, he looks as lost as The Mummy feels, never clicking with a character who’s supposed to be a rogue with a heart of gold. The early scenes in which Nick and Jenny spar over having slept together before the start of the movie are actively painful, what’s supposed to be sparky banter instead as convincing as Steve Carell trying to describe breasts in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Nick, even in the grips of a curse, never actually feels torn between good and evil, making the moments in which he has to choose between the good (blonde) and evil (brunette, mummy) ladies in his life absurdly underwhelming.

Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe)

Universal Pictures

Nick never seems like much of anything, really — anything more than just Cruise, doffing his shirt and deploying that hundred-watt smile and projecting a palpable hope that everyone watching is having a good time, even if he’s not sure what’s going on. There’s nothing he could have done to save The Mummy, or to have further ruined it either. The sad truth of The Mummy is that Cruise doesn’t matter all that much to it in the end. The movie grinds its way toward a will-be-back-again-soon finale that, tellingly, stages Nick’s biggest emotional moment so that you can’t see his face. It’s as if The Mummy is already setting up a way to go on without him, if it needs to.

It probably won’t. International box office numbers are unpredictable and have saved many a disappointing studio effort, but it’s still hard to imagine much of a future for the Dark Universe if this is the best pitch it can make for its existence — a film with no distinguishing characteristics or distinguished characters. It instead feels like an object lesson for the age of the franchise, one about how name actors may not matter as much as they used to, but characters definitely do. The Mummy promises a fantastical world of supernatural beings colliding and collaborating, forgetting that if no one cares about any one of these beings in particular, they’re not going to be sold on seeing them together, either.

Sam Claflin as Philip and Rachel Weisz as Rachel in My Cousin Rachel.

Nicola Dove / Fox Searchlight

The title character in My Cousin Rachel, a beguiling, enigmatic widow played by Rachel Weisz, may be a murderer. She may have poisoned her second husband, a distant English relative named Ambrose who traveled to Italy for his health, met Rachel, married her, and then died, never to make it back home. Rachel may be a killer, but somehow, in the eyes of the young man who falls in love with her, her homicidal potential isn’t nearly as dangerous a quality as her independent streak.

My Cousin Rachel, which was directed by Notting Hill’s Roger Michell and is based on Daphne du Maurier’s 1951 novel, is meant to be a 19th-century gothic thriller. It's told from the point of view of Philip (Sam Claflin), a 24-year-old orphan who was raised by Ambrose, his cousin, and has since inherited his gorgeous estate on the Cornish coast. Philip becomes convinced Rachel is responsible for his adoptive parent’s death, thanks to a disturbing letter from Ambrose saying as much that was sent right before he died. Philip is intent on confronting Rachel right up until he actually meets her, when he goes from scorning to smitten entertainingly quickly, inviting Rachel to stay while the movie keeps us guessing about what she is or isn’t hiding.

Thanks to some odd choices, what's meant to be a 19th-century gothic thriller instead comes across as a film about what it’s like to be a woman being judged by a man oblivious to all the power he holds. There’s a curious alchemy in the unevenness of its casting, pitting a dexterous Weisz against an outmatched Claflin in a way that foregrounds her character, even though it’s Philip at the film’s center. Claflin is a jarring fit for the part of Philip, a strapping man in the role of callow boy, which only adds to My Cousin Rachel’s sense of dreamlike malleability, as does the fact that Claflin also plays the doomed Ambrose in a few wordless scenes.

Philip (Claflin) with his godfather, Nick Kendall (Iain Glen).

Nicola Dove / Fox Searchlight

Claflin, in other words, plays father to himself. Philip isn’t the product of some sort of aristocratic parthenogenetic process, but he feels like he might as well be, out there in his country-estate-as-boys-club in which “the only women allowed in the house were the dogs.” Early in the film, upon reading a letter from Ambrose about falling for Rachel in Italy, Philip wonders dismissively why his caretaker would have any need for women when he has Philip — a sentiment that doesn’t come across as childish so much as surreally stunted when it comes out of the mouth of a 30-year-old actor.

It’s into this bachelor’s paradise that Rachel arrives, twice married and half Italian, brimming with sophistication and sexual experience even in her mourning black. “The vicar finds you very feminine,” Philip tells her after she makes her debut in the community by way of church and Sunday dinner, an observation that feels like it’s at least as much neg as it is compliment, though you take his point. Rachel’s womanliness is a force unto itself, shaking Philip out of his secure solitude and turning his head with hilarious rapidity. She defuses his initial hostility with a slightly salty joke and an admonition to go to bed, a mixture of flirtatious and maternal that Philip finds irresistible.

Rachel is very feminine, in the sense that she has had to learn to navigate life as a woman in a world dictated by men, to tamp down her feelings for her own protection, to charm and disarm while trying to keep people at an appropriate distance, a distance she miscalculates when it comes to Philip.

Philip (Claflin) pays a late-night visit to Rachel (Weisz).

Nicola Dove / Fox Searchlight

Even as his interest grows, Philip wavers between seeing Rachel as killer and victim, manipulative gold digger and genuinely loving spouse. Maybe she’s a saint who suffered through her late husband's paranoia and violent behavior, brought on by a brain tumor; maybe she’s a witch, with the herbal teas she brews and pushes on others, insisting they’re healthy and healing. But the more we see of her, through Philip, the more she just seems like someone who survived abuse and heartbreak, only to be put in precarious financial straits because Ambrose didn’t sign his will, leaving her economic future at the mercy of Philip, a stranger. Weisz allows peeks of Rachel’s frustration and calculation beneath her accommodating smile as she regards Philip with guarded affection, like a puppy who could rip your throat out.

My Cousin Rachel is overheated in ways that are sometimes funny, especially when characters try to warn the heedless Philip off the older woman with euphemisms that stop just short of waggling eyebrows (You understand? he’s asked, more than once). But any gossip about Rachel’s finances and lovers might as well be a weapon wielded against her, since it's up to Philip to decide what to believe and how it affects his behavior toward the houseguest he eventually hopes to wed — neglecting, of course, to ask if Rachel even wants to remarry.

She is a bad Victorian, Rachel, but My Cousin Rachel is unexpectedly good, a portrayal of oblivious patriarchy in the form of a mystery. There’s a sense of simmering rage beneath its fetching surfaces — the ire of a woman who’s been taught that acting in her own self-interest is a subversive act, but who senses freedom so close at hand. The film is guided by the question of whether Rachel is guilty, but ends up posing one about why Philip thinks it’s his place to decide, why he’s so certain of his right to have sway over not just this woman’s character, but her very life.

Alicia (Elle Fanning), Martha (Nicole Kidman), Edwina (Kirsten Dunst), Jane (Angourie Rice), Amy (Oona Laurence), Emily (Emma Howard), and Marie (Addison Riecke) in The Beguiled.

Ben Rothstein / Focus Features

The Southern belles of Sofia Coppola’s half-brilliant, half-infuriating The Beguiled have a tendency to fall into elegant tableaux, as if posing for some 1861 version of a Vanity Fair Hollywood issue that’s even less diverse than usual. When they gather in the parlor by candlelight for nightly prayer, they look like they’re restaging a painting. When they cluster around a piano to provide musical entertainment for John McBurney (Colin Farrell), the wounded Union soldier who simultaneously becomes their prisoner/gentleman caller, they arrange themselves in postures that look carefully rehearsed, long skirts draping elegantly, even the brunettes giving off an aura of willowy blondeness.

Like the Lisbon sisters in Coppola’s 1999 directorial debut The Virgin Suicides, who had a similar tendency to meld into one dreamy object in the eyes of observers, the characters in the moodily subdued The Beguiled accrue a kind of power when appearing as a collection — it lends them mystique, and can make them seem like more than the sum of their independent parts. All it costs is the sting of surrendering their identities as individuals. But as individuals, they are two adults and five girls with nowhere else to go, the remaining population of the Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies in Virginia three years into the Civil War.

Martha (Kidman) at the gates of the Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies.

Ben Rothstein / Focus Features

It’s an institution whose fripperies look frivolous and a little foolish with guns rumbling on battlefields nearby. The school’s headmistress, Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman), and teacher, Edwina Dabney (Kirsten Dunst), oversee and live alongside the last few students: coquettish Alicia (Elle Fanning), Confederate loyalist Jane (Angourie Rice), earnest Amy (Oona Laurence), and the less defined Marie (Addison Riecke) and Emily (Emma Howard). They strive mightily to maintain a sense of normalcy, continuing with their French and embroidery lessons while the world shakes apart around them.

The bubble of fussy propriety in which they exist isn’t denial so much as a kind of protective performance of gentility — they’re women and children living in a combat area from which their army is retreating. Taken alone, they’re vulnerable, but taken as a group, with their white dresses and white skin in their their white house with white columns tucked in the midst of old trees, they seem to be attempting to shield themselves by becoming a symbol of sheltered 19th-century Southern womanhood. They aren’t merely clinging to a dying past (despite Martha’s romanticized reminiscences about a time when her father's parties would fill the house with attendees in finery); their daily routine feels more like an act of desperate conjuring, an affirmation of their own worth, a way to demand decorum from anyone who comes through the school’s gate by insisting that that is the only conceivable way to treat them.

Coppola has always been fascinated by comfortable, cloistered spaces. She's devoted most of her alternately praised and maligned filmmaking career to exploring the existences of the advantaged (if not always happy) white women who tend to reside within them, and in that, The Beguiled is no different. The Farnsworth Seminary is a place where girls are sent to be prepared for pampered lives of decorative domesticity, to go from being the doted-on daughters to the well-bred wives of powerful men. Its faculty and students spark to life when McBurney arrives, like a theater company finally getting an audience — no accident, when the playacted femininity in which they’ve been tutored is dependent on male attention and compliance.

John McBurney (Colin Farrell) gets amorous with Edwina (Dunst).

Ben Rothstein / Focus Features

But so, too, is their safety, hinging on the women’s ability to evoke the restrictive but protective societal order from which they came, even as it threatens to crumble away. The stakes of all that girlishness have never felt higher in a Coppola film, and the boundaries of the privilege its characters enjoy have never felt so fragile — not even at the end of Marie Antoinette, in which Dunst’s oblivious, doomed queen is chased by rioters from Versailles. The female characters of The Beguiled are neither as tightlaced nor as delicate as they present themselves — Martha, the most proper and wasp-waisted of them all, plucks metal shards out of McBurney’s leg herself in an early scene, then sews the torn flesh shut — but it’s to their advantage to appear like precious commodities that need to be protected.

Which is why McBurney, who Amy stumbles across injured in the woods, poses such a stealthy hazard to the combination sanctuary and cage the school represents. He’s a man being introduced into the company of a group of bored, lonesome young and grown women who are starved for male attention and contact, sure. But with his hurt leg and the patrols of Confederate soldiers outside, he also seems so safe, so controllable that Martha convinces herself it’s “Christian charity” to let him heal before turning him in.

When The Beguiled, which is based on a novel by Thomas Cullinan, was first adapted into a movie in 1971 by Don Siegel, it made the way McBurney disrupted the school’s antebellum repression an overripe punchline about female desire and jealousy. In that version, he’s played by Clint Eastwood with a smirk and a luxuriant mane of hair, a virile cad who sets every lady aflutter, from Martha (who’s revealed to have had an incestuous affair with her brother) down to 12-year-old Amy (who McBurney eyebrow-raisingly declares “old enough for kisses”). When he gets his comeuppance, the movie veers from Gone With the Wind territory into Misery country — all of it scornfully hell-hath-no-fury.

Marie (Riecke), Jane (Rice), Alicia (Fanning), and Amy (Laurence).

Ben Rothstein / Focus Features

Farrell’s McBurney in Coppola's version is still dashing, and still tickled to find himself a rooster in a henhouse. But he’s been scaled down, both physically and in terms of swagger. This McBurney stumbled into a war he knew little about for pay and pleads to be allowed to stay at the school once he begins recovering. It’s not his sexual charisma that makes him so alluring — in fact, the first time he’s portrayed as an object of desire, he’s unconscious, Martha finding herself overwhelmed by the simple intimacy of laying hands on a male body again when she bathes his injuries. Instead, it’s the way he separates the women from their formation, cannily understanding what each wants to be told, whether it’s the promise of escape in Edwina’s case or professions of trust in Amy’s.

And they all want so badly to be the one he chooses, to be seen and plucked out of the herd, to be special — even though he's like a 19th-century version of a bad male feminist with his willingness to say the right things lasting only until he feels his power has been eroded. McBurney doesn’t seem particularly motivated to limit his attentions to any one Farnsworth resident when he can charm (or more) them all. In goading them to spar for his affections, he comes to pose a threat not just to the rectitude on which the school’s reputation is staked, but also to the reluctant solidarity to which the women have been consigned. The Beguiled isn’t Coppola’s strongest film, but it’s her smartest and most skillful in portraying how the dynamics of a group of women can warp and weft under outside pressure, turning from community to competition.

Martha (Kidman) and McBurney (Farrell).

Ben Rothstein / Focus Features

Which is why it’s so aggravating that Coppola, who also wrote the script, chose to excise race from a story built on a foundation of slavery, as if leaning directly into criticisms of her work as an apologist for the advantages her white protagonists enjoy. These critiques are frequently unfair — characters being blinkered doesn’t mean the work itself has to be — but there’s an undeniable one to be made here in the way The Beguiled turns its gaze away from the institution enabling the lives these upper-crust women are living. And it’s an active elision — there’s a character, Hallie, who is a slave in Cullinan’s book, and who features prominently in the 1971 movie, in which she’s played by actor and blues singer Mae Mercer. Hallie remains under Martha’s control, but she has, in the shifting dynamics of wartime, eked out some small liberties for herself as deprivation has acted as a leveler between herself and the school’s cosseted students.

Siegel’s The Beguiled may be a more lurid and less finely wrought film, but it is astute in showing that no matter how vulnerable the white women feel, Hallie is forever more so. McBurney flirts with her just as fiercely as everyone else, and she flirts back, though she’s skeptically amused by his attempts to draw parallels between their situations, and by his promises to help her reunite with her escaped lover. But when McBurney seizes control of the school, it’s Hallie he threatens to rape, causing her to flash back to a past assault as she spits out that he should be prepared to kill her first. Any perceived sanctity of white womanhood the other characters try to hide behind was never extended to her.

Coppola told BuzzFeed News that her decision to take the character out, explained in the film via a single line about the slaves having left, came about because she “didn’t want to brush over such an important topic in a light way.” The “important topic” being slavery, though her treating a character who is a slave as interchangeable with the institution indicates there’s a point she’s missing — which is that slavery already exists in the film, whether she chooses to put it onscreen directly or not. Slave labor kept the school running and underlies the wealth from which the school’s students come; it’s the ability to continue to practice slavery that’s spurred the war their fathers are off fighting.

Emily (Howard), Edwina (Dunst), Alicia (Fanning), Amy (Laurence), Jane (Rice), Marie (Riecke), and Martha (Kidman).

Ben Rothstein / Focus Features

It’s more than frustrating that The Beguiled is so adroit about the pageantry of privilege when it comes to gender and so negligent in treating race as something separable. It chooses to skirt the fact that the very class system these characters are trying to maintain their place atop rests on slavery, as do their own coddled existences, and to remove any mention of it doesn’t make this less so, it just creates a strange, noticeable vacuum. In a film that is so explicitly about white femininity, this omission doesn’t feel like the skipping of a topic too significant to be done justice to — it feels instead like willful blindness.

Mija (Ahn Seo-Hyun) with her super pig in Okja.

Netflix

Tilda Swinton plays twins in Okja, a funny-vicious-dazzling coked-up kiddie movie from South Korean director Bong Joon-ho — not the first time she’s done double duty, but definitely the most allegory-laden. She takes on the dual role of Lucy and Nancy Mirando, heirs to a multinational agrochemical conglomerate in the midst of some serious image rehab, and a study in light and dark.

Lucy is the sibling in the spotlight throughout most of the movie, having been appointed to head the family-owned company as it attempts to rebrand itself as virtuous, organic, and kind. Grinning around a mouthful of braces, she gives off a carefully curated impression of youthfulness and pastels, a CEO-as-cheerleader insisting big business really can benefit the planet, that the Mirando Corporation cares.

Lucy Mirando (Tilda Swinton)

Netflix

In the past, Mirando didn’t bother with the friendly facade. Nancy — who casts a forbidding shadow over the proceedings long before she actually appears — is a gravel-voiced, helmet-bobbed figure who was cut out of the Mirando leadership position and replaced by her sister/rival. She had followed too closely in the footsteps of the pair’s father, a man known for committing the occasional corporate atrocity.

Per the rules of twins laid out by The Simpsons and therefore scientifically impeachable, it would seem that Lucy is the good one and that Nancy is the evil one. But to accept that split means getting scammed by the shell game Mirando is playing, because underneath the bright makeover, it’s all the same sort of ruthless, market-sanctioned greed. There’s no good twin, just a less honest one who’s willing to smile and pretend the “natural” new food source she’s touting wasn’t developed in a lab. The end goal is still and has always been to turn the world into consumers, or into products.

And “product” is the unfortunate category into which the title character of Okja falls. She’s a “super pig,” a new type of ecologically sound meat animal and “revolution in the livestock industry” that Mirando is pinning its future on, one that looks sort of like a hippo crossed with a hog, or maybe just a scaled-up skinny pig. For a creature the size of a compact car, Okja is thunderingly lovable and, given what’s planned for her, tragically intelligent. She’s grown up in Edenic bliss in the care of 13-year-old Mija (the excellent Ahn Seo-Hyun) and her grandfather Heebong (Byun Hee-bong) on their mountain farm in South Korea.

Nancy Mirando (Swinton) and Frank Dawson (Giancarlo Esposito).

Netflix

What Mija doesn’t know about the oversize pet she spends her days frolicking outdoors with is that Okja is part of a pilot program in which super pigs were dropped off at farms around the world to be hand raised and later retrieved. Okja isn’t theirs — she’s the property of a company intent on taking her back for dissection, study, and marketing.

For Mirando’s inner circle of executives (Giancarlo Esposito and Shirley Henderson among them), the more indifferent employees down the line, and celebrity vet spokesperson Johnny Wilcox (weak spot Jake Gyllenhaal), Okja is both PR fodder and future sandwich filling. And if it seems callous to turn a creature into both adorable mascot and efficient source of jerky, well, maybe Big Meat requires a callousness the movie dares you to be capable of yourself: The manic adventure makes its way from South Korea to New York City and, eventually, to the nightmarish confines of a commercial slaughterhouse where super pigs get processed, going from expressive computer-generated animals to hanging carcasses to steaks.

Despite the effective and unsensationalized awfulness of that sequence, Okja isn't intended to be a fiery broadside against all meat-eating, though shooting it turned its filmmaker into a temporary vegan. Mija and Heebong make fish stew and treat themselves to one of the chickens they raise. And not even the members of the animal liberation group Mija crosses paths with on her journey to retrieve Okja, led by the beneficent Jay (Paul Dano), can come to a consensus as to the most ethical way to conduct themselves. One of their crew keeps fainting from having eaten too little out of a desire to minimize his carbon footprint.

Silver (Devon Bostick), Jay (Paul Dano), Blond (Daniel Henshall), Red (Lily Collins), and K (Steven Yeun).

Jae Hyuk Lee / Netflix

Existence, Okja allows, is basically a series of moral compromises, but mass consumption is something else. It involves compromise on a scale that’s terrifying, most of it unfolding out of sight and therefore out of mind, shrouded in comforting but frequently meaningless buzzwords like “values” and “natural.”

Framed around the experiences of the fiercely un-precious Mija, who becomes a half-grown action hero, Okja unfolds like a fable about a child and their nonhuman pal that’s been warped into something bleak and outrageous — E.T. by way of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Mija pursues Okja with scowling conviction through foot chases, car chases, and paw chases that send the characters crashing thrillingly through a city mall. She even makes her way across the ocean to the US for a showdown with the sisters Mirando.

Johnny Wilcox (Jake Gyllenhaal)

Jae Hyuk Lee / Netflix

But while it approaches its corporations-can’t-be-trusted themes from the perspective of an adolescent, Okja’s overall vision of the world as unable to pull itself out of a capitalist death spiral doesn’t feel simplistic. There are idealists intent on saving the planet in Okja, but Mija isn’t one of them. She just wants to help the ones she loves, and the more she sees of the expanse outside of the farm on which she grew up, the more it seems like she’d be lucky even to manage that.

A caustic horror comedy of sorts about the global economy, Okja doesn’t end on a perfectly rosy note. But as an act of global cinema itself, it’s more hopeful — an example of how border-crossing moviemaking can mean so much more than the personality-free, created-by-committee feel of so many recent would-be blockbusters. Okja, like Bong’s last film, Snowpiercer, has a multinational cast (also including Devon Bostick, Lily Collins, Daniel Henshall, and Steven Yeun), is half in English and half in Korean, and circles the Earth in the process of telling its story.

The film, which was written by Jon Ronson and which has taken a controversial, pioneering route from Cannes directly to Netflix, doesn’t feel compromised by these choices, but electrified by them — it may be nationless, but it’s personal and singular and weird, unmistakably a Bong Joon-ho creation.

Okja and Mija (Ahn)

Netflix

It is, in its own way, a kind of monster movie, about a creature Frankensteined together for our kitchens courtesy of genetic experimentation. Which makes it a Lucy-and-Nancy-worthy mismatched twin in its own right to The Host, Bong’s 2006 breakout about a creature born from chemical dumping on a US military base that lumbers out of the Han River to terrorize Seoul’s sunbathers.

In the equally eccentric-cynical The Host, it’s the monster, rather than the hungry public, intent on doing the eating, but like Okja, the film is about a mutant who’s created by mankind, only to be hunted and hounded by it. And in both, it’s the faceless power structures people create and submit to that are the real villains, whether it’s indifferent governments or amoral megacorps.

Bong is making movies on a larger scale than ever, but he’s kept his focus on individuals trying not to get ground up in the gears of a greater system (or, in Snowpiercer, in literal gears). In the mordantly convincing vision of an increasingly cold-blooded world he puts onscreen in Okja, that feels like it’s all anyone can hope for — that goes for humans and monsters both.

Britt Baron, Sydelle Noel, Gayle Rankin, Kate Nash, Alison Brie, and Marianna Palka in Glow.

Erica Parise / Netflix

Netflix’s wrestling drama GLOW is funny, poignant, and wonderfully acted, but what makes it really interesting is how aware it is of its own contradictions. The series’ fictionalized take on the real Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling promotion from the ’80s explores how empowerment and exploitation aren’t always so clear cut or easily parsed. Its female characters are women who’ve been dismissed by Hollywood as the wrong size, race, type, or tractability level. In joining GLOW, they’re promised exposure and rich material from which to work, but only by way of what the program's director Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron) cheerily refers to as “porn you can watch with your kids, finally.” And while these women are assured that the outsize wrestling personas they create are a way of challenging stereotypes of gender, race, and class, they have legitimate reasons for wondering if anyone watching will know that.

With a first season running 10 half-hour episodes, GLOW is the rare Netflix show that feels too short, given its abundance of promising characters and how relatively little runtime it has to spread among them. It’s a series that pits its characters against each other in staged catfights, but sometimes feels like it inadvertently pits members of its own talented cast against each other in a battle for screen time. And so, in the spirit of GLOW’s multilayered dramas, here’s a ranked look at how each of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling fared for themselves over that rousing first season.

14. Reggie "Vicky the Viking" Walsh

Marianna Palka as Reggie

Netflix

Reggie is the only actual professional athlete in the main ensemble, so of course she gets the shaft, both in the series itself and the show-within-the-show. Physical prowess isn’t remotely the highest priority for the kind of production Sam and producer Bash (Chris Lowell) have in mind. Early on, the plum role of Liberty Bell is taken away from Reggie and given to the more conventionally attractive Debbie (Betty Gilpin) — “She seemed more all-American,” the men shrug. And that’s basically everything of note for the character, who keeps to the background, but at least gets a fabulous Viking hat for her troubles.

13. Jenny "Fortune Cookie" Chey

Ellen Wong as Jenny

Erica Parise / Netflix

In a monologue combining a dozen Orientalist stereotypes into one hilariously tasteless package, Jenny doesn’t just lay forth her own wrestling persona: She establishes a pattern into which all of the other characters will soon settle. Wearing a conical hat and wielding a samurai sword, Fortune Cookie declares herself “cute like panda” but also “fast like dragon!” Jenny herself is Cambodian, adores birthdays, and...that's about it. Wong is so funny during her Fortune Cookie intro that it’s a shame she doesn’t get more time in the ring — though she does at least get to team up with Alison Brie’s Russian wrestling character in the final episode of the season, for a clever Communist allies combo.

12. Justine "Scab" Biagi

Britt Baron as Justine

Erica Parise / Netflix

As GLOW’s punk wrestler, resident teen Justine doesn’t really click during the first part of the season. She’s sulky and sullen, a devoted fan of Sam’s schlocky movies and of movies in general, and has a stilted thing for the pizza delivery guy. But then there’s that reveal, which unfolds in the most excruciating way imaginable: Justine is Sam’s daughter. In truly Freudian fashion, aligning perfectly with the psychosexual themes of Sam’s films, the truth comes out after Sam makes a move on the horrified young woman, prompting her to confess she’s the result of a one-night stand Sam had after he was kicked out of a Black Panther rally. He handles it (predictably) poorly, but Justine finally snaps into focus — not some kid idolizing a failed artist, but a girl trying to figure out how to connect to her father.

11. Arthie "Beirut the Mad Bomber" Premkumar

Sunita Mani as Arthie

Netflix

Nowhere is GLOW’s shortness more frustrating than in the cases of Jenny and Arthie Premkumar. The show’s cast is laudably diverse, but while the biggest stories go to the two white leads, these two characters of color are left without real arcs. Arthie, a premed student, is Indian-American, but per GLOW’s blithe racial insensitivity is told to present herself a “terrorist or genie or some sort of other evil Arab.” And so she dons a keffiyeh and becomes Beirut the Mad Bomber, the most incendiary of the wrestling personas. Mani (who showed off her dancing skills in the “Turn Down for What” music video) goes for broke, running around the ring wild-eyed and working up a signature move — the Lebanese Cannonball. But the payoff, in which Arthie facing real ire from a live audience who yells racial slurs and hurls beer cans, ultimately comes off as an unfinished thought. “Everyone really hated me,” she tells Rhonda (Kate Nash) afterward. “Yeah, but that's a good thing, though… right?” Rhonda answers. Arthie doesn't answer.

10 & 9. Stacey "Ethel Rosenblatt" Beswick and Dawn "Edna Rosenblatt" Rivecca

Kimmy Gatewood as Stacey and Rebekka Johnson as Dawn

Erica Parise / Netflix

“Our clients think we're funny and should be on television,” hairstylists Stacey and Dawn tell Sam at their audition. Turns out, their clients are right. Stacey and Dawn don’t get an arc either, but they, at least, don’t feel like they require one. As the series’ reliable source of comic relief, they are the Statler and Waldorf of ladies' wrestling, cackling and making prank calls from the sidelines. Gatewood and Johnson, two-thirds of the talent team behind The Apple Sisters, enjoy hamming things up as much as Stacey and Dawn do. They may not be the most fearsome of wrestling talents when they go into character as the elderly wrestlers Ethel and Edna Rosenblatt, but they’re so much fun to watch.

8. Sheila "The She Wolf"

Gayle Rankin as Sheila

Erica Parise / Netflix

Sheila’s got one note, but it’s, er, a howler. While all of the other women have to work up to their outsize personas, she lives as hers, 24/7. The fourth episode provides the only instance in which we see Sheila not fully done up, and it reveals her morning ritual — smearing kohl around the eyes, staining her teeth yellow, putting on a matted wig, and exhaling a sigh of relief, everything finally being as it should. She also wears a fur bodice, doesn’t talk a lot, and genuinely feels like a wolf in a human body. Sheila works better as a source of pathos than of quirk, a way for the show to delve into the idea that feeling like a genuine outsider doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to be great at playing one on TV. Maybe that's why she pairs so well with Brie’s character, Ruth, an actor who keeps treating Sheila’s behavior as some kind of method stunt instead of a form of dysmorphia. It forces Sheila to try to articulate why it wounds her when everyone treats her wolf affiliation like an eccentricity instead of part of her identity.

7. Rhonda "Britannica" Richardson

Kate Nash as Rhonda

Erica Parise / Netflix

Rhonda is a dim bulb in real life who, in the ring, plays Britannica, the smartest woman in the world. It’s not the most revelatory of divides between fact and fiction, but Rhonda makes up for it with juicier backstage antics, including her affair with Sam. Rhonda has blundered through life being pretty, moisturizing carefully, and not thinking too hard about what’s next. But she has an emotional intelligence that others underestimate — among them Sam, who assumes Rhonda’s sleeping with him to get special treatment, only to figure out too late that she actually liked him. It’s Rhonda who comes up with the GLOW theme song, and Nash (who’s a singer) mimics ’80s-era white-rapping flawlessly, delivering an awful, slightly off-rhythm earworm that’s impossible to shake: “GLOW, GLOW, that's the name / Women's wrestling is our game.”

6. Melanie "Melrose" Rosen

Jackie Tohn as Melanie

Erica Parise / Netflix

Melanie may be the only character on GLOW whose actual personality manages to dwarf that of her wrestling persona. Party girl Melrose, a transparent Madonna knockoff, is but a pale imitation of the force of nature that is Melanie. Melanie is the kind of woman who drives a limo, has what Sam calls a “‘please objectify me’ vibe,” and claims as her special talent that she “can wake up in the morning with absolutely nothing to do and just be in a Van Halen video by the end of the day.” Melanie strives tragically hard to be interesting, but the thing is, it works — the show is able to bounce her off of other characters to reveal different nuances and to create new drama. It’s Melanie who initiates the astonishingly insensitive prank of pretending, with the help of some purloined ketchup, to have a miscarriage due to a stunt gone wrong, an act of multilayered revenge against Cherry (Sydelle Noel). It’s also Melanie who needs to star in the R-rated sitcom spinoff GLOW leaves you longing for, one in which she'd solve crimes in the company of Bash’s drug-laden robot butler.

5. Cherry "Junkchain" Bang

Sydelle Noel as Cherry

Erica Parise / Netflix

Cherry is GLOW’s most competent member, which is less praise than it is a misfortune for her. A stuntwoman who stopped getting work because, as she tells Sam, “movies get a little white after 1979,” Cherry actually knows what she’s doing in terms of falls and jumps. Which is why she gets railroaded into training the other wrestlers, having to play hall monitor and hardass while getting shorted when it comes to her on-camera persona. Cherry is the grown-up of the series, but she’s no less captivating for it, and Noel plays her as steady but guarded, harboring various emotional wounds from a frustrating career and from having lost a child. It’s through her eyes that we see GLOW as the ramshackle operation it actually is, held together with grand promises and cocaine delusions. And it’s Cherry, joining up with Tammé (Kia Stevens), who provides GLOW’s most triumphant instance of the wrestlers taking control of their narrative by engineering a too-provocative-for-TV match against opponents dressed as members of the KKK.

4. Ruth "Zoya the Destroya" Wilder

Alison Brie as Ruth

Erica Parise / Netflix

It’s a credit to Brie’s skill that Ruth, the closest GLOW comes to having a main character, can be so annoying. She’s a theater kid who craves the spotlight in which no one is willing to allow her. Her qualifications include “extensive mask work and clowning workshops” and a willingness to show up to auditions where casting directors use her as a tool to get other, more commercially viable actors picked. She’s not lovable, Ruth, who starts the series by sleeping with her best friend Debbie’s (Gilpin) husband because she's feeling bad about herself. Brie plays up Ruth's self-pity and her neediness in ways that flesh out the character, making her empathetic without being endearing. “I don’t want everyone to hate me!” she wails to Sam; he answers, brutally, “Crying, caring, the desperation. That's what makes you unbearable.” He’s not wrong, but it turns out we don’t need to like Ruth to invest in her journey toward self-acceptance. Ruth isn’t meant for saving the day, no matter what she thinks of herself. She’s the heel, and once she finds her rhythm as Russian tyrant Zoya the Destroya, she lights up — though (again, credit to Brie) once she settles into her Soviet shtick, she almost immediately starts running it into the ground.

3. Tammé "The Welfare Queen" Dawson

Kia Stevens as Tammé

Erica Parise / Netflix

Tammé has a kid at Stanford, but when she heads into the ring, she’s a boogeywoman right out of Reaganite rhetoric, a semi-mythical figure used to rile the public about scammers getting rich off taxpayer money. Tammé plays the Welfare Queen, clad in a fur coat and jewelry, smirking that “Y'all are stupid for going to work every day and paying taxes.” As a living embodiment of conservative fears, the Welfare Queen is right on the line between offensive cartoon and subversive satire, and when Tammé raises her concerns with Sam, the conversation is fascinating. Sam goes on about pushing the envelope and creating “a fuck-you to the Republican party,” but Tammé, a bit player for whom GLOW is a huge break, is the one who has to stand in front of the camera, and the one wondering if she’s being taken advantage of. And yet of all the GLOW women, she's the one who has the best feel for her persona, no matter whom the Welfare Queen has been placed into combat with. It certainly doesn't hurt that Stevens is a real-life pro wrestler with a 15-year career under her belt. When Sam and Bash declare the Welfare Queen “our masterpiece,” their self-congratulatory sense of ownership is questionable, but they’re not wrong — in the ring, Tammé is a thrill.

2. Debbie "Liberty Belle" Eagan

Betty Gilpin as Debbie

Erica Parise / Netflix

From afar Debbie, a soap opera star turned stay-at-home mom, doesn't seem like she'd be interesting. Her character — the all-American hero, Liberty Belle — doesn't seem like she would be all that interesting either, just a blandly beautiful face who’s supposed to win her matches and reassure the world that order continues to hold. And yet, courtesy of the show’s writing and of Gilpin’s performance, both Debbie and her persona are totally compelling. Debbie is the friend who appears to have it all together. She’s the one who got cast on the soap opera, the one who married well (at least on paper), the one who had a baby. But Gilpin broadcasts her character’s barely disguised dissatisfaction through her every pore, even as she insists she’s happy. Debbie is all sharp edges underneath the curvy, blonde exterior, brittle and angry and hungry to have something of her own, and her friendship with Ruth is GLOW’s broken but still-beating heart. The moment she stands up in the crowd during the final match, announcing she’ll take her place in the ring, is the highlight of the series, both in terms of the shlock wrestling narrative and the backstage one. And of course, even then, the match doesn’t go precisely as planned. Why should it, really? Maybe it’s order that’s boring.

1. Carmen "Machu Picchu" Wade

Britney Young as Carmen

Erica Parise / Netflix

OK, sure, when Carmen’s estranged father, a famous wrestler named Goliath Jackson (Winston James Francis), shows up at the end to support his daughter, it’s a little pat. But if there is a stealth MVP of GLOW who embodies everything the series does best in its first season, it’s Carmen Wade, a naive, awkward, towering young woman with anxiety issues and a parent who doesn’t want her joining the family business. Carmen handily demonstrates wrestling basics for what is essentially a group of know-nothings, but there’s something particularly touching about the ways in which she tends to place herself on the outside, even in a world she knows better than anyone else onscreen. Carmen assumes she’s a heel, a villain who scares kids. But Bash (with whom she develops a winsome, surprising connection) insists she’s been a hero all along: “Look at this face, huh? Look at that smile. You're smiling all the time.” She is always smiling, even when she introduces her wrestling persona: “Machu Picchu, the Peruvian fortress, strong and proud.” “I’m a good guy,” she giggles with delight, and it’s impossible not to join her.

Okja.

Netflix

Okja is a movie about a multinational corporation bent on feeding everyone in the world the same lab-engineered garbage. Coincidentally, that’s the view some film purists have of the company that released it: Netflix.

The streaming giant kicked up dust at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where Okja and another Netflix feature, Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), premiered in prestigious spots in the main competition for the big prize, the Palme d’Or. Both films played at the Lumière Theater, cinephile holy ground, and yet the vast majority of the people who see them will see them via streaming. Maybe even on their phones.

That’s a prospect so disturbing to traditionalists trying to protect the theatrical experience that it actually prompted the festival to change its rules — as of 2018, all movies in the Cannes competition will also have to open in French cinemas. Meanwhile, at this year’s festival, audiences booed the Netflix logo and jury president Pedro Almodóvar and jury member Will Smith had a battle of philosophies during the opening press conference.

“I personally don’t perceive the Palme d’Or [should be] given to a film that is then not seen on the big screen,” the Spanish filmmaker provocatively declared. The American actor (who has a Netflix movie of his own set for December) countered that Netflix has led his kids to watch movies they wouldn’t otherwise have come across. “It has broadened my children’s global cinematic comprehension,” he said.

Will Smith, Agnes Jaoui, and Pedro Almodóvar at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.

Getty Images

In recent years, Netflix has successfully transformed itself into a fire hose of streaming content that’s made it more and more feasible for us to never go outside again. But it’s the company’s original series that have gotten most of the attention, while Netflix’s film strategy has felt less certain, a mix of Adam Sandler and awards trolling by way of Cary Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation and docs like The Square. Even as the company has stepped up its investment in movies, it’s shown an unfortunate tendency to just burp its titles out without much by way of promo.

The Sandler stuff is, according to Netflix's dubious numbers, doing fine. But for smaller fare — like the Shirley Jackson–inspired horror film I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House or this year’s Sundance winner I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore — the message has been, basically, to trust in the algorithm. As a platform, Netflix is immensely powerful and well-funded, but it has not, until this point, felt like an active force of good for the world of film.

Tilda Swinton with Okja director Bong Joon-ho on set.

Barry Wetcher / Netflix

And if you’re a die-hard theatergoer, like Almodóvar, it probably still isn’t — having a wealth of subscription streaming options at home has absolutely eroded the motivations of many to shell out for a ticket. But Okja is the first Netflix original movie that suggests the streaming service can do right by ambitious cinema. The multilingual, content-hopping, dystopian future-of-food epic from South Korean director Bong Joon-ho (of Snowpiercer and The Host) is an impossible-to-pigeonhole joy, a thrilling, funny, dark corporate satire by way of a kiddie adventure.

It was made for a reported $50 million, which is the kind of medium budget range that big movie studios have largely abandoned in pursuit of giant franchise ventures. It’s not a remake, a reboot, or a sequel — it does the increasingly rare thing of telling an original story, one that Bong dreamed up and wrote with Jon Ronson. And Smith is right: Okja is the kind of idiosyncratic, unfiltered, globally aware, demographic-defying release that people can't and don't get to see in cineplexes, and it's available so widely because Netflix footed the bill.

Almodóvar has a point, too, in that Okja is absolutely best experienced on the big screen (a few theaters have opted to screen it), something Bong has agreed with himself. But Bong is also pragmatic about how we watch movies these days, pointing out to ScreenCrush that a theatrical release is only a short part of a film’s life. “I believe that Netflix is a very good means of digitally archiving one’s film,” he said. “It’s not only a good way of digitally archiving, it’s a very democratic way for people to come back to and revisit the film.”

Okja.

Netflix

The fact that Okja is in even a handful of theaters is hopeful — an indication that the streaming experience doesn’t exist in total opposition to going out to the movies. There are still people interested in the immersive experience that is seeing something projected, and there are theaters willing to bet on their showing up. The way Netflix has handled the ramp-up to Okja, with press days and imaginative advance marketing, is heartening, too, a sign that the company can give a film like this the push it deserves, provide it with a real (if hybrid) release, and know how to treat it like a big deal.

It is a big deal, and it’s slated to be followed by some arguably even bigger ones — like the aforementioned Will Smith urban fantasy Bright, the company’s first full-on attempt at a blockbuster, or the restoration of Orson Welles’ unfinished The Other Side of the Wind, or Martin Scorsese’s upcoming gangster drama The Irishman, sure to be an Oscar bet. We may still be living in a turbulent world in which sweeping changes are alarmingly wrought by large corporations, but the existence of Okja suggests there is a potential upside to that. At least we know that, whatever happens, the movies might be good.

Tom Holland as Peter Parker in Spider-Man: Homecoming.

Chuck Zlotnick / Columbia Pictures

Did the superhero movie kill the teen comedy? Or at least lure its former audience away with one of those must-have pillars of light? That's the only reasonable explanation for why a genre with such an active afterlife has been having so much trouble lately getting traction with audiences when it comes to anything new. Mean Girls is so widely memed that social media would basically collapse without it. The 20th anniversary of Clueless was commemorated with tributes, oral histories, and a full week of ETonline coverage. Films from the John Hughes era through the Can't Hardly Wait era through the Easy A era get cozily considered using the golden lens of nostalgia, regardless of whether the viewer had even been born when the movie first came out.

And yet when a successor as excellent as last year's The Edge of Seventeen rolls around, it has the abbreviated lifespan of a scrappy, underseen indie. When it comes to movies and marketing demographics, relatable teen travails have had trouble competing with the more spectacular appeal of superpowered ones. That is, until Spider-Man: Homecoming, a film that smuggles in a delightfully dorky high school saga under the banner of a too familiar superhero one. The wisecracking Queens web-slinger has undergone his second reboot in a decade for a story that's always more interesting when dealing with crushes and extracurriculars than it is with fighting villains.

Ned (Jacob Batalon) and Peter (Tom Holland).

Chuck Zlotnick / Columbia Pictures

You know how this origin story goes — Peter Parker develops powers after having been bitten by a radioactive spider, he lives with his (newly hotcha) Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), and he devotes himself to a secret life of crime fighting after the murder of his Uncle Ben. Director Jon Watts (Cop Car) and his half dozen screenwriters know that you know all this, and thankfully skip over unnecessary explanations to dump us right into Peter's life as a junior superhero and sophomore in high school. While Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker was a figure of melodramatic grandeur and Andrew Garfield's was a dashing romantic lead, Tom Holland's comes off as an actual kid, albeit a jarringly toned one.

This Peter is as much a flailing fanboy of the Avengers as he is an aspiring member, waiting to be summoned up to the big leagues by reluctant mentor Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) or the industrialist's delegated point of contact Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), though both are more likely to ignore his calls. The film does its dutiful genuflecting to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but Peter's aspirations are less interesting as indicators of future movie installments than they are as any teenager's dreams of being able to skip past all the humiliating BS of adolescence and dive right into adulthood. Because as teens, Peter and his bestie Ned (Jacob Batalon) are crushingly uncool, which says a lot when they attend a magnet school in which everyone, even the bully Flash Thompson (Grand Budapest Hotel's Tony Revolori), is a big ol' overachieving nerd.

Peter (Tom Holland).

Chuck Zlotnick / Columbia Pictures

Who wouldn't choose the importance of saving the world over the realities of being an awkward high schooler who gets taunted as "Penis Parker"? Not that the world cooperates with Peter, who sneaks out at night to swing around Queens in costume looking to help out, but more often than not ends up doing things like giving directions to a lost elderly woman. When you've gone toe-to-toe with Captain America (Chris Evans, who shows up here for a series of very funny cameos), high school can be frustrating and boring — but then it can be frustrating and boring anyway, and Spider-Man: Homecoming really shines when it shows Peter as a guy whose exceptional powers don't excuse him from standard-issue high school problems.

And so Peter and Ned geek out over a 3,803-piece Lego Death Star, pine from afar for the beautiful senior Liz (Laura Harrier), and exchange quips with the snarky Michelle Jones (Zendaya, who will presumably be given more to do in the sequel). (In a welcome reflection of the actual borough, the student body is also not predominantly white). Spider-Man: Homecoming is the never-before-seen superhero movie in which academic decathlon doesn't just figure largely into the plot, but also enables the best set piece. When Ned discovers his friend's "Stark internship" is actually masked-vigilante work, all he wants most is to leverage the discovery in order to up their popularity, plotting out ways in which Spider-Man could appear at a party Liz throws and declare that he's Peter's pal.

Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), and Peter (Tom Holland).

Chuck Zlotnick / Columbia Pictures

It's such a potentially disastrous prospect that it's both a relief and disappointment when the plan gets derailed by superheroics, as Peter gets drawn away to the scene of a sinister deal involving alien tech-enhanced weapons and a memorable, if briefly seen, Donald Glover. At times, Spider-Man: Homecoming resembles nothing more than if Paul Feig and Judd Apatow's revered TV series Freaks and Geeks kept getting rescued from its most memorably excruciating moments by action sequences.

That can't be an accident given that one of Spider-Man: Homecoming's six writers is Freaks and Geeks star John Francis Daley (another cast member, Martin Starr, turns up as a teacher onscreen). But it's also the reason the movie loses rather than gains momentum as it goes on. Its depictions of teenage social mechanics are so fond and so genuine — from the agonizing car rides with parental figures to parties to the thrill and terror of asking someone to a dance — that the unavoidable showdown with the movie's baddie can't help but feel routine in comparison.

And that's even with a villain, played by a magnetic Michael Keaton, who's a pretty good one for once — Adrian Toomes, aka the Vulture, a disgruntled New York City salvage-company owner turned thief and weapons dealer (and lightly coded Trump voter, just tell me I'm wrong). Adrian is pretty small-time, for a Marvel baddie, just a guy intent on maintaining his family's upper-middle class quality of life rather than doing anything more ambitious and irrational like taking over the planet. But then the film's version of Spider-Man is carefully positioned as small-time too — "street level," as various characters in the film put it.

Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton).

Chuck Zlotnick / Columbia Pictures

Keaton's played a superhero before, as well as an actor famous for playing a superhero, and as a mechanical wing–sporting supervillain, he's great precisely because he doesn't play his character as anything other than a flesh-and-blood man. Heading up a criminal team that includes Michael Chernus, Logan Marshall-Green, and Bokeem Woodbine, Keaton positions Adrian as a self-mythologizing working-class bootstrapper who insists that all he's doing is defending the business he built. He's a decent foil for Spider-Man, this resentful, rationalizing adult going up against a precocious, eggheaded boy. To watch the two characters together is to wish they spent less time fighting and more time verbally sparring.

Their battles look like the stuff of so many other recent franchise flicks, all CGI and visual incoherence, a blur of impossible action in which it's hard to invest. But their banter fits in with the teen-movie tendencies that Spider-Man: Homecoming otherwise largely abandons in its conclusion in favor of MCU business. When they talk, Adrian becomes the assistant principal in The Breakfast Club, the dean in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (which gets an explicit nod in the film), the domineering, blithely condescending grown-up talking down to the kid he doesn't actually see. If his clashes with the film's hero feel increasingly rote, it's because he's not nearly as intimidating in his Vulture gear as he is out of it. In costume, he's just another colorful baddie to be taken down. But out of it, he's the monster sheltered by the structures of adulthood, the bully normalized and hidden in plain sight — a thoroughly effective teen-movie nightmare.

The ghost in A Ghost Story.

Bret Curry / A24

Casey Affleck dies and is transformed into a ghost early in A Ghost Story. He doesn't become a glowering ghoul or see-through specter, but a ghost by way of the Halloween costumes in It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown — a guy in a sheet with two holes cut out for eyes. It's a daringly cute image on which to hang a movie dealing with nothing less than the nature of existence. It's eminently shareable, an easily understood visual joke.

It seems at first like a way to create some ironic distance from the big ideas A Ghost Story goes on to tackle, to hedge about the sincerity with which the film takes on death, love, and the feeling of being dwarfed by the immensity of the universe. How serious can a story about eternity be when it's being channeled through an IRL emoji that haunts the shabby, comfy Austin house that Affleck's character, listed only as "C," used to share with his now-bereft wife, "M" (Rooney Mara)?

Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck in A Ghost Story.

A24

But A Ghost Story is absolutely serious — a wondrous, delicate shell of a movie that writer/director David Lowery made quietly and on the cheap after finishing Pete's Dragon for Disney. Its drollness is part of the miraculous balancing act it pulls off in transmitting its huge themes through humble imagery, from the ramshackle rental in which it mostly takes place to the scene in which M tries to numb her grief by eating pie until she's sick. It's a wide-reaching film told in miniature, one that seems guided as much by Instagram aesthetics as it does philosophy. It's told so small that its scale becomes key to its message.

How is the story of an aspiring musician who dies in a car crash and is mourned by his spouse supposed to support grand leaps into the future and into the past, not to mention a beer-fueled monologue about how the planet, the galaxy, and everything beyond it will ultimately be destroyed, all traces of humanity along with it? Then again, why would it not? A Ghost Story's verging-on-cutesiness is its way of engaging with the overpowering ordinariness that marks most of our actual encounters with towering concepts like mortality and the terrifying forward trudge of time.

When M is called into the morgue to identify the body of her husband, she gazes in stunned silence at his face for a long minute before awkwardly but perfectly covering him back up with the sheet that will become his uniform in the afterlife. She and C lived a perfectly average post-hipster life in a ramshackle house over which they had a perfectly average fight — she was ready to move (he wasn't), lingering in a space she felt they had outgrown. And then he was gone, leaving her to grapple with the pain and the idea of losing someone forever and eventually moving on, leaving a lonesome ghost behind.

A24

If A Ghost Story resembles any existing movies, it's Ghost as filtered through the sensibility of Don Hertzfeldt, the Oscar-nominated animator who populates his ambitious, devastatingly deadpan work with stick figures. But there really is something about its combination of winking overreach and genuine intimacy that brings to mind Instagram, and not just because of how it opts for a nearly square frame with rounded corners, like an old-timey filter placed over a modern-day photo. A Ghost Story is built around static shots that recall stills, especially in the beginning, when they keep fading to black and coming up to reveal the ghost standing motionless in some new corner of the house, observing the world he's no longer a part of.

The Instagram comparison isn't intended to diminish A Ghost Story, which is a wistful, wry, practically quintessential fable. Rather, it speaks to the gap the film engages with between the essential stuff of our lives and how inadequate our attempts at documenting it look from the outside, where it has a tendency to look small, or worse, interchangeable — just part of the flow of carefully curated photos of milestones and pretty sunsets. Can love be signified with a shot of two people in bed? That image is a standard of social media, one that A Ghost Story presents a particularly sublime variation of early on when C and M kiss half-asleep after having been woken up in the night. It's a scene the film returns to later, at which point it becomes heartbreaking, while remaining essentially the same image.

A home looking cozy from the street with its lights on during early evening, the fall of snow outside a window — the ghost itself, trudging home across a field, even ends up inadvertently re-creating a common bridal shot, the sheet stretching out like a train behind him as he walks across green grass. A passed-down piano, a song recorded on a computer that outlasts the person who wrote it, a snapshot pinned on a fridge with a magnet — how do you express the meaning these things can accrue when, to other people, they're just the detritus of someone else's existence?

Bret Curry / A24

Maybe it's impossible, or maybe we just have to accept that our lives, with all their pain and joy, might always look silly and standard when held up against the vastness of existence — the drinks shared outdoors on the stairs while the stars turn above. It's in that gap that A Ghost Story exists, when it, with terrifying ease, lets time slip by until there's a whole new set of people in the house, and then another, glimpsed in photogenic Christmases and house parties until everything gets knocked down and built again.

And the ghost, increasingly threadbare, shifts from a ridiculous image to one that's sad and profound — this mute figure who observes how short and small his life was compared with the grand reach of human existence, and who accepts its worth anyway. That's the kind of message you might roll your eyes at in an Instagram caption, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Columbia Pictures

The greatest Michael Keaton moment in Spider-Man: Homecoming is the one in which his character, Adrian Toomes, turns and slings his arm over the back of the passenger seat of his car and threatens Peter Parker (Tom Holland). It's a position assumed by adults about to lecture kids they've driven around for time immemorial. Keaton's delivery really seals the deal, the way he tells the 15-year-old in his backseat that "I'll kill you and everybody you love — I'll kill you dead," and the line manages to land halfway between criminal menace and parental chastisement.

Then he tacks this can-you-believe-it face waggle to the end of his bit about "of all the reasons I didn't want my daughter to date," as if they're two grown men chatting on the same level, as if he hadn't just promised murder if Peter doesn't walk away. Adrian's just figured out the guy taking his daughter Liz (Laura Harrier) to homecoming also happens to be the superhero who's been getting in the way of his criminal enterprise. But the whole scene sells us on the idea that Liz's escort would be getting some kind of intimidating speech regardless of who he was. The fact that Peter is also Spider-Man is practically a convenience for Adrian, who gets to give a dad talk and a supervillain rant simultaneously.

Some villains are bent on operatic revenge, some long to watch the world burn, and some seem to show up because the heroes would have nothing to do otherwise. But Adrian Toomes, otherwise known as the Vulture, pulls off being one of the most memorable comic book movie baddies in recent memory by evoking a dread that hits closer to home. He's your friend's dickish dad, or, in Peter's case, something even more awkward: his crush's dickish dad, who treats handshakes with other guys as a test of manhood and whose expansive suburban house seems chosen to broadcast how impressive his own is.

Columbia Pictures

Adrian is the kind of dude who gets a kick out of jokily wielding a giant kitchen knife when Peter comes by to pick up Liz, but who also happens to have a serious cache of enhanced weaponry he's used to kill before. The overprotectiveness, anyway, doesn't seem directly related to fears about his daughter, who's shown to be smart, self-possessed, and well-aware of how dazzled and intimidated Peter is by her. No, the I-have-an-alien-shotgun routine is mostly posturing, an assertion of dominance, Adrian giving this polite young man the what-for while also seeming disappointed by how unnecessary it clearly is.

The best aspects of Spider-Man: Homecoming are pure teen movie, so it's only appropriate that the Vulture is a grown-up bully — one who, Walter White–style, rationalizes his illegal dealings as the actions of someone just trying to get by. In the film's prologue, Adrian makes his heel turn from salvage biz operator to crook when the cleanup he has a contract for gets snatched away from him by a new government initiative. His pleas about supporting his family and potentially losing his house have an urgency there that's gone by the time the movie catches up with him eight years later, but he's still trotting them out. It's to protect that family, he says, that he'd kill Peter, as well as to protect the illicit mini empire he's built — not an excuse that anyone's buying except maybe Adrian himself.

There's a thread of disgruntled Trump affiliation running through Adrian's concerns about, er, economic uncertainty, in the way his not-unjustified indignation of corporate-government collusion crushing his small business leads him down a road to darker choices. After being kicked off the job, he and his crew lounge in the dark, bitterly watching the news about how Stark Industries has basically taken their place in picking up the pieces of a war that Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) participated in — an effective bailout. In the words of one of Adrian's employees (Bokeem Woodbine), "The assholes who made this mess are getting paid to clean it up."

Chuck Zlotnick / Columbia Pictures

And yet when Adrian rants about the rich and powerful in his big monologue at the end of the film, he's not interested in righting their wrongs, but in partaking in their ability to grab as much for themselves as possible. He talks about himself as a member of the working class that the 1% ignores — "we build their roads and we fight all their wars and everything, and they don't care about us" — and yet what he seems to want most is to join their ranks. His final act as the Vulture isn't one of war but of greed, leaving his skirmish with Spider-Man behind to grab for the spoils of his ill-advised big job, a scoundrel Icarus trying to fly off on failing mechanical wings. Keaton is so good in the role because he's careful to present Adrian as not bloodthirsty, not cartoonish — just a tribalist who's decided that everything is justified if it's in the name of family.

Adrian Toomes is this poisoned patriarch, a man who has weaponized his resentment and his desire to do right by those close to him when what he's really doing is bolstering his own image as a provider and a success, to those around him and to the wife and daughter who have no idea what he's been up to. Which gives added sweetness to Peter as this boy being raised by a single woman, he and Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) shown muddling through how to tie a tie together with the help of YouTube instructionals when he has to get dressed up for the dance.

May's advice to her nephew on how to behave toward Liz — "open the door for her, tell her she looks nice, but not too much because that’s creepy" — stands in contrast to Adrian's quizzing, based as it is on the assumption that what he needs to know is how to treat the young woman with respect, not to be warned about what he can get away with. Spider-Man: Homecoming presents Peter Parker with a possible (if unreliable) father figure in Tony Stark, but it's really May who ends up being the best counterpart to Adrian, a parent intent on foremost making sure her charge grows up to be good.

Lily Collins as Ellen in To the Bone.

Netflix

Ellen, the 20-year-old played by Lily Collins in To the Bone, is a former Anorexia Tumblr celeb. She's an artist whose drawings about her body issues — like the one we glimpse of a gaunt young woman standing nude on a scale — nabbed her a devoted niche following right up until one of those fans killed herself and sent Ellen the suicide note.

The trailer for To the Bone, the directorial debut of longtime TV writer-producer-creator Marti Noxon, drummed up some fierce advance debate about what it means to responsibly depict anorexia on the screen. But the film itself (which Netflix has added a trigger warning in front of) is far from oblivious about the way imagery can be used to fuel self-harm.

Rather, To the Bone engages with this imagery directly, via Ellen, who's intimately familiar with the rituals, totems, and habits of the community she's long been a part of. Ellen doesn’t just understand the rituals and totems that can accompany an eating disorder — she's cast herself as a kind of living, breathing thinspo stereotype, a girl who can calculate the calorie count of a plate of food at a glance, and who habitually circles her upper arm with her hand, as if to make sure her fingers can touch.

Ellen is pretty and white and emaciated — when she strips down for a weigh-in, you could count her ribs. She subs diet soda and cigarettes for meals, and her parents are well-off enough to afford the treatment programs she gets checked into, only to be quickly kicked out for her snarky comments to fellow patients. In her messy bun and her eyeliner, she's like a nightmarish minor rock star of malnutrition, less out of happiness than habit, because it's an identity. If there was a point in which she drew satisfaction from the attention she's gotten from fellow "rexies," to cite the cringeworthy term used by a fellow patient, it's long gone.

Susan (Carrie Preston) and Ellen (Collins).

Gilles Mingasson / Netflix

What remaining relationships she has left — her loving but frustrated younger half sister Kelly (Liana Liberato), her stepmother Susan (Carrie Preston), and the father who never shows up onscreen — are brittle with strain. Her mother, Judy (Lili Taylor), a woman with mental health issues in her past, loves her troubled daughter but retreated to Phoenix with her partner, Olive (Brooke Smith), to give herself space.

Ellen lives in the garage, a college dropout consumed by her relationship with food, with her body, and with a revolving door of treatments. She's got nothing looming in her future except an ever-increasing likelihood of death. When Susan finagles her stepchild a place in a highly regarded inpatient program run by Dr. William Beckham (Keanu Reeves), it feels like a last chance.

Critics of the film are right in that Ellen is a terrible poster child for eating disorders. But then To the Bone is about, in part, how the whole concept of there being poster children for this struggle is a problem. In the movie, that's true both for those characters who look at Ellen as a fucked-up aspirational icon, and for viewers waiting for her character to gel into a textbook example of the "right" way to get better.

The idea that people (including one of the other patients at Threshold, Dr. Beckham's program) glamorize Ellen is portrayed as just as repellent as the parents who, blaming Ellen for their daughter's suicide, mailed her photos of the dead girl. "That lady said you're kind of famous," a younger fellow patient says when cornering Ellen in the bathroom, and Ellen's exasperation is as obvious as her inability to shed the constructed veneer of damaged cool.

A gathering of Threshold patients.

Gilles Mingasson / Netflix

To the Bone is much less interesting in its portrayal of treatment than it is in its spiky representation of Ellen's anorexia as a form of addiction. Netflix, which is streaming To the Bone, bought the movie at Sundance in January, and it features a lot of qualities, like quirk, that people have come to associate with the festival in ways that are not always complimentary. Its jokes are never too dark, its edges never too sharp, and its ending, while not exactly neat and easy, is comfortably hopeful. The half dozen other patients at Threshold, which is run out of a house in Los Angeles, reflect a continuing tendency for eating disorders to be portrayed as primarily the domain of young, privileged caucasity.

But not entirely — Kendra (Lindsey McDowell), at least, is neither white nor straight nor underweight; Megan (Leslie Bibb) is older and navigating an unexpected pregnancy; and Lucas (Alex Sharp) is a boy, a garrulous ballet dancer who had a breakdown after an injury. Lucas's flirtation with Ellen gives some spark to otherwise predictable interpatient bonding, interpatient infighting, and kind but tough speeches from Reeves.

His character, Dr. Beckham, is the kind of hip physician who swears, who's not afraid to shout slogans in public, and who takes his charges on a field trip to LACMA's Rain Room so they can sway while the music swells and revel in being alive. The sequence strains for a magic it never achieves in the same way Beckham strains to be more than a source of handsome encouragement.

It's nothing revolutionary, To the Bone. But whenever it shows its impatience with focusing on causes of anorexia and bulimia and beyond, rather than how to manage and recover from them, it feels personal and messily electric. The film acknowledges that there are many, many pressures that can lead someone to an eating disorder, while remaining alive with anger at the reductionism of drawing a direct line to any one of them.

Dr. Beckham (Keanu Reeves) and Ellen (Collins).

Gilles Mingasson / Netflix

When Ellen mocks a girl for complaining about the contradictory messaging from magazines — "Society's to blame! The world is so unfair! — she's being an undeniable bitch, and yet you can see why her resentment has built up. Throughout the film, others float the possibility that her eating disorder stems from a desire to look good, repressed lesbianism, her dad's neglect, her mom's mental breakdowns, as if a mention of the right reason would suddenly snap her back into health.

Ellen can't explain why she does what she does, but she is not immune to the promise that there's some quick solution to her pain either, waiting on Dr. Beckham to supply magic words that don't exist, and furious to learn that he has no fix for her beyond her needing to genuinely want to get better. That may not be the lesson everyone in her situation needs to learn, but it's clearly one that Noxon did.

Noxon drew from her own experiences with an eating disorder in making the film, and while the film isn't directly autobiographical, it's at its best when it feels specific — the story of one person's experiences rather than a broadside about eating disorders as an impossible whole. Ultimately the most resonant message To the Bone has to offer is that there is no one certain way to heal from anorexia, and no one right way to tell stories about it either.