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Anna (Naomi Ackie) and Katherine (Florence Pugh) in Lady Macbeth.

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After she's married, Katherine (Florence Pugh) starts each day being woken up and cinched into a corset and cage crinoline. Then she's helped into a dress — her signature frock is cobalt blue and pinned with a brooch at the neck. And then she sits on a settee in a parlor in sleepy, stupefying boredom, watching the clock tick away until she can go through the whole dressing process in reverse and then find out if her husband, Alexander (Paul Hilton), will try to impregnate her that night.

Alexander is a stranger to her, a man old enough to be her father and one who treats her with open contempt. He's the browbeaten child of a tyrannical landowner named Boris (Christopher Fairbank), and he baldly reminds Katherine that his father bought her to bear heirs to his son. In that, Boris is out of luck — aside from some brusque acts of sexual humiliation, Alexander hasn't touched his child bride.

Katherine's is a miserable, oppressive Victorian existence, one in which she's treated as the equivalent of both an ignored ornament and a brood animal. But as the title of her movie, Lady Macbeth, suggests, Katherine is ready to wreck some shit. The film is a corrosive, intelligent costume drama from first-time director William Oldroyd, and it isn't Shakespearean at all — it's based on a Russian novella by Nikolai Leskov, though the action's been transported over to 1800s Northumberland.

Katherine soon sets about kicking down patriarchal dictates and chasing her own budding desires with an admirable recklessness. Her rage is glorious, incandescent, and entirely self-concerned — she's perfectly comfortable stepping on the necks of those she outranks or, if need be, stepping over their dead bodies. And in Lady Macbeth, while it's white men to whom the world belongs, the people whom Katherine has power over are mostly black.

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Katherine (Pugh) on her wedding day.

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It's a coincidence that Lady Macbeth arrives in theaters so soon after Sofia Coppola's exquisite, myopic The Beguiled, a historical drama that takes place during roughly the same time period in Civil War–torn Virginia. But it's a serendipitous one. The Beguiled, after all, has been criticized for its decision to excise a slave character (a choice director Sofia Coppola recently defended) and, in doing so, to effectively exclude race from its depiction of the dynamics of a group of genteel Southern women who take in a wounded Union soldier. Lady Macbeth does the opposite, inserting race into a 19th-century England so habitually portrayed as all white onscreen that projects about actual famous figures of color from the era have had trouble getting made.

The sketch Lady Macbeth offers of a rural society divided into strata on the basis of race as well as gender and class gives the film a contemporary-feeling jolt, though maybe it shouldn't — as Oldroyd has pointed out, assumptions about the era's racial uniformity have more to do with traditions in media than historical research. Race is never mentioned out loud in Lady Macbeth. Very little is mentioned out loud in Lady Macbeth, a movie fond of beautiful static shots to foment a sense of claustrophobia and long silences under which emotions roils. But it's there onscreen, complicating the story of its antihero's struggle to carve out a better life for herself at the cost of those intended to use her, and those she ends up using.

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Anna (Naomi Ackie) and Katherine (Pugh).

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It's there, in particular, in the form of Anna (Naomi Ackie), the long-suffering maid whose responsibility it is to tend to Katherine. Anna is Katherine's most frequent companion, the person tasked with yanking Katherine's corset tight in the morning and sitting up with her in the evening to keep her awake for her indifferent husband. And yet the power is entirely on Katherine's side.

When Katherine begins testing the boundaries of her circumscribed wedded life during a giddy window of liberation when both Boris and Alexander are traveling, she discovers that no one else has authority over her, though they might have to shoulder the blame and face consequences for her behavior. She starts small, taking walks on the moors when she's been told to stay inside and drinking all of Boris's favorite wine, but her insurrections escalate into taking a lover and, not long afterward, murder.

And through it all, Anna is there, Katherine delighting in all but daring the servant to inform the world about her various delinquencies, and to face whatever the consequences might be for defying the progressively more frightening young woman she answers to.

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Katherine (Pugh) and Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis).

Roadside Attractions

Katherine allows the handsome, brutish, ethnically ambiguous groomsman Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis) into her bed and lets Anna discover her nude in the morning, basking in satisfaction at her own boldness. Anna has more reasons to be shocked than her young mistress's open, giggling infidelity — Sebastian was one of the workers on the estate who, not long before, got a laugh out of stripping Anna and hoisting her like a pig for weighing, with rape strongly implied.

Sebastian first caught Katherine's eye when she put a stop to the incident, not out of concern for her maid but because she wanted to flex her power by telling the men they were wasting her husband's money by fooling around. It's one grim little meet-cute, and meanwhile Anna hurries away to weep on the stairs, with no expectation of justice meted on her behalf.

Katherine is an impetuous girl who starts blowing things up because she can, and who becomes truly terrifying and tragic only when the idea of a happy ending, a previous impossibility in her dire situation, flits tantalizingly if improbably into view. Pugh, who’s now 21, is blisteringly great in her breakout role, fascinating and unlikable and oh so young — the lady of the house as defiant teenager.

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Katherine (Pugh) and Boris (Christopher Fairbank).

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When Boris berates his daughter-in-law for her poorly hidden affair, he sounds like nothing so much as an enraged dad yelling at his recalcitrant kid — “Do you have any idea of the damage you’re capable of doing to this family?” he roars. He might as well be handing her the keys to the castle in reminding her that it's in everyone else's best interests to affirm her blamelessness. She might get degraded and treated like an object, but she enjoys a level of societal protection that Anna never has.

Like The Beguiled, Lady Macbeth is about power and the performed innocence of white womanhood. But in enriching its drama with race, Oldroyd's film demonstrates just how much Coppola's missed out on in contorting itself in its attempts to make gender dynamics its only axis. Lady Macbeth's main character slides from exhilarating outrageousness to painful monstrousness, a journey that's illuminated by how her resentment at her own mistreatment fails to give her any empathy to those she in turn mistreats — to Anna, to later arrivals Agnes (Golda Rosheuvel) and Teddy (Anton Palmer), and even to Sebastian, who starts to pull away from his aristocratic lover when her demands get more ruthless. Katherine's acts of go-girl vengeance are soured not just by their increasing viciousness, but by the way she flexes the advantages she has over others.

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Which is an idea that's never better summed up than in the sequence in which Katherine murders her father-in-law, poisoning him at breakfast and then serenely barricading him in another room to die. Anna is with her the entire time, Katherine ordering her to sit, trembling, and make small talk over the sounds of Boris in agony. It’s a shoot-the-moon approach to homicide, so hilariously outrageous that no one could believe in her guilt, but the giddy audacity of Katherine's act is mitigated by Anna's obvious trauma at being made an unwilling accomplice.

Katherine has such confidence in the other woman's comparative powerlessness and vulnerability that she renders Anna mute through seeming sheer strength of will, unable to spill Katherine's secrets or to defend herself. The empowerment Katherine finds at that moment literally comes at the cost of a black woman's voice — an act of silencing that could be a critique of Coppola's act of erasure.

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Soldiers on a pier in Dunkirk.

Warner Bros. Pictures

It's the damnedest thing, the way Christopher Nolan's monumental new World War II movie uses its actors. They're utilities, really, place markers. Dunkirk doesn't have characters so much as it has familiar faces there for orientation purposes. Which is helpful, in a film that jumps between three locales and three different time frames to depict the famous evacuation of British troops from the beaches of Northern France. There is, for instance, Tom Hardy in a single-seat fighter plane out over the English Channel in the section set in the air, wearing an oxygen mask (dude loves a mask) that reduces him to a pair of eloquently worried eyes for most of the runtime.

There's Cillian Murphy getting pulled out of the water, wide-eyed with shell shock, onto one of the hundreds of private boats that were requisitioned to help get as many men as possible home from the coastal city where they'd been surrounded by German forces. There's pop star Harry Styles, in his movie debut, tucked into the group of men who have to swim back to land after their ship is bombed. His character, one of three pointy brunette boys who end up casting their lots together while speaking almost not at all, is listed as "Alex," a name which, if it was mentioned at all onscreen, I never caught. Murphy's character gets no name at all — he's just "Shivering Soldier."

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Tom Hardy

Warner Bros. Pictures

Aneurin Barnard, Kenneth Branagh, James D'Arcy, Tom Glynn-Carney, Barry Keoghan, Jack Lowden, Mark Rylance, and Fionn Whitehead are in there as well, playing men who might have names or might not — there's not a lot of interest in exposition and introductions. Rylance plays a civilian sailor who, with his son (Glynn-Carney) and another boy (Keoghan), heads into dangerous waters to help with the rescue effort. Lowden is one of the pilots to accompany Hardy on the flight toward France. Branagh is a navy commander and D'Arcy is an army colonel, the two overseeing the agonizingly slow evacuation from a pier that's an occasional target for German bombers. They all provide points of view on a massive effort.

Dunkirk isn't indifferent to individuals so much as it takes place on a scale not meant to accommodate them — it's focus is too wide, IMAX-wide if you can swing it and have the film fill your field of vision. It's a war movie that pushes back against all the usual expectations of war movies, with their focus on a humanizing backstory and distinguishing acts of bravery which set someone apart from the crowd, those tried-and-true ways to emphasize which deaths matter. You never see the faces of German soldiers on screen in Dunkirk, or bother with much context on the greater conflict. It isn't the story of a victory but of a miraculous escape, in the wake of what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called "a colossal military disaster." Its constant, nerve-racking tension comes from its three levels of adrenaline-addled immediacy.

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Tom Glynn-Carney and Cillian Murphy.

Warner Bros. Pictures

Dunkirk is a film that does its thinking on the level of militaries and nations rather than of men on the ground. It transmit the desperate math of a situation in which there are 400,000 man on that shore, and that the optimistic number they hope to get out before Axis troops close in is 45,000. The breadth of the first shot — in which Dunkirk shows the beach, broad and speckled with foam and filled with soldiers lined up for boats that have been coming slowly — is stunning and terrifying at once. It's an image of a mass of men who are less than 50 miles from home but who have no way to close the distance, an army trying to hold itself together as a larger organism instead of a group of frantic humans clawing to survive.

This approach might sound chilly, but Dunkirk turns out to be one of the best things Nolan has ever done, a cerebral act of shock and awe that plays into all of his strengths as a filmmaker. Characters have never been one of them, aside from the obsessive men he adores in ways that indicate they're the only figures onscreen he really relates to, attempting to fit worlds around them rather than the other way around. There's a reason Nolan's greatest film, The Prestige, is the one that doesn't try to normalize the monstrous sacrifices its dueling protagonists make for their craft. In Dunkirk, there aren't really characters, and there's no space for families, love interests, or the other human dramas Nolan can barely pretend to take interest in. In Dunkirk, obsession makes sense, because all of its characters are united in the same large-scale goal.

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Fionn Whitehead

Warner Bros. Pictures

Dunkirk suggests just how much pulling back suits Nolan, and not just in the grandeur of big shots like the one in which a slew of soldiers' faces gaze fearfully up at an approaching enemy aircraft, but in terms of emotion. The film is constructed like a WWII answer to Inception — another puzzle box in which the story of the fighter planes takes place over an hour, the story of the small boats takes place over a day, and the story of the army on the beach takes place over a week. The way they're cut together, intersecting at different points and showing us the same events from different perspectives, might come across as a distancing gimmick in a film driven by characters. But Dunkirk is driven by action, and its temporal complexity allows it to be about action and waiting at the same time, a ticking-clock sound underlying scenes and serving as a motif in Hans Zimmer's score.

Where other war movies tend to instinctively close in on personal stories, Dunkirk attempts to grapple, sometimes almost in the abstract, with what it means to be part of a collective, to be just one of a sea of uniformed bodies presented in battle. For the young men on the beach, played by Barnard, Styles, and Whitehead, it's a terrifying prospect, as they search for a way to not be in the part of the army that, they're sure, is set to be captured or killed. For Hardy up above and Rylance down on the water it's inspiring, urging them into feats of potential sacrifice for the greater good. If anything, that's what Dunkirk is about — what it means to go against all animal instincts of personal survival to risk your life for a community.

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Dunkirk

Warner Bros. Pictures

When it arrives at its ending, the flicker of sentimentality present in its salute to the stiff upper lip of different figures in different strata is both surprising and earned. Dunkirk is a film that indicates the tide coming in by showing bodies washing on shore, and that finds its greatest moment of grace in a man coasting knowingly toward doom. It isn't a standard war movie, but it sure is some beautiful, difficult thing.

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Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets; Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element.

STX Entertainment; Columbia Pictures

It's been twenty years since Luc Besson's The Fifth Element. Twenty years since Milla Jovovich was regrown from a severed hand and strapped into a Jean Paul Gaultier bandage outfit, ate multiple whole chickens, and decided the ideal person to teach her the universe-saving power of love was Bruce Willis. Twenty years since what might well be the most fabulously, weirdly extravagant science fiction movie of all time.

And while Besson's new film, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, isn't good, necessarily, it is extremely Fifth Element-like, from the filmmaker's generally Euro-flavored style to the distinctive costuming, from the wild imagination to the wildly underwhelming romance. Here are six of the reasons Valerian is poised to fill that Fifth Element-shaped hole in your heart.

1. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets cost even more than The Fifth Element, which was, in 1997, the most pricey European film ever made.

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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

STX Entertainment

Yes, that's adjusted for inflation (an original $90 million). Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets came in at a reported $180 million, making it the quite possibly the most spendiest indie of all time, and it's all there onscreen. All of it. It starts on a planet of supermodel-lithe pastel aliens who live in shells, wash their faces in pearls, and immediately get blown up. It's mainly set on Alpha, a space station 30 million strong, having grown over decades into a space for thousands of different human and alien cultures. There are a lot of expensive movies these days, but few of them look and feel as opulent as Valerian does, like there were no economic limits on the galaxies it was able to dream up.

2. Valerian, like The Fifth Element, is a movie about saving the world that can't seem to help drifting toward vacation.

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Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne).

STX Entertainment

Chalk it up to the general air of exorbitance. In The Fifth Element, Leeloo (Jovovich) and Korben (Willis) end up on the luxury space liner the Fhloston Paradise for reasons unimportant (what matters is that they get to hang out with Chris Tucker's outrageous talk show host Ruby Rhod). In Valerian, Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne) are supposed to save Alpha but keep getting mired in interstellar red light districts and a giant multidimensional swap meet in the desert that they dress up for like it's space Coachella. Valerian has an even more garbled plot and less forward momentum than The Fifth Element does, but its digressions are way more fun than its main action anyway — like the subplot in which Laureline gets forced into a white dress and huge hat by blobby aliens who have her offer up the contents of her skull as an appetizer for their fussy emperor. Or when Laureline has to stick her head inside a giant psychic jellyfish. (In Valerian, everyone only wants Delevingne for her brain.)

3. Valerian also shares The Fifth Element's dizzying sense of space.

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STX Entertainment

In The Fifth Element, Leeloo jumped off a ledge and into Korben's taxi for a chase that took them darting through the dozens of layers of flying traffic in futuristic New York City. Valerian does that sequence one better by having its title character ram through a wall and then crash rapidly through different layers in Alpha. He plunges through extraterrestrial orchards and underwater settlements and leaps into and out of a dozen different mini worlds the movie barely lets you see before sending Valerian spinning out into space. Action sequences should make use of as many dimensions as possible. And in that aforementioned swap-meet segment, there's a whole extra one the characters can only see when wearing special glasses. The result is a chase that takes place over a barren landscape in one dimension and a warren of cluttered city streets in another, with Valerian's arm stuck in a portable transporter in the former so that he can use his gun in the latter. It's as odd as it is innovative.

4. Which is good because the romance remains dismal.

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DeHaan and Delevingne in Valerian.

STX Entertainment

The love story in Valerian may not be as jarring as then-42-year-old Willis wooing then-22-year-old Jovovich, who was playing a physically perfect being who was also basically a newborn. But it's about as unconvincing, with DeHaan playing a character who's supposed to be a womanizing swashbuckler and Delevingne playing the hypercompetent, hypereducated partner who puts up a show of resisting her partner's charms. The two come across as terribly…mini for these seen-it-all roles, like high schoolers putting on a production of His Girl Friday. The film is based on a French comic book series that presumably had more ramp up to its romance, but in Valerian, the flirty-bickering relationship feels like someone skipped to the end of a prolonged will-they-or-won't-they, with Valerian proposing marriage early on in a way that's as abrupt and chemistry-free as Korben defeating the forces of evil with a declaration of love.

5. But the point isn't the stories — it's the worlds, which are dazzling.

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Valerian

STX Entertainment

In Valerian, Besson treats Alpha as an extension of the teemingly diverse and dense vision of New York he presented in The Fifth Element. The space station, with even more alien races and even less structure, is a multi-species settlement that's distinctly organic and messy — humanity's place in the system, under a commander played by Clive Owen, is central but no longer guaranteed to be ascendent. It's a place where absurdity and wonder go hand in hand, and the film fills its screen to the brim with eye-catching imagery that's gone before we really have time to take it in — from the massive underwater creatures on which those jellyfish grow to the fishermen hunting for prey off a cliffside using butterflies as bait. So much of Valerian's and Laureline's scrabbling to save Alpha from a disaster involving possible terrorism feels tiresome because what we really want is to spend time on Alpha when it's not in danger of being destroyed.

6. Also Rihanna is the ultimate Fifth Element-worthy spectacle.

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Rihanna as Bubble in Valerian.

STX Entertainment

In terms of the size and scope of her role, she's the equivalent of Diva Plavalaguna, the alien opera singer played by Maïwenn Le Besco in the 1997 movie. But despite the briefness of her time on screen, Rihanna is the movie's greatest special effect, both because of the digital morphing she does during her dance number and because she's, you know, Rihanna. As a character named Bubble, she does a pole dance in which she shapeshifts into different looks, from French maid to schoolgirl to Cabaret to Marilyn Monroe. The film stops dead in admiration, and so should anyone viewing it. It doesn't matter how unnecessary the full number is to the larger plot — you don't watch The Fifth Element for its storytelling, you watch it for its joyous, ridiculous sense of place and style, and that's doubly true for Valerian — a movie that isn't nearly as memorable, but that works just fine as a tribute.

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Dina (Tiffany Haddish), Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith), Ryan (Regina Hall), and Sasha (Queen Latifah) in Girls Trip.

Michele K. Short / Universal Pictures

Girls Trip is a funny, filthy comedy that has given the world both a mini Set It Off reunion, and the year's best fruit-assisted blow-job joke. The movie has made over $42 million in its first week in theaters, the biggest box office opening in director Malcolm D. Lee's career. It’s also the latest reminder of the power of black female-driven stories and black female audiences — a lesson Hollywood's been taught many, many times before, but has retained about as well as Leonard in Memento. Girls Trip isn't just a financial success. It's managed to be a hit in a summer in which other heavily promoted, star-laden, R-rated comedies have floundered.

There's something else Girls Trip offers that shouldn't be discounted at a moment in which decade-spanning friendships have tended to be treated like burdens. Written by Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver, Girls Trip is about longtime pals who still actually like each other, which comes as a relief after having to endure some more self-lacerating recent frenemy ensembles. Like, say, Friends From College, the Netflix Original series that premiered a week before Girls Trip, and that also centers on the sometimes bawdy adventures of a group of fortysomethings, in this case ones who met as undergrads at Harvard.

Friends From College was created by Forgetting Sarah Marshall filmmaker Nicholas Stoller and his wife Francesca Delbanco, and features a bunch of likable performers, among them Keegan-Michael Key as author Ethan, Cobie Smulders as his lawyer wife Lisa, and Nat Faxon as trust-funder Nick. The show itself, however, is a conspicuously sour experience about characters who seem to secretly loathe one another, but who stay close because it's a way of holding onto the past — maintaining outgrown friendships like clothes that no longer fit, but cannot be thrown away.

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Sam (Annie Parisse), Nick (Nat Faxon), Ethan (Keegan-Michael Key), Lisa (Cobie Smulders), Marianne (Jae Suh Park), Max (Fred Savage), and Felix (Billy Eichner) in Friends From College.

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Then there are the characters of Rough Night, a movie from earlier this summer that's being compared to Girls Trip for reasons merited (it, too, is about a bunch of female college friends who reunite for a getaway) and not (they kill someone and spend most of the movie trying to cover it up). The pals in Lucia Aniello's directorial debut — aspiring state senator Jess (Scarlett Johansson), kindergarten teacher Alice (Jillian Bell), activist Frankie (Ilana Glazer), and socialite and soon-to-be divorcé Blair (Zoë Kravitz) — are over a decade younger than the ones in Friends From College and Girls Trip, but are already sick of each other.

Well, except for Pippa (Kate McKinnon), a stray Australian who Jess befriended on a semester abroad — a stranger to the friend group that the territorial Alice immediately treats as a threat. When they're brought together for a bachelorette party in Miami ahead of Jess's wedding, their initial intimacy is forced. It takes booze, coke, and involuntary manslaughter to really break the ice between the four women who no longer have much in common beyond their dorm-room days.

Few people count on holding onto every friend they make in their teens and early twenties, no matter how many bong rip–fueled proclamations of "forever" are made at the time. A reality of friendship is that people grow at different paces, they drift apart, and sometimes they lose touch, periodically or for good. But what Friends From College and Rough Night end up suggesting in their acts of self-laceration is that grown-up friendships are immature, that there's little room for them in a real adult life, which ought to be consumed by work and romance and family.

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Blair (Zoë Kravitz), Frankie (Ilana Glazer), Jess (Scarlett Johansson), Pippa (Kate McKinnon), and Alice (Jillian Bell) in Rough Night.

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In Rough Night, Alice's attempts to stay close to her bestie Jess are presented as intrusive and a bit sad — the acts of a single woman with an indifferent career and time on her hands, someone who's trying to cling to a friend who no longer really has space for her. The two women do eventually have it out and manage their "aw" moment of reconciliation, but the movie itself never seems to settle on whether it's laughing with Alice or at her.

In Friends From College, the dysfunctional closeness of the main group is a symbol and a symptom of the ways in which the characters keep one foot in the past, unwilling to fully commit to the lives they've established since those days of infinite promise. There are two non-Harvard significant others, Max's (Fred Savage) boyfriend Dr. Felix Forzenheim (Billy Eichner), and Sam's (Annie Parisse) wealthy husband John (Greg Germann), who stand on the outside of the friend group looking in with thinly disguised impatience or skeptical amusement, expressing what the series takes for granted — that these people are holding each other back with entanglements that are portrayed as bad habits.

The women of Girls Trip — self-help luminary Ryan (Regina Hall), journalist Sasha (Queen Latifah), nurse and single mom Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith), and office worker Dina (Tiffany Haddish) — were an inseparable crew in college, too. The Flossy Posse, complete with matching necklaces, were a dance floor–conquering Florida A&M foursome who got tugged apart in the years following school by the demands of their respective adult lives.

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Girls Trip

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When they reunite for the first time in five years, at Essence Fest in New Orleans, their raunchy adventures eventually give way to an airing of grievances about wrongs that were done and resentments that have cropped up. But their reconciliations are deeply sincere, if occasionally rushed (why did Sasha have to shamedly kill off her site?!), an affirmation of the value of these relationships. There's nothing embarrassing about the Posse in Girls Trip, which depicts the friendships these characters have sustained not as vestigial remnants, but as a guiding force toward being true to oneself.

Girls Trip, Friends From College, and Rough Night take different approaches to grown-up comedy — one's straightforward and a touch sentimental, one's dark, and one's half drama. But there's a sense of liberation to Girls Trip that Friends From College and Rough Night can't come close to, and it has nothing to do with its take on the genre. Girls Trip is genuinely fond of its main ladies and invested in their successes, while Friends From College and Rough Night struggle to calibrate how apologetic they should be for their own characters' privilege.

Friends From College is a series that's not as dire as the reviews might make it seem, but which does come across as maddeningly undecided as to how much it wants viewers to dislike its incestuous, self-rationalizing collection of Ivy Leaguers. Rough Night, too, comes across as a savage satire of (mostly) white-girl privilege that was then reworked into something more like Bridesmaids — that its characters literally get away with murder isn't the problem so much as the fact that the movie also lets them off the hook for so much else.

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Rough Night

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It's not as if status, a maybe inextricable part of a story about college, isn't a part of Girls Trip too. Sasha hides how broke she is while keeping the tags on her clothes so that she can return them, and Ryan pretends to believe her husband Stewart (Mike Colter) when he says he's no longer cheating on her so that they can maintain their image as a perfect power couple. But the image management its characters do is a lot more loaded, shaped by an awareness of respectability politics while not buying into them. That's especially true for Ryan, who feels she's had to make painful personal compromises in order to achieve mainstream success and look like the "right" kind of black celebrity to land a business deal with white-led conglomerate.

All of which makes the climax of the movie bold in a way that underscores a certain conservatism of the views of adulthood in Friends From College and Rough Night. Ryan doesn't choose her friendships over her marriage, but she allows her friendships to guide her back to her truth. She lets go of the need to pretend to have a traditionally perfect life, and lets herself believe in the resonance of her life as it is — not as part of a have-it-all illusion, but as something messy and real. Her final voiceover, in which she describes her relationships with the Posse as a through line in a life in which romantic relationships and career circumstances can change, isn't just moving — it's meaningful. Theirs are friendships you actually want to root for — and what a relief that is.

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Charlize Theron as Lorraine Broughton and Sofia Boutella as Delphine Lasalle in Atomic Blonde.

Jonathan Prime / Focus Features

Atomic Blonde is a brutal, stylish action movie in which Charlize Theron beats up KGB agents and has showy, aestheticized sex with Sofia Boutella.

If this were the '80s — the decade during which the film takes place — that setup would read like one intended to play to a grimy theater full of dudes who turned up to see a beautiful leading lady kill Soviets and woman-on-woman action. But in 2017, a female-centric action saga featuring queer romance sounds more like the stuff of empowerment than exploitation, presuming it's done right (on top of that, “Russia” is a pretty emotionally loaded term these days). Just goes to show how what might be nationalistic, gazey trash in one decade can be reworked into a morally ambiguous milestone of representation in another.

But the reality is that Atomic Blonde is neither a reactionary neo-exploitation flick nor a boldly feminist landmark — nor is it the kind of film that wants you to think about anything at all. At a moment in which everything lends itself to a political reading, there's something reassuring about the way the movie's slick surfaces repel such attempts. The film, which comes from stuntman–turned–John Wick director David Leitch, could really bring the country together in appreciation of the straightforward gratification of cool clothes, pretty people, and breathtakingly choreographed violence.

Atomic Blonde features some of the most on-the-nose music choices in the history of cinema — the kind of songs ("Der Kommissar," "99 Luftballons") you might joke about putting in spy movie set in 1989 Berlin. It has as much fidelity to its period setting as a fake vintage T-shirt from Urban Outfitters, and enough twists to render its plot — which has something to do with an executed British agent, a mole, and the fall of the Berlin Wall — totally nonsensical. It is fabulous.

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Focus Features

That’s all tribute to the star wattage of Theron, who as MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton dons a shaky English accent and strides, in flashbacks, into tumultuous Berlin on the verge of a historical moment. Framing this story, she sits an interrogation room in London defending what turns out to have been a thrillingly troubled time, staring down her superiors, played by Toby Jones and John Goodman, with unrufflable poise. John Wick had immense successes turning Keanu Reeves into an action hero as Manhattan businessman, slipping back into his suit and his assassin life after years of retirement in New Jersey. Atomic Blonde does just as good by Theron by casting her as a woman trying to harden herself into crystal for her own protection.

The movie isn't subtle about the symbolism, but then subtlety is very far from its mode. Lorraine’s first scene is her emerging from a bath of ice water, which was intended to numb her visibly battered body, then clinking a few cubes into some Stoli to speed along the process. Despite evidence that she and her former colleague were close, she stays cool as a shaken cocktail when she's given an assignment to go to Berlin and figure out how and why he died.

But all the arctic toughness in the world can't make someone invulnerable, and Lorraine's action scenes never downplay the breakability of the human body, even when she's the one doing most of the breaking. Theron did her own stunts in the film, re-upping her badass bona fides while allowing Leitch to shoot her fights scenes in long, uncut, seriously impressive takes. The greatest of these treks up and down the staircase of an apartment building, and is such an electrifyingly convincing simulation of a sloppy, spur-of-the-moment skirmish that its bloody ending is laugh-out-loud delightful. Lorraine's battles aren't always easily won, but she inevitably looks awesome.

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James McAvoy as David Percival.

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So does James McAvoy as MI6's "gone native" Berlin chief David Percival, and Boutella as punky newbie French agent Delphine Lasalle. I was particularly smitten with McAvoy's character, a hard-drinking hot mess who likes wearing sweater vests with no shirt underneath and who sleeps in a pile of languid lovers. McAvoy's big blue eyes and baby face mean he’s often cast in earnest roles, so there's a sense of elated release when he's allowed to play against type in something like this (or as he did in Split earlier this year). David's no fool, and there are indications from early on that he's not nearly as out-of-control as he likes to pretend — that acting dissolute is a shield for him in the same way that acting aloof is one for Lorraine. He's a good foil for her, and a suspect so obvious it feels like he couldn't possibly be the person she's hunting.

Or is he? Honestly, I've seen the movie, and I couldn't untangle the ending for you to save my life. It involves a list of damning info everyone's looking for, a defecting Stasi agent played by Eddie Marsan, and Bill Skarsgård as a local fixer sporting a variation on that haircut now beloved by the alt-right (it, admittedly, looks great on him). And then there's Theron, with her platinum bob and her cigarettes, her assessing gaze and her flying fists. The movie leers appreciatively at her long limbs, but then it leers at everything else as well, from her costars to the neon-lit furnishings of the room Lorraine commandeers for herself. Atomic Blonde doesn't come close to the radical, norm-flipping vision of something like Mad Max: Fury Road, but then it doesn't aim to, doesn't have all that much to say, if plenty to show. It's a calorie-free serving of simple pleasures, and sometimes that's exactly what you need.

1. Columbus, a slow-burning drama that puts John Cho in the spotlight.

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Haley Lu Richardson and John Cho in Columbus.

Depth of Field / Superlative Films

The world is still waiting for John Cho to get the glossy Sleepless in Seattle-style rom-com he deserves. In the meantime, there are the quieter pleasures of Columbus, the beautifully unhurried directorial debut of Kogonada, the Korean-American video essayist turned filmmaker. Cho stars in the film as Jin, a man who's summoned back from Seoul to the US, where he grew up, after his father collapses and is hospitalized while visiting Columbus, Indiana. While killing time in the town, Jin crosses paths with Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a local who's a year out of high school and torn between staying with her mother, a recovering addict still reliant on her help, and pursuing an offer on the East Coast that could lead to a dream career. Casey's a self-taught architecture nerd, while Jin is the estranged son of an architect, and they bond over visits to the modernist landmarks the town is known for. The rapport that develops between them is reminiscent of the relationship in Lost in Translation, occasionally edging into flirtation without ever being driven by it. It's the rapport of two people who find common ground while navigating the respective limbos in which they're stuck, contending with filial duty, personal desires, and whether beautiful buildings can actually help someone heal.

How to see it: Columbus is now in theaters in limited release; here's a list of locations.

2. Endless Poetry, a mind-melting personal film.

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Adan Jodorowsky in Endless Poetry

Satori Films

Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky became the midnight movie king of the '70s with his psychedelic features El Topo and The Holy Mountain. His planned adaptation of Dune never made it into production, but the ideas were so spectacular that they inspired a documentary about the film that never was. At 88 years old, Jodorowsky is still making movies, and his latest, Endless Poetry, is an autobiography at its most bawdily surreal. The story the film tells is a familiar one of a son not wanting to take the path his father has set out for him: Alejandro wants to be a poet, not a doctor. But the telling is wildly imaginative, bursting with the promise of youth and a desire to shake the world; there are puppet shows and dance numbers, circus performances and carnivals. To re-create the Santiago of his childhood, Jodorowsky has paper cutouts of old storefronts pulled down in front of the existing ones, and in one scene has a stagehand moving props around in plain sight. He casts one of his sons, Adan, to play his teenage self, and another son, Brontis, to play his father. Jodorowsky himself makes the occasional appearance onscreen alongside them to offer commentary. Pamela Flores plays Alejandro's mother, who communicates only in song, and also plays Stella, the fellow poet to whom he loses his virginity, a woman who appears in a flurry of primary colors in a café in which everyone else is dressed in black and white. Endless Poetry is an ecstatic unfurling of memories of a bohemian life that can't be contained in prose.

How to see it: Endless Poetry is now in theaters in limited release; here's a list of locations.

3. The Girl Without Hands, a genuinely grim Grimm fairy tale.

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The Girl Without Hands

GKIDS

If you've ever needed a reminder of how dark a lot of fairy tales are before they're Disneyfied, consider this French animated adaptation of a brothers Grimm story. Its nameless title character gets sold to the devil by her miller father in exchange for boundless wealth — and when her purity protects her from her would-be captor's demonic touch, he has dear old dad chop off her arms with an axe. Also, her mother gets killed with possessed dogs and a pig. The film, directed by Sébastien Laudenbach, is decidedly not for children, but it is a fable, and it's elegantly told through spare, stylized drawings that soften its bouts of bleakness without erasing them. Like any fairy tale worth its salt, The Girl Without Hands has an eventually happy (or at least righteous) ending in its sights. But it never treats its characters as symbols, or loses sight of their flawed humanity, making it really a poetic but poignant saga of surviving abuse.

How to see it: The Girl Without Hands is now in theaters in limited release; here's a list of locations.

4. The Incredible Jessica James, which makes a strong case for Jessica Williams as a movie star.

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Jessica Williams in The Incredible Jessica James

Netflix

Jessica Williams had a supporting part in writer/director Jim Strouse's last film, People Places Things with Jemaine Clement. She takes the lead in his similarly low-key new one, playing Jessica, an aspiring dramatist still dealing with heartbreak over the end of her relationship with Damon (Lakeith Stanfield). The result is such an enjoyable vehicle for the former Daily Show correspondent that it's a bit of a disappointment when the film eventually grows a plot and becomes a rom-com. Like many a young creative attempting to make it in New York, Jessica scrapes by, gets told "no" all the time (she has a wall of rejection letters), and comes from a family that finds her aspirations confounding. But Williams brings a sardonic optimism to the role that makes small scenes, like the one in which she dances through the opening credits, or the one in which she clears space for herself on a subway seat without saying a word, a total joy. Chris O'Dowd, who shows up as a fellow recent dumpee who Jessica gets tentatively involved with, is his usual schlubbily genial presence, but his thirtysomething divorcé Boone often feels like he's drawing focus in a film that's really less a romance than it is a winsome snapshot of a struggling 25-year-old Brooklynite.

How to see it: The Incredible Jessica James is streaming on Netflix.

5. A Quiet Passion, a portrait of a famous poet as fabulously odd.

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Cynthia Nixon and Jodhi May in A Quiet Passion.

Music Box Films

It's impossible to describe Terence Davies' Emily Dickinson biopic without making it sound agonizingly boring. The trailer even looks like a spoof of a costume drama, with a gown-wearing Cynthia Nixon declaring her devotion to her poetry and getting dressed down by her mutton-chopped father (Keith Carradine). But the film itself is rich and wonderful, about a woman unable to hide her light under a barrel or conform in order to better fit in. At the start of A Quiet Passion, Emily leaves school after being declared by her teacher a "no-hoper" for her inability to yield to the status quo in her thoughts on faith. Thereafter, she returns home and pretty much stays there, enjoying friendships and family but retreating further into reclusiveness as the years go on. A Quiet Passion underscores Dickinson's proto-feminism without turning her into an anachronism. This Emily is an unclassifiable individual, one whose idiosyncrasies and brilliance sometimes cause her great pain as she consigns herself, as if it were an inevitability, to an unmarried life. "I long for...something. But I am afraid of it," she says. A Quiet Passion is about a famous poet, but it's also about genius as singular and isolating, its main character burning so bright it sometimes aches to spend time in her company.

How to see it: A Quiet Passion is available for rent.

6. Women Who Kill, a comedy about relationships and podcasts.

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Ann Carr and Ingrid Jungermann in Women Who Kill.

The Film Collaborative

If Sarah Koenig and Dana Chivvis, the producers of Serial, were exes whose relationship bled through into their true-crime investigations, the result would be something like the main characters of Ingrid Jungermann's slyly funny film. Jungermann is Morgan and Ann Carr is Jean, and while the two are no longer a couple, they still live together, spend all their time together, and c-host a successful podcast about female serial killers. It's not the healthiest of breakups, but then what Morgan does next — romancing and quickly moving in with a mysterious woman she knows nothing about named Simone (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night's Sheila Vand) — isn't healthy either, especially when a jealous Jean starts to suspect Simone might have a dark past. Women Who Kill skewers the trappings of stereotypical Park Slope lesbian life, from the Subaru Outbacks to the food co-op devotion to the scolding lecture one character gets about realistic-looking dildos ("Realism implies that lesbian sex isn't real sex unless there's a penis involved"). But it also offers a sly critique of our current national obsession with armchair detective work, and the point at which our prurient interest in real murders, no matter how intellectualized, becomes something internalized and ugly.

How to see it: Women Who Kill is now in theaters in limited release; here's a list of locations.

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Anthony Mackie in Detroit.

Francois Duhamel / Annapurna Pictures

The main character of Detroit is a historical atrocity. There are people in the movie, too, some of whom really existed and some of whom are composites, but for much of its runtime, the movie treats them as components of a larger tragedy. These characters careen toward an incident that results in the deaths of three people — specifically the deaths of three black teenagers at the hands of white policemen who were later acquitted after pleading self-defense.

The film, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and scripted by Mark Boal, takes care not to channel its account of the Algiers Motel killings through any one perspective. As the city that Detroit is named for transforms into a war zone of rioters, cops, and the National Guard over the course of five days in 1967, the film darts from character to character, circling ever closer to the event at its core.

It pays a visit to the home of Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega), a young man with old eyes who is fatefully called in to his nighttime gig as a security guard at a store near the Algiers Motel. It sidles up to the patrol car of Philip Krauss (Will Poulter), a DPD officer of self-assured monstrousness who's shown shooting a man (Tyler James Williams) for stealing groceries. It slips backstage at the Fox Theatre, where singer Larry (Algee Smith) and manager Fred (Jacob Latimore) learn that their vocal group, the Dramatics, is about to be denied its chance onstage because of turmoil on the street outside. It pauses poolside at the Algiers, where two white women who've come to Detroit from Ohio, Julie Ann (Hannah Murray) and Karen (Kaitlyn Dever), are partying and pondering what to do now that their money has run out.

As its ensemble converges at the Algiers, some taking shelter for the night and others already staying there, a prank with a starter pistol draws police attention when tensions are already extremely high. And it's then that time slows into a stomach-churning sequence in which everyone in the motel's back annex gets lined up against a wall by Krauss and his colleagues (Jack Reynor among them), who demand information about and evidence of a sniper weapon that doesn't exist.

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John Boyega as security guard Melvin Dismukes.

Francois Duhamel / Annapurna Pictures

It becomes a nightmarish feedback loop in which the cops, unwilling to lose face by backing down and admitting they made a mistake, incite panic from the black men and white women who can't give them what they want. And that panic just enrages them more, feeding their feelings of authority and contempt, leading them to escalate. Their victims get threatened, beaten, harassed, and shot, the camera lingering on teary faces, eyes rolling in trapped terror, and lips whispering prayers. It's an encounter that unfolds like something out of a horror movie or the grimmest kind of thriller.

The sequence is the focus of the film, the reason Detroit exists. But in terms of its aims to elucidate and create conversation, it's not nearly as effective as the way the film ends.

After the killings, and after the infuriating and expected trial, in which detectives idly try to pin a murder on the innocent Dismukes and a judge throws out confessions of guilt, Detroit catches onto one of its characters and follows him, narrowing in on him for its quiet, devastating coda. It's Larry, who wants so badly to be famous before the night at the Algiers that he sings to the emptied-out Fox Theatre just to have the time onstage, fame seeming so close he can almost grasp it.

After the incident, he can't bring himself to chase the same dream, not when the sight of a white record executive at the studio scalds him inside. We see him spot a white woman dancing in the audience of a Dramatics concert after he's left the band, a glance that speaks volumes when he has to walk away.

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Algee Smith as Larry Reed.

Francois Duhamel / Annapurna Pictures

Larry just can't go back to seeing the world the way he used to after the truths that were laid out for him that night at the Algiers — he no longer feels safe, nor is he willing to participate in a society that might buy his records but would dehumanize him and paint him as a criminal in order to excuse his murder.

Larry isn't the main character in Detroit, because Detroit takes pains not to have one, but the film is at its best when it crystallizes around him in its final chapter, no longer standing back at a remove but becoming personal, grounding its perspective in the singular point of view of a man who makes it through the horrors of the Algiers Motel alive, but not unscathed. Detroit may effectively showcase an appalling spectacle of violence, but its real power is in its closing sequences, in which it portrays racial trauma in a far more intimate fashion. It's a film that dramatizes the horrifying way three people died from systemic abuse, but it's most eloquent in showing what it means to live with it.

The journalistic approach that Bigelow and Boal adopt for most of Detroit is, like the spliced-in clips of real footage from the time, a way of emphasizing that their movie was respectfully researched, that it's a vehicle for truth and authenticity (or as much as it's possible — a title card at the end acknowledges that some gaps were filled in with fictionalized material). But it's deceptive, too, that approach, creating a clinical sense of distance before plunging us into that brutal central stretch in the hotel hallway.

Bigelow made her name with brawny, virtuosic genre fare like 1991's Point Break and 1995's Strange Days before transitioning, in her collaborations with Boal, into what's now a trio of films that have married those big-screen thrills to more serious subject matter. But what worked brilliantly in The Hurt Locker — the movie that won Bigelow an Oscar in 2009 with its explorations of the addictive nature of the adrenaline-addled highs of combat — is a lot less comfortable in Detroit.

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Will Poulter as Officer Krauss.

Annapurna Pictures

Detroit is just as dexterously made, but it brandishes its sense of thematic heft and its sense of craft in a much more discomfiting way. The Algiers sequence, in particular, has a claustrophobic intensity that's as off-putting as it is effective, because the last thing a dramatization of real racialized violence like this seems like it should be is exciting.

Detroit is a film that offers up its violence for practical and prestige purposes, aiming to create a scripted work that will break through where photos and reportage and video have not. In an interview with Variety, Bigelow said that she decided to make the movie after a grand jury ruled not to prosecute Darren Wilson in November 2014 for shooting Michael Brown. Brown's death and the deaths of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, and many others are the obvious, continuing present-day context for the historical events Detroit depicts, but they're also looming reminders that Bigelow and Boal hardly had to go back 50 years to find a significant incident of police brutality against black victims.

On July 28, after President Trump gave a speech in which he joked to an audience of law enforcement officials about roughing up suspects, Detroit producer Megan Ellison tweeted a video of his words intercut with footage from the film, inviting him to see it, and noting, "It's time to change the conversation."

Trump seems about as likely to sit down and learn something from Detroit as he is to abruptly realize that steaks are and have always been better medium-rare — but such is the curious combination of conviction and cynicism that Detroit represents. It tells a story Bigelow felt so strongly about that, as she explained to the New York Times, its importance outweighed the criticism she'd get as a white filmmaker for presuming to tell it.

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A scene from Detroit.

Francois Duhamel / Annapurna Pictures

But that importance rests on the assumption — and maybe it's an accurate one — that a glossy, deftly composed narrative feature from the director of Zero Dark Thirty can do what the live-streamed death of Philando Castile could not, and reach crowds who previously insisted that, actually, all lives matter. It rests on the assumption that an episode from the past has impact the present does not.

Art can and does change the way people see the world. But the combination of tastefulness and relentlessness with which Detroit approaches its subject matter is careful and dutiful and rarely resonant, despite Boyega's heartbreakingly world-weary gravity, despite Anthony Mackie's exhausted anger as a just-returned Vietnam vet being treated like an enemy combatant in his own country, despite Poulter's chilling smirk, and despite the terrifying visuals of tanks rolling down a city street.

The film opens with a prologue that sets the scene for the 1967 Detroit rebellion not in details about the city but in far more sweeping ones, providing a condensed explanation of the Great Migration, white flight, and redlining that speaks to who the film's intended audience is and what they're expected to know or not know. It's the kind of wide angle from which individuals blend into crowds, or into fodder for a tragedy. Detroit's most returned-to image is people who've been made, at gunpoint, to turn their faces to the wall, but it's never more moving than when it allows one of them, at the end, to turn his face up to the light.

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Idris Elba and Tom Taylor in The Dark Tower.

Ilze Kitshoff / Columbia Pictures

Idris Elba plays the mystical gunslinger Roland Deschain in The Dark Tower. It should be the ripest of ripe blockbuster roles, given how much revenge, brooding, and wearing of a leather duster it entails. The duster is key, with plenty of swirl to it for all the times Roland ends up whipping around to shoot something, on one occasion reloading by catching a chamber full of bullets in midair. It's dramatic, but not as dramatic as the scene in which he takes out a baddie at a distance without turning his head, just sensing the shot with his powers. As the code Roland recites goes, you kill with your heart — especially when it looks cool.

Roland is the central character of the eight-book Stephen King series on which The Dark Tower is based, a sprawling Western-fantasy-science-fiction-horror mashup that various bigwigs (including J.J. Abrams and Ron Howard) have been trying to adapt for the screen for a decade. The movie that finally emerged from that development morass — one directed by Nikolaj Arcel, who wrote the script with Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, and Anders Thomas Jensen — instead funnels its story through 11-year-old Jake (Tom Taylor), a troubled boy who lives in Manhattan, but who's been dreaming about Roland and the world of magic and demons from which he comes. It's a confounding decision on many levels — the most obvious of which is that when you have Elba playing some cowboy version of an Arthurian knight, why in the multiverse would you shift focus to an annoying kid?

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Taylor and Elba.

Ilze Kitshoff / Columbia Pictures

Elba can't seem to catch a break. The English actor has been a famous name for so long that it's easy to forget how few great parts he's actually gotten. Post–Stringer Bell on The Wire, he's rattled around in a bunch of supporting gigs, some more memorable than others — Heimdall in the Marvel Cinematic Universe; villains in The Losers, Beasts of No Nation, No Good Deed, and Star Trek Beyond; some voiceover work. The greatest offense of Prometheus is that Elba and Charlize Theron have hate sex and it happens offscreen. He was also Nelson Mandela in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, a great performance in a middling awards bait biopic. TV's been better, from Showtime's Guerrilla miniseries to BBC's crime drama Luther, a series that's not as fresh as it used to be, but which seems to keep chugging along because the title character remains one of the most interesting Elba's gotten to play. Elba's most famous film role is, in some ways, the one he's always suggested for but hasn't been offered — that of James Bond.

Elba has been a movie star in waiting for years. The Dark Tower is a lame-duck adaptation destined to enrage book fans and bewilder everyone else, but at least it seemed poised to give the actor a prime spotlight. The fact that Elba gets consigned to being a surly sidekick and surrogate father figure as much as he is an action hero suggests that Hollywood still doesn't know what to do with him. As villainous wizard Walter, Matthew McConaughey offers up what's basically a more evil version of whatever he's doing in those Lincoln car commercials, swanning around in a duster of his own — black, draped over a barely buttoned black shirt. Roland is just as underwritten, but Elba takes the opportunity to bring soulfulness to his barely sketched-out path to redemption — and when that fails, he still manages to be funny.

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Elba and Matthew McConaughey.

Ilze Kitshoff / Columbia Pictures

Those are, strangely, the best parts of The Dark Tower — when, having failed to deliver the promised cool, the film opts for bits of fish-out-of-water business, leveraging the larger-than-life Roland again in present-day New York. As Roland, Elba squints at TV commercials, reveals himself to be terrible at bluffing, and pays an emergency room doctor with what looks like a gold coin before stalking out, bellowing, "Bring my guns!" Elba sells it with the timing and by playing Roland painfully straight, and in those moments, you can see the movie The Dark Tower could have been — probably still a letdown for devotees of King's series, but at least something fun. Elba alone can't make The Dark Tower worth watching. But he can make the case, yet again, that he deserves better material than this.

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Robert Pattinson as Connie Nikas in Good Time.

A24

The masterfully scuzzy feel-bad Good Time is the kind of movie that demands consideration for all the post-YA choices Robert Pattinson has been making. In the five years since The Twilight Saga ended, series co-leads Pattinson and Kristen Stewart have pursued acting careers seemingly engineered to put as much ground as possible between them and the glittery supernatural romance that turned them into highly scrutinized international stars. Stewart's transformation into an art-house and critics' darling has been well-documented, from the meta-commentary of her roles as celeb assistants in Olivier Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper to her part as a queer object of desire in Certain Women.

Pattinson has attained less acclaim for what he's been up to, though it's been similarly ambitious and auteur-driven. He played a limo-riding billionaire on a journey of self-destruction in David Cronenberg's chilly, underrated Cosmopolis and then, perfectly, turned up as a limo-driving struggling actor in the Canadian filmmaker's followup Maps to the Stars. He worked with Anton Corbijn and Werner Herzog in biopics Life and Queen of the Desert, neither of them particularly good, but both indicative of good taste in directors. He was intriguing as Guy Pearce's captive turned sidekick in the dystopian The Rover, and quietly terrific as Charlie Hunnam's employee turned respected colleague in The Lost City of Z. Like Stewart, he's seemingly been freed up by getting to play characters who are, at best, spotlight-adjacent, ones who aren't outsized but who are perfectly to scale.

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Buddy Duress

A24

That’s definitely the case with Good Time's Connie Nikas, an aspiring lowlife who embarks on a neon-lit crime spree through Queens after a violent offscreen clash with his grandmother and a botched bank robbery. As Connie, Pattinson does not jerk off a dog, despite what you may have heard from talk show anecdotes, but he does engage in a lot of other eyebrow-raising activity. He breaks someone out of police custody, seduces a teenager, and beats a security guard into unconsciousness. The movie, which was directed by brothers Benny and Josh Safdie, portrays Connie as a guy who's not half as smart or as good at big-picture planning as he thinks he is, but who shows a sly animal cunning in his moment-to-moment interactions. His overestimation of his criminal competence is the reason he spends most of the film on the run from the cops, trying to salvage a plan that didn't seem all that feasible to begin with.

Connie's adventures on the lam in the ungentrified reaches of the outer borough unfold like a comedy of errors in which our scumbag hero inflicts a terrible orange-blonde bleach job on himself as a disguise and breaks into an amusement park to try to figure out where someone out of their mind on acid would hide cash. Only Connie's desperate improvisations are rarely all that funny, not when he brings disaster into the lives of everyone he touches — a one-man infection who gets more dangerous as the night gives way to morning. The chief and most painful bit of collateral damage is Nick (Benny Safdie), Connie's developmentally disabled brother, who he convinces to take part in a fantasy of stealing money and starting a new life together in Virginia. It's a scheme that lands Nick in jail, where he's an easy target, before the film's opening credits. Connie spends the rest of Good Time trying to get Nick out, though the more we get to know him, the less he seems capable of being the kind of caretaker Nick needs, even before he involves him in a felony.

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Taliah Webster

A24

Connie is mesmerizing and awful, leaping from one dire situation to the next like a polar bear navigating melting sea ice. But Pattinson is great, carrying a film that sits entirely on his rangy shoulders, the handheld camera frequently jammed up tight on his face as he searches for a way out of whatever predicament he's landed himself in. He plays the character as a kind of anti-heartthrob, with not a wisp of outlaw cool to his behavior, and when he levels his battered looks and charm at women he wants something from, like the unstable Corey (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and the achingly young Crystal (Taliah Webster), you feel nothing but alarm. It's a performance that rests on an understanding that humanizing someone and making them likable need not be the same thing at all.

We come to understand Connie pretty well by the end of Good Time, just from seeing how he operates — his puffed-up grandeur, his sense of wounded injustice, his ruthlessness. The film invites you to care about what happens to him without rooting for him, especially in its final act, when Connie and Ray (Buddy Duress), the fellow traveler he's picked up along the way, kill time in a stranger's apartment. The sun comes up, the atmosphere acquires the pinched feeling of an impending monster hangover, and it becomes increasingly clear that whatever happens to Connie, he's not going to figure out a way to fix the mess he's made. And yet that's when he lays into Ray, sneering at this fresh-out-of-prison doofus he doesn't want to admit is his funhouse reflection, and proclaiming his superiority to the "fuckup," despite the two men being in the same dire situation.

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Benny Safdie and Pattinson

A24

You understand, at that moment, that Connie's contempt is part of his world view, that he gets his highs off having someone around to look down on, push around, or control. It's a revelation that casts his relationship with his sibling in an even darker light, because Nick is so obviously vulnerable to manipulation. Connie genuinely loves his brother, but it's a toxic kind of love, the kind where you'd readily drag someone down with you rather than risk being alone. Good Time starts and ends with Nick, but the film belongs to Connie, and to Pattinson, who lives and breathes the young man's poisonous desperation. It's the kind of performance that sticks with you, like a layer of grime that needs to be washed off.

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Channing Tatum and Farrah Mackenzie in Logan Lucky.

Claudette Barius / Bleecker Street

Ocean's Eleven had George Clooney emerging from prison in the rumpled tuxedo he was arrested in. Even in the context of the effortlessly hip universe of globe-trotting miscreants the 2001 film set forth, it was a cool look. That look established his character, Danny Ocean, as a gentleman crook — smart and suave and pewter-haired, stealing from the rich to give to himself and his friends because they'll just be so much better at spending money than the assholes they're taking it from.

Steven Soderbergh, who directed the Ocean's trilogy and who returns from a four-year retirement from filmmaking to bookend it with the equally jubilant new heist comedy Logan Lucky, is a savant when it comes to understanding the appeal of his lead actors. He constructed his fantasy of a community of hypercompetent thieves around Clooney's matinee-idol aura — con men as movie stars, or vice versa.

We want Danny to win not because he was wronged in some way, but because he feels he's too suave and too smart to have to submit to the indignities of a daily grind, and Clooney sells us on the fact that Danny’s right.

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Adam Driver and Tatum.

Claudette Barius / Bleecker Street

The main character in Logan Lucky, on the other hand, needs to win because he really needs the money. Jimmy Logan is a working class guy facing a future of unstable employment in an area with few opportunities — a red-state talking point transformed into the hero of a heist flick. The film, which was written by the possibly fictional Rebecca Blunt, is Ocean's Eleven turned inside out. Its characters are amateurs, a trio of siblings from Boone County, West Virginia, who try to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway during the biggest NASCAR race of the year.

The plan they come up with is no less elaborate than Danny's plan to rob three Las Vegas casinos on the night of the big fight, but it's rigged together with all sorts of duct-tape ingenuity. And it's centered around Jimmy, a man who was struggling to get by before he got laid off from his construction gig due to insurance-related bullshit.

Tatum enters the film elbow-deep in the engine of his truck, and spends the rest of it in camo cargo pants or Carhartts. Soderbergh understands the contradiction of Tatum as a performer — which is that he can come across as a little stolid until he explodes into dance or physical comedy or that million-watt smile. Soderbergh built Magic Mike around Tatum, his history, the way he moves, and his general air as someone who, while not dumb, has gotten used to assuming his strengths are in what he can do with his body rather than his brains. His title character in Magic Mike was a man very aware of the ticking clock on his stripping career, and of the need to eventually move on to something else.

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Riley Keough

Claudette Barius / Bleecker Street

His character in Logan Lucky never had a chance to run out the clock — in high school Jimmy was the quarterback and the prom king, chasing a pro football career before blowing out his knee. Now he walks with a limp and has the meaty solidity of a guy who works with his hands, but whose athlete days are gone. He's still a dreamboat, but a battered and disheartened one — aware his best days might be behind him and that he's got little by way of promise in his future.

It's a future in which he's asked to endure being looked down on by Seth MacFarlane (as a wealthy, British-accented race-car sponsor), a humiliation no human being should have to endure. And it's a future in which he might not be able to see the daughter he adores, Sadie (Farrah Mackenzie). Sadie is Jimmy's whole world, though his ability to see her hinges on his shaky relationship with his since-remarried, white wine-sipping ex-wife Bobbie Jo (Katie Holmes).

It's the desire to stay close to Sadie that finally prompts Jimmy to recruit his bartender brother Clyde (Adam Driver, speaking with a delightfully slow drawl), an Iraq War vet with a prosthetic arm; and their sister Mellie (Riley Keough), a hairdresser with a taste for fast cars; to take part in the caper. With the help of a DIY explosives expert appropriately named Joe Bang (an antic Daniel Craig), who's initially inconveniently incarcerated, they dip their toes into a life of crime.

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Jack Quaid, Brian Gleeson, and Daniel Craig.

Claudette Barius / Bleecker Street

Where the Ocean's films leapt easily from Vegas to Europe and back again, Logan Lucky is mainly concerned with the drive from Concord, North Carolina, to West Virginia. Its characters don't get to travel, and it's the possibility of Bobbie Jo moving Sadie across state lines to Virginia — where Jimmy can't afford to follow — that gets him moving on his plan.

Any dumb quip you might think to crack about Logan Lucky, the movie already makes for you. At one point a local newscaster nicknames the attempted theft "the hillbilly heist," "the redneck robbery," and "Ocean's 7-Eleven." The film is awash with regionally and culturally grounded details, from the centrality of NASCAR to the child beauty pageant Sadie gets dolled up to compete in. The Logans even conduct some important business at a county fair, and endure a chemical leak contaminating the local water supply with the forbearance of people well-accustomed to being stepped on by corporations.

But the film's humor comes from the characters' eccentricities, not the lives they're living. When Joe Bang forces the Logans to bring his two newly religious brothers (Brian Gleeson and Jack Quaid) in on the job, for instance, the punchline is not their faith but the moral loophole through which they justify participating. They have to be assured that someone they knew had a bad experience when working at the supermarket sponsoring the race, so it deserves to be robbed.

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Bleecker Street

All of this happens to echo the kind of desultory rationalization heist movies often cough up to allow their characters to comfortably be cast as good guys as well as thieves. But that's something Logan Lucky doesn't even bother with. Its characters share a general sense of downward mobility and disillusionment with the American dream, but there's no more effort put into demonization of their targets than there is a Hillbilly Elegy-style castigation of the Logans.

Choosing a setting like Logan Lucky's is practically a politically charged act in itself these days — here's a serious slice of Trump country, complete with noneuphemistic economic anxiety! But the closest the film gets to showing its hand in that regard is only in how little it bothers making a case as to why we should root for the crime it's depicting to be successful. The people the Logans are robbing have lots of money, and they have next to none. What else needs to be said?

Maybe just this: Logan Lucky features a scene in which Tatum cries while listening to a little girl sing "Take Me Home, Country Roads." It's not Clooney in a tux, but it's just as good.

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Alex Breaux and Dave Bautista in Bushwick.

Seacia Pavao / RLJ Entertainment

Two weeks ago, white supremacists and neo-Confederates marched through Charlottesville, clashing with counterprotesters, resulting in the death of Heather D. Heyer. This Friday, white supremacists and neo-Confederates will launch a brutal attack against New York City onscreen, all for discomfiting fun, in Bushwick. The indie action movie envisions Brooklyn being invaded by armed, racist Southern separatists who've branded themselves the "New American Coalition," and whose stated intentions to "live our lives the true American way" involves less of the pesky "ethnodiversity" they consider a societal weakness. Their private militia pours into designated areas around the country, including, however improbably, the titular neighborhood, only to find the locals putting up a lot more resistance than they'd anticipated.

When directors Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott and writers Nick Damici and Graham Reznick put the project together back in 2015, they couldn't have expected that, by the time Bushwick made its way to limited theaters and VOD this week, it would end up coming across as pulpy exploitation of very current fears about resurging white nationalism. The low-budget, blue state answer to Red Dawn — which plays less campy than the description above might suggest — stars Brittany Snow as Lucy, a naive grad student who's headed, Red Riding Hood–style, to her grandmother's house, when she emerges from the subway to find that during her L train ride, the borough has erupted into warfare.

Dave Bautista is Stupe, the janitor into whose company Lucy stumbles, who has a tragic but convenient past as a badass marine and medic. Together, the pair wind their way through firefights in the streets in real time, by way of a strung-together series of long takes that's more laborious than it is impressive. As they search for safety and an explanation, what emerges is a half-baked premise that builds up white nationalists in order to allow everyone else to go to literal war with them.

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Brittany Snow in Bushwick.

Seacia Pavao / RLJ Entertainment

Bushwick's filmmakers are aware that their work has become increasingly similar to current events: In the press notes, after citing recent terrorist attacks and Rick Perry's Texas secession comments as inspirations, they add "as we finished the long process of post-production, we again watch as the United States becomes even more politically, economically and racially divided because of the 2016 Presidential election."

But instead of accruing weight through its glancing gestures toward real events, Bushwick falls into an uncanny valley of relevance, too self-serious and close to exposed nerves to be dumb fun, and too sloppy to be provocative. The protest imagery the film borrows and the way it's set in a historically Latino, rapidly gentrifying area just highlight its cynicism. Bushwick rails against violence while reveling in it, having its villains spout racist rhetoric while portraying most of its own characters of color as criminal caricatures. It's an unintended hour and half treatise on how timeliness alone doesn't equal significance.

And that's a lesson worth taking in, even though the movie isn't. Timeliness has gained allure in the era of Trump, when real world turmoil presses in so urgently from all sides. When it comes to talking about TV and film, the urge to see reflections of the present day has been not just irresistible, but also a way of justifying why these things continue to deserve attention. In the last month alone, Terminator 2, The Dead Zone, Intervention, and The Tick have all been described by different outlets as "more timely than ever."

But timeliness isn't, in itself, a fundamental positive, not unless it's put to use for artistic or political resonance to make a worthy point. That's true for more than just a throwaway movie like Bushwick, which makes garbled references to gun ownership, diversity, and 9/11, and yet has nothing in particular to say.

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Bautista in Bushwick.

Seacia Pavao / RLJ Entertainment

It's true, too, for something like Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit, which despite its Oscar-winning director and overall gleam of prestige, has faded rapidly from the box office and from public discussion, failing to draw audiences with its portrayal of the deaths of three young black men at the hands of police in 1967. Analyses of the film's underperformance have stressed its timeliness, the way it took on themes relevant to present day activism, the way it offered up its enraging, lesser-known historical incident in deftly dramatized fashion.

Detroit was marketed to emphasize that same angle, with imagery of baton-wielding police officers facing a crowd of black civilians that evokes photos from Ferguson. But moviegoers obviously didn't agree on Detroit's importance — didn't agree as to how indispensable a scripted portrayal of a 50-year-old event of racialized police violence really is when similar events are still happening today, and when they're streamed online. The timeliness of Detroit was offered up like something medicinal, something that should be downed because it's good for you, though the film never justifies why that is, and why the past, in its case, illuminates the present instead of just emphasizing how little has changed.

It's the reason the uproar over HBO's proposed Confederate, which is set in a world in which the Confederate States of America successfully seceded and continues to practice slavery, has such piquancy — because the creatives behind it have tried to use timeliness as a shield for its much criticized alternate-history scenario. Confederate is science fiction that, in the words of co-creator D.B. Weiss, "can show us how this history is still with us in a way no strictly realistic drama ever could," a sentiment that presumes that its audience is not living with the consequences and remnants of that history already. That's a justification that's exclusionary at worst, and, at best, evidence that the nascent and still-in-development project uses some notion of generalized relevance as validation for its existence. And that, alone, is not enough, nor is Bushwick's vacant fantasies of white nationalists attacking so that they can be shot at.

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Lakeith Stanfield and Nat Wolff in Death Note

James Dittiger / Netflix

Light Yagami, the handsome, misanthropic genius at the center of the original Death Note manga series, has been transformed into Light Turner in Netflix's movie adaptation. Americanized Light is still a bored, bright teen who gets gifted with a nearly boundless power to kill at the start of the story, but he's not popular the way he predecessor is. He's introduced huddled on a table outside his high school doing other students' homework for pay. This Light is friendless, aloof, and also white — a furor kicked up online around the film in the wake of the whitewashing perpetrated by the earlier 2017 anime adaptation of Ghost in the Shell. In transferring the action from Tokyo to Seattle, director Adam Wingard and producers Jason Hoffs, Roy Lee, Dan Lin, and Masi Oka cast Nat Wolff in the lead role rather than an Asian-American actor.

Then again, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's saga isn't Asian-American either. It's imported from Japan, where it's already been the basis of four homegrown live-action movies with Japanese casts. In the complicated and evolving conversation about Asian representation onscreen, adaptation, and erasure, it's not accurate to describe Death Note as replicating the exact outrages of Ghost in the Shell, which kept the cultural trappings of its source material while discarding the actual people. That film literally had Scarlett Johansson playing a character who had the stolen brain of a Japanese woman transplanted into the body of a white one, an accidental but incendiary metaphor for the vampirism it was perpetrating.

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Wolff

James Dittiger / Netflix

Netflix's Death Note fails Asian-Americans in the more mundane way that most Hollywood releases continue to — by not casting Asian-American actors in any significant parts, a fact that has some extra sting given where the source material came from and the film's predominantly Asian-American producers. But Death Note isn't an act of cultural ventriloquism or cringey orientalism — it's an earnest, ludicrously overstuffed attempt at reworking the original story for an American context, part of the latest instance of Hollywood's long pattern of devouring international intellectual property and remaking it (for better or worse, usually the latter), from Vanilla Sky to The Departed to January's ill-fated Jamie Foxx vehicle Sleepless. It's not an illustrious tradition, but it's one Death Note is part of, and to classify it as straightforward whitewashing is to suggest that Lakeith Stanfield, who plays one of the other two main characters, is effectively white — protesting one act of erasure by committing another kind.

Netflix's Death Note at least seems to have had some intention behind its primary casting choice. In headphones, a flop of home-bleached hair, and a black T-shirt, Wolff isn't just sporting a general uniform of teen outsiders, outcasts, and burnouts; it's a look that, in combination with the aura of resentment accompanying it, feels intended to bring to mind some more specific connotations of the Dylan Klebold or James Holmes variety. Death Note's antihero is, like them, a spree killer, albeit one whose journey of mass murder is meant to better the world as well as serve as an act of ego.

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Wolff and Margaret Qualley

James Dittiger / Netflix

Light isn't just any young white man. His look evokes a very specific sort of young white man, the kind who've made up the majority of mass shooters in the US. Light comes into possession of something scarier than a gun: a notebook that drops from the sky, and that allows him to dictate someone's death through the simple act of writing their name inside it. The film doesn't try to overexplain the notebook or the death god that comes with it, a demonic figure by the name of Ryuk (voiced by Willem Dafoe) whom only Light can see. He's functionally a divine troll, and Light an overconfident Redditor sure that he knows how to fix society — a smart, bullied, self-righteous, motherless kid who comes into possession of a frightening amount of power. It's a shrewd opening gambit that hints at what Death Note could do by using its source material as an inspiration rather than a burden. But the film never fully embraces or lives up to the possibilities of its provocative, slow-motion introduction.

Death Note instead tries to cover so much ground that it barely gets a handle on the mechanics of its murderous wish fulfillment and its teenage antihero before it sets off at a sprint. As a manga series, Death Note ran for 108 weekly chapters; then, as an anime series, it spanned 37 episodes. The Netflix adaptation tries to cram everything into a just-over-100-minute runtime. Light gains a girlfriend and partner in crime almost instantly — Mia Sutton, played by the always intriguing Margaret Qualley, a disaffected cheerleader barely bothering to conceal the sharp edges no one expects to find in her. Mia serves as a promising confidant and a devil on the shoulder of Light, who embarks on a global campaign of killing off criminals under the pseudonym Kira. But their romance is treated as foundational before we ever really get to see it form, consigned to a montage in which their first fumblings are intercut with footage of death row inmates, terrorists, and cartel leaders dying off while the planet gapes and cheers.

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Stanfield

James Dittiger / Netflix

Stanfield's character, when he arrives, gets an arc that's similarly condensed — he's a legendary detective who goes only by the name L, and takes on the unpopular task of tracking down Kira. The eccentric candy chomper is the film's most overtly cartoonish character, and Stanfield leans into that nicely, disguising himself by pulling a turtleneck over the lower half of his face and folding his lanky limbs into a squat on top of chairs rather than sitting in them. He's enjoyably weird and, like any good fictional detective, brilliant, which we see in how quickly he homes in on Kira's true identity. But there's no space here for the prolonged battle of intellects between L and Light that forms the backbone of the anime series. One of the unfortunate realizations as Death Note churns onward is that it would have been better off either cutting L (to the ire of fans) or cutting Mia, and focusing on Light's relationship with whichever character remained as forces threaten to expose his identity as Kira.

As is, neither connection is all that resonant, and neither, ultimately, is Light, whom the movie softens right when it should be making him more charismatically monstrous. Wingard is a clever director with an unignorable sense of style, and his great earlier films, You're Next and The Guest, had a way with deconstructing genres while paying homage to them. But he never finds a baseline to riff off of with Death Note, which — despite floating a few good ideas and demonstrating a welcome sense of humor — can't manage to pull together into any kind of coherence. Its most electric moments are the ones that have no direct relationship to the source material at all, from Light's just-short-of-a-trench-coat stylings to the rainy, neon-lit look of its Seattle, from the semi-ironic soundtrack that includes the notable use of Air Supply to Light's tense relationship with his policeman dad (Shea Whigham).

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Netflix

For all of the film's weaknesses, it's still fair to say that Death Note is one of the best American adaptations of anime and manga to date, because the bar has been set so very low. It is, at least, a project whose problems aren't related to a condescension to or bewilderment by its source material. But between its attempts to service the sprawling nature of the original story and its desire to transform it for a new medium, Death Note gets mired in a limbo — neither a functional standalone film for those unfamiliar the manga and anime, or one that seems like it'll satisfy existing fans, despite producer Masi Oka's insistence they were the audience for whom the film was made.

Death Note compresses a frustrating volume of plot twists, no breathing room allowed, and yet it doesn't end up capturing the spirit of what it's transliterated. We're still waiting on the first good American anime remake. Maybe we'll never get there — but Death Note does, at least, hint at what it might look like when we do, and that endeavors at adaptation aren't totally doomed.

1. Gook

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Justin Chon and Simone Baker.

Samuel Goldwyn Films

Taking place on the first day of the 1992 LA riots, Justin Chon's black-and-white indie with the incendiary title serves as a pained rumination on the place of Asian-Americans in our troubled racial tapestry. Its main characters, brothers Eli (Chon) and Daniel (David So), work in Paramount, just east of Compton, running the struggling shoe store left to them by their late father, a first-generation Korean immigrant. They exist within the primarily black and Latino community without belonging to it — outsiders looked at as either predatory trespassers or soft targets by most of the people they encounter. And not without reason — they're queasily aware that they're seen in the same light as the suspicious liquor store owner down the block, Mr. Kim (Sang Chon), a Korean man from their father's generation who's content to take money from the neighborhood but sits glowering behind his bulletproof glass, clutching a gun. In a scene meant to evoke the killing of Latasha Harlins, he threateningly accuses 11-year-old Kamilla (Simone Baker) of stealing.

Kamilla happens to be the brothers' only local friend, a surrogate sibling of sorts who's found a sanctuary for herself in their store, though it's one her own brother, Keith (Curtiss Cook Jr.), disapproves of due to the tragic history between their families. In its depiction of a city poised to explode with tension and fragmented along racial lines, Chon self-consciously evokes Do the Right Thing, a huge work that casts a long shadow from which Gook doesn't escape. His film is a nuanced, minor version of Spike Lee's as told from the perspective Sonny, the Korean grocer who pleads in broken English to those who would burn his store at the end "I no white! I black! You, me, same!" But Gook, with its Asian-American characters witnessing and lingering at the fringes of black oppression and unrest, aware of it without sharing in it, would never make so simple a claim.

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

2. Kill Me Please

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Dora Freind, Mariana Oliveira, Valentina Herszage, and Júlia Roliz.

Cinema Slate

Sex, death, and adolescent angst intertwine in Brazilian filmmaker Anita Rocha da Silveira's mesmerizing debut, a movie that lingers in the general vicinity of horror without ever giving away where it's heading. Kill Me Please is half a dreamy exploration of the lives of a set of well-off high schoolers in Rio's Barra da Tijuca neighborhood, and half a study on how a mysterious string of nearby murders starts to affect their state of mind. The killer has a taste for pretty adolescents — adolescents like the main character, 15-year-old Bia (Valentina Herszage), a schoolgirl who is titillated rather than frightened by the things she has in common with the victims. Her friends, with whom she spends long, idle hours — no parents are ever seen onscreen — gather around news of a new body being found like it's the hottest gossip. Hotter, even, because when you're their age, death feels more like an intriguing abstraction than a real fear, even when it's lurking in the empty lots around your rapidly developing corner of the city.

Then Bia has an intimate encounter with mortality that seems to set her world permanently askew, leading her to systematically alienate everyone in her life, from her devout boyfriend to her besties, in pursuit of something she can't begin to articulate. Mood rather than story-driven, Kill Me Please has a deep, Lynchian weirdness to it, from the heightened showiness of the church services the characters sometimes attend, to the voracious quality of the making out they habitually engage in, like they're trying to swallow their partner whole. But the death-obsession doesn't seem exaggerated at all — just a standard kind of teenage curiosity allowed to blossom into something darker and grander, into a last scene that makes Rocha da Silveira feel like a gothier, sexier successor to Sofia Coppola. And how awesome is that?

How to see it: Kill Me Please is now playing in Brooklyn, and heads to LA on Oct. 13.

3. Lemon

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Brett Gelman, Nia Long, Keith L. Williams, and Conrad Roberts.

Magnolia Pictures

Lemon is an absurdist movie about a fortyish failed actor named Isaac (Brett Gelman) who gets dumped by his estranged, blind girlfriend Ramona (Judy Greer) and stumbles his awkward way around Los Angeles coming to terms with his underwhelming life to date. If this description sounds tremendously quirky-indie, well, for the most part, that's how the film plays. It premiered at Sundance and, in addition to Gelman and Greer, features appearances from fellow scene stalwarts like Michael Cera, Gillian Jacobs, Jon Daly, and Martin Starr. But Lemon is also the directorial debut of a black woman, playwright, and filmmaker Janicza Bravo, who has a keen interest in interrogating the insular world of alt-comedy in addition to playing around in it.

And so the movie also features Nia Long as a casting director Isaac attempts to woo by asking her out for an uncomfortable date of stilted conversation. While it doesn't exactly go well, he then convinces her to take him along for an even more uncomfortable outing to her Afro-Caribbean family's barbecue, where the attendees are bemused by Isaac's wincing attempts to talk to them about race. Isaac isn't presented as another blundering white guy comedy protagonist for whom everything works out okay in the end — he's a man whose presumptions of success get observed from the outside, where they don't look all that merited. If there are any hints of autobiography in the characters' uncertain fledgling romance (Bravo and Gelman, who are married, wrote the script together) they're best guessed at — the film feels boldly indifferent to any more personal readings. It is, in the end, more compelling in the interviews Bravo has given than as an intentionally divisive viewing experience, but its discordance is distinctive and hard to forget. More than anything, it leaves you anxious to see what she does next.

How to see it: Lemon is now in theaters in limited release — here's a list of locations.

4. The Trip to Spain

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Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.

IFC Films

Fair warning: The Trip to Spain utterly flubs its ending with a miscalculated joke that's meant to be at the expense of Steve Coogan (playing a fictionalized version of himself), but feels more like a burst of xenophobia. Everything before those final 30 seconds is wonderful — a wealth of bitterly funny meditations on status, food, travel, mortality, and relationships from the team of Coogan, fellow actor-comedian Rob Brydon (also playing himself, sort of), and director Michael Winterbottom. The Trip to Spain is the third movie in a series from the trio, each of them cut down from a longer episodic TV version, but you don't need to know that or to be familiar with predecessors The Trip and The Trip to Italy to appreciate this new one.

All that's required is an enjoyment of the improvisation-heavy dynamic between Coogan and Brydon, who drive around Spain on a travel writing assignment eating gourmet meals and trading banter and celebrity impressions (David Bowie and Mick Jagger are among those added to the roster). The relationship between their characters is the sort you don't often see onscreen, one based less on mutual affection than on mutual understanding. The two snipe at each other as often as they commiserate over careers and aging. They're united in their showbiz insecurities and egos, and while that isn't the most heartwarming basis for a friendship, three films in, it's still a very entertaining one.

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

5. The Villainess

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Kim Ok-bin

Well Go USA Entertainment

There aren't a lot of movies out there that alternate between bone-crunching violence and K-drama-worthy emotional twists. But The Villainess makes you think that there really should be. The film comes from Jung Byung-gil, who, like Atomic Blonde's David Leitch, got his start as a stunt performer before becoming a director. And it shows in every astonishing action sequence the movie packs in, including an opening one that plays like an homage to the hallway fight in Oldboy. Only this is shot entirely from the main character's point of view as she punches and slices her way through dozens of gang members in an act of vengeance we only later discover the motivation for. The camerawork is just as dazzlingly, impossibly fluid in the fight scene carried out on motorcycles, and the jaw-dropping sequence in which the hatchet-wielding main character smashes her way onto a moving bus.

But when she's engaged in technically awe-inspiring acts of slaughter, antihero Sook-hee (Kim Ok-bin) is being put through the ringer dramatically in a plot that pulls freely from La Femme Nikita, Shiri, and Kill Bill and plenty of others. Sook-hee trains to be a gang assassin and then, after her husband gets killed, gets recruited by a black ops government organization to train in even more ridiculous ways to serve as an assassin for them. Also, she's given plastic surgery, has a kid, and marries a new guy who's secretly been deployed by the agency they both work for to keep tabs on her but who's maybe also falling in love with her for real. And she goes undercover as a lead actress, which is a delightfully counterintuitive approach to blending in as a sleeper operative. It's all extremely hard to follow and silly, but Kim plays her character's suffering as real and wrenching, making The Villainess a rare thing indeed — a brutal action movie in which the damage you worry most about is that done to its protagonist's heart.

How to see it: The Villainess is now in theaters in limited release — here's a list of locations.

6. Whose Streets?

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Magnolia Pictures

[Note: BuzzFeed News signed on as a presenter of Whose Streets? in August — the author of this piece saw the film in January.]

It's been three years since Ferguson, but sometimes it can feel like it's been three decades, given how much has happened since the unarmed, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9, 2014. The rousing, vital documentary Whose Streets? works both as a way to revisit one of the moments that brought Black Lives Matter to national prominence, and to reckon with how much went unseen in news coverage from on high. Directed by activist-turned-filmmaker Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis, Whose Streets? offers a ground-level point of view of events that might start off with the painfully familiar to anyone who followed the media coverage, but quickly becomes less so, the film lingering in Ferguson after the news crews leave to capture the burgeoning of a movement.

Whose Streets? is raw and vivid in its mission to depict what those crews didn't, mixing news footage with cell phone footage with professionally shot footage. It gradually coheres around figures like Copwatch's David Whitt, and partners Brittany Ferrell and Alexis Templeton, people who work to channel the momentum of the unrest into ongoing activism. The film only grows more powerful as it goes along — maybe never more so than in the scene in which it holds on the face of the sole black woman in a line of police. As the activists the cops are confronting engage with her and then tell her they have love for her, she tears up — and watching, it's hard not to do the same.

How to see it: Whose Streets? is now in theaters in limited release — here's a list of locations.

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Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, and David Lynch in Twin Peaks: The Return

Suzanne Tenner / Showtime

For its big finish on Sunday night, Twin Peaks wrote itself out of existence.

As endings go, it was an even bolder fuck-you to anyone in search of closure than when The Sopranos devoted its precious last minutes to a botched parallel parking job before cutting, mid-Journey chorus, forever to black. The Sopranos finale merely cut the viewers off from characters whose lives, it suggested, would go on without them around to observe and enjoy. The Twin Peaks finale went further: It didn't just refuse to put a bow on the show's return — it tugged at the threads of its entire premise until the whole thing unraveled.

During the last two installments of Showtime's alternately frustrating and fantastic 18-episode revival, Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) managed, by way of the series' eternally dreamy logic, to blip back in time. With the help of his former colleague Phillip Jeffries, once played by the late, great David Bowie, and since replaced by a giant talking kettle, Cooper found and seemingly saved Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) from the murder that first set Twin Peaks into motion. It was the ultimate savior's act from someone who'd spent the original series trying to find the culprit behind the killing: He prevented it from ever happening in the first place. Laura's tarp-wrapped corpse vanished from the beach on which it was found at the start of the original series, Laura herself vanished into some alternate life, and if things had ended there, with Julee Cruise singing over the credits, you'd have a hurried but practically straightforward happy ending, at least by Twin Peaks standards.

But the show kept going, into a coda in which the results of Cooper's feat were depicted as gloriously unsatisfying and unsettling, not restoring the fictional universe to some happier whole but appearing to erase it entirely, leaving the doughty FBI agent adrift with no home to return to, in a colder, harder reality in which his certainty and his ever-important mission were replaced with confusion. Or was that delusion? "What year it is?" Coop muttered while standing on a familiar Twin Peaks street that now looked like foreign territory, after strangers answered the door of the old Palmer house. And Lee, now playing a hard-times waitress Cooper had picked up in Odessa, let out one last blood-curdling scream — a very Laura-like action, but in this context, maybe the cry of someone realizing she'd just let an unstable person drive her halfway across the country on a hallucinatory quest. In the context of current TV and our intense expectations of continuity and completeness, the end felt tantamount to an act of trolling.

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Sheryl Lee and MacLachlan

Suzanne Tenner / Showtime

It is 2017, to answer Coop, though "What year is it?" has always been a fair Twin Peaks question. The original series took place in a syrupy present day that evoked the ’50s, all the better to emphasize the contrast between the idyllic surface of its community and its dark underbelly. But the contradiction of Twin Peaks has always been how uncannily alluring its title setting felt anyway — a place where the air is crisp and the cherry pie perfection, and domestic and sexual violence lurked behind every closed door. In some ways, Twin Peaks played like a warped, manufactured memory of Americana. It changed in fascinating ways during its 26-year absence from the screen, but audiences changed just as much.

The fact that Twin Peaks: The Return felt so alien and indifferent to convention, closer to co-creator Lynch's Inland Empire than the original series, led some cinephiles to claim it for film — the dreaded "18-hour movie." But Twin Peaks: The Return was TV, and its combative approach to what's become of our relationship with the small screen was one of the most interesting aspects of watching it. Twin Peaks: The Return could only be the product of the age of peak TV, Showtime giving Lynch and Mark Frost free rein to realize their every weird, beautiful, or capricious impulse. And yet everything about it ran counter to the way we watch in the peak TV era. It was a handy contrast that the series aired against and alongside Game of Thrones, a show fueled entirely by its story and its elaborate mythology.

Twin Peaks, on the other hand, was basically unspoilable, must-watch TV with no urgency to it. You could be told exactly what happened in an episode — say, Dougie (MacLachlan) wins multiple jackpots at a casino and is reunited with his curiously unquestioning wife Janey-E (Naomi Watts), and then Michael Cera turns up to do a Wild One impression — and it would make no difference to the experience of watching it. It was a terrible fit for our moment of fan theories and exhaustive day-after recaps, but was reflexively processed that way anyway, despite being much more of a poem than a puzzle to be solved.

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Dana Ashbrook, Miguel Ferrer, Lynch, Chrysta Bell, Robert Knepper, Jim Belushi, Kimmy Robertson, and Harry Goaz

Showtime

This was, after all, a show that you could tease all kinds of readings from its rich, murky content, and none of them seemed more rooted than the other. Writers heatedly debated the meaning of the utterly terrifying early sequence in which the couple canoodling in front of that plexiglass box get their faces eaten off by some malevolent force. It was a metaphor for digital filmmaking! Or a metaphor for Netflix and chill! Or a metaphor for how to watch the series! And all of these interpretations were undeniably obvious to everyone but Lynch, who when asked if the scene was an allegory for watching, replied blithely, "No. But that’s an interesting way to think about it."

The opaqueness of Twin Peaks was built in from the start. When Frost and Lynch first pitched it to ABC in 1988 as a murder mystery without a killer, the co-creators hadn’t yet decided who the culprit would be. BOB, the demonic spirit who was finally battled in blob (BLOB) form in the 17th episode of the revival, was famously born from a happy accident. A glimpse of set dresser Frank Silva, who died in 1995, was caught in a mirror in a shot, and Lynch ended up casting him as one of television's most memorable monsters. Frost and Lynch made their mythology up as they went along, which didn't stop viewers from trying to parse it like it was sacred text when the series first aired, and didn't stop them from doing the same this time around, no matter how much resistance that text presented.

And goddamn, did it put up a lot of resistance this season. It transformed the incisive Cooper into the holy fool Dougie for most of the run, and turned the flirtatious teenager Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) into an unhappy harridan of a grown-up who may or may not have actually been in an institution the whole time. It spent long non sequitur stretches away from familiar characters and in the company of new ones, all those kids at the Roadhouse who were introduced in the midst of various personal dramas and then, often, never seen again — like fragments from some CW show grafted onto the ends of episodes.

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Julee Cruise

Suzanne Tenner / Showtime

Unlike every other revival in this revival happy time in which no intellectual property is ever dead and buried, Twin Peaks: The Return was fiercely disinterested in fan service, to the point of obstinance, withholding well-known touches like the Angelo Badalamenti theme song until late in the game. It paraded familiar, now time-worn faces back in front of the camera, but sparingly, spending more time in Buckhorn, South Dakota, and Las Vegas than in the small Washington town of its title. It owed its existence to nostalgia, but nostalgia was something the new season felt deeply skeptical of. Which is why the ending, which ripped the coziness of the original series to shreds, felt so bracing and so warranted.

Twin Peaks chipped away at the cherished bit of American iconography that is the wholesome small town, exposing a rotten core — but it indulged in it, too, with eccentric characters, fits of soaring emotion, and unshakable strangeness so entrancing they in some ways obscured the degree to which this was a story about trauma. In giving Coop a chance to not just help banish evil but to rewrite history, Twin Peaks: The Return recentered the series once again around its primal act of brutality — the rape and murder of a teenage girl — then cashed its beloved world in, in exchange for her life.

The universe we were spat out in exchange was sadder and colder — a place where the cosmic romance of Coop and Diane (Laura Dern) got transmuted into the tawdry reality of a couple named Richard and Linda fucking in a roadside motel, and where time stretched out over long, lonely highway lines. It was a universe with considerably less magic, but it was one that wasn't all hazy over a romanticized act of violence. The ending may not have offered a sense of closure, but there wasn't any backward glancing either.

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Molly's Game

STX / TIFF

Neither Tonya Harding nor Molly Bloom ever won an Olympic medal, but both got close enough to taste gold. Harding made it onto the US Olympic figure skating team twice, though not onto the podium, the second time in a fog of controversy in the wake of the attack of rival Nancy Kerrigan. Bloom was in the qualifying trials for freestyle skiing when she wiped out, a life-derailing accident that would send her down a very different path of hosting illegal high-stakes poker games, getting raided by the FBI, and writing a book about the whole affair. Both Harding and Bloom are women whose public downfalls ended up eclipsing their successes — women with interesting, complicated stories. Which is why both are subjects of splashy movies that just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, with their respective stars, Margot Robbie and Jessica Chastain, getting reams of acclaim.

These are the kind of roles actorly dreams (and awards conversations) are made of — true stories! Juicy ones! As the Tonya of Craig Gillespie's I, Tonya, Robbie dons the fluffy bangs and the '90s fashions and then proceeds to tear her way, ravenous and incandescent, through a rise from poverty and fall from grace that's portrayed as both epic and ridiculous. As the Molly in Molly's Game, Chastain gets to rat-a-tat-tat her way through rapidfire Aaron Sorkin dialogue (the film is also marks his fairly slick looking directorial debut). Molly teaches herself about Texas hold 'em and the vices of rich men, and then saunters around her high-end gambling den like a unimpressed demigoddess in designer stilettos. Harding's and Bloom's lives make for unquestionably great parts, but how they fare in being translated to characters is a thornier question, one that could fuel the ongoing debate about what we want in a good female character.

The delightful I, Tonya, which is still waiting on its buzz to translate into a sale to a theatrical distributor, casts Harding's story as a tragicomedy, which has some journalists contending it does more laughing at her than with her. Its chosen tone is heightened and sardonic, and it leaps from the past to the present and back again, based (per its own description) on "wildly contradictory interviews" with Harding and her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly (played by Sebastian Stan). Robbie, Stan, Allison Janney (deliciously despicable as Harding's embittered mom, LaVona), and Julianne Nicholson (as coach Diane Rawlinson) play their characters in the past, and in the present day, where they talk to the camera and give differing accounts of what happened. They also interrupt the action to complain about a lack of screen time or a niggling misunderstanding, or to defend themselves, or to break the fourth wall to disagree with what's on screen.

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I, Tonya

LuckyChap Entertainment / TIFF

In other words, I, Tonya wears its subjectivity up front, something that fuels Gillespie's riskiest choice: to show Harding's life as one of moving from an abusive childhood with LaVona into an abusive marriage with Jeff into an abusive relationship with the American public. That is, at least, how Tonya presents it, as she runs up against figure skating's class ceiling early and repeatedly, too poor, too sturdy, and too "redneck" to please the sport's gatekeepers, but too good at skating and jumping to be ignored. She's an unreliable narrator, and while I wouldn't say I, Tonya laughs at her, it does undercut her attempts to self-mythologize her own status as an underdog turned unwitting villain. I, Tonya portrays an existence of legit hardship and depressingly normalized degradation, but one whose injustices were sometimes just bad choices, especially approaching "the incident." Its Tonya acquires a untidy grandeur because of her contradictions, not in spite of them, crushing out cigarettes with her skate blade and skipping over inconvenient details the film delves into anyway. She's no role model, but she's a hell of a pleasure to watch.

Personally, I would take a thousand stylized, self-rationalizing on-screen Tonyas over the Molly of the second half of Molly's Game, who gets increasingly, infuriatingly defined by the men in her life, among them her demanding dad (Kevin Costner). It's a consistently maddening Sorkin tendency that, in the first half of his first turn as a director as well as a writer, it looked like he'd kicked. Molly's Game, which will be released on Nov. 22 by STX Entertainment, is great as a poker procedural — Chastain in cool, cynical voiceover explaining the game at large and the games she ends up in charge of in particular. The savvy, capable Molly — who drifts into a celeb-heavy Los Angeles game she takes over, then travels to New York to start one of her own — is not a player herself. But she understands the ebb and flow of the game and what players want, perfectly, tailoring luxury environments and recruiting fresh meat to keep the regulars satisfied.

When Molly's Game digs into the business of gambling and the whims and vulnerabilities of powerful men who spend mountains of money trying to one-up each other, it is witty, gossipy, and very entertaining. That's especially true in the dynamic that develops between Molly and a capricious and cruel movie star played by Michael Cera called "Player X," a man on whom her LA game depends, but one who enjoys, as he puts it, "ruining lives." In Player X, Molly finds a fascinating antagonist who understands her manipulations and will tolerate them only as long as he feels outside of them. But the more Molly's Game tries to decide what its story is about rather than just telling it, the more the film feels like it's trying to "solve" Molly rather than portray her, to the point where its two big emotional moments involve Molly being sat down and informed about her own daddy issues by one male character, and getting passionately defended by another, her lawyer (Idris Elba), while she stays silent. Molly isn't much of a role model either, but Sorkin is increasingly intent on making her one anyway, even though what he finds more noble about her is her willingness to go to jail to protect the foibles and scandalous secrets of the wealthy men who were her clients.

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Molly's Game

STX / TIFF

It's the kind of development that can make a girl want to shake a fist at the sky and howl "Sorkiiiiiin!" But it's also an indication of how little we still all agree on what makes a great female character. Molly is smart, capable, bold, and complex, and yet in the end, Molly's Game feels a need to emphasize that she is also good, as if that were remotely relevant. It has men to attest to her strength, her upstanding aspects, and why her problems were not actually her fault, as if her worth as the subject of a film weren't evident without those details. In trying to affirm her value, Molly's Game relieves her of her agency and most intriguing qualities, something I, Tonya, far less forgiving, would never do. I, Tonya is harder on its main character, and better to her because of it, never reducing her to influences and circumstance or excusing her flaws. Molly's Game neatens up its protagonist in order to make her more appealing, missing the point entirely — which is that it's the messiness that makes characters rounded and interesting, regardless of their gender.

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Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem in Mother!

Paramount

You have to salute the sheer, outlandish audacity of Darren Aronofsky.

In Mother! (which for readability's sake we're capitalizing, though the official title is all lower case) the filmmaker behind Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream enlists all kinds of horror, religious, historical, and home improvement imagery to tell a phantasmagoric allegory about how artists will never love another person the way they love their work. And right in the middle of this deranged howl of a new movie is his own current romantic partner, Jennifer Lawrence.

As an unnamed housewife, she's subjected to an escalatingly nightmarish situation at the behest of her husband, an also unnamed older poet played by Javier Bardem. If Mother! reflects, in even the most roundabout way, how Aronofsky really feels about the tension between domesticity and the drive to create, Lawrence would do well to keep a copy of the film around as evidence in the case of a breakup.

At the start of the film, Lawrence and Bardem live alone in a house so remote it doesn't seem to have a road leading up to it, much less any neighbors nearby. Nevertheless, a stranger played by Ed Harris turns up at their doorstep, claiming to have been told that the place is a bed and breakfast. It's not, but Bardem invites Harris to stay for a drink anyway, and then to stay the night, and then as long as he wants, with the newcomer's assessing, cold-eyed wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) showing up unannounced the next day to join him.

Lawrence, who's been painstakingly restoring the once-burned house by hand while Bardem wrestles with writer's block, is quietly shocked and hurt at her spouse's sudden fit of hospitality, especially since he didn't think of consulting her. Adding insult to injury, Harris and Pfeiffer are unapologetically crummy houseguests who smoke indoors and wander into private rooms, and who, it's soon revealed, haven't been up front about their reasons for coming. The truth is trickier — Harris knows Bardem's work and is a huge fan.

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So far, so unsettling, but all of it still relatively realistic, the unhappy Lawrence pinning on a polite smile and cleaning up after the entitled visitors who make a mess of her beloved home. Then more strangers start showing up, some of them violent and others just rude, making themselves comfortable in the house like a reverse The Exterminating Angel in which the guests can't be made to leave. The sharp-eyed might notice these developments correspond to the Book of Genesis — Adam arrives first, then Eve, then Cain and Abel, and later, there's even the home renovation equivalent of a flood.

Like the environmentally themed poem that was passed out before the film's Toronto International Film Festival screening, this biblical symbolism is something of a red herring. Mother! doesn't really parse as a religious fable or an ecological one, but elements of both swirl in the increasingly heavy atmosphere as Lawrence pleads with Bardem for a return to normalcy. She wants to go back to the private paradise she's been trying to maintain for the two of them, and for the child she's finally conceived. Bardem finally seems to hear her, and also starts writing again. And that's when things start going epically off the rails.

A bloody wound inexplicably opens in the floorboards, and then a forbidding antechamber gets revealed in the basement. The health of the semi-organic ecosystem that is the house goes seriously downhill, and while newcomers keep coming through the door, reality leaves the film for good, the whole tumultuous history of humanity in miniature (swear to god) rushing in.

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Lawrence

Paramount

To describe the characters Bardem and Lawrence are playing as people isn't really accurate — they're types, jagged fragments of full personalities. Bardem is the artist as monstrous deity, creating universes and then destroying them to start over, starved for praise and forever pulling away from his partner to look outward for it and for new stories to use as inspiration.

Lawrence is the perfect nurturer, a Giving Tree in the all-natural-fibers-clad body of a nubile 26-year-old, cooking and keeping house and desiring nothing more than to support and spend time with the husband who finds her attentions suffocating. Aronofsky's regular cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, spends most of the movie with his camera up close to the Madonna-esque oval of Lawrence's face, capturing flashes of betrayal, anger, and fear as her home is invaded by outsiders.

Mother! may be told through Lawrence's character, but make no mistake, this is a movie about a man. More specifically, it's a movie about a man whose need to create is a bottomless thing, a dissatisfaction that will always have him looking outward and prioritizing the attention of his audience over the person to whom he should be closest. That remains true even when members of that audience partake in an appalling version of a Eucharist that also happens to read like a filmmaker's hyperbolic rendition of what it's like to get work torn apart by critics.

The passive devotion that is the defining quality of Lawrence's character might be maddening, but it ultimately reads less as reductive than as a way for Aronofsky to bolster his extremely unflattering but unapologetic case against his own stand-in. His urge to create art is portrayed as an insatiable hunger and such a fundamentally selfish restlessness that he chafes even against the most impossibly undemanding of partners. Her unqualified love can never satisfy him like his pursuit of the love of strangers.

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Lawrence

Paramount

Mother! is an art film getting a wide release, a fascinating (and maybe doomed), stylistically radical, thematically unfriendly, and admirably batshit gamble. It doesn't tell a story so much as it feels like it offers a warped self-portrait of someone admitting there are limits to what they're willing to give, but not what they're willing to take, and in the end they can just begin again with someone else.

Though bathed in blood and tears and suffering — this disturbing abuse weathered almost entirely by Lawrence — Mother! isn't remotely a traditional horror movie. But it is uncompromisingly horrific, in the way of listening to someone you know blurt out a bunch of ugly, unvarnished truths at the tail end of a drunken night. The honesty might be real and raw and compelling, but you're also left having to figure out if you'll ever be able to look at them the same way again.

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Bodied

Adishankarbrand / TIFF

Last week, Joseph Kahn summoned the wrath of the Beyhive down upon himself — and not just once but repeatedly. For the average person online, drawing the enraged attention of one of the internet's most devoted and formidable fandoms is something to be feared and avoided at all costs. But the 44-year-old Korean-American filmmaker didn't just goad Beyoncé stans into attack with taunts about their inability to do real damage and quips to the press destined to immediately be taken out of context, he greeted the influx of bee emojis and tweeted insults like Lieutenant Dan howling defiance at a hurricane.

Or maybe just like a director with a new movie to promote. "To be honest, I did it on purpose," Kahn admitted over coffee in Toronto, referring to his campaign of strategic hive-poking and the resulting media coverage. And, he pointed out, it worked. "Everyone knows Bodied now. You can make a good film, but if you throw it out into a vacuum, the air does not get in there. The only thing people care about these days is celebrity. My movie has no stars. So all you have to do is know how to rattle the internet cage."

Bodied, which was the opening night pick of the Toronto International Film Festival's beloved Midnight Madness program, is Kahn's first film in six years, one he wrote with battle rapper Alex Larsen, aka Kid Twist. Altogether, Kahn's made three films, including 2004's self-aware Fast and the Furious-but-with-motorcycles riff Torque, and the 2011 teen-comedy-slasher genre mashup Detention, which, like Bodied, he funded himself. But the reason he's so well-acquainted with the world of dedicated pop fandoms is because it's the entity in which he spends most of his time. He's best known as a prominent, prolific, perpetually outspoken music video director who, since launching his career in the early ’90s, has worked with everyone from Muse to Destiny's Child, Britney Spears to Dr. Dre. And, of course, with Taylor Swift.

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"Look What You Made Me Do"

Big Machine Label Group

Since 2015, Swift has been the music artist with whom Kahn's career has been most closely linked. It's a connection boosted, in part, by Kahn's willingness to wade into the online fray in defense of the seemingly eternally embattled pop star (it's in talking about Swift that Kahn is most careful with his words, describing her as an "excellent target"). Kahn has directed five music videos for Swift, including the monster that is "Blank Space" (2.16 billion views and counting) and late August's internet-breaker "Look What You Made Me Do." He was still slugging it out on behalf of the latter, an intensely parsed and much-discussed video in which Swift contends with her past personas, in the days leading up to the Bodied premiere.

Kahn obviously isn't afraid of controversy or a fight. At a time when people working in Hollywood have gotten increasingly cautious about their online presences, he's maintained one of most markedly salty, trolly Twitter feeds of any filmmaker working today. (Illustrative sample: "I just gotta remind everyone that my twitter has only one message. Fuck you.") These facts are even more crystal clear when watching Bodied, which stars former Disney Channel actor Calum Worthy and actual battle rappers like Dumbfoundead and Dizaster, and is a button-pushing comedy that uses the underground hip-hop scene as a way to tackle language wars, cultural appropriation, and freedom of speech.

But if that pitch sounds like the ramp-up to the kind of potential nightmare 4chan apologia you'd want to run away from, screaming, the reality of Bodied is a lot more conflicted, considered, overstuffed with ideas, and yes, sometimes, even sensitive. It’s a film that argues on behalf of the right to say anything while simultaneously emphasizing how much words can wound. "This film has a lot of issues in it, and I'm not dismissing any of them," Kahn said. "In fact, one of the things we're trying to figure out is, in the world of absolute free speech, is there a limit? Is there a consequence to going too far? I wanted to explore the furthest reach of that."

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"Wildest Dreams"

Big Machine Records

Bodied was produced by Eminem, another artist Kahn's directed videos for, and a man who famously got his start in the freestyle rap battle scene. But while Eight Mile gets name-checked in Bodied, the film primarily owes its existence to a Swift controversy. More specifically, it was born out of the one kicked up by the video Kahn did for "Wildest Dreams," shot in part in the Serengeti and meant to evoke a location shoot for an old Hollywood production à la The African Queen, with Swift and Scott Eastwood playing actors whose onscreen romance bleeds into real life.

Kahn was aware there were, to use his word, "complexities" to this concept from the start — plenty of shit in which to step. These included concerns as to whether the video would accidentally make it look like Swift was out to shoot lions instead of a film, and whether she'd be accused of "whitewashing history and ignoring segregation" if Kahn cast a black actor to play the director of the fictional feature, as was his original impulse. These considerations failed to dampen the firestorm of arguments the video set off about whether Swift was romanticizing colonization and erasing Africans from the African setting. Kahn wasn't having it.

"I started making jokes about it. I had one joke where I said, 'Asians can't be racists. Black or white, all dogs taste the same to us.' Paper magazine wrote an entire hit piece on me talking about how I don't do videos for minorities, which is absurd, because I've done 30 years of music videos and half of them are hip-hop." Eventually, he said, the furor became an inspiration. "I thought, this is insane — no matter what I write or what I say, they just want to be social media bullies. And the nature of even talking about race is so constricted behind the accusation, and not over the analysis, and I thought, Wow, there's a movie."

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Joseph Kahn at the Toronto International Film Festival

Maarten de Boer / BuzzFeed News / Getty Images

Which is where battle rap came in. "There's an anger in me, and it only seemed to be expressed by a world where a white guy and a black guy could make completely racist jokes against each other, worse than anything I've ever written, and then they go get a beer together," Kahn explained. But in addition to its particular hip-hop scene, Bodied also keeps one foot on campus, where woker-than-thou characters are shown trying to one-up each other in circular conversations about race, gender, class, and privilege. One of the most provocative ideas the film floats is that the vocabulary of social justice has been co-opted for verbal one-upmanship just as competitive as battle rap.

"I feel sometimes like when people who can't outsmart me online, they'll just go back to my old tweets and say, 'Look, he's racist, don't listen to him.' It's dirty play," Kahn says. "They don't know me. They're just taking jokes, and saying that all stereotyped jokes are racist, which I genuinely do not believe. A joke is a contradiction you agree with. Just because the contradiction is dangerous doesn't mean you don't agree with it." Kahn sees Bodied as embracing that sense of danger, while acknowledging that the intersection he's been occupying between an incendiary indie movie and young music fandom can be "messy and ugly."

But also, maybe, advantageous? Bodied, which was well-received at TIFF, has yet to cement a distributor, but Kahn's been tweeting about getting multiple offers. And certainly, for Kahn, all the attention didn't hurt in getting to this place, even if so much of it was angry. "I don't think it really means much," he said of the online uproar. "I think, on one level, it's just blowing up the pop stan world," which then becomes a conduit to draw more promotion of his film work, especially when it comes to his already infamous LA Times interview in which he joked, "Beyoncé copied 'Bad Blood.'" "How many indie films get linked hundreds of times in an interview with a filmmaker talking about race?" he pointed out. Then, not one to resist, he added, "Thank you, Beyhive."

Get to know these stars now, people.

McKenna Grace (I, Tonya)

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Margot Robbie is already getting well-deserved awards season buzz for her portrayal of Tonya Harding, but I, Tonya belongs to Allison Janney, who plays Harding’s chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, abusive, fur coat–clad mother, LaVona Golden. Some of Janney’s most harrowing and insidiously funny scenes are opposite 11-year-old actor McKenna Grace, who plays a young Tonya.

From getting kicked out of a chair to being beaten with a brush in an ice rink bathroom, Grace holds her own opposite Janney’s scene-steamrolling. She imbues young Tonya with an emotional steeliness that lends even further depth to Robbie’s interpretation of the skater in her later years — and she was a complete pro on set. “McKenna was so sweet and fun with me,” Janney told BuzzFeed News after the film premiered in Toronto. “She would call me ‘Miss Alison.’ She would say, ‘Miss Alison, I know this is not who you really are. I know this is your character, and I have a pad in my shoulder, so you can hit me harder. It’s OK.’” —Keely Flaherty

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Natalie Morales (Battle of the Sexes)

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Battle of the Sexes left a lot to be desired — it was a challenge to buy Emma Stone as Billie Jean King, to see a very extra Steve Carell in sideburns as Bobby Riggs and not Anchorman's Brick Tamland, and to keep my eyes from rolling at the very glossed-over portrayal of King's lesbianism.

But then there was Natalie Morales. The actor — not the Today show host — first popped on my radar on Parks and Rec and won my heart on the gone-far-too-soon ABC comedy Trophy Wife. She's had arcs on some very other successful TV series, like White Collar, The Newsroom, and Girls, but she hasn't been given a film platform like Battle of the Sexes and seriously, she runs with it.

Her performance as the sarcastic but genuine Rosie Casals, a fellow tennis pro of King's, quietly steals the movie. She nails the nuances of Rosie's clearly coded gayness — Morales herself identifies as queer — and her hilariously dry commentary in the broadcast booth during King and Riggs' big match makes the film's climactic moments all the better. Let this be the role that allows Morales to take the lead. —Jaimie Eitkin

Maarten de Boer / BuzzFeed News / Getty Images

Daniela Vega (A Fantastic Woman)

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We hear Vega before we see her, as her character Marina croons a deceptively upbeat song about a wayward lover while her current one, a much older man named Orlando (Francisco Reyes), watches her with rapt attention. She sings with panache and wit, but when Marina steps offstage, her demeanor grows quiet, almost shy. When Orlando suddenly dies of an aneurysm, we begin to understand why: Marina is trans (as is Vega), and we watch her struggle to grieve her beloved's death as the police treat her with suspicion and Orlando's family treats her with contempt (and worse). Co-writer-director Sebastián Lelio rarely takes his camera off of Vega's face, and Vega's subtle, emotionally intricate performance commands our attention and fills our hearts. —Adam B. Vary

Sony Pictures Classics

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Taron Egerton in Kingsman: The Golden Circle

Giles Keyte / Twentieth Century Fox

The new sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle is a far better-behaved movie than the first Kingsman. Yet somehow, this makes it so much worse.

Say what you will about the first installment of what's now a whole secret agent–spoofing action franchise — but at least it had the guts to commit to the snickering nihilism that emerged as its defining quality. 2015's Kingsman: The Secret Service gleefully massacred the Westboro Baptist Church for kicks, blew up the head of then-president Obama as part of an apocalypse-averted punchline, and concluded with a gag about anal that didn't skewer the sexual politics of vintage James Bond flicks so much as just restate (and relish) them in blunter terms. The film began as an energetic, rude riff on the sacrosanct brand of Britain's most famous fictional spy and ended up somewhere in the realm of South Park humor, except crueler and more horny. Whatever good times it offered were the good times of drinking with fun strangers at a bar who are almost certainly going to beat you up later in the night.

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Julianne Moore

Alex Bailey / Twentieth Century Fox

The new movie doesn't want to sell you such uneasy entertainments. Subtitled The Golden Circle, the sequel is more intent on selling you some movie tie-in whiskey instead, and maybe also some movie tie-in shaving products. Like the first film, The Golden Circle is directed by Matthew Vaughn, who cowrote the script, based on a Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons graphic novel, with frequent collaborator Jane Goldman. And like the first film, the new Kingsman stars Taron Egerton, engaging and always a little too sweet-faced for the material, as Eggsy, a gifted working-class kid who shakes up the upper-crusty traditions of a secret spy ring, hidden away behind a London tailor shop and operating conveniently unfettered by government oversight.

Not that the secret spy ring gets much screentime as a functional organization in The Golden Circle. Like The Secret Service, the sequel is less interested in showing how Kingsman operates than in exploring what happens when it gets blown up — literally: The new baddie, a ruthless drug kingpin and dedicated '50s nostalgist named Poppy (Julianne Moore, in what's just one of her two unhinged retro housewife roles this fall), wings a bunch of missiles at the facilities early in the film, forcing Eggsy and chief tech support Merlin (Mark Strong) to seek help from a sibling organization in the US, a group that turns out to be called, appropriately, Statesman.

Statesman is based in Kentucky, and their cover operation is considerably more expansive than a bespoke tailoring operation — it's a bourbon distillery that happens to be massively successful (a convenient plot development). Their members, Tequila (Channing Tatum), Whiskey (Pedro Pascal), and Champagne (Jeff Bridges), eschew the tailored suits for more casual wear, falling stylewise into a blurry area between "cowboy" and "oil baron," and wielding shotguns, bullwhips, and electric lassos.

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Pedro Pascal in action

Twentieth Century Fox

If Kingsman was an institution delineated by class, Statesman is an institution delineated by...nothing in particular, at least as far as The Golden Circle's toothless take on US iconography and social realities goes. When, for example, Ginger Ale (Halle Berry), Statesman's equivalent to Merlin and the lone black and female member we see, talks about how she gets blocked whenever she tries to become an active agent, the movie never bothers to explain why.

Then again, it doesn't really have time to. The Golden Circle all but invites the audience to speculate as to how few days some of its cast members actually spent on set. Elton John appears in an extended cameo as himself, and it feels like he racks up more time onscreen than some of the actual higher-billed actors. Famous faces show up onscreen and then vanish for long stretches; surviving characters from the first film get offed with barely a shrug; and one who died gets resurrected in just as desultory a fashion.

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Mark Strong and Halle Berry

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It's not a spoiler that Colin Firth's Harry Hart turns up alive in The Golden Circle (he's in the trailer) and it's not worth spoiling how it happens, simply because his killing gets undone with the screenplay equivalent of a hurried hand wave. Firth, with his crisp accent, the crisper line of his suits, and his surrogate-father air, was a highlight from the first film, and his presence is felt at the start of the second. But his return plays like a haphazard and undisguised act of fan service, just as the incorporation of Princess Tilde (Hanna Alström) into a larger role comes off like an awkward attempt at fan appeasement — an attempt to fend off anger at how this woman was turned into a butt-fucking punchline in the first film by having the main character now ready to put a ring on it in the second (what a wealth of meanings the movie's title holds!).

If the first Kingsman was a work of lol-nothing-matters provocation with a real mean streak, the second is a work of lol-nothing-matters laziness, a follow-up that fits in a few stylish action set pieces, but can't be bothered to invest in its own fictional world. The developments that do have potential, like Polly's devious plan to make herself a legitimate businesswoman by forcing an end to the war on drugs, become all the more frustrating because the way they unfold is so slapdash, especially in line with the movie's merchandising aims.

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Channing Tatum

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And nothing else is given the attention the branded liquor receives. Statesman bourbon is already available to purchase and was apparently chugged by Berry at Comic-Con as part of a promo stunt. It's given loving attention in multiple scenes throughout the film, to the point where its existence is important to the confusing final act of the movie, in which there's a betrayal that seems to take place only to skirt having to put Moore in a fight scene. It's all in service of what Vaughn told the New York Times he considers "the future of advertising," "authentic storytelling with the product in there," not real-life products being wedged into a fictional movie but a fictional product making its way to real liquor store shelves. Maybe this would feel less egregious in a more coherent movie — like the first Kingsman, which, in all its misanthropy, didn't play like a clothing ad despite the fact you could buy its clothes. But in The Golden Circle, the sales pitch feels impossible to ignore, a development more cynical than any of the first one's juvenile jokes.

6. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul

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Jason Drucker, Charlie Wright, and Alicia Silverstone in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul.

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John Denver song used: "Take Me Home, Country Roads"

The Wimpyverse returned to theaters after a five-year absence in May at the expense of a no-longer-age-appropriate original cast that got ruthlessly dumped like puppies that had grown into larger-than-anticipated dogs. The Long Haul's newer, spryer version of the Heffley clan was accordingly paired with a fresh, current topic — how to balance face time with screen time in the digital age. The road-trip comedy results were so dismal they might have killed the franchise for good, but in one aspect, at least, they were pretty on point: And that aspect is John Denver, whose music has bewilderingly been everywhere, at least at the movies, this year. At a low point for the Heffleys on their device-free, problem-plagued road trip to grandmother's house, their luggage gets strewn all over the highway to the tune of "Take Me Home, Country Roads." But, like everything else in The Long Haul, its participation in 2017's strangest soundtrack trend is just off: The movie opts for the Me First and the Gimme Gimmes cover instead of the Denver original. Get it together, Heffleys!

5. Kingsman: The Golden Circle

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Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, and Pedro Pascal in Kingsman: The Golden Circle.

Giles Keyte / Twentieth Century Fox

John Denver song used: "Take Me Home, Country Roads"

The greatest pleasure the underwhelming Kingsman sequel has to offer comes not from anything it actually puts onscreen, but from reading director Matthew Vaughn's grumpy interview responses about realizing that his film is actually the sixth this year to feature a Denver tune. "I was like, fuck you, Ridley," he (mostly jokingly) told Uproxx about discovering that his movie and Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant share a song. "Not that he had any idea, but it did break my heart," Vaughn said. And sure, it's possible that The Golden Circle's incorporation of "Take Me Home, Country Roads" in a scene of heroic sacrifice might have had more impact if audiences hadn't heard it employed for a similar cornball-poignant effect so recently before. It's also possible that the sequence would have fallen flat no matter what, given the only setup it got was a hurried earlier mention of a character's unexpected fondness for country-western music. Like a lot of The Golden Circle, the moment plays like rough notes for a scene no one got around to actually writing.

4. Free Fire

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Armie Hammer, Jack Reynor, and Noah Taylor in Free Fire.

A24

John Denver songs used: "Annie's Song," "It's Up to You," and "This Old Guitar"

Ben Wheatley's feature-length firefight takes place in the '70s, which at first seems mainly like an excuse to dress its stellar cast in outlandish period fashions and to liberate the plot from pesky "why don't they just use their cell phones" questions. But as the film goes on, it starts to feel like Free Fire was really set in the '70s in order to make sense of its heavy use of John Denver tracks. The cynical shoot-em-up may not have the year's best use of Denver's music, but it definitely has the most, incorporating three songs into its scenario of criminals cracking wise while killing each other in a Boston warehouse. Chief among them is "Annie's Song," the surprisingly mellow choice playing in the van of the hotheaded Harry (Jack Reynor) as he pulls up to an arms deal that's about to go spectacularly wrong. When, multiple acts of violence later, someone gets back in the van and starts the engine, the song gets cranked up again, becoming the perfectly incongruous accompaniment to a sloppy, brutal skirmish that concludes with the crushing of someone's skull just as the song reaches its peak — fill up your senses on that.

3. Alien: Covenant

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Danny McBride and Katherine Waterston in Alien: Covenant.

Twentieth Century Fox

John Denver song used: "Take Me Home, Country Roads"

We never hear the original version of John Denver's most famous (and the year's most cinema-friendly) song anywhere in Alien: Covenant. We only hear it sung posthumously by a character who died offscreen between films: Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), the scientist who was one of the few survivors of Prometheus, the previous film in Ridley Scott's planned trilogy of prequels. The cracked recording of Shaw croaking out the lyrics to "Take Me Home, Country Roads" is beamed into space like a beacon (or a lure), leading the crew of the colonization ship of the title to land on the planet on which she'd gotten stuck. The more we realize about what happened on the ground, the more Shaw's song choice turns tragic and haunting, because going home to the place she belonged wasn't an option.

2. Logan Lucky

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Channing Tatum and Farrah Mackenzie in Logan Lucky.

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John Denver songs used: "Some Days Are Diamonds (Some Days Are Stone)" and "Take Me Home, Country Roads"

If any film on this list is entitled to revel in "Take Me Home, Country Roads," it's Steven Soderbergh's joyous heist movie. The characters in Logan Lucky live in West Virginia, the state the song is about, even if work and eventual crime frequently take them into North Carolina. Matthew Vaughn could take a lesson from how Soderbergh's film sets up its extremely effective John Denvery payoff. Logan Lucky opens with Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) telling his beloved daughter Sadie (Farrah Mackenzie) about the song, making the case for it as one she should sing in an upcoming pageant. While she's a fan, she opts for Rihanna's more crowd- and costume-friendly "Umbrella" instead. But when it comes time to perform, and she spots her dad in the crowd, she makes the last minute decision to sing his favorite tune instead, a cappella, imperfect, and absolutely wonderfully. It's an irresistibly tear-jerking moment, sure, this act of child generosity to a struggling parent, but it also captures the bittersweetness lurking underneath what is, on the surface, a rollicking comedy. Logan Lucky's characters may identify fiercely with the place they're from, but they're also constantly made aware of the economic tenuousness and limited options that come with it. Theirs is a strong love, but a painful one as well.

1. Okja

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Paul Dano in Okja.

Netflix

John Denver songs used: "Annie's Song"

Okja's John Denver moment comes in the midst of a scene of madcap chaos: The title character, a genetically engineered superpig being hunted by malevolent global conglomerate Mirando, has been on the run with her owner, Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun), the giant animal wild-eyed and panicking as she tramples through the crowded and unfamiliar urban territory. But just as Mija and Okja hit a dead end and Mirando's men come blundering in, they're rescued by the forces of the Animal Liberation Front, who've come to attempt to save the day. The action slows, "Annie's Song" starts, and as K (Steven Yeun) helps the bruised Mija up, the rest of the ALF clash, amusingly, with the corporate employees, fighting them off with umbrellas and tablecloths. The camera holds on Mija's face as she watches J (Paul Dano) tenderly pull a shard of plastic from Okja's foot. How is this scene so silly and so profoundly moving at once? Maybe it's director Bong Joon-ho's astounding skill with balancing tonal juxtapositions, or the aura of serene kindness that Dano projects. Or maybe it's Denver, singing that ode to his wife, the sweetness of his voice used not quite for irony or for pure sentimentality, but somehow both at once. There's no more perfect accompaniment for this moment of grace in a movie that portrays the world as increasingly cold and cruel — it's not just the best use of a John Denver song in 2017, it's one of the best scenes of the year.