Frame Depth

With the world currently preparing to probably be somewhat “whelmed” by the upcoming mega-crossover Avengers: Infinity War, I, like most of the film-viewing planet, have been re-watching the Marvel oeuvre in order to enter the correct headspace to really take in what that movie is going to be. The product of a ten-year long waiting game that most audiences have been more than happy to play, built on the foundation of a 2008 film that set the film industry on a path that we’re still going to be following another ten years from now. I’m still early into this project of sitting on my couch and reliving so many memories of speculating with high school friends about what superhero the next end-credits scene will tease, and it has already given me some shocking realizations: the first Iron Man is still the best Marvel movie, Captain America: The First Avenger isn’t the rollicking, Indiana Jones-esque adventure classic I remembered it being, and, maybe most shocking to even the biggest Marvel fans, Iron Man 2 is still just as good as I thought it was when I was 16.

I so often see it ranked in the bottom five of the Marvel listings, and because it has been a few years since I watched it incessantly following the Blu-Ray release, I figured it was a movie that just hadn’t aged well when compared to the more recent Marvel works. Despite my loving it upon release, I never argued for its merits when people declared it the “worst Marvel film”, or “boring”, or “meandering”. I’ve been a life-long Iron Man fan, first of him as a character in video games before getting into the many, many trade paperback collections of his solo comics. My obsession with Tony Stark made me completely eat up anything Marvel Studios put out featuring him until recent years, when I had the realization during my first screening of Captain America: Civil War that I didn’t care that I was seeing Iron Man in a movie anymore. And I realized I hadn’t cared when I saw the Hulkbuster in Avengers: Age of Ultron either. I enjoy both movies fine, but Robert Downey, Jr.’s Tony Stark doesn’t give me that same jolt of excitement he did just a few years previous. It could be a writing or performance issue, but I think the real reason is that Tony Stark has stopped growing as a person in any kind of believable way. When taking a look back at the first two Iron Man films, and from my memories of the third, Tony used to feel like a real person that had real issues to overcome.

2008′s Iron Man showed us a man being forced to experience all of the damage he has been causing the world first-hand, and being broken by this. When he emerges from that cave in that armor, he is beginning the journey down a path to becoming a better person. Tony spends a lot of that movie being angry, of course at Obadiah Stane and the Ten Rings, but mostly at himself, for creating the monster that took the lives of Yinsen, his family, and nearly Tony himself. He failed to see that he inadvertently had been arming both sides of the war on terror, taking money from both the military industrial complex and the terrorists that kill young American soldiers, and spending that money on alcohol and sex. That rage is what fuels Tony in that film, and allows him to purge Stark Industries of Obadiah Stane, the first steps into making up for the terrible things he has been doing for his whole life.

Thinking this is enough to be a better person, Tony reverts back to some of his old ways, but now equipped with the Iron Man armor and a whole new level of fame he didn’t even know was possible. This is where we begin Iron Man 2, where he is once again bragging about how he has achieved peace through his designs, and reveling in the fact that he has the press and the public groveling at his feet. It is no question then that he and Pepper Potts have gone back to their familiar dynamic as well, as he is not yet ready for that level of commitment to anything. He is also drinking more than he ever has before, a characteristic that his comic book counterpart had been known for best before any sort of film adaptation came around. Alongside all of this toxic behavior is a handy plot-device of the palladium core in his arc reactor poisoning his blood, which gets worse as his attitude and decision-making does. Of course, the higher the percentage gets, the crazier his decisions and personality become, as he tries to comes to grips with his imminent death, creating a sort of feedback loop that causes things to spiral for him. This is where Tony starts to become aware of the other parts of himself he must purge if he is to complete the journey he began when he stomped out of that cave in that hulking grey armor.

If this weren’t already too much for Tony to deal with, the movie also introduces one of the roots for the various character flaws Tony has under his belt, his father Howard Stark. A mixture of Walt Disney and Howard Hughes, Howard Stark is first introduced as a genial, smiling older man standing next to a model of “the city of the future”, putting on his best face for the American public. But he is later referred to as a “lion” by the Justin Hammer, and as a “thief” and a “butcher” by Ivan Vanko. Like Tony, Howard had a duel life, one as a cheery hero to the common man and another as a death dealing weapons manufacturer. He never got around to being a father to Tony Stark, who was following in his exact footsteps right up until the shrapnel entered his chest. But in a video revealed to him by Nick Fury, Tony sees that Howard went through the same struggle of identity, and also had to come to grips with all of the terror and pain that he has unleashed upon the world. Howard’s method for redeeming his incredibly spotty legacy is Tony himself, and leaves him a secret within the Stark Expo floorplans in an attempt to rebuild the world he once helped destroy. Similarly, Tony realizes that his gift to the world is Iron Man, but has been wasting that gift on himself. This is of course all mixed in with Hammer and Vanko making plays against Stark, as well as Black Widow being set-up for her inclusion in the rest of the franchise.

All of that would be well and good, except for the frustrating fact that not a lot of these very disparate and seemingly unrelated plot threads are not fully resolved till later movies or just not picked up at all. Tony’s drinking comes to a head in this film in a scene in which Tony pilots the suit drunk in order to appease a house full of partygoers and nearly decapitates a few with a repulsor beam, but this is seemingly glossed over by a fight he has with Rhodey minutes later. He experiences no real consequences for being an out of control alcoholic, and it still has not been addressed as of Civil War, and I highly doubt it will come to pass in either of the Infinity War movies. It really seemed to be the big emotional climax that the first two films were building to, the final “demon” that Tony would have to conquer on his road to betterment. Instead, he receives a much needed humbling moment when he enters the wormhole at the end of The Avengers, and sees that the universe is much grander than he anticipated. That continues the arc of his personality issues and carries into Iron Man 3, and we see a much more cooperative Tony from thereon out. Iron Man 3 completes his identity crisis by proving to him that he is not overshadowed by his work, either good or bad, like he fears he will be in that cave in the first film, and showing that he still has things to offer the world despite just being “a man in a can”. The less said about what Age of Ultron and Civil War do for Tony’s character, the better. At this point, his character is completely dependent on what the plot needs it to be. I have already forgotten much of what he does in Spider-Man: Homecoming, but I do remember thinking the mentor role serves him well.

So why defend Iron Man 2 if it fails to deliver on the plots it sets up? Mainly because it dares to address these things in the first place. The only other movies in the Marvel canon to come close to the level of introspection Iron Man 2 attempts to do are Iron Man 3 and Black Panther. The moments we see of John Slattery’s Howard Stark are eye-opening in terms of Tony’s character, and show that he does have something to relate to his father over. The many attempts to recreate the Iron Man armor show Tony that what he thinks is the ultimate arbiter of peace by way of obsolescence is just the opening of a can of worms that may lead to the next arms race. It asks if Tony Stark can truly overcome his immoral past, or if he is doomed to be the leader on the world’s ultimate path to the apocalypse, despite what his intentions may be. That’s not a question that gets asked in your more typical Marvel fare, which many people still claim this movie is.

Secondly, while there are of course things to tear apart story, character, and performance wise in some areas, the action and effects are top notch. Black Panther this year showed how bad VFX can be in blockbusters, but that is not something Iron Man 2 suffers from, even eight years out. While it is infuriatingly short, watching Iron Man and War Machine fight the Hammer drones works as pure spectacle, to say nothing of the entire chase sequence that precedes it. There have been of course better action sequences out of Marvel since then, but it has been a very close race with the climax of this film always in the discussion for me.

Lastly, Sam Rockwell’s performance as Justin Hammer makes it a true tragedy that he no longer seems to be a part of the MCU in spite of the fact that he is one of the few Marvel villains to survive the entire run-time of a film. He does make a brief cameo in the short film All Hail the King, but it is not nearly enough for what he deserves. Rockwell was in the running to play Tony in the first film, and it’s not too hard to imagine an alternate universe where we see a pre-shrapnel Tony acting very similarly to Hammer in this film. In different moments he can be smooth, buffoonish, intimidating, and weaselly. He deserves to return in Iron Man 4 (if we are ever blessed enough to receive one) for the dance he does onto the expo stage alone.

SPOILERS for Bright ahead.

Take a peek into any current comment section or Reddit thread discussing David Ayer’s 2017 urban-fantasy/cop drama Bright and you’ll undoubtedly read the same phrase over and over again. Despite a plethora of negative critical reactions towards the movie penned by controversial geek-figure Max Landis (who became even more controversial this last week when following sexual harassment/assault charges), it has become as big as of a success as a Netflix original film can be, with most of the praise being directed at the “world-building” of the film. People’s imaginations have been lit-aflame by its depiction of a universe with centaur policemen, famous Orc athletes, and dragons flying over the Los Angeles landscape. But as fantastic as all of those things seem and are, the actual world depicted in Bright is so similar to our own that the fantasy aspect of the movie almost comes off as an afterthought. So what exactly are fans of the movie latching onto as examples of good world-building? Is the world of Bright fully realized or is it just changing the bare-minimum of our world to seem fresh and exciting?

What Bright really seems to excel at, in my opinion, is not precisely “world-building”, but something I think can be called “world-hinting”. The examples from earlier, like the centaur and the dragon, are things never expanded on. They are the foundation on which a world can be built, but without any sort of information on them, they only exist to raise questions that are not answered. The side effect of this is that the viewer is left to fill in the gaps, and with things like dragons being so outside of our reality, the viewer can conjure quite a lot. In other movies, this technique can be used to great effect, such as in Mad Max: Fury Road, where we see a tribe of men on four stilts walking across a swamp (the difference there being that the Mad Max franchise is much more established than Bright). World-building, at least in my eyes, is something more in-depth than a quick visual like the dragon. For a recent example, the world of John Wick is built by John Wick navigating through what makes it unique as a world. The rules of the assassins are thoroughly explained and demonstrated throughout the plot of the movie, so that by the end we mostly know how it works, and can also imagine the implied history of this assassin order. It feels fleshed out, believable, and is actually shown to us by the film instead of being left up to our imaginations. There are rules and rituals to the assassin-laden world of John Wick that we can recognize.

This isn’t to say that Bright isn’t clearly using “world-hinting” to great effect, it is by fan’s standards, but everything else we see from Bright is not fantastical enough to justify dragons in the sky, or centaurs in riot gear. While a central conceit of the movie is that people live in close quarters with fantasy creatures, these fantasy creatures are nothing but loosely-veiled analogues for real life ethnic/socio-economic groups. There’s nothing, besides their appearance, to differentiate an Orc or an elf from a regular human being. Magic does exist in this world, but in a very limited capacity and it is not explained in any way that makes it feel believable, even within this world. It seems as though part of Ayer’s goal was to be a realistic cop drama as well as an urban fantasy, and as a result, it feels uninterested in its fantasy aspects. When you see things like a dragon in the sky, or hear tales of an unnamed “Dark Lord” (whose lack of a name is another sign of poor world-building), it starts to seem very unbelievable that the world is so similar to modern day Los Angeles. A Hispanic character even mentions The Alamo, which as far as we know as the audience played out the exact same way it did in our world, despite the existence of Orcs, Elves, dragons, Dwarves, centaurs, and maybe even lizard people. Even Shrek exists, with no clues as to what other races in this world might think of a film like that. Logically, some races in the world of Bright might view Shrek differently than we do.

Details like that go a long way in making the world of a fictional setting feel like work was put into it. When Bright began with a montage of street-art done by the different races, I felt hope that this world would be all thought out as well as that intro was. Tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it things like the world “elf” being highlighted within the word “self” seemed like a sort of social movement hashtag that would exist in a modern fantasy world. But details like that started to fall completely by the wayside almost immediately as it became more and more of a typical cop drama. By the end, there isn’t any memorable lore to the world of Bright besides the fact that Orcs followed a Dark Lord 2000 years previously and that Orcs need to be “blooded” (what this means is never fully explained or demonstrated).

The film had an easy surrogate into this world that it never utilized: Will Smith as Daryl Ward. Ward, like most humans in this world, has a distaste for Orcs and seems to be generally ignorant of their culture. His partner, Nick Jakoby, is the first Orc cop, and the only Orc in the movie that doesn’t come off as a blatant urban stereotype. It would have done a lot of good for the movie to have Jakoby, either directly or indirectly, teach Ward about the life of an Orc in this world that was in any way unique to Bright. But because he is an outsider to his people, we don’t learn anything about the Orcs from him. He doesn’t feel like he is one of them at all. In the scene in which he is executed by an Orc gang and immediately brought back to life by a wand, they decide to let him go due to a prophecy that only gets mentioned one other time in the movie. We never learn the contents of this prophecy, or if it is something every Orc knows, or why it means Jakoby would be forgiven for everything. It’s extremely unclear if Jakoby teaches Ward anything about his people or breaks through any of his prejudices against Orcs, and as a result we don’t learn anything about them either.

A warning up top: I cannot fully talk about this movie without giving out SPOILERS. I’ll try to keep them somewhat lite, but when it’s necessary events of the film will be described.

Everyone’s story of how they came to love Star Wars is very similar: they most likely saw it young and were absolutely enchanted by the imagination, creativity, and pure fun on display. There is no better escapism than Star Wars, as it allows us to forget the doldrums of our reality while also being a perfect example of Campbellian story-structure and a fascinating distillation of both Western and Eastern popular culture and philosophy. Since its release in 1977, it has grown into something much larger than it was intended to be. One can make a very compelling argument about its artistic merit being nearly completely absent since Return of the Jedi, but many filmmakers in the past have managed to slip thematic points and messages into even the most commercial of movies. It seems as though Star Wars, the epitome of commercialism and marketability, would be the last place nowadays one would look for thematic depth, but in maybe the most stunning upsets of the year for movies, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi is an intensely emotional and thematically deep entry in the franchise that enriches its mediocre predecessor and pays a beautiful tribute to anyone that has been entranced by the magic of movies.

The general consensus around the that last entry, The Force Awakens, is that while it might have been a fun return to the universe, it was bogged down by being so subservient to the previous films in the franchise. Fan service can be a nice reward to those who have stuck with a property for a long time, but pointless references and retreads of previous plot-points can render the movie effectively inert when it comes to the spirit of the movie. But then comes along Rian Johnson, a director with a clear understanding of genre trappings, as shown in his high school Neo-Noir Brick or his paradox-ignoring time travel thriller Looper. Johnson smartly applies the same type of subversion techniques to Star Wars, meaning instead of simply parroting events or cliches from the previous movies, he alludes to them for a very specific reason and point. Gone are the moments where Ponda Baba and Dr. Evazan walk into the frame for a moment for no discernible reason, or the moment where Finn bumps the game board featured in A New Hope. Many fans, including myself, were concerned when the trailers featured AT-AT-like walkers, fearing a retread of the most-loved Star Wars entry. Instead, we got a film that challenges what we know about not only the characters we met in the last film, but challenges the entire concept of the original Star Wars trilogy by having us re-examine Luke Skywalker himself. And I am happy to say that Luke overcomes this challenge to reestablish himself as a true hero.

Earlier this year, while marketing Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the second movie in a planned trilogy, Marvel Studios claimed the movie’s tone would be “Empire-esque”. This is a term that has cropped up in film discussions, especially discussions of franchise films series, that has been used to describe a film with a darker tone than its predecessors that isn’t afraid to move in unexpected directions. However, The Last Jedi is much better described by that term than the second Guardians film is. What makes The Empire Strikes Back work so well as a sequel, and why it is often considered a better movie than the original Star Wars, is the fact that it broadened the universe, concepts, and characters of its predecessor in a way that was true to the essence of the original. The Last Jedi does this not only for The Force Awakens, but for the original trilogy as well. And it does it in the same way Empire did: by revealing that Luke Skywalker is a flawed human being that still has things to learn about the force, the nature of conflict, and of course himself.

As mentioned above, I will be discussing spoilers, and this is were I have to start getting into them, as the central theme of the movie cannot really be discussed without mentioning an appearance by a certain character. At a pivotal moment for Luke, he is visited by one of his old mentors, the spirit of the Master Jedi Yoda, who tells him that the best teacher of all is failure. And we see this sentiment ring true for every other character in the film. Rey fails to redeem Kylo Ren and places him in a higher position of power, where he will only be more dangerous. Poe makes a fool-hardy decision that almost entirely destroys the Resistance. Finn’s heart is not yet fully into the Resistance, and has anger building up over the injustices in the galaxy. Kylo Ren’s failure in the last movie has made him realize his reverence for Vader is only holding him back. Even minor characters like Admiral Holdo learn by making mistakes; if she had been open with Poe, he would not have planned subterfuge against her. But these mistakes and failures serve to round out our characters, give us a clearer picture of who they are, and allow them to overcome them in order to grow into more complete people. None of the failures are more destructive, and therefor more educational, than the mistake Luke made when he panicked about Ben Solo’s darker tendencies. But this failure allows him to eventually see what a Jedi teacher really should be, which is much different than what most fans think of when they think of a Master Jedi.

“War does not make one great” is one of the Yoda-isms we hear in The Empire Strikes Back, but until now no one has really given that line any credence. The reason Kylo Ren becomes so fascinated with Darth Vader is because of his status as one of the greatest warriors in their history. The good he did as a Jedi Knight, and as a reformed man at the end of Return of the Jedi, is of no interest to Kylo. Even the fans of Star Wars are more into Vader as a villain who slaughters people rather than a complex person who has strayed from the good path (just see the demand for and reaction to the Vader scene in Rogue One). And the prequel movies did nothing to help this issue of “warrior-worship” by giving all of the Jedi, including the peace-loving Yoda, fantastic battle abilities. But the way that Luke wins in Return of the Jedi is by throwing away his weapon - refusing to fight. Resolving conflicts with violence will only beget more violence. This is also the reason Obi-Wan refuses to engage with Vader in A New Hope, and why he is allowed to become one with the Force immediately afterwards. A Master Jedi must be a pacifist, inspiring others through peaceful means rather than inspiring others with violence. At the end of The Last Jedi, Luke demonstrates this to the entire galaxy with a legendary stand-off against Kylo Ren and an entire First Order invasion force. Shortly afterwards, he is allowed to become one with the Force, much like his beloved mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi. In the final scene, a child slave is hearing the legend of Luke Skywalker before being chased outside by one of his captors. He uses the Force to pull a broom towards him, looks to the sky, and sees a ship entering hyperspace. Inspired by his hero Luke, he dreams of adventure, a better world, a better life. That child is anyone who has been enchanted by the story of Luke. That child is Rian Johnson, J.J. Abrams, Gareth Edwards, and any other filmmaker that was raised on the original trilogy. That child is anyone, anywhere that has watched any of the Star Wars movies and fallen in love with the characters and the universe. It’s anyone who has watched a movie and been emotionally affected by it.

Saoirse Ronan

“I want to go where the culture is” is a declaration by Catherine “Lady Bird” McPherson from early in Greta Gerwig’s film Lady Bird that spelled out for me exactly why I fell in love with this movie. Lady Bird is a movie that covers a lot of angles of personal identity, but one that it discusses that I have not seen done as well in other movies is that of feeling like you do not belong to a particular culture of any sort of import or recognizability. The old adage that “the setting is also a character” can be a cliche and trite one, but in the case of the city of Sacramento, California in Lady Bird it may be incredibly accurate. Gerwig’s directorial debut is so injected with charm, delight, and care in every moment that it is impossible for it not to grip you.

Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) is a young woman living in Sacramento who, alongside her best friend Julie (Beanie Feldstein), is on the cusp of graduating from a Catholic high school. Attempting to support her at home as she tries to escape from Northern California to a college on the East Coast are her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf), her father Larry (Tracy Letts), her adopted brother Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues) and his girlfriend Shelley (Marielle Scott). As the school year goes on, she deals with romance, new friends that come between her and Julie, and her mother’s reluctance to let her leave the state for school.

Mostly what people praise when it comes to this movie is the performance of Ronan as Lady Bird, and she deserves every bit of adoration that she gets. She comes off as such a real person, something of a refute to the concept of the “manic pixie dream girl” by being a fully-fleshed out character with not only lots of charm, but some delusions and faults as well. She pulls off the nearly impossible task of playing an exceedingly moody teenager without ever coming off as whiny or annoying. She makes some wrong decisions throughout the film, but because we fully know her to be a good well-intentioned person we never think of her as unintelligent for the choices she makes. Metcalf as her strict but loving mother plays such a believable tough mom, a woman dedicated to making her children’s lives better at the risk of her relationship with them being strained. Much like how Ronan balances her charm and moodiness, Metcalf perfectly manages to be a sort of antagonist to Lady Bird but is never seen as unreasonable or unlikable by the audience. Much like Lady Bird herself, our perspective is trapped between childhood and adulthood, allowing us to see the reasoning behind all of the character’s choices. Letts as Lady Bird’s father is not featured as much in the film, but really gives off a loving counterpart to Metcalf. A lot of the delight of this movie comes from seeing how big of a heart her family has, and a lot of the sadness comes from Lady Bird’s inability to see that in her mother and father. The entire supporting cast does such a good job of being believable, and delivering Gerwig’s incredibly realistic dialogue with ease.

Where I wholeheartedly connected with this movie was in the idea of Sacramento having this incredibly specific culture, despite Lady Bird’s belief that it is non-existent. There are so many more cultures and cultural traditions than most people believe, as it can be difficult to discern them if they are not as broad as some others. Lady Bird is fully entrenched in a lot of Catholic cultural practices, but does not appreciate those as “culture”. Refreshingly, Gerwig never portrays the church or its staff as oppressive or obstructionist, and instead shows them as most people experience them which is a community that, like any other, has its ups and downs. I grew up the same way in that I felt like I grew up Catholic and felt like I did not belong to any culture, and it can create its very own brand of loneliness that results in an immense desire to escape to more “cultured” places. Lady Bird’s search for a connection to a “real” culture leads her to take in the company of people that she doesn’t exactly gel with, an experience I am far too familiar with. But these people, similar to the portrayal of the Catholic church, are never demonized by the film, and one of the most emotional moments of the movie comes from one of these people. It’s not until you’re too far gone until you realize that your supposedly “culture-less” point of origin was instrumental in shaping who you are. There are several moments in the movie completely unrelated to Lady Bird, such as when a priest played by Stephen Henderson, sees Marion at her job at the hospital, that do nothing but establish Sacramento as a fully-lived in place with real people with real lives.

The economic themes in the film are also exceptionally strong, with so much of what Lady Bird wants from life being directly obstructed by her families financial problems. The movie takes place in the early 2000′s, shortly before the financial crisis would strike in America, and lot of Marrion’s dialogue revolves around the idea that their family is poor. A favorite past time of Lady Bird and Julie is fantasizing living in houses that are better than theirs, in scenes that simultaneously manage to make you laugh and feel an intense ping of sadness. It is quite disheartening with Lady Bird’s wholly normal dreams of going to college or wearing nice clothes are nearly completely thwarted by her economic status. But this never comes with any sort of pity for Lady Bird or her family, and we instead simply relate and become more attached to them.

I find so many horror films these days draw their inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece The Shining, mostly in aesthetics and specific shots. While it is completely understandable to want to emulate and reference a classic of the genre, I feel there isn’t much of a point to doing so besides wanting some credit from horror-buffs for acknowledging that that movie is good. Director Yorgos Lanthimos, now known for his critically-acclaimed comedy The Lobster, has come the closest in The Killing of a Sacred Deer to the incredible tone, mood and pacing of The Shining while also managing to say so much itself about the human body, forgiveness, and truly having empathy for another human being.

Steven Murphy (Colin Farrel) is a heart surgeon and family man who takes it upon himself to mentor a young man named Martin (Barry Keoghan) since the tragic death of his father. He introduces Martin to his family, his wife Anna (Nicole Kidman), his daughter Kim (Raffey Cassidy), and his son Bob (Sunny Suljic), who all seem to take a liking to him despite his awkward and frank manner. Soon, Steven starts to become worried as Martin behaves oddly around him and his family, and as a strange disease inexplicably strikes his children. Steven learns what he must do in order to save his family, but it may be a price too high to pay.

The progression of the plot and how everything plays out is masterful. While not a long movie (it clocks in and just a minute over two hours), the inevitable ending seems to creep towards us at an unbearable pace until we can barely stand it anymore. The movie begins fairly lightly, and seems like it will be another surrealist comedy much in the vein of The Lobster, but after a certain conversation almost all comedy is appropriately sucked out of the movie except for a few key scenes. By the time the climax does roll around, I was barely able to look at the screen. It reminded me so much of how The Shining builds towards its climax, starting somewhat innocuously before getting much more serious, and ending with Jack chasing Danny as Wendy experiences her horrifying visions. Of course, it does start out with a feeling unease that lingers throughout the film by showing us a real heart surgery being filmed and with its emotionally bereft dialogue, but the comedy lulls us into a false sense of security until its haunting score takes the film in a completely different direction. Lanthimos is also smart enough to leak out plot details and characters backgrounds rather slowly, always leaving a bit of mystery for us to wonder about, even at the very end of the movie. Characters lie about their past and very important plot details are never fully explained, which may infuriate some viewers but left me not knowing just enough to remain curious about the story.

Just as he did in The Lobster, Colin Farrel delivers Lanthimos’s purposefully-stilted dialogue as it was no doubt intended to be, which means it is strange, often emotionless, and awkward in the best way. In the scenes in which he must show some emotions, he is so vibrant that the scenes become unforgettable. He has one of the most expressive faces in film, and his huge beard proves to be no obstacle in letting him show this asset off in this movie. Every character speaks (or sings, in the case of Raffey Cassidy) in this way, and there isn’t an actor that doesn’t make it fascinating. Kidman plays her character fiercely, and takes on an interesting angle once she learns what is happening to her family. Her marriage to Steven isn’t exactly normal, but she never seems too distressed about what her husband asks her to do. When she is tasked with helping to save her children, she gains a motherly fury and dedication that Kidman really sells. But the best performance (and maybe my pick for best supporting actor this year so far) is Keoghan as Martin. He had already impressed me in Dunkirk as George, the poor boy who bumps his noggin, but his performance in The Killing of a Sacred Deer is next level great. Lanthimos uses his rather unusual looks and delivery to great effect. Even in the most dense of scenes, Keoghan can make you laugh with just how weird he is. In one of the hardest scenes to watch in the movie due to its graphic nature, he has an extremely odd line (”It’s a metaphor. What I just did is a metaphor.”) that broke the tension so hard that my entire screening laughed for an extended period afterwards. Talking any more about his character may be too much of a spoiler, but just know that this performance has many surprises and I don’t think could have been played by any other actor.

If there is one criticism of this movie that severely holds this movie back, it is how its female characters, of which there are only three, are all treated in terms of what they must do sexually. Each of the movies female characters all offer themselves completely to a male character (three times, for one character), and while Steven is portrayed as having some extremely peculiar sexual hang-ups, he is never made to perform some of the things Nicole Kidman is, for instance. The actresses are not totally humiliated, and the actresses (besides one) are given other things to define their characters, at least. It also helps that they all play these parts especially well, but I just wish that it at least balance the scale by adding some female gaze to the film or changing at least two of the sexual encounters in the movie to be less one-sided.

The film is good enough that it may overcome that criticism, especially in how it handles its visual metaphors. Very early on, the motif of watches and hearts (both “tickers”, of course) are established right away, and reoccur visually across the movie at its most vital points. In a very Cronenberg-esque way, the human body ends up providing a lot of the horror of the film as Steven’s children are stricken by their strange disease. Most of the movie has an oppressive empty feeling, which is beautifully highlighted by cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis and his choice to have so much negative space dominate just about every frame. That emptiness can maybe the absence of emotion in the characters (and the film in general), but I maybe see it as the absence of justice, something the film is really concerned with. It asks the question of what it means to truly empathize with somebody who is wounded, either physically or emotionally. How do we really know what a person is going through unless we go through it ourselves? If you have wronged someone, what length are you willing to go to in order to demonstrate that you are sorry for what happened? Lanthimos shows us the hypocrisy and futility in telling a person “I’m sorry, I know what you’re going through.”

There are touches a filmmaker can add to a movie, little details of no real import, that can end up making a film as great as they get to be. One such movie is Body Heat from 1981, The Empire Strike Back’s Lawrence Kasdan’s directorial debut. On one level, it operates much as a remake of the classic 1944 film Noir Double Indemnity, but with some added and updated elements it becomes one of the firsts and one of the best of the so called “Neo-Noir” film movement. A star-making breakout film for its lead actress as well as its director, Body Heat deserves to be re-examined for its stylish, smart aesthetic as well as its impressively strong depiction of its femme fatale.

For those familiar with the plot of Double Indemnity, the plot has very few deviations, but enough to be its own things. Ned Racine (William Hurt) is a fairly incompetent, womanizing lawyer who, on a blistering Florida night, tries to pick up Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner). Matty is a married woman, but regardless, the two begin a literally steamy affair that eventually leads them to plot to kill Matty’s husband, Edmund (Richard Crenna). Investigating Matty are Ned’s associates and friends Peter Lowenstein (Ted Danson) and Detective Oscar Grace (J.C. Preston), who begin to close in on the sordid couple. As the truth comes closer and closer to coming to light, the situations only get more tense and the characters only get more desperate.

The most important detail Kasdan brings to this familiar story is the fact that the small Florida town in which the characters reside is being bombarded by an incredible heatwave. Each actor sells this so well, and it’s more than just adding fake sweat to the actors’ bodies. Everyone looks so uncomfortable and surly at all times, which makes the scenes where someone is plotting murder or interrogating somebody about their movements so much more real. It makes all of the sex scenes that much more sensual, adding a weight to the relationship between the two leads that is vital to our investment in the story. The heat becomes a fairly good excuse for all of the decisions that the characters make, as who of us has not been made delirious due to heat? As the movie goes on, the temperature only seems to rise, which becomes increasingly appropriate as the situations get more and more damning for Ned.

William Hurt as Ned is a godsend for this movie. He comes off as one of the smarter, if not incredibly flawed, Noir criminals. He comes off as an intelligent and thoughtful person, but one who will only put effort into satisfying any base desires. And of course, these base desires are only amplified by the growing heat. His sleazy mustache is another of the great touches of this movie, as it works to improve his looks (the resemblance between him and Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl is astounding) as well as make him look exceedingly seedy. He comes off as somewhat genre-savvy, in a great scene in which he tells Matty that he has decided that they are going to kill her husband and says that “a man will die for no reason”. He is completely aware that there is no good reason for committing murder, but his carnal desires are simply too strong. Danson makes for an endlessly entertaining supporting character, in a role not to different from Edward G. Robinson’s character in Double Indemnity. The ambiguity as to whether or not he is fully aware of Ned’s antics makes him vaguely threatening as well as quite nebbish. His wide grin, huge glasses, and bizarre but welcome dancing scenes make him look something like a cartoon character, which only adds to the surreal nature of the film. Richard Crenna as the clueless husband of Matty Walker makes only a brief appearance in the movie, but immediately gets across the idea that he believes he truly owns Matty. This doesn’t excuse the plot to murder him, but it shows us that nobody in this movie is to be admired. Similarly, J.A. Preston as Oscar doesn’t come into play much till near the end of the film, but he commands attention whenever he is in the room by also being fairly in on how Noir plots operate. Much like the Noirs of old, it becomes clear almost immediately that crime does not pay.

But the real reason this movie garnered as much attention as it did is because of Kathleen Turner’s absolutely stunning film debut as Matty Walker. Playing a classic femme fatale requires a mixture of vulnerability, confidence, and poise, and she has all three in spades. In her introduction scene, she demonstrates an incredible ability to turn conversations at the drop of a hat, and she consistently gives off the vibe that she is worth going to the lengths that Ned goes to in order to be with her. The crux of the film hinges on her, and she delivers in every sense of the word. We as the audience want her and Ned to end up together. As we learn more and more about her, she becomes increasingly sinister. But the constant twists keep our thoughts on her in a state of confusion, much to the movie’s benefit. There are a lot of ways to peg her character, but as the ending of the film tells us, Ned’s biggest mistake in the movie is underestimating her ability to plot and connive. No matter how sleek and aware he is of the foibles of past Noir stooges, he still falls victim to her seductive glow.

It is absolutely incredible to me that this is Kasdan’s first film. Visually, it helped establish the look of all Neo-Noir’s that would crop up throughout the 80′s, like Blood Simple, The Driver, To Live and Die in LA, and plenty of other crime movies like Manhunter and 48 Hrs.. He clearly has such a knowledge of Noir films and what they entail to make a meta-Noir that still functions beautifully as a classic Noir. The film’s comedic moments all work well and prove to be exceptionally comedic. His treatment of his femme fatale archetype character is something to be respected; although she is more than objectified by our main character, it proves to be one of the only genre tropes a supposedly genre-savvy character like Ned still walks straight into, and Matty knew he would from the beginning.

Taika Waititi is a man who may know a few things about the effects of imperialism and colonialism. Born in New Zealand, Waititi is of aboriginal descent, a fact that filters into all of his work usually in fairly subtle ways. In the newest film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor: Ragnarok, the theme is a little more broad, but it is all balanced out by Waititi injecting the movie with the most humor of any of the Marvel films to this point.

This is often the biggest complaint amongst the Marvel films from its detractors. Since the quippy, improvised nature of 2008′s Iron Man made it big due to the decision to let Robert Downey, Junior inject his own personality and style of humor into the dialogue. As the franchise has gone on, Marvel has doubled-down on this specific type of humor, even without Downey, often to diminishing returns. The movies are still successful critically and financially, but none of them have quite made the same impact. The humor in them no longer feels as fresh as it did nine years ago, with Avengers: Age of Ultron being seen as a let down due to its “jokey” villain and running bits. The Captain America films have been backing down from the jokes overall, which maybe is the reason that The Winter Soldier and Civil War are seen in a better light. But, with films like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Dr. Strange, and Ant-Man, we can see that Marvel is still very interested in being funny. The hiring of Waititi to direct this installment was a clear indication of this, and at least to me this was seen as a good move based on the fact of Waititi being established as a more than competent comedy director, and it being a new direction for the Thor series.

It makes a lot of sense that this is the aspect of the movie that works best. Nearly every joke works, and there is at least one joke just about every two minutes. There are classic pratfalls, word-play, broad comedic reactions, call backs to jokes in previous films, sex jokes, and even comedic cameos all peppered in throughout the film. There are a few flaws that in any other movie that would be glaring, but because all of them are book-ended by over-the-top antics it is easy to forget them over the course of the run-time of the film.

Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the Prince of Asgard, has been out searching for the much talked about Infinity Stones since the end of the last Avengers films. Taking a break from his search, he returns to Asgard where, when we last saw it it was under the rule of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) disguised as his and Thor’s father Odin (Anthony Hopkins). The search for the real Odin leads to the return of Hela (Cate Blanchett), the Norse Goddess of Death, who invades Asgard. Thor and Loki get diverted to the planet Sakaar, which is under the rule of the eccentric Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum), who pits Thor against a very talkative Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), who has also been missing since the end of Age of Ultron. Assisting Thor in his plight is Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), a former Asgardian warrior who now works for The Grandmaster. With all of Asgard in the balance, Thor must convince his brother, his former teammate, and an old veteran to return to Asgard with him to defeat Hela.

Hemsworth has never been bad as Thor, and has always been successful at bringing a playful lightness to the character, but this is by far his best outing as the Thunder God. From moment one, he has a gleeful smile that never fails to seduce the audience into laughing at whatever he happens to be saying at the time. We’ve seen Hemsworth do broad comedy before in the Vacation reboot, but never quite to this effect. Similarly, Hiddleston takes Loki in a whole new direction. While he made some jokes here and there in the previous films, he has never been gifted a script with this much bit saturation before, and he handles it very well. His reactions are priceless, as is his physical comedy work. In interviews, Hiddleston comes off as much more of a dry humorist, but he cuts loose in this film to great effect. Mark Ruffalo always brings a good sense of gravitas to Bruce Banner, and he manages to maintain that while also providing some great comedic moments. It is also just always great to see the characters of The Hulk and Thor together, as their fraternal, battle-drunkenness makes them a classic pair. But the real star, comically, is Jeff Goldblum. Much like how Downey was given free reign to make Tony Stark his own, it is rather obvious that Waititi simply let Goldblum run wild with his character. There’s not a single line that leaves his mouth that isn’t dripping with glee. Sakaar, the planet over which he rules, is designed after his personality, and as a result the set design of his living quarters only adds to how funny his scenes are.

There are actors who get the short shrift in the movie, mostly Tessa Thompson. She plays Valkyrie with a cool, tough confidence, but unfortunately is just not given enough to do in order to fully get a grasp on who this character is. We are told she is a battle-scarred veteran, but besides one flashback and a drinking problem that is only played for comedy we never connect emotionally with that fact. Anthony Hopkins, while he did at least have one of the best-quick jokes in the whole movie, is relegated to only a little bit more than a cameo, with his one big scene being something of a dramatic whiff. He clearly has more interest in projects like Westworld nowadays than he does for any Marvel property. Karl Urban, who plays Skurge in the film, is always a pleasant sight to see, but he is of little import to the overall story or really to any of the jokes. The shots you see of him in the trailer are his best moments.

The most common complaint with all of the Marvel movies, besides ironically the first Thor movie, is the fact that all of their villains seem to be these vague, under-written non-characters who end up being incredibly forgettable and wastes of time. None more so than Thor: The Dark World’s Malekith, who is probably the worst villain the series has had to date. Therefor, there was a lot of pressure on Ragnarok to have a memorable villain, especially after a mixed reaction to Kurt Russel’s Ego in Guardian of the Galaxy Vol. 2 earlier this year. Thankfully, Cate Blanchett is a great actress who adds touches to her character, such as her lithe, smooth way of moving her body, that makes her stick out in a sea of mediocre antagonists. She is clearly and quickly established to be a big physical threat, and ends up having some of the best action scenes in a movie that does not really excel in its action. She isn’t exactly a deep character, but what she represents is vastly important to the anti-imperialist and anti-establishment themes of the movie. She manages to shine a light on established characters that reinvents our image of them. Asgard, which is typically seen as a bastion of utopic peace, is revealed to have been built on a base of innocent blood and conquest, and Thor must grapple with the idea that the ideals he so fiercely defends are the ideals of a liar and a warmonger. We’re made to think of all of those that the Asgardians had to wipe from existence in order to establish their dominance in the Nine Realms. The parallels to real world colonialism are so much more poignant coming from a native New Zealander, and it ends up being a much more focused message than anything that was said in Civil War. The emotional stakes of the movie are not really there, but its comments on cultural and religious Imperialism are rather smart.

1985 is a year that has not yet been surpassed in terms of zombie cinema. Only one month apart, two movies came out that distilled just about everything great about these types of movies. They are on totally opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of tone (and zombie type), but that only serves to show the range of the genre that has gone totally in the direction of the more well known film, George Romero’s magnum opus Day of the Dead. But I want to make a case for the movie I prefer out of the two, but only slightly. Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead is perhaps the most fun film I have ever seen, and it contains everything I love about zombies while also being maybe the most fresh take on them.

The general premise of the film is something that delights me all on its own. A psuedo-sequel to the classic Night of the Living Dead, but not the well-known 1968 movie. It is a continuation of the supposed events that inspired the original movie, which I find to be such a unique idea. According to this film, sometime before NotLD was made, an experimental chemical called 2-4-5 Trioxin was reeased in a morgue that made all of the corpses come back to life. The bodies were placed into barrels, and a shipping error by the military gets one of the barrels sent to a medical supply center in Louisville, Kentucky. A young punk named Freddie (Thom Matthews) is relayed this information whilst being trained for his new job by Frank (James Karen) and Burt (Clu Gulager). Outside, Freddie’s friends Suicide (Mark Venturini), Trash (Leana Quigley), Spider (Miguel A. Núñez Jr.), Chuck (John Philbin), Casey (Jewel Shephard), Scuz (Brian Peck) and his girlfriend Tina (Beverly Randolph) arrive to pick him up from work, and decide to party in a graveyard until he’s off work. Once the dead start rising, we also meet Ernie (Don Calfa), an eccentric mortician who works in the cemetery. The rest of the movie is simply survival as more and more people are zombified and turn on the living.

I am in love with every aspect of this movie. It seems like director Dan O’Bannon, more well known as the screenwriter of Alien, personally oversaw ever facet of production in order to make every element as entertaining as possible. Every actor does their job so wonderfully, from the younger, less experienced punks to the older and absolutely wonderful character actors who are clearly just letting loose. James Karen’s chemistry with Thom Matthews is so delightful that they had to bring them in again (to much lesser effect, unfortunately) in the sequel. The juxtaposition between actors like Clu Gulager and Miguel Núñez works so well to show the fact that the characters really have to overcome their differences in order to survive. The late Mark Venturini delivers his lines with so much energy and anger that every single one of them stick with you and instantly feels iconic. The actors are funny, appropriately terrified when need be, and sympathetic. I also find their wardrobes to be memorable and very well thought out, as they instantly show you who they are just at a glance.

But the real reason this is the best zombie movie ever made is because of the zombies themselves. Oddly enough, aspects of them have really stuck in the pop-culture due to the fact that this is the movie that created the notion of zombies only eating brains. Outside of this movie, that idea has been run into the ground by jokes and parodies, but it never feels hokey or played out in the context of the film. Each one is very well designed, with older corpses appropriately looking dried out while more recent ones still ooze blood. Their speech is incredibly eerie, each one having a strange, distorted voice that isn’t exactly human. They’re fast and completely unkillable, which makes them the most dangerous zombies in any film. The real star zombie is The Tarman (Allan Trautman), a gooey, lanky corpse that emerges from the barrel of 2-4-5 Trioxide in the beginning of the film. No matter which version of the movie you watch (his voice was altered in later releases of the film), he has the most fascinating voice. Trautman really sells being a twenty-year old corpse, and moves in this fluid, dance-like way that is just intoxicating. There’s no question in my mind that he is the best zombie ever put to film.

The other aspect of the film I cannot fail to mention is the incredible soundtrack. Return of the Living Dead is also a punk film, through and through, and therefor contains a soundtrack filled to the brim with some great songs. The Cramps, 45 Grave, The Flesh Eaters, T.S.O.L., The Damned, and a few others are all used in very memorable ways throughout the film, but the real highlight ends up being Roky Erickson’s “Burn the Flames”, which is used in the best possible way in maybe the best scene in the movie (and was a moment that was suggested by James Karen). The main theme composed by Matt Clifford is also incredibly catchy, creepy, and memorable. Whenever it is used in the film, it adds a great sense of importance to whatever happens to be going on.

In terms of themes of the movie, they can be somewhat hard to discern during a viewing simply because the events of the movie are just so overwhelming. But thinking about it afterwards, I find the movie to be a sort of deconstruction of the punk livelihood. From the fact that they want to party in a cemetery and their leader’s name being Suicide, it is clear that the punks deify and fetishize death. Trash’s fantasy of being torn apart and devoured by old men is sexually exciting enough to get her to dance naked on top of a grave stone. But when confronted with actual death, and people even beyond death, they realize that their attempts to existentially conquer death by embracing it do them no good when put to the flame. We see that Ernie, the mortician, may be the most prepared due to his familiarity with cadavers, but in reality none of us are prepared to face the realities of death. In the infamous scene in which the characters interrogate one of the zombies, when pressed as to why they want to eat brains, she informs them that it helps with “the pain of being dead”. According to this movie, pain does not even stop at death. Apparently when a person dies, they enter a state of pain that can only be satiated by eating human brains. The fact that this doesn’t exactly track logically is something that I love; death will always be impossible to fully understand or comprehend, even with testimony from a dead person.

In this day of Stranger Things, It Follows, and The VVitch it has become the cool thing to pay homage to the horror masters of the 80s. A lot of the techniques and tones that modern horror filmmakers swear by were developed by these auteur directors who themselves experienced a wide range of success that usually skewed towards low. Their techniques were in turn inspired by horror of the 40s and 50s, something that is sort of forgotten by more modern creators. But back in 1986, before it became cool to utilize this style of music, cinematography, and themes, there was Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps, which performs much as  a greatest hits CD does in that it contains almost everything about the 80s that everyone loves today, with some key differences. The result is a movie that encapsulates everything we love about the decade while also being an extremely fun time on its own merits with some great character work.

The story opens on a spaceship, in a wonderful pastiche/parody of things like E.T. or The Thing, but also classic 50′s space movies like IT! The Terror From Beyond Space. A rogue alien spaces a container that holds a mysterious experiment, which lands on Earth in 1959 near the sorority row of a local university. This even happens to coincide with the escape of a mental patient, who promptly murders a young woman who hard parked at make-out point with her boyfriend who goes to investigate the capsule that had just entered the atmosphere. There’s already so much classic horror-schlock that has happened at this point that it is very clear what kind of vibe Dekker was going for. Thirty year later, two college teens, Chris (Jason Livey) and J.C. (Steve Marshall) break into a lab in an attempt to pledge to a fraternity to meet women. Inside, they find the thirty year old corpse of the boyfriend who was attacked by a mysterious creature that had emerged from the container. The rest of the movie follows the two friends alongside Detective Cameron (Tom Atkins) as the college and town quickly devolve into chaos as more and more people become zombified by alien slugs.

This story is insane, but in the best possible way. It contains elements of The Thing, Night of the Living Dead, Evil Dead, and The Fly. There’s also a lot of DNA of classic 50′s and 60′s B-movies, not unlike those directed or produced by Roger Corman. This results in a movie that feels likes a lot of things at once: a parody, a homage, a love-letter, and its own fun teen movie. The first act, once we get past the alien shootout and 50′s monster movie black and white intro, is just an 80′s college movie until the pair finds the frozen corpse. Dekker’s script weaves all of these things beautifully, and they never feel at odds with each other. The material is all handled very well by its main cast, and the supporting characters fill their roles fairly well. But the real stand out performance is Atkins as Cameron, who is clearly having the time of his life making this movie. Within three lines, you know that this is the character the watch. He pulls off being a parody of a hard-boiled detective and a really good hard-boiled detective. He has a catchphrase that really seems like something an old noir character would throw around. Without him, the movie wouldn’t be the cult classic it is today.

Horror fans have always loved references and shout-outs to the classics of the genre, and Night of the Creeps may hold the record for the most references in a movie. John Carpenter, George Romero, Tobe Hooper, David Cronenberg, Steve Miner, Sam Raimi, Roger Corman, and James Cameron all get characters (or a college, in Corman’s case) named after them, and Ed Wood’s Plan Nine from Outer Space gets a direct mention. It seems like ever since The Thing From Another World played on the TV in Halloween that a horror movie needs to name drop or reference other horror movies whenever possible, and it continues to delight fans to this day.

The other factor that really sells this movie as a classic are its effects. Every zombie and creature looks absolutely incredible, and the gore especially is a real treat for those that seek blood and guts in their horror. Cinematographer Robert C. New never breaks new ground with his lighting or colors, but he manages to make all of the creature effects to be hokey in just the right way so that they only add to the kitsch vibe of the movie. The slugs that are responsible for turning the innocent college students into zombies are appropriately very gross, and a clear inspiration for James Gunn’s Slither, a more modern and slightly more serious take on this very movie.

When examined in conjunction to his next movie, The Monster Squad, which involved all of the classic Universal monsters coming together to battle a small contingent of school children, that a huge strength of Fred Dekker’s is his penchant for re-imagining and remixing classic ideas and combining the influences of several decades. Night of the Creeps also has a lot in common with his first screenwriting credit as well, House. In House, a man with several tragic events in his past, including the disappearance of his son and the time he spent in Vietnam, come back to haunt him in some truly weird ways while he is staying in a  house he inherited from his late aunt. His story perfectly parallels Cameron’s in Night of the Creeps, who was a policeman on the night of the landing of the experiment, and has nightmares about the event that could be scenes right out of House. It’s clear Dekker has a lot to say about how the events of the past can influence our lives today, and the importance of letting past wounds heal before they become destructive. None of his movies provide any great insight into the nature of nostalgia or the past, but his characters become relatable due to their struggles with overcoming the loss of loved ones.

One of the main reasons horror fans are so die-hard about the genre is that it a truly committed filmmaker can pour his imagination and creativity onto the screen unlike in any other genre. A lot of the beloved cult films of the 70′s and 80′s were made by eccentric people who just wanted to show off their weirdness on the big screen, and so many people thank them for it. According to the 1979 horror film Phantasm, Don Coscarelli was one of the weirdest human beings to walk the planet at the time of the movie’s making, and I could not be happier that he was.

Phantasm is the story of Mike (A. Michael Baldwin), a young man who is being taken care of by his older brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) after the tragic death of his parents. After the funeral of one of Jody’s old friends, Mike witnesses a very imposing Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) lift a coffin with a single hand, and he becomes somewhat obsessed with this man’s activities, much to Jody’s chagrin. Most of the plot then devolves into the two brothers and their ice cream man-friend Reggie (Reggie Bannister) going back and froth between their home and the funeral home in which the Tall Man resides, but the film keeps your interest in these events by consistently only getting stranger each time they change locations.

It’s very easy to see what Coscarelli’s weak points are as a director, as the script written by him is full of forgettable and embarrassing dialogue. The line deliveries by the actors does not help much either, especially the lines delivered by Bannister. Baldwin and Thornbury mostly do okay in their parts. Baldwin, being rather young, has an innate vulnerability to him that does make him sympathetic, but he always seems a bit too reserved for the events that transpire. Even more damaging to the movie is the weak editing, also done by Coscarelli, which makes a lot of basic mistakes with timing. But these things also add to the alluring weirdness of the movie. Everything about it is off in just the right way to make it fairly unsettling.

What works best in this movie are three things: Angus Scrimm as The Tall Man, the funeral home set, and the wackiness of Don Coscarelli’s brain. Every shot of Scrimm contains so much ethereal mystery, and the insane facial expressions he makes make him so much more than human. His voice was made for the threats he delivers, and every line he speaks feels like a treat for us. There’s no question he deserves a spot in the upper echelons of classic horror villains, right alongside Jason and Freddy. His domain, the funeral home, is a space that simultaneously begs and dares you to explore it. We never see a lobby or waiting room, it is simply an endless chain of hallways with no endings and no way to know what is just around the corner. Combined with the excellent score by Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave (which is derivative of Halloween and Suspiria in the best way), it makes for some extremely impressive and creepy vibes whenever our characters enter this space. Coscarelli deserves so much credit for the imagination on display: freaky dwarfs relentlessly pursue our characters, disgusting pus-like blood, crimson red and desolate alien worlds, and best of all, floating silver orbs armed with drills and knives that become responsible for an incredible and unforgettable death scene. These elements come together like a fever dream to both confuse and delight the audience consistently throughout the second and third acts.

Mike’s obsession with The Tall Man and the mortuary clearly establish a theme of death, and a lot of the movie seems to be about how we as people are pulled towards and repulsed by death in terms of our interest in it. While The Tall Man is a scary figure that dominates the movie with his presence, their is also something very alluring about him. His size in this movie alone demands your attention, and during most of my watch I was just waiting for his next appearance. The ending of the film firmly establishes that there is no escaping or conquering death as Mike might have hoped, which makes this ending very harsh and bleak. Anyone who has ever lost close family or a close friend can relate to the young boy’s story, which makes the final shots all that more tragic. In a movie that reaches some truly baffling and goofy heights, there is some heft in what it is trying to say to us.

Horror films are always evolving, changing, reinventing, and these days it seems like they want to be taken as seriously as possible. Horror-comedies are a sub-genre that seems to have almost completely died out, at least as far as widely released films go. Nowadays, a horror film will usually only have comedic elements, such as Adam Wingard’s 2011 film You’re Next, while the films getting wider recognition liked Warner Brothers’ Conjuring franchise, The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, Don’t Breathe and Green Room are almost completely devoid of any sort of comedy or lighter moments. It is always great to see more serious takes on horror, and I am very glad that serious horror films are getting attention critically, but there is always room in a lot of horror fans’s hearts for the type of films that can in one moment shock you and in another have you genuinely laughing. Horror franchises from the 80s leaned into this methodology a lot, as any film featuring Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger will show you, but with the exception of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit no one has made a legitimate horror comedy in many years (and even that film is debatable whether or not it is a true horror comedy). The last truly great one may have been The Cabin in the Woods in 2012, and there has been a hole in horror fan’s hearts ever since.

This is where Christopher Landon’s Happy Death Day comes in to not completely fill up this hole, but at least provide us with some proof that there are still some talented individuals dedicated to keeping these types of films alive. Landon previously tried attempted horror-comedy with 2015′s Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, but that filmed failed with both critics and audiences alike. Happy Death Day, whose plot is nothing more than slasher film’s take on the Groundhog Day scenario, has the enough of the elements of an entertaining horror film that it proves to me that his last attempt was just a fluke.

Jessica Rothe plays Tree, a shallow sorority girl who wakes up in the dorm of Carter (Israel Broussard) on her birthday after a night of hard-partying. She progressives through a relatively normal day, in which she blows off her roommate Lori (Ruby Modine), continues an ill-advised affair with her professor (Charles Aitken), and chooses to not attend a birthday dinner with her father (Jason Bayle). But on her way to attend a frat party, she is attacked and murdered by a mask-wearing stranger, only to wake up in Carter’s bed that same morning and repeat all of the events of the day yet again. All of the “horror” scenes where Tree is being chased by and wrestling with the killer I found to be pretty well choreographed and fairly tense, with nothing but genuine jump scares (ie when there is a jump scare it is the killer and not a fake-out).

Rothe is the main reason that this movie as much as it does, as she always seems to be in tune with whatever mood and tone the scene demands. On a dime, she can go from being something of a vapid, stereotypical slasher victim to a stronger and more capable survivor, to a very effective comedic actress that elicits genuinely humorous moments. Even the more serious moments of the film, which the film doesn’t handle that well overall, Rothe is never bad. With a stronger script and director, she can turn in a bombshell of a performance. The other actors do their jobs, but Rothe easily outshines them all in every single scene.

A lot of the film’s fun comes with its soundtrack, which switches from an enjoyable score from Bear McCreary (who also turned in a great score in last years 10 Cloverfield Lane) to songs such as Demi Lovato’s “Confident” in a bizarre montage that ends up being one of the film’s highlights. With horror-comedies, it can be very hard to balance the tone of the soundtrack, but with the way this film progresses, becoming gradually more and more comedic as Tree gets used to what is happening to her, the music appropriately becomes more upbeat. It doesn’t fully shy away from a more tense score, but it starts to have fun just as the audience does.

There are a lot of things keeping the movie from being perfect, and they mostly lie within the plot and story itself. It becomes obvious from the first cycle that Tree finds herself in that a lot of the movie will be a simple morality tale of a person that needs to learn to treat others better. The movie mostly does follow this track till near the end of the film when it throws a twist that I’m not sure entirely works, but provides some very enjoyable lines and moments. Mostly the twist just adds unnecessary questions, and I found myself almost wishing that it had stuck to its more traditional story.