If future films deliver similar spectacle and true, epic filmmaking, then this lengthy sequel can afford to be a prelude.

Acheson channels exploitation legend Sid Haig as Charlie, and it’s just delightful to see Nelson give one of the all-time “oh, it’s that guy” bit part specialists a truly memorable role. That it’s in that rare remake that successfully inverts an old favorite while staying true to its grisly inheritance makes it even more of a gift.

In its strange and successful mixing of genres, Dust Bunny is arguably everything that Mockingbird Lane, Fuller’s misguided attempt at an edgy take on The Munsters, was not.

Adapting the graphic novel The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg, writer/director Julia Jackman creates a fable that is still damningly important and relevant: that women are not allowed to control their own bodies or their own stories.

With Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, [Tarantino] finally gets to complete his own work of cinematic archeology, and what he exhumes springs to life like the first time it was projected. Viva Kill Bill!

Hamnet is at its best when exploring primal emotions, following the example of Agnes, with her elemental connection to the earth.

The first film was both a fun and furry buddy cop romp and a gentle metaphor for acceptance and cohabitation. Zootopia 2 goes further down that path in a fashion that is unabashedly moralizing when it comes to how some groups are excised and othered in a community, and how gentrification can be a tool of oppression.

Johnson may need reminding that atheists aren’t just here to provide comfort to believers. That misstep aside, Wake Up Dead Man is a cunning and entertaining mystery, a return to form for the franchise.

Sentimental Value lacks the giddy bracinginess of The Worst Person in the World; it’s a more measured, more meditative thing. It is also a return to form, of a sort.

The familiar faces inject instant warmth, but I’m not sure it’s entirely earned. By the time Jay Kelly arrived at its last line – buffed to a bland sheen, as if the whole film was reverse-engineered to land there – I had cooled considerably.

Its open-ended nature, its calm ambiguity, and its captivating, self-contained world all come together to give a clear view into Oshii’s creative and spiritual obsessions – even if that view doesn’t really provide much insight.

The ending simply lacks the guts to remain committed to King’s sociopolitical fury, and what starts as Wright’s best post-Cornetto Trilogy film ends up as his weakest. But when it’s really up to speed, The Running Man laps the competition.

As much as The Carpenter’s Son threatens to swallow you whole, and as much as it probes the oft-ignored darkness inherent in the Bible even outside of the Apocrypha, its thesis remains a little too academic to move the soul.

Peter Hujar’s Day is a monument to the thrillingly mundane minutiae of living. I found it almost indescribably moving.

The ninth film in the franchise, Predator: Badlands flips the whole Predator equation on its severed head from moment one by, for the first time, really concentrating on the Yautja rather than on humans.

At just under two hours, Die My Love is a lot of movie with not a lot of story. Good thing, then, that it centers Lawrence in very nearly every frame.

What Stitch Head mostly aims for and generally achieves is a warmth of comedy and emotion that will sit well with young audiences.

It’s arguably Linklater’s best use of an ensemble – and that’s saying something. But great as each individual performance is, and broad as Linklater pulls his aspect ratio, Nouvelle Vague is really a close-up on Godard.

The air of fear that still pervades every frame of It Was Just an Accident is undeniable and institutionalized, to the point that cops take cash or cards for bakhshish, the customary bribes required just to live in public.

True, the odd quill may scratch the surface, but there’s nothing really penetrating.

Lean as a hellhound, Shelby Oaks doesn’t rely on jump scares, although there are plenty of those. Instead, its true terror is found in writer/director Chris Stuckmann’s ability to move effortlessly from adrenaline shocks to creeping psychological strain.

Much as Blue Moon is a eulogy for the death of a creative life, it’s also a testament to Linklater’s continued vitality as a filmmaker.

For a film that gets right up close to a musical genius, it’s when he’s walking away, hands jammed in his leather jacket, that you can see the resemblance most clearly.

There are no life lessons here, only an uncommonly focused look at one life – the sometimes joyful, sometimes punishing day-to-day existence of a young man whose future is more uncertain that most.

Black Phone 2 may be a power ballad to the original’s minor chord metal, but it still rocks.

It’s one of Roberts’ best ever performances, not in least part because of how confidently she wears her age and Alma’s secrets, now that her ingénue years are firmly behind her. The woman with the mile-wide smile is no longer interested in courting our favor.

The script, and Byrne’s suitably breathless, solipsistic reading of it, give the audience every reason to not simply dislike Linda but despise her.

It’s a dead-serious cautionary tale and sincere call for de-escalation, dressed like a political thriller by a director who’s aces with action (and whose actual best film, by the way, is Point Break). A House of Dynamite does not always easily straddle the gulf between docudrama and disaster movie conventions.