After years of movies where even the most mediocre heroes appeared to be invulnerable and indomitable, it’s an arresting jolt — and exactly the film the franchise needed.

Too many films that rely on secrets stop being compelling once those secrets emerge. Marrowbone just becomes more compelling. It’s one of the year’s most immaculately crafted movies, and it’s the kind of story that keeps dodging convention right up to the final shot. It fits neatly into the Gothic genre, but it innovates within it at the same time.

The filmmakers try to innovate largely by making the movie as toothless and easily digestable as possible. Nothing in the film is real enough to care about past the moment, or serious enough to trouble audience’s sleep. Maybe in a world that’s already full of real-life disasters, it’s innovative enough to make monumental destruction this much dumb, lightweight fun.

The Endless rapidly develops from a mysterious, elliptical story about cult survivors and strained relationships into a much larger and stranger movie, essentially the Aliens to Resolution’s original Alien.

For viewers who are still impressed by CGI destruction and thrilled by the sight of realistic mechas in action, Uprising is yet another escalation in scale, staged creatively and with apparent love for the old-school kaiju genre.

Unfriended: Dark Web has enough snark, shock, and disregard for anyone’s emotional comfort to briefly confuse viewers into thinking it’s pulled off something worthwhile. But when it’s done, it’s easy to walk outside feeling like you’ve spent 90 minutes doing nothing at all.

Vikander doesn’t do much with a character whose chief attribute is earnestness, but Tomb Raider improves once it gets to the island and lets the derring-do take over.

The sheer dynamism and energy of the movie are compelling, even when the character drama isn’t.

The film hits all the necessary beats for a straightforward horror film in an eerie post-apocalyptic setting. But it’s more effective as a portrait of four people who have constructed a deceptively peaceful life under the constant, inescapable threat of death.

It’s a pretty take on the story, but it’s also a frustratingly safe and squishy one. It’s infinitely well-intentioned, full of warm self-affirmation and positivity, and absolutely nothing about it feels emotionally authentic enough to drive those messages home.

Annihilation is a portentous movie, and a cerebral one. It’s gorgeous and immersive, but distancing. It’s exciting more in its sheer ambition and its distinctiveness than in its actual action.

Hereditary is a hell of an intense ride, made for a crowd that enjoys heart-clutching adrenaline spikes. The cast is unerringly terrific.

It’s gripping, funny, and full of spectacle, but it also feels like a turning point, one where the studio has finally recognized that its movies can be about more than just selling the next installment. In the process, the studio has ended up with one of the most enthralling entries in its entire universe.

Unlike the first two films in the series, Cloverfield Paradox doesn’t stand on its own as a horror movie, or even as a standalone story. There’s no central idea, no governing principle, and more to the point, virtually nothing frightening about it. No one involved in creating this movie seemed to have any clue what kind of tale it’s telling from one minute to the next.

Bright is a series of disconnected action vignettes that work as standalone sequences, but don’t hang together in any kind of meaningful way. It’s impossible to not think of Suicide Squad’s similar failings as Bright barrels from one dark, noisy scene to the next.

Audiences will likely come away from The Last Jedi with a lot of complaints and questions. But they’re at least likely to feel they’re in the hands of someone who cares about the series as much as they do, someone who loves its history, but sees the wide-open future ahead of it as well.

Because the film goes in so many tonal and narrative directions, it feels like a grab bag anyone can reach into and fish around in for something to their personal tastes, from dramatic themes to offhand banter, from mindless pummel-fests to thoughtful conversations about heroic responsibility. Justice League isn’t an entirely coherent film, but it’s certainly an egalitarian one.

At its best, My Friend Dahmer makes some weak attempts to reckon with virulent homophobia in an Ohio suburb in the late ‘70s. But for the most part, it’s just a movie about the sick thrill of watching someone become progressively stranger and then a murderer.

Newness is a modern love story, where selfies and LTE play a role, but its sweet, wildly optimistic final minutes are something else entirely.

A Silent Voice didn’t necessarily demand to be an animated feature. But because KyoAni’s creators are able to put so much expressiveness into the characters, it communicates much of what they’re feeling without words.

On the surface, American Satan is a horror movie about how the devil is bad, and entering into vague contracts with him will not make you happy. I’m not sure what audiences are supposed to get out of it otherwise.

Just as trying to keep up with every geopolitical crisis on the planet all at once can be overwhelming, trying to track Geostorm’s name-checked concerns and its barely present characters is likely to tax viewers’ attention spans. Horror movies help people process some of our worst fears, but there’s a reason most movies don’t try to address every human fear at the same time.

It’s an enthusiastic, hilarious reboot of the idea of what a Marvel movie can actually be, resulting in an effervescent, delightfully self-aware ride that was the most fun I’d had in a superhero movie in years.

What’s lurking beneath the surface of this ruthlessly violent horror movie is a glimmer of gold. Happy Death Day is fun enough to be worth watching.

Every retread of a familiar story has to bring something new to the table, if it’s going to justify its existence. Instead, this is yet another cinematic Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together out of scavenged parts, and shocked back to life for no clear or compelling reason.

Despite its flaws, one thing about Blade Runner 2049 is most welcome: it is trying to be about something. It is trying to be deep, rich, and complex. We’ve grown so used to lowest-common-denominator blockbuster cinema that it’s almost shocking to watch a big science-fiction movie, featuring these kinds of stars, swinging for the fences in this way. It’s hard not to be impressed by, and a bit grateful for, the ambition and care evident in every frame.

At its best, it’s a reminder that King’s biggest strengths lie in his unparalleled ability to build tension, create atmosphere, and tell a direct and brutal story, not in his ability to launch profitable many-branched franchises.

It’s a heightened, sometimes stagey take on a trashy exploitation flick, but it is mesmerizing.