This is a documentary that demands a large bucket of popcorn.

By contrast to the previous rendition’s warm geniality, Oakley’s film is much more concerned with the messiness of 19th century life  —  dust and dirt ring the hemlines of long dresses, fingernails are rough and often filthy, and the natural world surrounds the sisters in its sweep. The film often cuts from the human characters in various states of emotional upheaval to a bird swooping in the sky, or a herd of deer glancing up in alarm. Spider webs are frequently invoked, and the film has far more dogs in it than Austen herself might have imagined.

There have been several such films that have taken a basic assassin story and tacked on some religious window-dressing as a kind of gilded frame around the resulting bloodbath. Action master John Woo, for one example, routinely set some of his most giddy shoot ‘em ups inside of churches (giving him yet another excuse to release his beloved white doves in the process), for a satisfying, if blunt juxtaposition (see also the end of The Godfather). But the gifted Tariq (Mogul Mowgli, Ghosts of Sugar Land) isn’t going for obvious analogies or cheap ironies here.

Oppenheim, a talented documentarian (Some Kind of Heaven, Ren Faire), basing the film on Luke Dittrich’s seminal Esquire article, “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” takes a kind of interpretive tack with Hansen. As portrayed by the ever-twisty Pattinson, the line between his performative self (thrusting out from behind a literal curtain with the professionally grave, self-important sweep of a high-school principal, or maybe a mortician) and his actual self with his wife and kids, gets smudged into a dark smear, leading him deeper into psychosis. At one point, when one of Hansen’s perp-jump scares goes wrong, he lies down in a fetal position and sinks into a fugue state, unable to be reached by the increasingly agitated Andie.

This film, now the second reboot of a series that has seven previous installments, isn’t terribly interested in pity, conscience, or redemption. In fact, despite the trappings of a more conventional horror caper  — including a protagonist who has just learned he’s going to be a father  — Cregger’s creation has no intention of going soft on us, all the way through the pitiless ending.

The best use of cherubs since Botticelli. Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a cynical, embittered author penning the end of his very popular “Conquistador” trilogy of books. On a whim, he leaves his palatial modern manse in Washington state and heads out to Ireland, to the very hotel his late parents enjoyed their honeymoon. As Damian McCarthy‘s film is a proper Irish horror story, there’s a witch, a cynic and a drunk involved.

This brings us to Adam Wingard’s cinematic embolism, a half-assed ‘80s action/horror homage that works diligently to get its intriguing premise off the ground before devolving into a morass of tired tropes, frenetic sound detonations, and frequent soundtrack needle drops. All with a 7-year-old girl in tow.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Asswipe. Matt Johnson’s film concerns a seminal summer in the nascent career of a young, pretentious punk-ass who eventually grows up to become Anthony Bourdain, capturing, in essence, a young man at the precise crux between his reach and his grasp. As beloved as the later-day Bourdain, the one-time high-end chef, turned tell-all memoirist, and eventual global TV mainstay, became, by his own admission, his early years were pockmocked by fits of self-absorption, self-destruction, and grating irascibility that, to his considerable credit, he has never shied away from (in the film’s epigraph, he refers to himself in that era as a “spoiled, narcissistic brat.”) 

The question, then, is whether or not Destin Daniel Cretton’s new Spider-Man picture, the fourth installment in this series, can keep this positive mojo going. Whereas I’m typically rubbish at the predictive market  —  this is the guy who was convinced Supergirl would do just fine  — if nothing else, the film certainly deserves to be a hit, not something one would have said about many of the more recent bloated, lifeless MCU installments since the groundbreaking Avengers: Endgame back in 2019. 

In writer/director Christopher Nolan’s conceit, this idea of openness and trust was betrayed by Odysseus (Matt Damon), in tricking the Trojans to accept the “gift” of a giant wooden horse, secretly filled to the rim with Greek warriors, all of them furious and miserable after spending the better part of a decade away from home in order to win the war for their king, Agamemnon (Benny Safdie). After the appreciative Trojans dragged this giant horse into their city as a symbol of peace with the Greeks, Odysseus and his men snuck out of the structure in the middle of the night, and opened the previously impenetrable Trojan gates in order to let the rest of their army inside, sacking the place in a fury of raping and pillaging. Odysseus won the war, such as it was, but, as Nolan has it, lost a good bit of humanity in the process. 

Many will compare this film to 2000’s Gladiator, and it’s an apt comparison, for better and worse.

Based loosely on the classic western True Grit, the original comics focus on a dispirited Kara (Supergirl’s actual name), taking refuge on a distant planet, and becoming embroiled in a dispute between a fierce, young girl named Ruthye, whose family was  brutally murdered by the villain Krem of the Yellow Hills, part of a group of bloodthirsty brigands terrorizing the local planets. When this same Krem shoots and poisons Kara’s beloved dog, Krypto, she and Ruthye track down the pirates together, in a race against time, in order to get the antidote, and settle things up between Ruthye and Krem.