“Harry Dean Stanton is…,” the opening credits of Lucky say in big letters right before the title, thus conferring upon one of our humblest players a level of movie-carrying star power usually reserved for a Schwarzenneger or a Stallone. When Harry Dean Stanton passed away last month at the age of 91, he had stayed active until the end. Very few movies gave him the leading role; the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are Repo Man and Paris, Texas, both from thirty years ago. But the outpouring of grief from cinephiles was rightly that of an icon, one who delivered more fine performances for more fine directors than we could keep track of, and I suspect this is also because those performances always felt more open than transformative. That is, unlike an Oscar titan like Meryl Streep or Robert De Niro, you got the sense (illusory or not) that if you were fortunate enough to meet him in person, he would probably be pretty close to what you knew from his best roles, with little pretense of celebrity. So Harry Dean Stanton is Lucky, and Lucky is an old soul in an older body, a chain-smoking retiree whose tranquil routine—maybe too tranquil, for some audience members—is broken when it starts to sink in that he can’t go on forever.

In a way, it’s amazing that this film—directed by the actor John Carroll Lynch (who has a pretty wide resumé of supporting roles himself)—gets away with as many contradictions as it does. It stays remarkably light and buoyant for a film that keeps pondering mortality, subjectivity, and “the void”, and then throws in a metaphorical Garden of Eden just for good measure. And it maintains grave seriousness even as its view of a small town in the American southwest is atilt with comic eccentricity. (Cinephiles will get the bonus of watching a well-cast David Lynch play a man uncommonly obsessed with his tortoise). Undoubtedly, this is because the film avoids the easiest climactic ways out—Lucky has, for instance, no estranged family member he needs to reconcile with—while allowing its little details and discrete vignettes to mean as much as its “big scenes.” I suspect the movie is perfectly satisfied to be small, and to see what it can find within that scale. There’s a scene at the end when Stanton, who by the then has been at both the giving and receiving end of fine monologs, suddenly makes eye contact with the camera and lets out a big silent grin—and for a second, you can’t tell if you’re looking at the character or the actor himself. Lucky is, by design, a film too miniature and too shaggy for entry into Valhalla. But that moment is one of the most subtly transcendent shots I’ve seen this year; it left me both heartbroken and exiting the theater on a high. As the movie keeps reminding us, everyone will die someday. But not every actor gets to take such a lovely final bow.

✬✬✬✬✩

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Lucky is still playing in a few theaters. See it with a small crowd of people who care.

I’ve never believed in ghosts, but movies may be the next best thing: apparitions of light and shadow taking the form of a person or a moment whose original no longer exists. At the movies, the dividing line between one mortal plane and the next can be as simple as a cut, a fade, or a presence implied where none is seen. And for this reason, some of the most effectively ghostly special effects predate not only the digital revolution, and not only color film stock, but sound cinema itself. So credit David Lowery for creating an appropriately elemental spirit and a proudly analog look—even as a digital rental—with A Ghost Story. A nameless man and wife (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara) live together until he dies in a tragic accident. From there, looking like a man under a sheet with holes cut out for eyes, his ghost haunts their old house and watches both mournfully and angrily as time moves on without him.

It is not the easiest film to get into, just like any film that treats its actors more as photographic models than characters. And as it rockets off into the mysteries of space and time, the true fullness of its cosmic aspiration is beyond the film’s reach. Its level of insight is no more profound, or less obvious, than the philosophical rap about tiny human footprints in an infinite universe that a guest (Sundance stalwart Will Oldham) delivers at a shindig after the house has been invaded by post-grads. In other words, A Ghost Story is not so much the wisdom of a life lived as it is dinner party conversation for intellects of a certain age. But it is also a work of cinematic imagination from an up-and-comer who wants to build on the very Malick-isms that have turned so many moviegoers off. The middle passage, where time slips between cuts and pans, is beautifully detailed. The authentically muted portrayal of Rooney Mara’s grief, done with a minimum of dialogue or actorly emoting, has stuck with me. Even the moments where it risks silliness—and doesn’t always come away clean—have a lucid audacity to them. It’s certainly not horror, but it is empathetic to why you would want to haunt a world where everything keeps sliding away. That emotional core works, and any sad sack could tell you it means as much for the living as it does for the dead.

✬✬✬✬✩

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A Ghost Story is available to rent on iTunes. This Halloween, try fun-sized pretension.

When filmmaker Taylor Sheridan was last in theaters, it was as the writer (but not director) of last year’s Oscar-nominated Hell or High Water. I didn’t shine to that film as much as some of my friends or the Academy; it was a solid western noir script, but the presentation of it felt too glossy by half. That is, for its tale of crime and punishment in the American heartland, I could never quite shake the feeling that I was watching movie stars play-acting for a camera. Wind River, his follow-up and his first time directing his own script, takes its atmosphere a step in the right direction simply by being more stark. It feels brought down to the soil, even if the soil is under three feet of snow.

Old Hollywood has its own tradition of borderland noir—Touch of Evil (1958), Ride the Pink Horse (1947), etc.—and Wind River aspires to work a twist on that fear of lawlessness by being set on America’s border with itself. Or to be more specific, an Indian reservation, with all the federal neglect that entails, where Native Americans mingle with the white inhabitants of a nearby Wyoming town, and where a local hunter (Jeremy Renner) and a green FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) have to solve the murder of a Native American teen, found dead in the snow miles from the nearest anything. The murder mystery itself is completely linear, but I’d wager that’s not a poverty of imagination so much as a sad-eyed interest in inevitability. Sheridan remains a fine observer of the heartland, with a good ear for dialogue, an ability to add personal nuances to characters who might otherwise fade into cliche, and a strong sense for a version of American life that’s a million miles away from the Westwood Village, where I saw the film.

There is, I think, a certain obviousness that mars the film: an obvious mystery, an obvious rape-revenge resolution, and an obvious cinematic style, limited to a few mood-setting chords and anonymous handheld photography. Sheridan has room to grow as a filmmaker, but he knows how to keep a plot clipping along, when to drop the thematic hammer, and how details can turn a corpse into more than a mere procedural. Wind River‘s interest is in different kinds of American society, where new generations make their stand on top of old legacies, and where the past should neither determine fate nor be forgotten. And on those counts, Wind River lands some inspired touches and fine climactic monologues. Its overt social conscience toward modern Native American life is undercut, or at least complicated, by the fact that the hero relied on to mete out justice is a white man, treated cinematically as a kind of cowboy and Indian rolled into one. But in one of the keener details, we see that his Native American ex-wife is raising their mixed race son on a track of upward mobility, pointed towards bigger towns with better pay and better schools. And I like to imagine they’ll be moving on while he’s content to stay. Like any good revenge story, it seems mournfully hesitant at the idea that the present can ever truly set the past right. But it’s smart enough to keep one eye cagily trained on the future.

It Comes at Night first came to my attention over the summer, when a writer for the Guardian coined (or tried to coin) the term “post-horror”, to describe not only It Comes at Night, but other recent releases like Personal Shopper and A Ghost Story. Here were films that borrowed iconography and plot elements from the horror genre—and maybe even had a scare or two—but whose pacing and focus on cosmic, spiritual, or existential concerns made them more at home in an arthouse or on the festival circuit than in Netflix’s Horror carousel. Once the term “post-horror” hit the hivemind of the internet, a lot of genre fans rightly called bullshit, and they have two good reasons for doing so. First, because the term implies that there’s something about the genre that needed a high-minded corrective—”isn’t it about time?” said the Guardian—when directors like Brian De Palma and George Romero were able to put provocative subtext or sophisticated craft into packages a hell of a lot schlockier than any of the movies listed above. And second, because the traits of a “post-horror” film (an emphasis on poetic visuals, dreamy pacing, and cosmic/spiritual/existential concerns over conventional frights) aren’t really new to the genre at all, a small cluster of them in a few months notwithstanding.

But if there’s one value of the term “post-horror” trying to be forced into existence, it’s in how it draws attention to the way such films are marketed, and to the gap between critics’ and audiences’ perception of them. To the extent that any film’s reception can be numerically quantified—and isn’t that what the internet keeps trying to do with everything?—there’s no doubt that there seems to be a gap between “the critics” (RottenTomatoes) and “the people” (IMDb, CinemaScore, etc.) when it comes to It Comes at Night. As for whether it’s the movie’s fault, or just that weekend audiences who pay to see a horror flick want something less cryptic and more viscerally immediate, I think in this case they can split the difference.

So how is the film? Pretty good, so let it never be said an enterprising filmmaker can’t end the world on a tiny budget. Set in a world where a plague has wiped out most of human civilization, an interracial family tries to scrape by in their house in the woods. The son is troubled by nightmares, the (white) father protects them with a cold, tribal pragmatism. When they agree to let in another, much more more noticeably happy family, the tense truce that ensues builds to a bloody climax. For most of its runtime, it’s a mood piece, trying to make a cramped wooden house as atmospheric and unpredictable as the Overlook Hotel, with varying results. Frustration can be understandable, since the film’s sparse scene-by-scene storytelling suffers from a certain vagueness: a vague post-apocalyptic scenario and a vague “it” stalking the woods yield a vague allegory—something about American isolation, something about paranoia, maybe something about race—that, like many films from the indie sphere, feels like a strong concept that had to be padded to reach 90 minutes. It is only in the third act that the vagueness starts to lift, at least thematically, leading to a terrific payoff for anyone who doesn’t insist that stories be tidy. The biggest mystery is an open chasm, but there’s something rewarding about its core: a traumatized young boy whose dream sequences have a hint of prophesy, but who is ultimately unable to change the direction of the narrative at all. It’s enough to mark writer-director Trey Edward Shults as a talent to watch: a filmmaker with ideas awaiting a more robust treatment. Here’s rooting for him.