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.

Back when it hit theaters, the question of whether or not Wonder Woman was good got tangled up with the whether or not it was important: on the film and director Patty Jenkins’s shoulders was placed the cause of whether or not a woman-driven, woman-directed tentpole franchise could “work” at the box office. It is, I think, an unfair expectation to place on any film that’s essentially the same kind of expensive pixel-camp we see a dozen times a summer, and that itself is a kind of double standard. Before the film was released, I saw a post on social media—and it’s telling of our time that I can’t remember if it was a friend or a meme—that the goal is not for Wonder Woman to come out and be amazing. The goal is for Wonder Woman to come out, suck, and then be followed three weeks later by another femme-centered superhero movie, because that’s the way it works with the boys. That sounds about right to me. It’s strange that building movies on women is still considered a “niche” strategy by so many Hollywood forecasters, especially when Wonder Woman is the second highest grossing film of the year (for the record, the only one currently ahead of it is the testosterone-fest of Beauty and the Beast).

So if a verdict is what you’re looking for, I can say with absolute certainty that Wonder Woman is totally fine. On a cinematic and dramaturgical level, it’s no worse or better than the average tentpole—more focused than a lot of lesser films, less developed and airtight than the better ones. (Given how Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad were disastrously received last year, that makes it definitely a step in the right direction for the nervous masters of the DC Universe). It’s the sort of adventure high on slo-mo fights and fleshed out by stock characters who shout exposition they couldn’t possibly know so that the audience doesn’t fall behind. It doesn’t really try for any surprising turns until late in the game. And if the idea of an explicitly anti-war action flick that racks up a bloodless bodycount sounds contradictory to you, you’re right.

So I’d say that this is the sort of movie that asks you not to think about it—except it’s more the sort of movie that asks you to think about it in a very certain way. It makes sense that most conversations about the film have had to do with the politics of representation, because that’s the movie’s most distinguishing mark, and it knows it. I don’t just mean having scenes where an attractive woman kicks someone’s ass; that’s hardly uncommon, and most times it’s for the men. I mean that Wonder Woman aspires to match its heroine by differentiating itself with a feminine perspective in a sausage-fest environment. The women have established their bonds of sisterhood, motherhood, etc., before a male character is even introduced, and so many of the scenes of Our Heroine meeting the human race for the first time exist solely to get laughs of recognition at the BS women experience in everything from politics to fashion to a thousand little social interactions. (Like, say, fending off a “friendly” hug from a stranger who’s clearly discomfortingly attracted to you). That insistence of perspective, more than any of DC’s hokum about whether mankind is worth saving, is the catharsis. Women like this geeky stuff, too, goddammit, and for the life of me, I’ll never understand why so many male geeks have bristled at the idea. As long as Hollywood is going to try to turn geekery into gold for the foreseeable future, godspeed.

✬✬✬✩✩

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Wonder Women is available to rent on iTunes and Amazon. But Diana really dropped the ball on Hitler.

Presenting Alien: Covenant, in which the DNA of several movies—a literal sequel to Prometheus, a spiritual sequel to Blade Runner, a Planet of Dr. Moreau, and a run-and-gun splatter-fest—mix into a half-formed mutant that bursts from Ridley Scott’s chest and onto screens everywhere. Prometheus had been Scott’s mixed-reception start at giving the monster from Alien its own origin story, and Alien: Covenant resumes its predecessor’s mythology as well as its ponderous meditations on man, god, and mortality. This is the sort of movie that uses the word “ambulate” when “walk” would have worked just as well. It is also the first Alien movie to succumb to the horror cliche of having people killed during sex, and something of that schizoid nature typifies the film.

The opening act, where another ship of doomed space travelers awaken from their interstellar sleep and respond to a mysterious signal, actually does a fine job of throwing us back into this universe. The characters of Prometheus became semi-infamous in geek culture for being among the dumbest brilliant scientists to ever explore a new planet. The characters of Covenant are better drawn, particularly Billy Crudup’s shaky captain and Katherine Waterston’s solid replacement-Ripley. Then, once the ship lands and the alien appears, those characters hit a wall. It’s a fundamental question that I’m not sure Alien: Covenant has an answer for: is the movie meant to belong to Waterston’s Ripleyesque heroine, or is it Michael Fassbender’s show? Fassbender pulls double duty here, reprising his role as the creepy android David from Prometheus while also playing a “new model” that the colonists bring with them. David, it seems, has been stranded on a distant planet, biding his time and attempting to genetically engineer a “perfect organism.” And as Fassbender takes his place as the Alien backstory’s chief villain and prime motivator, all Covenant‘s humans start to fade, reintroduced only to be eaten.

All of which is to say that Alien: Covenant is a movie distracted from itself, and I can’t tell which half is the distraction. Does the philosophical backstory distract from the basics of an Alien movie—another day, another airlock—or is it the other way around? The speculation about the origin of the species (ours and “its”) is a lot less fun; this is a movie that throws around terms like “faith”, “believe”, and “creator” in a way that implies meaning without actually having much. But then, Scott’s interest in those ideas is the part of the movie that feels most passionate; the action, by contrast, is professional but utterly impersonal.

Each part is intriguing, each part is incomplete. But if this particular sci-fi fan is allowed to be schizoid himself, I must admit I kind of enjoyed sifting through this new material for two hours: rooting for Waterston, marveling at Scott and co.’s visual wizardry, and barreling through the detailed, claustrophobic sets. The lasting question, and the one that addresses why this new film was greeted by so many fans as a non-event, is whether its most basic mission is even desirable. Could an explanation of the creature, even if done right, do any good? I’m reminded of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”, another touchstone of sci-fi horror, whose opening paragraph contains this warning: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should travel far.” Something of that essential Lovecraftian anxiety was ingrained in the original Alien: the sense that the endlessness of space, only just being explored, might contain terrors beyond imagination and comprehension. And I’ll bet you points off the gross that that long, cold stare into the unknown will continue to power Scott’s first masterpiece long after the mythology of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant start to fade.

✬✬✬✩✩

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Alien: Covenant is available for rental on iTunes. If you want to see a movie where one Michael Fassbender hits on another Michael Fassbender, this is probably your only chance.

It’s easy to be flippant about any film whose very title is two registered trademarks followed by the word “movie”, but there is a reason The LEGO Batman Movie—a hit with reviewers and moviegoers earlier this year—ended up in my Netflix queue in the first place. In an age of overblown franchise tentpoles, there’s something cheekily appealing about taking blockbuster maximalism and miniaturizing it. A LEGO action sequence is staged and scored like it was Michael Bay, Christopher Nolan, or Marvel, only every explosion results in a rain of miniature plastic blocks. And why not? After all, don’t all action movies, if done right, feel like children at play? At least, that was half the fun of Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s witty, invitingly meta The LEGO Movie, which launched the franchise on an unexpected high note, smuggled in some smily satire, and made its CGI mayhem feel new simply by making it clear that all the epic sagas at multiplexes these days are really just a matter of toys.

LEGO Batman capitalizes on that success, grabbing a hold of the DC universe (and as many other franchises as it can get its hands on) for an adventure whose action feels dreamt up by a kid and whose moral feels insisted upon by a parent. There is not nearly as much cleverness as its predecessor, though not for lack of trying. It starts riff-tracking its own movie before the opening credits have even started. And as it uses pop culture as a sandbox, it quickly aims for the kind of cleverness that can so easily seem obnoxious because it encourages audiences to feel like the screen is smaller than they are. The fun panders to our universal geekery; it offers little except pastiche, tribute, and the kind of likable self-parody for kids that’s been writing itself since Shrek.

No harm, no foul—but can’t we do better? The last bona fide Batman movie I saw was The Dark Knight Rises. It was, I think, Christopher Nolan’s weakest film by far, with aspirations towards seriousness that landed in an utter tangle. But LEGO Batman, without the satire and novelty of its LEGO original, took the caped crusader so far in the other direction that I had the opposite reaction: I realized I’d rather watch a talented director like Nolan try to create a new movie myth, even if it risks collapse, than watch 100 minutes of jokes that congratulate us for memorizing the old ones. Spotting references is a good deal different than true media savvy, which is the difference between the hollow pleasure of LEGO Batman and the smartest touches that made The LEGO Movie such a cheery surprise. And if it’s not careful, and as more spin-offs fill the pipeline, that’s the only true risk this franchise is likely to take: the unpleasant moment when being cheeky towards cliches is revealed to be a long-running cliche of its own.

✬✬✬✩✩

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The LEGO Batman Movie is now on home video. Hand me down the shark repellent.

Ah, Judd Apatow. It’s been over a decade since he led a tidy revolution in Hollywood comedy by acknowledging that dirty-joke-mongers have a great deal of vulnerability behind them. For his work as a director, I know some cinephiles who still treasure him, and others who think he got too indulgent and disappeared up his own ass somewhere in Brentwood circa This is 40 (2012). But as a producer, his enduring impact is as an incubator for comics jumping to a kind of creative, personal screen authorship, including Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Kristen Wiig, Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer, etc. One could argue that, among performers, comedians are the most willing—even pathologically eager—to share intimate details about themselves to an audience of strangers. So bless them for making movies. And now, with The Big Sick, Pakistani-American comic Kumail Nanjiani gets added to the list.

Nanjiani is probably best known as a supporting player on Silicon Valley, where he had the chance to score some laughs but, for the first few seasons, didn’t usually take center stage. Now, The Big Sick is a triumph. Co-written with his wife Emily V. Gordon, the movie is a semi-autobiographical comedy—Kumail plays himself, Zoe Kazan plays “Emily”—about their courtship, which was complicated by the pressures of a traditional Pakistani family and briefly interrupted when a medical emergency sent Emily into a forced coma. “An Awkward True Story”, quoth the posters, and by you now you should know that we live in a time when “awkward” carries positive connotations.

It is one of the most charming comedies of the year. The script succeeds at tackling its themes—the immigrant experience, millennial dating habits in the digital age, how different cultures approach the institution of marriage—with tremendous specificity and without ever losing sight of the chemistry at the core. The scenes of Pakistani-American life challenge the “if a character is X, they must also be Y” rule that shackles so many screen representations. The first thirty minutes between Kumail and Emily make a strong case that my generation might someday produce its own Annie Hall (1977), and that if we do, it’ll be more generous. (In Kazan’s Emily, I recognize the millennial flightiness of my own love life, but she’s too good at spotting people’s bullshit—a genuinely attractive quality for a long-term partner—to be shunted to the corner or labeled a “manic pixie dream girl”).

Director Michael Showalter, of the comedy troupe Stella, keeps the mood gentle and observational, and he balances the tone so that when the medical emergency arrives, the emotional stakes are raised without the movie ever sinking into melodrama. On the contrary, the coma is a chance to add Ray Romano and an always-welcome Holly Hunter into the comic mix as Emily’s parents. It is only in the last act when The Big Sick starts to falter, when it starts to lose its specificity by playing too close to the standard rom-com formula: the communication errors, the initial rejections, the ultimate reunions, etc. It begins to feel, in short, like a movie—and merely one movie among many others. But that might just be another heartwarming way of saying that, when it comes to how America and the Hollywood establishment churn out mass product, newcomers will get a chance.

✬✬✬✬✩

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The Big Sick is still playing in a few theaters. See it with an audience while you can.