Annihilation starts off grand and cosmic: a meteor flies through space and crashes into Earth.  Then we stay cosmic but more grounded - we’re in the biology class of Lena (Nathalie Portman), teaching med students about the basic cellular nature of life.  We gather that Lena’s husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) is a soldier, and is presumed dead after being missing for a year.  But as she moves about her bedroom back at home, repainting the walls, he appears silently in the doorway.  He has returned, but also not: Kane can’t remember where he’s been, or how he got home, and then proceeds to begin coughing up blood.  Their ambulance is intercepted by armed soldiers, and Lena is sedated; when she awakens, a woman named Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) informs her of double horrors - her husband is seriously ill, and was involved in a mission to explore an uncanny irruption in a sparsely populated, swampy region of the U.S. that’s being termed “the shimmer.”

For a big budget war movie, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk runs against the expected grain in ways large and small.  It’s perhaps obsessively interested in communicating the scale of a world war, in terms of distance, multitudes, and time, but it accomplishes this through spareness rather than any piling on.  Two great armies face each other: the conquering Germans and the defeated English, 400,000 of whom have been driven to European continent’s edge at the beginning of World War II, gathered in a small defensive pocket around the French city of Dunkirk.  Through the course of the film, though, we only ever see the faces and bodies of Allied soldiers, never their German enemies, except indirectly, as marauding aircraft or through the explosion of artillery shells.  And we see the vast numbers of Allied troops as much in the empty and exposed spaces of their positions as in their actual presence; they are many, yet they are utterly vulnerable at the French shore, literally standing in lines to the sea in one of the film’s memorable early scenes.

Life combines a traditional sci-fi warning tale about the dangers of toying with forces humankind doesn’t understand with the lesser-known storyline of characters making catastrophically dumb choices, resulting in what I like to call a “double-trouble” morality tale.  These two narratives can be complementary, but in Life they exist in some tension — the high moral purpose of the first (this is a movie with a BIG IDEA that you should take seriously) is somewhat at odds with the more popcorn flick thrill of watching a close-knit team get picked off by a baddie.  The film’s heart is in the harum-scarum direction, which means its attempts at seriousness end up feeling a little silly and pretentious.

So many things feel off in Alien: Covenant that it’s hard to know where to begin; so we may as well begin at the beginning.  After a brief opening in which an android named David (Michael Fassbender) and his creator (Guy Pearce) chat about creation in an abstractly white and modern room, we see a spacecraft making its way across the starry vastness.  The vessel is named Covenant, and its sole conscious operator is Walter (Michael Fassbender, again!  What what?!) — an android cousin of David (ah!).  The ship carries a crew and two thousand people bound for a planet they intend to colonize, but they’re all in suspended animation on account of the years-long duration of the trip.  Within minutes, though, catastrophe strikes, as some sort of cosmic event (neutrino surge?) whips into the ship, tearing a flim-flam solar sail clearly not designed for such rough stellar business.  The emergency awakens the crew, though the captain doesn't make it — in the first of many don’t-quite-make-sense moments, his sleeping pod turns into a cremation chamber, and he burns alive.

(Kong: Skull Island) I guess there’s something oddly audacious in making a remake of one of the most influential films of all time, but simply doing it as an unabashed popcorn flick.  In its limited ambition, Kong: Skull Islandtakes us on a weird ride that seems to only go through the motions of trying to make us care about what happens.  Truly, the only character who you mind lives or dies is Kong, which I’m guessing was not the conscious intention — but that’s what happens when the human characters are a grab-bag of cliches, non-entities, and after-thoughts.  It’s almost like they just included too darned many actors, and couldn’t figure out what to do with them.  There’s a scientist guy who seems called out just enough to make you think he’s going to be significant in some way — but no.  Ditto with a female researcher who seems more or less along for the ride.  This is all the more noticeable in that it’s chock full of good or great actors — John Goodman, Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Samuel Jackson, John C. Reilly — who are either miscast (Hiddleston, Larson) or forced to speak lines from a script (all of them) that, if there were an Academy Award for non sequiturs, boy would it win!

Star Trek: Beyond  /  directed by Justin Lin

Arrival is a cautious but progressive tale of alien-human contact, pushing the boundaries of Hollywood sci-fi conventions without quite blasting them into outer space.  It opens with startlements small and large: first, a montage of a woman played by Amy Adams interacting with her daughter, in which the child succumbs to a deadly disease, then scenes of this same woman trying to teach a class on linguistics, only to have the class cancelled by events beyond her control -- the sudden appearance of twelve huge, uncanny objects floating just above the earth at various locations.  The situation evokes strains of dread, but coming on the heels of watching the professor lose her child means we watch it with a certain detachment, as if the end of the world isn’t far and away the only worst thing one can imagine.

The Handmaiden is a film constructed with as much cunning as the plots hatched by its devious and desperate inhabitants.  It’s a genre-mashing bodice-ripper, except that in its playful and perverse universe, the camera lingers as often over the donning of bodices as their undoing - and they are never actually ripped, only ever sensually undone.

(Doctor Strange) From the apparently inexhaustible archives of Marvel Comics arrives the latest transmutation from page to screen: Doctor Strange.  Unlike the superheroes we’ve seen to date — Thor, the Incredible Hulk, Captain America — Doctor Strange actually occupies a different quadrant of the vast yet often claustrophobically repetitive Marvel universe: This superhero works with the world of spirit and magic, not pseudo-scientific superpowers.  So there’s that.

The opening scene of Elle administers an electric shock to the audience that will color our sense of everything that follows: a woman lies on the floor of her house, amid broken porcelain, as a masked intruder rapes her and her cat calmly looks on.  She moans in pain, and blood runs between her legs.  But as we move from this brutal, primal encounter between man and woman, the film begins to unsettle our sense of what has transpired, in the first place by playing with audience expectations of female victimhood.  Michele Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) seems to calm quickly, even as the sight of her in her bathtub, blood rising to the surface of the water, offsets her peacefulness.  Why isn’t she calling the police?  Does this mean she wasn’t really raped?  But we have the evidence of our senses to know that she was, even if Michele isn’t acting in ways that we expect.  In a curious reversal, her lack of traumatization unnerves the viewer.

(Hunt for the Wilderpeople) It’s hard to think of another recent film that is so superficially inoculated against criticism.  The hero of Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Ricky (Julian Dennison), is an adorable New Zealand orphan who just wants a real home and to be his unique self, goals that are achieved and challenged in a not-quite-surreal adventure through the New Zealand bush.  But though it oozes charm and vitality, plunges us into unfamiliar, gorgeous landscapes, and plays an audacious game of mixing high drama with studied, small-scale sweetness, Wilderpeople never quite feels as authentic or heart-rending as it seems to want, or adds up to a coherent, persuasive whole.

(Ghostbusters 2016) Suffice it to say that I’m pretty sure the sexist backlash to the Ghostbusters re-boot, unleashed even before the film was released, is sourced from the same rancid stream of American manhood from which the Trump campaign draws its sordid sustenance.  In this light, the battles of the new, distaff quartet of ‘busters against hordes of mostly male ghosts can be viewed as an eerie metaphor for the film’s own cultural status; at some level, you’re going to cheer these ladies on, no matter what, because they’re fighting the good fight.

Victoria kicks off with an image of liberation and youth: the eponymous heroine (Laia Costa) dances alone amid the industrial bass beats and strobing lights of a 4 a.m. Berlin nightclub.  She seems happy, but also somehow out of place: she apparently doesn’t speak German, and you have to wonder why she’s dancing by herself.  A young German man starts to flirt with her; their paths cross again as she is leaving.  The man, Sonne (Frederick Lau), and Victoria engage in a light, flirtatious banter; the conversation interweaves into interactions with Sonne’s three friends.  Fairly inebriated, the four men collectively form a wild bundle of male energy, boisterous, friendly, competitive, and aggressive.  They try to persuade Victoria to take a ride with them in a car, which turns out not to be theirs at all, as an aggrieved owner soon makes clear in off-screen shouting.  Victoria seems amused rather than worried by their amateurish efforts, and gives in to their entreaties to join them as they carouse through the pre-dawn streets in drunken camaraderie.  The latent aggression is suddenly loosed as Sonne’s hyper friend Boxer gets into a shoving match with a pair of random passersby, but it’s just as suddenly gone, like a squall blown through to clear skies.  The men persuade Victoria to accompany them to a rooftop, where they continue their partying.

Hail, Caesar!, the latest from the Coen Brothers, is a cheerfully modest film, a confection wrapped in an enigma cloaked in a pastiche.  To say its plot revolves around the mysterious kidnapping of a major Hollywood star for purposes unknown is to fall unforgivably for the film’s playfully dramatic misdirection.  After all, it turns out to be less than an outright kidnapping, and something more amusing and idiosyncratic, like, oh, an attempt by secretly Communist screenwriters to gently convert said star to their capitalism-critiquing crusade. Hail, Caesar! may be more about casually exploring or evoking a state of mind than anything else - that state of mind being the curious concoction of business, fantasy, and human relations that constitutes Hollywood, at least Hollywood in its temporal setting of the early 1950’s.  Hail, Caesar! is a virtual museum or catalogue of films within a film, encompassing cowboy action, spy farce, water ballet, musicals, and historical epics; it frequently feels as if it’s simply pausing to pay loving homage these older, mostly abandoned forms.

The Witch starts with a scene of exile, as William (Ralph Enison), his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie), and their children are thrown out of their 17th century New England settlement on account of the father’s heterodox religious beliefs.  Cut off from their already isolated human community (so far from England!), William sees an opportunity to live according to his own religious beliefs, and closer to the will of God.  But as they make a new life in a rough-hewn homestead hard by dark and encroaching woods, it’s not long before the family’s faith begins to be tested: their newborn disappears literally from out under the nose of their eldest daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), in what seems an impossible disappearance; but the audience at least sees the agent behind it -- a cloaked figure who carries the baby through those dark woods to a secret location, where the child is killed and its pulpified body slathered onto the skin of his murderer.  The sequence is rendered mysterious and unearthly by incomplete glimpses of what exactly goes on (though a mortar and pestle-type processing of the baby’s body seems to be part of the procedure); but despite the grisly and weird presentation, it’s unexpectedly matter of fact rather than malign or sadistic, as if someone were going about necessary business that lies outside human notions of good and evil.

(Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens) Some day I’d like to explore possible reasons for why I think Star Wars has had such a magnetic hold on so many (males) of my generation and beyond; for now, I wanted to note this in connection with the excitement I’ve personally felt leading up to the release of The Force Awakens, an excitement fed by a cleverly restrained ad campaign that made the new movie seem to contain expansive possibilities for a fellow eager to glimpse them.  Another way of putting this caveat to what follows: I’m not a Star Wars fan, but someone who despite his best critical judgment feels this franchise exert a mysterious power that at times seems to flow through every living thing and bind the universe together from one end to the other: the power of. . . nostalgia.

(Where to Invade Next) It’s awfully amusing that the right in this country views Michael Moore as some sort of bomb-throwing radical.  I think this comes from a combination of his avowedly liberal politics and the fact that he’s figured out an arguably effective way to get his views into the public sphere, whatever the flaws of his films might be; he is made out to be a buffoon because in actuality he’s a real threat.  I’m not saying Michael Moore is the future of left politics, but you can’t deny he’s on to something, especially after watching his latest.

10 Cloverfield Lane is a tight, smart captivity-survival narrative, drawing on tropes of abduction, terrorism, and female empowerment to propel its tale.  It’s like some fun, twisted karmic twin to Room, minus the kid and with existential gloom in place of parental anguish.  The predicament in which protagonist Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) finds herself has various shades of ambiguity from the start, but it’s definitely not good; following a car accident during a long-distance drive, she awakens to find herself shackled to the wall of an unknown basement room, her arm hooked into an IV that may or may not be dispensing helpful fluids into her body.  It’s a good example of the film’s charm that she immediately begins working on a way to escape in clever and resourceful ways.  Her gaoler then appears; conveying a no-good combination of menace and courtesy, Howard (John Goodman) ominously warns her to get used to her surroundings.  Michelle then unexpectedly overhears what sounds like an altercation between Howard and another man; but when she meets the latter shortly afterward, bearded, ball-capped Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) claims not to be a captive at all, and even says he wants to be there.  More incredibly, he backs up the story that Howard had told Michelle about why she can’t leave, and which she’d immediately dismissed - that there has been a chemical attack outside, and no one is left alive.

Ridley Scott’s latest film,The Martian, is a wholesome packet of can-do sustenance, like one of those freeze-dried, vacuum-packed Salisbury steaks on which lonesome astronauts chow down.  To the late David Bowie’s question, Is there life on Mars?, the film shouts out a resounding, Yes! - and like the claustrophobically anthropocentric Interstellar, the answer is a narcissistically reassuring one - life on Mars is us, goddam it!

If only Ant Man’s narrative matched the swift ease with which its title character zaps between insect-tiny and man-size!  This latest emissary from the Marvel borg is something of a slow burn; by my reckoning, it never really gels until its last 20 climactic minutes.  Before then, we’ve got to watch Paul Rudd not only learn how to operate his amazing suit, but also re-connect with his basic charm as an actor; I don’t know if it was the pressure of playing a Mighty Super Hero, even one as silly in concept as Ant Man, but Rudd seems to be rudderless for much of the film — not bad, just oddly generic.  Props must be given to Michael Douglas, who delivers the pseudo-scientific balderdash with which his Dr. Hank Pym is burdened with a Douglasian mix of conviction and faint menace that makes it just barely go down OK.  Still, there was more than one scene among Rudd, Douglas, and Evangeline Lilly where dollars to donuts they had to have been commiserating between takes about how the hell they got stuck saying these silly lines for the silver screen, even if they’re all being paid bajillions of dollars to do so; you can just sense it!