Fury Road is a rootin’, tootin’ return to the primal struggle, post-apocalyptic wasteland, and questionable driving practices that George Miller elaborated with his trilogy of Mad Max films three decades ago.  I’m not the one to definitively gauge the precise cultural impact of those earlier movies, only I know that they made a splash on our collective consciousness in a way that shockingly few sci-fi movies really do; they encapsulated a certain plausible vision of a degraded yet automotive future (perhaps the single most hellish aspect of its vision - civilization gone, but cars, like cockroaches, still thriving).  Don't tell me I'm the only person who has used the phrase “like something out of Mad Max” countless times to invoke a ramshackle jerry-rigged technological and/or sartorial quality!

Midnight Special starts off tight and fast, much like the primer-grey muscle car in which its protagonists initially rumble through a dark Texas night.  Two men, Roy (Michael Shannon) and Lucas (Joel Edgerton), are on the run; a young child in goggles and headphones seems to be their cargo.  But though scenes of a TV news broadcast identify this trio as two kidnappers and their victim, it’s clear the men are getting the boy away from danger and to a place of safety.  The circumstances grow eerie real fast - we learn they’ve taken the boy, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), away from a religious cult headed by his adoptive father, Calvin (Sam Shepherd); we also learn Calvin has worked the boy’s unearthly input into the basis of his sermonizing.  It seems that Alton channels data from government satellites, numbers and coordinates and other such arcane information, which is why the FBI is now raiding the cult’s compound in search of the boy.  These opening scenes are jam-packed with pieces of plot in motion, yet for all the tension, it’s mostly assuredly low-key: the FBI’s appearance isn’t accompanied by flash-bang grenades and gunfire, but by a man holding a warrant; the fast-moving muscle car is clearly trying to get away, but there are no actual car chases.

(Crimson Peak) Here’s the thing: though Crimson Peak is commitedly, hauntedly gothic, populated with snarling ghosts that seem to want to reach out and touch ya, it’s the living that heroine Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) really needs to watch out for.  In the film's opening scenes, writerly, wallflowery Edith is swept off her feet by dashing English nobleman Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) in a meeting that seems to be pure turn-of-the-20th-century serendipity: Thomas is visiting America in pursuit of funding for a machine he’s invented to mine clay from his family estate back home, and Edith is the daughter of the Buffalo, NY investor Thomas hopes will back him.  Thomas has even built a toy-sized scale model of the thing to puff away and impress the investors.  But Edith's father Carter Cushing (Jim Beaver) is a stern judge of character, and doesn’t trust something about the panty-waist Brit; he sends him and his creepy sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), packing after a little background check turns up some bad news on the pair.  One violent, mysterious paternal death and a transatlantic crossing later, though, Thomas is carrying his bride Edith across the threshold of his family manor, Allerdale Hall.

(Room) One of the first thoughts I had after watching Room was that it’s remarkable how a not-amazing film can nonetheless be deeply emotionally gripping and involving.  I don’t entirely know why I find this confusing or even paradoxical, but I sort of do, and I could even say that these confusions are part of what has for a long time made me cautious about publicizing my thoughts about films I see.  At root, it may just be a fear of being wrong, and at a slightly shallower level, about a fear of not knowing what makes art good versus not so good.

(Spectre) Color me impressed that the James Bond franchise has persisted through the present day.  A decade ago and more I was urging, to extremely small and non-influential circles, that James be replaced by Jane and the whole series go feminist action hero.  I said this as someone who had been raised watching these films, but who felt that a point of exhaustion had been reached.  For whatever reasons, though, my suggestion never became the social media tidal wave I thought it would be.  Another road was followed instead — a revamped, energetic renaissance of Bond-age, with Daniel Craig leading the charge, first with the greatly entertaining Casino Royale, then the so-so Quantum of Solace (worst title ever, right?), and then the operatic Skyfall.  There was a turn to the psychology of the man, and though we never really did get too much insight, these efforts introduced an intriguing and appealing intimacy into the audience’s relationship with Bond that really hadn’t been there before.  Though there was still gadgetry, it was introduced as much for its limitations as its cool factor; the ultimate gadget, after all, was Bond.

I had high hopes for Sicario: I’d heard rumors of crushing tension, bleak moral calculi, gripping action.  After watching it, I can say that these elements are all there in aspirational form; but much like the American war on drugs war it purports to depict, Sicario is a enterprise doomed by its own overweening hubris.  Straining to achieve high tension and brooding menace via a spare and clinical style, the effect is undone by cross-currents of implausibility and melodrama.  On the level of substance, the cross-pollination it posits between the war on drugs and the war on terror ends up failing to capture the particular horror of either quixotic crusade.  Though the film purports to offer a peek behind the curtain of the reality of American power and rampant militarism, it feels strangely vague and unmoored from our actual world.

(The Guest) So now we know the truth of what really happened to Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) when he only seemed to die tragically and ironically at the end of Downton Abbey, Season III: he was actually resurrected as a killer zombie doomed to haunt small town America.  It might sound silly, but it’s an idea no less silly than the entertaining but preposterous film, The Guest, in which Stevens stars as a man who isn’t who he says he is and is not. . . quite. . . all there.  

(It Follows) The basic premise of writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows is crude and borderline-absurd, in the vein of any decent urban legend: if you have sex with the wrong person, a mysterious death-dealing creature will pursue you without respite, until you are done in -- unless you have sex with someone else, at which point the creature will turn its attentions to that partner first (kind of like a sexualized version of The Ring); but once it deals with him or her, it will return its deadly attentions to you.  Oh, and this creature can take the form of any person, and simply walks in your direction until it gets you; only those who are its current or future targets are able to see its patient approach.  Pulpy enough for you?

The premise of Lucy is cockamamie, its execution wild and borderline ludicrous.  Within the first few minutes, a young American expatriate in Taiwan, the eponymous Lucy (Scarlett Johanson), is tricked by her Eurotrash boyfriend (Pilou Asbaek) into service as a drug mule by Korean gangsters.  Her recruitment is in the most brutal fashion imaginable: she is terrorized and knocked out, then wakes up to realize that a hefty pouch of drugs has been inserted into her stomach via quick and dirty surgery.  A fellow prisoner shot up with the drug quickly babbles and dies, so in case we doubted it, we know Lucy is in a dangerous predicament indeed!

(John Wick) Although I thoroughly enjoyed it, part of me keeps wanting to pop the bubble of my experience of John Wick — to prick the Wick, so to speak.  The motivations given to its titular character for enacting the central revenge plot are, from a certain perspective, stunningly manipulative and psychologically simplistic.  But I think this move is deliberate, not ham-handed, and that the filmmakers have intended to make an action flick that is pure and even meta in its execution, acknowledging the conventions of the genre by taking them to their extremes, and making it work through all those elements that really matter in a good action film: style, pacing, tone, a sympathetic hero, and of course the choreography of violence.  On this last point, the film is a virtual ballet of mesmerizing fisticuffs and gunplay, and often a combination of the two — I can’t remember the last film I saw with so many pointblank gunshots delivered like NRA-endorsed punches to foreheads and vital organs.

(The Double) What is it about the appearance of our identical double that gets us so hot and bothered?  Oh, this has not yet happened to you?  Me neither — but Richard Ayoade’s The Double suggest that should either of us be forced into such an encounter, it will be far from a soothing one, though not without its moments of enchantment and personal growth, and that we should be braced for things to get messy (read: bloody) sooner rather than later.

(Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter) In its opening scene, we follow Kumiko’s eponymous heroine (played by Rinko Kikuchi) as she treks across a beach and into a small grotto.  A treasure map has brought her to this place - we never learn how she got it - where she uncovers a mysteriously hidden VHS tape, wrapped in burlap and ickily scampered over by crabs and other dank seaside life.

(Coherence) Like a non-mystical, less apocalyptic variation on Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Coherence summons a celestial object to threaten transformation, doom, and, quite possibly, slow-motion sequences.  In this case, the object in question is an icy comet hurtling through the night sky of a middle-class Silicon Valley neighborhood, above the roof of a dinner party soon to be knocked off its axis (and ass) by certain mysterious effects of this extraterrestrial visitor.

(Prometheus) A secret exhaustion underlies the crisp surfaces and epic aspirations of Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s Alien-prequel-spinoff-3-D-competition with James Cameron’s Avatar.  For perhaps the first ten minutes, it seems possible we are encountering a story that weaves together alien civilizations and the origins of man in a way that’s both cosmic and grounded.  We move from a prologue involving panoramic shots of an alien world (vast and mythic and mysterious), to a pair of anthropologists’ discovery of ancient and portentous cave art in Scotland circa 2090, to the ministrations of a very odd man aboard a traveling spacecraft.  But as we blink out of hyperspace and multidimensional credits and into contact with the main narrative, the intrigue and possibilities of the setup begin to run, slowly at first, but then with increasing speed, into the meatgrinder of a disappointing execution.

(Blue Room) A crime has been committed, but for much of the enigmatic and resonant The Blue Room we are left to surmise its scope.  The accused, Julien Gahyde (played by the film’s director, Mathieu Amalric), is asked by a prosecutorial figure (Laurent Poitrenaux) to describe his relationship with his mistress, Esther Despierre (Lea Drucker).  Though the procedure is bureaucratic and invasive, Julien seems eager to cooperate with this interrogating father figure.  The flashbacks of the recollections he provides are neatly integrated into the film’s flow; but from the start you have an impression that these recollections are all-too vivid to Julien, that part of him is still living in the times past that he describes.  And though he protests his innocence from the get-go, he lacks a certain conviction; he is like a man who can’t decide whether he wants to escape or be bound.