The arguments over Joker will be many and misinformed; arguments that will usurp sober analysis and arguments that will dwarf message board flame wars. Those predictable, petty spats are already being snuffed out and sucked up into a political tornado, which has become so volatile that military officials in Oklahoma issued a preemptive warning to service members citing “disturbing and very specific” dark web chatter of potential violence at screenings of the film, which opens Friday on over 4,000 screens across the country.

At the center of the controversy is the question of whether Joker—a gritty, R-rated reimagining of the Batman archnemesis’ origin story—glorifies the radicalization of a disaffected white, American man who commits terroristic acts of violence and chaos. Sound familiar? Director Todd Phillips, who is probably best known for helming the Hangover series of films, added fuel to the firestorm in a recent interview with Vanity Fair, antagonistically deriding “woke culture” for creating an atmosphere in Hollywood anathema to comedy. Hence the gritty reboot of his career.

The above bears mentioning as it forms the backdrop for the highly ambitious and hotly anticipated Joker. It also makes a non-partisan reading of the film virtually impossible. Adding to the fever pitch is the buzz generated by early screenings; Joker’s clout skyrocketed in September when it took home the top prize at the Venice International Film Festival (previous years’ winners include Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma and Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water). Among skeptical cinephiles it begged the question: are superhero movies ready to grow up, move out, and contribute to the larger cinematic conversation?

With a few notable exceptions, including Christopher Nolan’s stately Batman trilogy and the somber X-Men spinoff film Logan, the genre has creatively stagnated over a decade dominated by homogenous, two-dimensional Marvel Studios fare. And in an industry stuck in a state of infinite arrested development, Joker is a jolt to the system. This is a defiantly dark and decidedly adult take on the iconic villain that will electrify audiences—especially those unfamiliar with its most obvious influences.

Both its narrative fiber and its cinematic vocabulary Joker pilfers shamelessly from the work of Martin Scorsese—particularly Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy (the former a violent power fantasy anchored by an unhinged anti-hero and the latter a dark comedy about unchecked celebrity worship… also anchored by an unhinged anti-hero). The parallels between Joker’s Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) and Scorsese protagonists Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro and Robert De Niro, respectively) are blatant, though Phoenix contributes something utterly alien and uniquely his own to the role. His Joker is pompous yet naive, irrational, impulsive, desperate, dangerous, vulnerable.

Fleck is introduced as a down-and-out wannabe comedian cohabitating with his doting, doddering mother in an awful apartment complex somewhere on the wrong side of Gotham. Struggling to hold down a job and keep up on his medication, Fleck flounders impotently from one crisis to the next. By degrees, the daily injustices bubble to a rolling boil and Fleck, beaten and broken, is compelled to strike back. Phoenix is phenomenal throughout, contorting his emaciated body into impossible shapes in one sequence and gracefully dancing down a flight of stairs like Fred Astaire in another.

Unfortunately for Phoenix, Phillips fails to stick the landing. Joker captivates as a transient character study, but it’s a mediocre purveyor of plot; more than one big reveal falls flat because Phillips doesn’t trust the audience to read his heavy-handed cues. Worse, the film’s climax strains believability to the breaking point, undermining an hour and a half of impressive tension, pathos, and worldbuilding. Like the character himself, Joker is a walking contradiction—brilliant and daring yet clumsy and shallow. Its glaring imperfections make the inevitable internet absolutism all the more frustrating.

Arguments over how to read the politics of Joker will be exacerbated by the muddiness of Phillips’ vision; his unwillingness to commit to either an objective or subjective perspective on the character will further enflame the disagreements engulfing the film. “I’m not political,” Fleck insists in the final act, as clown-masked copycats loot and riot across the city. It’s the kind of empty, irrelevant parcel of dialog that sounds a lot like an executive disclaimer—though it does convey the narrative challenge inherent in establishing motive for a figure who is an ultimately unknowable agent of chaos. Could it be that the Joker is just more interesting the less we know about him?

Occasionally, Phillips’ screenplay flirts with radical, Wicked-esque role reversal, suggesting that maybe the wealthy Wayne family are the antagonists and the Joker is a sort of homicidal avenger of the working class. It’s an intriguing avenue for exploration, ultimately abandoned amid concessions to quote-unquote clever connected-universe commercialism that only cheapens the film and undercuts its ambition.

But credit where credit’s due: Joker deserves recognition for forcing a difficult conversation we wouldn’t be having around Dr. Strange or Thor. With any luck, its success will encourage studios and filmmakers to embrace their anarchic instincts and take greater risks with art that pushes boundaries and more meaningfully explores the human drama happening underneath the makeup, behind the mask, and before the cape. That’s a future worth arguing for.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a tale of two Tarantinos. Set in 1969 against the twilight of Tinseltown’s golden age, the two-hour-and-forty-five-minute period drama captures the writer-director at his most confident and laidback—and also at his most disappointingly conventional. In 1994, Pulp Fiction made Quentin Tarantino a household name in part because of its radical, non-linear narrative style. The director drew cosmopolitan influence from the global film scene (most notably the French New Wave), and successfully challenged convention with a stylish, adult crime drama that delighted in breaking rules. He’s since veered into more comfortable territory, creating a slew of entertaining but unambitious genre indulgences.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood follows fading TV star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt-double/personal assistant/best friend Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Breezy but narratively sparse, it’s the most straightforward film in Tarantino’s winding career. At times it plays almost as a retrospective; here you have Pulp Fiction’s idiosyncratic Los Angeles, there the hazy hangout vibes of Jackie Brown, even the overt western imagery of Django Unchained and the Hateful Eight are present on the studio backlot (Dalton was once the star of a popular black-and-white TV series called “Bounty Law”).

Yet it is unquestionably Inglourious Basterds with its gleeful historical revisionism that serves as the best point of reference for Tarantino’s latest (Basterds even begins with a chapter card titled “Once upon a time… in Nazi-occupied France”). Thus the director frames the two films as fairy tales, here trading Nazis for “hippy” cultists in a subplot centered around real-world actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), who was murdered in her home in the Hollywood hills in August of 1969. Both films flagrantly crisscross the border between fact and fiction, advancing a shared thesis on the power of cinema to combat the horrors of history. Necessarily, both are tied to the idea of movies and moviemaking. In Inglourious Basterds, film itself is weaponized; in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, LA is the ultimate movie set.

What distinguishes Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as more than mere Basterds rehash or pale pastiche of Tarantino clichés is its sincere emotional center. The filmmaker has written so many blithe, shit-talking assassins and callous, loquacious criminals that the low-key bromance between Rick and Cliff comes as a genuine surprise. Plus, the pair are flawed in more endearing, human ways than your typical QT anti-heroes. Dalton is a self-described “has-been” with a stubborn cough and a drinking problem; Booth is an aimless underachiever who lives in a trailer behind a drive-in movie theater. All these two relics have is one another, and honestly, it’s kind of sweet.

Naturally it wouldn’t be a Quentin Tarantino movie without a few moments of the manic violence the director has made his hallmark. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood feels perfunctory in this regard—the carnage plays as a concession to expectation rather than an honest consequence of the actions that inspire it. Perhaps the director is aware of this; Tarantino is an aggressive self-analyst when it comes to his body of work, and he’s made no secret of his intent to retire after his tenth film. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is now number nine, and it’s a perfectly worthy penultimate entry. It cements Tarantino’s effortless ability to create characters that pop and to make two-hours-and-forty-five minutes vanish in a flash.

Still, it’s authored by a fundamentally different filmmaker than the auteur that unleashed Pulp Fiction onto unsuspecting moviegoers two-and-a-half decades ago. Its nostalgic winks and nods to the Tarantino of yesteryear further reinforce how unoriginal Once Upon a Time in Hollywood feels by comparison. Like Dalton, the director seems increasingly at odds with himself and his place in an industry he struggles to recognize, straining just a little bit harder each day to find the success that once came so easily.

Something wicked this way comes in Jordan Peele’s new high-concept horror film; the answer—and the title—is Us. In his sophomore stab at the genre, the filmmaker trades the waspy East Coast enclave of his breakout debut Get Out for the sunny shores of Santa Cruz, where would-be vacationers the Wilson family confront a foursome of homicidal home invaders who happen to look a lot like themselves.

Like Ray Bradbury’s quintessential carnival novel, Us opens with an approaching thunderstorm. The year is 1986 and the hottest prize on the midway is a Michael Jackson “Thriller” t-shirt (eek!). Donning her new duds, young Adelaide (newcomer Madison Curry) slips away from her parents and into a chintzy funhouse where she accidentally unleashes a force both frightening and familiar. The trauma of this encounter follows Adelaide into adulthood. Now a mother (and now played by Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o), she returns to Santa Cruz to face childhood fears that have laid dormant for more than 30 years.

Baked into the heady premise is the potential for serious psychological self-conflict, but Us delivers disappointingly literal answers to its most intriguing questions. And unlike Get Out, which jealously guards its mystery until the climactic final act, Us unravels early and struggles to recover. At nearly two hours, the film runs a touch too long and the last-minute twist doesn’t quite land. Still, Peele’s pop-horror sensibilities shine throughout, with gleeful gags and gore in equal measure. Just don’t expect to find a whole lot more beneath the surface.

Neither are the movie’s many influences deeply buried. A choice collection of VHS tapes is displayed prominently beside a television early in the film, namechecking titles like C.H.U.D., The Goonies, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Peele borrows liberally from these works and others—and don’t be surprised to catch a clunky cliché or two. Can we get a mortarium on ominous crayon drawings and homeless men holding eerily relevant cardboard bible-verse signs?

Somewhat mitigating the underlying weakness of the script are the committed performances of the film’s strong cast, which includes Winston Duke, Elizabeth Moss, and Tim Heidecker. Each player is essentially performing dual roles, and all dive in with gusto. Nyong’o is especially impressive, bouncing between the roles of a tormented mother and her seemingly soulless aggressor, an empty vessel with dead eyes and a hollow croak of a voice. “Who are you?” Adelaide hazards after their first chilling encounter. “We’re Americans,” comes the enigmatic whisper of a response. It’s an effective moment—one of too few in the film—where Peele resists the impulse to overexplain.

Us is a letdown, but it still brings more to the table than your average Conjuring spinoff or Saw sequel. For Peele, a comedian, the horror genre is a funhouse mirror. He repurposes familiar tropes to reflect a grotesque, perverted image of reality while revealing an underlying, perhaps overlooked truth. This is the power of symbolic storytelling, which Peele wields with passion and purpose. It’s a talent that hasn’t gone unnoticed—the director was recently tapped to helm TV’s Twilight Zone reboot—a perfect fit for his particular blend of social commentary and the supernatural. The short format may also prove a screenwriting boon, perhaps pushing Peele to weave more tightly focused tales whose only boundaries are that of the imagination. And that’s a quality he has in spades.

Stationed somewhere along a weathered strip of highway between signposts reading Philosopher and Provocateur, Werner Herzog crafts his specific breed of poetic documentary films. His latest, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, is a contemplative exploration of emerging and bourgeoning technologies, from the humble origins of the internet to an ambitious plan to land a man on Mars.

It’s a topic that begs for scrutiny under Herzog’s existentialist eye, and the 73-year-old filmmaker digs in with earnest (if often perpendicular) curiosity. Each of the ten constituent chapters addresses a separate sphere of innovation, the purported subject always secondary to the implications foreseen by the introspective, extroverted auteur. For Herzog, the question isn’t “How does it work?” when interviewing the programmer of a team of autonomous soccer-playing robots, but rather “Do you love it?” in reference to the squad’s star player, Robot Eight.

Lo leads off with a tour of UCLA, where Herzog is quick to brandish his trademark deadpan wit. “The corridors look repulsive, but this one leads to a shrine,” he intones via voiceover narration. The camera follows a chipper gentleman into a sickly green room preserved exactly as it was in 1969, when the very first message was sent between computers in Los Angeles and San Francisco. That historic message comprised only three characters (“log”) and caused one of the machines to crash, leading to a prophetic typo—“lo.”

Other standout sequences include a visit to an isolated rehab center for adolescent internet addicts, a retreat for victims of wireless radiation sickness, and the home a grief-stricken family whose matriarch attributes the online abuse she endured following her daughter’s fatal car crash to the devil himself. “It is the spirit of evil,” she somberly suggests of the web. “It’s running through everybody on earth and it’s claiming its victories in those people that are also evil.”

Herzog approaches each of these characters with the particular cocktail of irony and empathy their situation demands. In a scene with the aforementioned family that recalls Grizzly Man, he refuses to show even a portrait of the victim lest it be misread as exploitation. Instead, he photographs the piano room, and other “places in the house that she liked.” He respects catastrophe almost as much as he does audacity, which makes him a perfect match for SpaceX CEO Elon Musk—for whom he readily volunteers to make the long journey to Mars, even if it means punching a one-way ticket.

The sum of these scenes is a mosaic of human triumph, tragedy, and eccentricity borne of our unassailable desire to create. The explosion of internet technology over the past two decades and its occasionally frightening potential for the future proves fertile ground for a filmmaker with Herzog’s singular perspective, though Lo and Behold declines to make any sweeping statement. Rather, each vignette plays like its own Herzog doc in miniature, treating the science as exposition so he can explore questions like, “Does the internet dream of itself?”

The answers are as varied as they are fascinating and the film, though minor in an oeuvre as accomplished as Herzog’s, is compelling and worthy in its own right. So what’s next for a restless storyteller that’s already tackled death row, the ends of the earth, and the internet in the 21st century alone? Next up is Into the Inferno, an investigation of active volcanoes—and only Herzog knows where the wild road will take him after that.

What a year for westerns! From Fury Road’s post-apocalyptic riff on Stagecoach to Tarantino’s close-quarters talk-‘em-up The Hateful Eight and the wide-eyed austerity of Slow West, the genre has had its best year in… maybe ever. And that conversation gets a whole lot more interesting with the arrival of The Revenant, Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu’s ambitious follow-up to 2015 Best Picture winner Birdman.

Based on Michael Punke’s 2002 book bearing the subtitle “A Novel of Revenge,” The Revenant casts Leonardo DiCaprio as frontiersman and father Hugh Glass, whose brutal encounter with a grizzly leaves him bloodied, broken, and—worst of all—in the care of nefarious fur trader John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy). Fitzgerald shirks his promise of a proper burial, leaving Glass with a parting mouthful of dirt in a shallow grave, alive and alone in the American wilderness.

Glass’ protracted recovery and dogged quest for vengeance unfurls with grace and menace—like smoke from a billowing campfire—into one of the most breathtaking survival stories of all time. Credit is owed in no small part to the cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki, whose résumé reads like a top ten list: Children of Men. Tree of Life. Birdman. Gravity. I could go on.

Yet his work on The Revenant taps into something deeper. Something primal. The landscapes he captures suggest the impossible majesty of our imagination or ancestral memory, from mossy primeval forests to immaculate snowcapped mountains to the ghostly pall of the moon in various phases of eclipse. These images, bolstered by a general dearth of dialogue, form a unique cinematic vernacular. If you’ve followed The Revenant through its troubled production at all over the past year, you’ll know that that achievement comes at a price.

“A living hell.” That’s how one crewmember described the shoot in an interview with Variety. According to Hardy, the film became colloquially known as “The Forevenant” among cast and crew over a grueling nine months on set. What accounts for that staggering schedule is Iñárritu’s insistence on shooting the film sequentially, using (almost) entirely natural light. With only a brief window in which to film, each day became a struggle against dusk, weather, and morale.

Perhaps then there’s a touch of legitimate fatigue that bleeds through into each exhausted performance. DiCaprio imbues Glass with almost supernatural drive, pressing ever onward on two shaky feet, caked in mud and blood, or slithering through grime, diving headfirst into raging rivers, and fighting—often literally—for survival in relentless pursuit of Hardy’s callous, sharky Fitzgerald. This is mostly Leo’s show, however, and he brings a harrowing, obsessive determination to the role—which many speculate may finally land him an overdue Oscar.

A moral chasm separates these two principal characters, but both teeter dangerously on the precipice of savage violence in each do-or-die moment they’re lucky enough to live. The dangerous world of The Revenant threatens at every turn to explode into a torrent of bloodshed, and the action set-pieces command attention through the sheer three-dimensionality of their carnage. Lubezki’s camera roves past plumes of smoke from discharged rifles as arrows puncture skulls and bullets flatten men.

The sum of these skirmishes is a battle-charred epic anchored by a simple, emotionally resonant story executed by consummate master craftsmen. The Revenant is alive with kinetic energy, yet shows expert command of pace and tone over the entirety of its 156-minute runtime. We’re left feeling as haggard and as hollow as the protagonist by the film’s final act, and the questions it leaves us with linger alongside a cumulative awe. This is Hollywood spectacle of the highest caliber, a breed of big-budget, down-and-dirty entertainment that doesn’t pander to its audience, doesn’t lean on cliché, and doesn’t take prisoners.

From the perspective of a beleaguered film crew, Iñárritu’s methodology may be questionable—but as a viewer, it’s hard to argue with his results. Depending on how you log it, The Revenant is either the best movie of a young 2016 or the best western of the year in a year of exceptional westerns. Its fearsome intensity is matched only by its creative fearlessness, and the evidence of its power is audible in the chorus of gasps that ring out from its rapt audience.

Bring on the Shyamalanaissance! Seriously, I’ve been pulling for my boy M. Night since before he let fly the string of stinkers that turned the whole wide web against him, and The Visit is (hopefully) his first shaky step toward a complete career recovery. Arriving unfashionably late to the found-footage party, Shy Guy’s latest might easily be written off as a “me too” effort; a final, sad admission that the besmirched auteur—infamously hailed as a successor to Hitchcock—has at last resigned to life as a studio shill (the presence of producer Jason Blum here doesn’t exactly inspire confidence). It would be easy to write all that… if his new movie weren’t so much damn fun.

Even as a Shyamalan apologist, I write that last bit with something of an asterisk. Here’s the thing—I don’t think The Visit is an especially great film by any objective academic standard. It isn’t as brilliant as The Babadook or as creative as It Follows. It’s not even on par with Night in his prime. But those are probably the wrong comparison points. His scrappy comeback feels closer in spirit to a Sam Raimi gagfest than any of the above. There will be blood. There will be puke. There will be shit.

The basic thrust of the narrative revolves around teenage siblings Becca and Tyler (Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould), who board a train bound for rural Pennsylvania for a weeklong stay at grandma’s house. Upon arrival however, Nana and Pop Pop display some bizarre eccentricities that may not be entirely harmless. It’s a back-to-basics thesis for Shyamalan, who’s coming off two 100+ million dollar blockbuster bombs. The simple story is bolstered by naturalistic performances by DeJonge and Oxenbould, who come across authentic almost to a fault—prepare to cringe with empathetic embarrassment as a 13-year-old white kid freestyle raps about pineapple upside-down cake. Yeah, boi.

That unbridled honesty is effectively juxtaposed against the comic absurdity of the film’s sick scares. Shyamalan has in the past employed humor to relieve tension, but here the line between horror and comedy is intentionally blurred; The Visit boasts as many uproarious laugh-out-loud moments as it does effective jump scares, and there’s a degree of overlap if you were to draw a Venn diagram. It’s these moments when the movie feels like it’s firing on all cylinders as a goofy, gross-out good time. So much so that its dodgy attempts at character development actually undercut the prevalent anarchic tone. The drama plays out competently enough, and it’s hard to fault Shyamalan for his doe-eyed earnestness, but I do feel the film could have benefited from a little less self-seriousness. The on-camera interviews feel especially hokey, providing a vehicle for schmaltz that sticks in the craw.

Still, Shyamalan seems limber working within the confines of the found-footage format, even poking fun at himself via DeJonge’s character, who documents the goings-on with precocious directorial indecision. Naturally, Night also exploits the medium’s requisite gimmicks, in addition to a few rare moments of inspired visual brilliance. One such sequence caps the film’s climax, elevating the DIY aesthetic into something unexpectedly beautiful. If only he had the balls to go out on that moment!

Depending on who you ask, M. Night Shyamalan has made either a couple bad movies, or a couple good ones. Regardless of where you fall on that spectrum, The Visit should be viewed with an open mind. Though far from perfect, it smartly toys with expectations both within the genre and within Night’s own catalog. At the very least, it’s proof the besmirched auteur still retains some of his past greatness, and at best provides a glimmer of hope that he may yet have his best years ahead of him. As for today, there’s a hell of a lot of fun to be had at grandma’s. You first.

David Fincher seems at something of an impasse. Three long years have elapsed since he made The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and a number of potential follow-ups have fizzled in the interim. Sony wouldn’t commit to a sequel, and the director came to loggerheads with Disney over a planned blockbuster adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He entered talks to direct Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs biopic, but that fell through too. The only concrete credit to Fincher’s name since 2011 is Netflix’s House of Cards. And then along comes Gone Girl.

Based on the bestselling novel by Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl pitches a familiar premise: a woman disappears under suspicious circumstances, and a trickle of evidence begins to mount implicating her husband. The woman is Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), daughter of two celebrated children’s authors who reluctantly trades her New York City apartment for a flyover-state McMansion at the behest of her husband Nick (Ben Affleck), the kind of guy who plays Call of Duty and watches Adam Sandler movies. After five years their marriage has cooled, and on the morning of their anniversary, Amy vanishes.

Where Gone Girl goes psychologically with that conceit is of more interest to Fincher and Flynn than the physical whodunnit; the central mystery is unraveled by the movie’s midpoint. Owing to his wife’s popularity, Nick comes under intense scrutiny in the press. In turns portrayed as the beleaguered husband and the smirking sociopath, Nick’s every move is examined under a microscope and debated ad nauseum by rabble-rousing TV pundits. Throw in a jilted ex-lover (an icy Neil Patrick Harris) and an unscrupulous lawyer (Tyler Perry) and the crucible becomes even more volatile.

The casting is excellent and everyone impresses — including Rosamund Pike, who appears via flashbacks and narrates from Amy’s ominous diary. Affleck charms with his ambiguous everyman-isms, though those Batman muscles look a touch ridiculous in the ‘burbs. Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry both play admirably against type, and as always, David Fincher directs the shit out of every second of it.

Scenarios that might feel cheap or tawdry in the hands of a lesser filmmaker are elevated by Fincher’s dark vision and another oppressively atmospheric score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Muted colors, simple framing, neat cuts: there’s a certain stylistic minimalism to the approach that the director seldom betrays. Fincher lets Flynn do most of the talking, and that’s the greatest weakness of Gone Girl. As compelling as the craft may be and as assured the direction, Gone Girl feels more like a beautiful exercise than an essential cinematic experience.

It’s an opportunity for Fincher to jingle his spurs after a prolonged hiatus and an opportunity for the cast to collaborate with one of the best filmmakers working today, but not a whole lot more. Especially as the successor to Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl can’t quite shake the “airport novel” stigma. Both films are perfectly entertaining adaptations, but it’s hard not to wish Fincher would aim a little higher. Gone Girl finds the director no further along artistically than he was three years ago: still at the top of his storytelling prowess, but in search of a tale to match his talent.

Gone Girl digs at the emotional damage men and women inflict on one another beneath the facade of a fairly typical potboiler. In all likelihood, your ability to enjoy the film will depend on the extent to which you appreciate filmmaking on a mechanical level, and your enthusiasm for another murder mystery from the guy who directed Zodiac and Seven. Fincher’s expressed interest in Jobs and Verne prove he’s still committed to telling a variety of stories, and if Gone Girl is a stopgap to projects of that caliber and ambition, it’s all the more worthy for it.