The central scenario might be overly familiar, and I honestly can’t say Whannell’s film doesn’t do a darn thing that isn’t unexpected, but forgive me if, somewhat surprisingly, I kind of liked this prequel.

As perceptive as all of this might be it’s just as equally slight, Bujalski playing it somewhat safe as things reach their conclusion. But the movie is constantly entertaining nonetheless, Corrigan, Smulders and Pearce all working in sensational tandem allowing the filmmaker’s themes and ideas to come to life with delightful enthusiasm.

[This] is McCarthy’s showcase and she more than delivers. While no one would ever give her an Academy Award for this performance that doesn’t make her any less perfect. She gives Spy its reason to exist, McCarthy hitting the comedic bull’s-eye so frequently she doesn’t so much deserve an Oscar as she does an Olympic Gold Medal.

[It’s] hard not to walk out of Aloha with a smile, the other stuff lurking inside the narrative, the way the characters interact, how they communicate, the subtle, delicate little human truths they discover along the way, much of that isn’t just terrific, it’s shockingly close to sublime.

By keeping things small, intimate even, [San Andreas] ups the emotional ante by leaps and bounds over many of the more recent entries in the genre. Better, it keeps things from spilling into silly, overwrought and absurd ultra-cheap SyFy Channel terrain; and while this is still nothing more than a glorified B-movie, it’s still rather more compelling than it honestly has any right to be.

It’s compelling stuff, fascinating, even, but it also feels a little more like an audition reel for a potential feature than it does an insightful, intimately probing documentary, and that’s an issue Russell’s investigative opus sometimes has trouble overcoming.

Good Kill isn’t a direct hit, but it does speak its mind with forthright tenaciousness, Niccol searching for truths on a bloodied battlefield disinterested in revealing a single solitary one of them.

There just isn’t any reason for this new incarnation of Poltergeist to exist. All it does is run in circles trying to hit all the highpoints of the original.

As debuts go, Slow West is a stupendous one, the film an elegiac Western triumph both fans of the genre and newcomers alike will hopefully enjoy in equal measure.