Like all the best fictional spy melodramas, truth must course through them in order for their crazy twists and turns to resonate. That is happily the case with Beirut.

Nope. Still doesn’t work for me. I wanted to give Father Figures a second chance mainly because, even if I didn’t particularly like the movie during my first viewing, I still respected its ambition quite a lot. But the comedy just doesn’t work, undercutting itself and demolishing its potential to entertain at seemingly every turn. What a waste.

Blockers is a really funny motion picture. Better, it’s also an emotionally authentic one, that combination making this comedy something of a minor sensation I’m certain to be watching again soon.

A Quiet Place is close to perfect, this monstrously entertaining chiller a nightmare-inducing smash I’m going to be screaming the praises of for many years to come.

With MacDowell’s magnificence holding things together, and with the filmmakers showing an resolute ability to cut to the emotional heart of the matter with such incisive meticulousness, the fact that I don’t particularly care for Love After Love near as much as I probably should is as surprising to me as it likely will be to anyone else.

Michele Soalvi’s The Church is absolutely bonkers. Not so much scary as it is gruesomely unhinged, this paranormal possession story of damnation and selfless sacrifice is impossible to forget and even more difficult for genre fanatics to resist.

All of which makes Pyewacket a rewarding genre rollercoaster flaws and all, and if one is going to venture alone into the woods looking for a good scare MacDonald’s latest hike into the unknown is an awfully good place to start.

While a step up from Cline’s book, and while Spielberg does make a number of attempts to comment and dissect many of the more noxious elements regarding gender and race that are found inside the story, Ready Player One never seems to be fully able to reconcile any of its major themes in ways that aren’t either condescending or offensive.

I can’t say Faces Places was the best documentary I saw in 2017, but it is without a doubt one of the more giddily and exuberantly enjoyable motion pictures I’ve had the pleasure to watch in quite some time.