That Transcendence doesn’t ultimately work is decidedly a problem but that doesn’t make the experience of watching it any less riveting, and as failures go this is arguably one I’ll be thinking about and pondering for many months to come.

Under the Skin doesn’t apologize for being difficult, everything inside its cinematic shell a rollercoaster of emotional tumult worthy of being ridden multiple times.

The movie doesn’t deliver, not at the end, at least, but it does carry its tension to term, that in and of itself almost good enough to make seeing the baby born moderately worthwhile.

Made with style, imagination, confidence and panache, [The Conjuring (2013)] gets under the skin right away and then stays there for the remainder of its innervating 112 minutes, building to a solidly sinister and unsettling finale that had the audience I watched it with on collectively disquieted pins and needles.

Less than 12 months later, producers/writers/directors Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard have managed to cajole another group of talented filmmakers to take their crack at the concept, and results are, to be perfectly frank, close to astonishing. V/H/S 2 doesn’t just improve upon the first film, doesn’t just take note of its missteps and mistakes, it quickly enters the pantheon as one of the great horror anthologies ever made.

Say what you will about either movement but the heart and soul of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party did bring about conversations about wealth disparity and cultural (and corporate) privilege in this country, those ideas taken to a grotesquely unsettling extreme in the world imagined by DeMonaco.

I can’t say this Evil Dead will be as revered or as influential as its predecessor, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t without merit. Alvarez proves to be a horror filmmaker with passion, energy, style and vision, taking the Raimi/Campbell/Tapert concept into twisted new territory while at the same time paying just homage to the original trilogy at the exact same time.

Texas Chainsaw 3D isn’t just a bad movie, considering the potential evident during the first third and showcased during the final scene it’s also a disappointing one, the first wide release of 2013 a sad reminder that some wells just shouldn’t be returned to.

While steps in the right direction are made with Breaking Dawn – Part II, it’s much too little and far too late, and this saga of undead romance is as laughably soapy now as it was when Meyer’s first book initially hit the bestseller list.