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Gal Dove has already won. That's what makes SEXY BEAST such an effective crime movie before most of the crime even begins. He isn't chasing money, power, respect, or one enormous score that will finally allow him to retire. He already retired, moved to Spain, married a woman he genuinely loves, and spends his days baking beneath the sun beside a swimming pool. The criminal life isn't something he's dreaming about escaping. He escaped it. Then Don Logan shows up.

There may not be another actor working today who can complain as entertainingly as Billy Bob Thornton. Give him bad news, an impossible business problem, an irritating family member, or somebody who doesn't understand the oil industry, and LANDMAN can happily spend several minutes letting Tommy Norris explain exactly why everything is terrible. Thornton somehow makes that entertaining long after the novelty should've worn off, which remains one of the biggest reasons this show works at all.

The first thing that sticks with you about I LOVE BOOSTERS isn't the shoplifting, the politics, or even Boots Riley's willingness to make capitalism look completely ridiculous. It's how aggressively alive the movie looks. Colors are everywhere, clothing practically demands its own screen credit, physical gags are tucked into backgrounds, sets seem governed by different laws of physics, and the movie has enough visual personality to embarrass plenty of movies costing far more.

A title like BRIT NOIR COLLECTION IV suggests darkness, but these three films are much less interested in shadowy alleyways than they are in respectable rooms where somebody is lying. Each comes from the mid-1950s, and all three find different ways to turn seemingly ordinary British life into something uneasy. A writer gets too curious, a supposedly dead husband comes home, and a condemned murderer claims he knows the identity of a spy. None of the films need to push hard to make their worlds feel suspicious because distrust is already built in.

GHOST SONG spends almost the entire runtime of the black-and-white version at the San Sebastián Film Festival denying itself the ability to use color to its advantage, turning Hamburg, young love, dreams, and death into shades of black, white, and gray. Somehow, that restriction gives Fatih Akin's supernatural romance much of its personality, making a story that can feel a little too familiar at times look like something pulled from a memory that's already starting to fade. It’s weird, because I didn’t know what to expect going into this (as I try to do with most films), and what I came out the other side with was a gorgeous journey into the afterlife through contrast, both visually and literally.

I laughed exactly once during SCARY MOVIE. That creates an awkward situation when reviewing a comedy, because at some point I have to wonder whether the movie is just that unfunny or I’m either too mature or too immature (can that be a thing?) for this particular brand of nonsense now. Maybe it’s all three. Twenty-six years after the original SCARY MOVIE helped turn over-the-top parody into a box-office monster, the Wayans returned to the franchise alongside Anna Faris and Regina Hall, and there’s something so appealing about seeing so many familiar faces together again. That goodwill lasted longer than most of the jokes did for me, which becomes a problem when jokes are practically the only reason this thing exists.

Movies about making movies and television usually gravitate toward the people everybody recognizes. Directors bark instructions, actors struggle with performances, producers panic about money, and writers stare miserably at blank pages. THE SCOUT spends its time with somebody whose work is necessary but usually finished long before any of those people arrive. Sofia drives around New York photographing apartments, businesses, streets, and whatever else might eventually become somebody else's fictional world, and Paula González-Nasser finds something quietly fascinating in how much real life has to be invaded to manufacture one.

There’s an advantage to putting a horror movie inside a real haunted attraction: the production doesn’t have to spend much time convincing us that the place has personality. HELLBILLY HOLLOW was filmed at the actual Alabama attraction that gives the movie its name, and that setting is easily one of its best assets. The barns, backwoods paths, carnival contraptions, and deliberately grimy spaces already feel like places where something awful could happen. Director Kevin Wayne understands that and gets plenty out of simply turning the attraction’s machinery against the people wandering through it.

I don’t normally include trigger warnings at the beginning of my reviews, but CUTE deals directly with sexual attraction toward a child, sexualized age-regression, and other uncomfortable material involving minors. I want to make clear that the film itself does not place any children in harm’s way, but the subjects it explores could still be extremely difficult or upsetting for some viewers, so I think it’s important to say that upfront. The title CUTE is ultimately less a description and more an accusation. We traditionally associate the word with harmless things. Children, stuffed animals, oversized eyes, soft colors, tiny things, and anything designed to provoke affection before we've had time to think about why. Director/co-writer Marlene Emilie Lyngstad takes that and turns it inside out, building a story around adults whose relationships with childhood, innocence, protection, and desire have become tangled in deeply uncomfortable ways.

Martial arts movies have never automatically been my thing, which makes the ones that completely abandon common sense a lot easier to appreciate. NINJA WARS apparently reached the same conclusion. Kosei Saito's 1982 fantasy takes ninjas, feudal politics, romance, prophecy, sorcery, grotesque villains, bodily transformation, copious blood, and a young Hiroyuki Sanada, throws everything into the same pot, and never worries too much about whether any sane person would have combined these ingredients.

The strangest thing about CRUEL TALES OF THE BOHACHI isn’t how much blood, nudity, cruelty, or general depravity Eureka Entertainment has managed to squeeze into two discs. It’s how little fifty-plus years have done to make either of these movies feel tame. BOHACHI BUSHIDO: CODE OF THE FORGOTTEN EIGHT and its spiritual successor, BOHACHI BUSHIDO: THE VILLAIN, come from a period of Japanese genre filmmaking when apparently somebody could ask, “Is this too much?” and the answer was repeatedly, enthusiastically, “Not even close.”

For a while, THE HERETIKS feels like the most dangerous Disney Channel Halloween special that never existed. There are witches, kids sneaking around, fun Halloween costumes, old folklore, forbidden magic, and enough edgy teenage angst that something like HOCUS POCUS doesn’t feel like a ridiculous comparison. Then director Gregg Bishop flips a switch, the violence starts flowing, and the movie makes it very clear that nobody promised these kids a family-friendly adventure. That turn is where THE HERETIKS really won me over.

A thirteen-year-old can understand that the adults around him are angry long before he understands why. He can see people choosing sides, hear how families talk about one another change, and recognize when someone he cares about suddenly becomes someone he’s apparently supposed to avoid. WILL YOU STILL BE MY FRIEND builds itself around that uncomfortable space, where childhood feelings are still relatively uncomplicated, but the world surrounding them absolutely isn’t.

Andrea Artusi cheats on his wife and almost immediately discovers that adultery itself bothers him considerably less than the possibility that she might be capable of doing the same thing. That hypocrisy gives THE MAGNIFICENT CUCKOLD its funniest material, but Antonio Pietrangeli isn't satisfied with simply watching a guilty husband get a taste of his own medicine. Andrea's affair doesn't destroy his marriage. His imagination nearly does that for him.

Kaze's greatest talent isn't keeping a wife and nine mistresses. It's somehow managing to act genuinely confused that any of them might eventually become angry about the arrangement. Eiji Funakoshi plays that bewilderment so well in TEN WOMEN IN BLACK that some of the movie's funniest moments come from watching a man encounter the completely predictable consequences of his own behavior and react as though everyone else has suddenly become unreasonable.