Aftersun

• Director: Charlotte Wells
• Writers: Charlotte Wells
• Starring: Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Brooklyn Toulson, Sally Messham

Grade: A-

Take yourself back to a treasured memory from when you were younger. Better yet, take yourself back to a memory from a pivotal time in your life. What comes flooding back to mind first probably aren’t the bigger moments like the actual events that happened, but how those moments made you feel. How they impacted you and changed your worldview, even though you may not have fully realized it at the time.

Causeway

• Director: Lila Neugebauer
• Writers: Elizabeth Sanders, Luke Goebel, and Ottessa Moshfegh
• Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Brian Tyree Henry, Linda Emond, Jayne Houdyshell, Stephen McKinley Henderson

Grade: B-

The recovering soldier genre is one that’s produced plenty of memorable films, and likely just as many – if not more – flops. It’s hard to say exactly where Causeway will ultimately land; much as it strays from the genre’s formula, it doesn’t contain enough drama to make it an instant classic. 

Wendell & Wild

• Director: Henry Selick
• Writer: Henry Selick, Clay McLeod Chapman, Jordan Peele
• Starring: Lyric Ross, Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Angela Bassett, James Hong, Ving Rhames

Grade: B

Henry Selick may not be a household name in the same way that Hayao Miyazaki or Pete Docter or Brad Bird are, but his contributions to animated films can’t be denied. I still remember a room full of shocked faces when the answer to a trivia question announced that Tim Burton did not direct The Nightmare Before Christmas. Whenever Disney gets too cutesy with a few too many animal sidekicks, Selick manages to come back with something of a polar opposite. That he does so by pushing the stop-motion animation medium forward each time just goes to show how different the animation world would be without him.

All Quiet on the Western Front

• Director: Edward Berger
• Writer: Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson, and Ian Stokell
• Starring: Felix Kammerer, Daniel Brühl, Albrecht Schuch, Moritz Klaus, Aaron Hilmer, Edin Hasanovic

Grade: A-

War is hell. It always has been, and it always will be. Whether you’re a Spartan fighting against the Trojans, or a colonialist seeking your independence from the British, or a German slumming through the trenches in France, one thing remains constant in war: those that fight always lose. You don’t need a multi-million dollar Netflix production to tell you that. You don’t necessarily need to remake Erich Maria Remarque’s novel – a version of which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1930 – either. Indeed, it’s the biggest question for director and co-writer Edward Berger: why did All Quiet on the Western Front need to be made?

Raymond and Ray

• Director: Rodrigo García
• Writer: Rodrigo García
• Starring: Ewan McGregor, Ethan Hawke, Maribel Verdú, Sophie Okonedo

Grade: C-

Remember how it felt the first time you watched The Hangover? It was the type of comedy where anything was possible, where the screenwriter was free to make up whatever kooky shenanigans they could think of simply because the action had unfolded off-screen. Raymond and Ray feels like the dramatic equivalent of that kind of storytelling, a free-for-all experiment where everyone simply talks about someone we never actually meet first-hand. It feels like an acting exercise, and an empty one at that, where its primary cast mostly makes it out unscathed.

Carmen

• Director: Valerie Buhagiar
• Writer: Valerie Buhagiar
• Starring: Natascha McElhone, Steven Love, Michaela Farrugia

Grade: B

When we’re first introduced to Carmen, the titular heroine of writer/director Valerie Buhagiar’s film, she seems to be in the throes of a comfortable life. She’s the sister of her Maltese town’s Catholic priest and, despite the fact that nobody in town likes or respects her, she’s mostly content. She’s live with him in the parish’s rectory since she was 16, and she considers her role as his care-taker her own full-time job. Naturally Carmen is a woman of strong religious conviction, so when her brother suddenly and unexpectedly dies, leaving her essentially homeless, she begins to question exactly how big a role her faith should have in her life going forward.

Blonde

• Director: Andrew Dominik
• Writer: Andrew Dominik
• Starring: Ana de Armas, Bobby Cannavale, Adrien Brody, Julianne Nicholson, Evan Williams, Xavier Sameuls

Grade: C-

Has any Hollywood star loomed larger over pop culture since their discovery, and lingered even longer after their death, than Marilyn Monroe? Whether directly or indirectly, the blonde bombshell has appeared in too many biopics and fictionalizations to count in this column since her untimely death. Her life is the stuff of legend, and her tragic exploitation at the hands of virtually everyone that she trusted is well known by now. So what could be gained by making a new account of her life, based on Joyce Carol Oates’ novel of the same name?