If I say “pagan horror cinema” to you, dear film viewer, and it doesn’t automatically raise the specter of The Wicker Man, I am not sure that you are operating on writer-director Ari Aster’s wavelength, nor, I think, within his intended audience. That cinematic relationship is both the film’s personal test and its cruel inheritance, a horror lineage that bestows a queasy moral vista that the film very evidently wishes to surpass. The schematic reading of any pagan horror film (which is to say, films hardly trying to hide their indebtedness to The Wicker Man) is that they allegorize the dormant aftershocks of Paganism on modern Christianity, typically coding the latter as individualistic and civilization and the former as communal and essentially transgressive in its refusal of modern liberal norms. And, inevitably, they tend to find the latter mortally terrifying, especially when the pagan religion is, gasp, lead by women rather than men.

Films in this mode partially relieve the moral dubiousness of meditating on the supremacy of the modern West by only explicitly comparing it to essentially European pasts (otherwise, Midsommar bears an unmistakable ideological kinship with Eli Roth’s ludicrously racist Green Inferno, even if they are aesthetic and affective polarities). But while this blunts Midsommar’s immediate sense of ethical indiscretion, the film’s vestiges of more overtly Eurocentric visions are still readily apparent. Midsommar tests itself against The Wicker Man by upending and disfiguring the original film’s obviously dubious gender politics and skepticism about communal life, but, as I wrote above, it also inherits a debt that it can’t fully break from. Midsommar would dearly like us to know that it is skeptical of modern Western social forms, more overtly so than The Wicker Man or most pagan horror films, but that doesn’t overtake the slow-creeping terror with which it treats the non-individualistic Western past.

Joker is a portrait of a lost soul waywardly wandering his way through a meat thresher called 1980s Gotham City. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a clown who dreams of being a stand-up comedian, who cares for and lives with his physically and perhaps mentally ill mother Penny (Frances Conroy), and who suffers from a rare and unnamed neurological disease that makes him laugh when he gets nervous. When he is fired from his job for (unthinkingly, which is telling of his personality) bringing a gun to a gig at a children’s hospital, he kills three drunk Wayne Enterprises stockbrokers on the subway, nominally to stop them from assaulting a woman and, more immediately, from attacking him, but ultimately to let out his slowly encroaching agitation at the world. While Fleck starts a relationship with Sophie Dumond (Zazie Beetz) and worships aged television talk-show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), Joker strangles Arthur in a swampy miasma of social disarray and simmering economic and cultural tensions that look suspiciously like those effecting the United States circa 2019, and which have done nothing to abate in the ensuing years.

First things first: It’s not actually original, except within the heavily circumscribed container of the comic book film, either in its loose meditations on mental illness, or what Fleck, like Travis Bickle before him, would probably call “urban rot,” or its very Scorsese-esque depiction of a facsimile of post-‘70s New York, or in its rehashing of Batman’s most famous, and most negative-mirror-image-of-himself, antagonist. Joker really, and unapologetically, is just an inferior rehash of Taxi Driver meets The King of Comedy, and its strengths are inseparable from the viscous brutality and nervous energy of those two classics of frayed New York discombobulation and neoliberal deregulation.

The thing is: Joker is a pretty pungent pistol-whip of a film. While copping from Taxi Driver is old hat in the world of “serious” and “not-so-serious” (and “why-so-serious?”) cinema, King of Comedy remains mostly uncharted territory, even all these years later. Like that acid-bath parody of domesticated masculinity, Joker is a shiv of a character study, from Joaquin Phoenix’s toxically limber evocation of self-destructive animosity to De Niro’s own exploration of his own cinematic history in his appearance as Franklin, the embodiment of Rupert Pupkin’s wildest milquetoast desires. I didn’t think writer-director Todd Phillips (cowriting with Scott Silver), he of The Hangover fame, had it in him.

With its spectral mood and sinister diagnosis of 21^st century social restlessness, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows was one of the early success stories of the A24 horror boon. Its atmospheric texture, evoking an oneiric gloss on reality, made it one of the patron saints of the so-called “elevated horror” explosion, which rode a crest of stylistic experimentalism to examine undercurrents of human trauma and dejection. A mere half-decade later, by 2019, elevated horror already felt bloated, no longer an exploratory rebellion against the corporate debasement of ‘00s horror but a codified set of rules and regulations, an examinable, even scientifically replicable, formula and a self-immolating object. Like much of late ‘10s culture, it increasingly felt like an attempt to solidify the status quo in the guise of intervening in it.

Within that context, let no one accuse Mitchell of resting on his laurels with Under the Silver Lake. Rather than extending the genre trappings of It Follows, Mitchell emphasizes its mood of extraordinary ennui and cyclical, ever-gestating confusion, figuring the modern world as a quiet, drawn-out apocalypse, a walking corpse. It recognizes the earlier film’s poetic evocation of suburban detritus set against a backdrop of industrial aimlessness as the real heart beneath the (too obvious) metaphors for sexual transmission. Like its predecessor, Under the Silver Lake is a deeply woozy film, a story about lives running in circles that can only lead to a puzzle never to be solved, and like its predecessor, it positively vibrates with both internal instability and the emptiness of that very energy.

The Irishman is both a stern rebuke and a sober reckoning. After the breathtaking but ultimately tiring The Wolf of Wall Street, with its grotesquely flippant energy (grotesque in good ways as well), and the sublimely adventurous but sometimes hermetic Silence, The Irishman is a self-conscious homecoming. It announces itself as a return to the primordial breeding ground from which Scorsese’s career came. On one hand, it is a return to form promising a severe sense of finality. It tethers its director’s fifty years of cinematic releases together and ravages them, burning the director’s less critical supporters with righteous indignation. On the other hand, The Irishman is also one foggy four-hour anti-climax, a swamp of characters who seem unable to think or act creatively at all. It is a portrait of the mob as an American bureaucracy, not an American battleground. It is a homecoming as an act of slow, painful penance, a return to the most fertile ground of Scorsese’s career in order to scorch the earth.

Scorsese’s films often chase and desire dizzying heights of cinematic bliss, from the apocalyptic panic of Bringing Out the Dead to the slippery, Warner Bros. zeal of After Hours, a trend that reaches its apotheosis in the impossibly manic “Sunday, May 11, 1980” scene in Goodfellas. While these heaving highs of pure cinematic muscle are inevitably chased by brutal come-downs, the man’s films often court the very vitality and vivacity they ostensibly want to redress. Whatever comeuppance they insist on, you leave feeling satiated, even torqued. The Irishman, conversely, is pure holding pattern. There’s no up or down, no growth and decay, no cinematic evolution and destruction, just a tired old man who seems to have been out of sorts in his very body decades before his nominal decrepitude. In Steven Zaillian’s screenplay (adapting Charles Brandt’s nonfiction work I Heard You Paint Houses), Robert De Niro’s Frank Sheeran is not so much a broken man as a stillborn one, a guy whose slowly crumbling self belies the hollow husk he always was.

Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a film about the melancholy of desolate spaces and the overpowering intimacy that can take up residence in them. A sensory romance to rival Wong Kar-wai’s aching, radiant exploration of unstated affection In the Mood for Love, or Alain Resnais’ oneiric portrait of fractured connection Hiroshima mon Amour, Portrait is the rare romance that explores the very nature of its genre. Portrait is really a meditation on the form of connection and love itself, on the way it breaks the self into many dispersed parts, the means by which it creeps up on you, how it takes over the soul and consumes the mind. Fundamentally, the film asks what it means to relate to another person. It is certainly, in this case, a “queer” film, but the relevant sense of that term is less that the two lovers are women than that the film troubles any stable or foundational understanding of what desire itself ought to look like. And I do mean look like. In addition to bewildering any conventional desire to label the film a specifically “lesbian film,” Portrait offers romance in a simultaneously expansive and fragile sense, as something that occurs in the gap between the mind and the eye. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an uncommonly perceptive exploration of perception itself.

Nominally, the “looker” is Marianne (Noémie Merlant), commissioned by a Countess (Valeria Golino) to paint a portrait of her daughter Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), which we intuit is de rigeur  prior to an aristocrat’s impending marriage, in this case to a nobleman of Milan, who Héloïse has never met. Héloïse cannot know that she is being painted, which would indicate her agreement to the marriage, which she steadfastly refuses. She is only home from her chosen life in a convent because her older sister has recently committed suicide. Under the pretense of being a companion, which becomes the actuality of being a friend and lover, Marianne accompanies Héloïse on daily cliffside walks while she discreetly memorizes the contours of her face for a portrait she completes behind closed doors. However, when Marianne completes her portrait, she refuses to maintain the façade and tells Héloïse, who rejects the painting not, as we expect, out of a refusal of her impending husband’s desire but out of a desire to court and cultivate the beauty located in the artist’s desiring eye. The painting, Héloïse finds, doesn’t capture her fire, so to speak, nor the fire of Marianne’s attraction to her. Knowing that the painting reflects a desire of Marianne’s that remains untapped, both for observing Héloïse and for the possibility of creating with her, Héloïse decides, willfully and for the first time, to pose for Marianne.

In the spirit of reviewing things other than obscure horror films from the ’80s, I’ll be spending the next few weeks dusting off some less eldritch cinematic creatures from the long-ago year of 2019, a uniquely intriguing year for the cinema and the final year before the industry took an extended hiatus for reasons I do not have to clarify.

In the beginning, there is only a boat clarifying its way out of the foggy sea, a speck of uncertainty coagulating its way out of the graininess of the film stock. The Lighthouse begins in the ether, in other words, with a material thing etching itself out of the two nebulous spaces we call the ocean and cinema. Over the subsequent 100 minutes, David Eggers’ film will stage and then vandalize the attempt to escape it. Finally, the belief in the distinctly human attempt to solidify stable things, to escape the all-consuming and finally formless world we come from and will return to, becomes a cruel trick of the gods. The Lighthouse is an otherworld, a confounding out-of-the-way that is also, in its overflowing sensory exertions and heaving presences, an all-around-us. It’s always there, an omnipresent sensorial experience. But it also feels like it is perpetually drifting into nothingness. It is both a force and a void of a film, a dimly visible but often sensible appreciation for the unclarifiable. As a film, it’s everywhere, on all sides of us, but you get the sense that you see it less than it can see you. The boat will deliver two men to a lighthouse off the coast of New England. It also delivers the strangest of dispatches to us.

The Lighthouse is a horror film of the mind and the body. It has as much in common with Tarkovsky as Cronenberg. It’s a spiritual lament, but also a corporeal act, a film in which places, machines, and bodies require upkeep, in which mending and releasing are acts of the flesh, the mind, and the spirit. The light of the lighthouse the two men operate is a terrible siren beckoning the soul to its furthest reaches, but it also needs oil to keep running. The cistern of drinkable water looks like celestial sludge, but it also needs to be churned. The film’s soundscape (by sound designer Damian Volpe and composer Mark Korven) is thoroughly otherworldly, but it also must make due with Willem Dafoe’s perennial farts. And a peek from above into a bedroom offers a writhing intimation of a body that might be engaging in some eldritch ritual of cosmic undoing, but it’s probably just the more everyday unknowable of masturbation behind a closed door. A seagull is an omen of ill intent and an unthinkable cosmos, but it’s also a blank thing that just doesn’t care about us that much, and doesn’t really want to bear the weight of our symbolic readings of it.