Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood opens with consecutive images of its two villains. Neither are Charles Manson, despite what the marketing claimed. The first is wanted poster of a Wild West outlaw. The second, in a whip zoom back, is Jake Cahill, Wild West lawman extraordinaire, a nasty renegade backed by Manifest Destiny who knowingly nods at the camera and who dishes out justice with an unforgiving grimace and little interest in the formalities of legality or the niceties of compassion. A marker of a time in the American imagination when retribution required little justification and morality was Manichean and measurable rather than mysterious and muddy, it is no wonder, we’re soon told, that Rick Dalton, the actor who once played Cahill in the early ‘60s TV boon as an unbending arbiter of goodness, has been reduced to momentary turns as a weekly walk-on heavy on budget Westerns and other TV shows dedicated to newer, younger, more ambiguous stars worthy of the murky waters of the late 1960s. The kind of justice he represents, a mixture of unbridled individualism and cosmic force, casts a dubious presence in a world where pretensions of moral purity backed by national predestination are increasingly threatened by recalcitrant forces of social unrest laying bare previously concealed realities and shrouded conflicts.

Two villains I wrote, but although Dalton is now reduced to playing villains on television, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood interrogates the possibility of giving him the fantasy of hero-dom he so desperately craves. When we cut back to a scene from Bounty Law, the show on which Dalton made his career playing Cahill, it’s to the shadow of a man, who falls dead into the frame, before Cahill covers him in the shot with his own image on a bounty poster. The shadow becomes flesh becomes print, illusion into reality into the legend. By the end of Once Upon a Time, Tarantino’s film will have helped Dalton fill out his shadow by giving him the chance of becoming a real-life Cahill, to embody a cowboy in the flesh. But the cost for turning dream into reality is a reminder that reality is a game of smoke and mirrors. Whatever else it is, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is a love letter to a time that, the film acknowledges, never really existed on the terms Tarantino wanted it to. Tarantino’s most recent film is a critical paean, and a wistful eulogy, for a hope that the film seems to recognize, but cannot fully admit, is a delusion. Which is to say: in aspiring to salvage the late 1960s, Tarantino also realizes he can only really be a pallbearer at its funeral.

Just as we previously left him, at the end of John Wick: Chapter 2, our man Wick was hurtling down the suspicious streets of Manhattan, fearing for his life after having been recently excommunicated from the worldwide assassin community for (deservedly, in the film’s view) killing a person on hallowed ground. That ground was New York’s Continental Hotel, one of the many hubs of official assassin activity in, as we learn, an increasingly wide and complicated network and economy of murder. Its owner is Winston (Ian McShane), and he has used his power to delay the ensuing hit on Wick by one hour. We open John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum mere minutes before that hit is to be sent out to, seemingly, every hit-person on earth. Parabellum’s Latin subtitle suggests – promises, really – no shortage of ego on the part of the film. And the dense and forbidding aura of its world, and the controlling and manhandling showmanship of this behemoth of a film, do not disappoint. This is a work that will summon swarms of extended forces, out of nowhere, to bear on one man who has to call forth an equally forceful reserve of will to survive, a celebration of one man’s capacity to survive a sheer, overbearing, unending onslaught of raw, leviathan-like cinema.

Wick 3 was the most highly stylized, most ornate of the series up to that point – the most continental of the Wick features, if you will, a kindred spirit of the aesthetic sensibilities more commonly associated with Continental Europe. That the one ostensible refuge in the film’s world suggests a hyper-controlled aesthetic sensibility seems to imply that the film’s aesthetic proclivities are ways of evacuating the ungovernable traces of real-world human spontaneity and uncertainty. This is a film that has been painstakingly manicured for us, to our liking, to do our bidding, to exert supreme effort and control in punishing one man and to take pleasure in his ability to survive that punishment. It asks that we revel in controlled chaos and the possibility of coming out the other side undaunted. It is pristine in the force of its construction, the single-minded brutality of its monomaniacal and thoroughly, violently uncomplicated imagination.

And revel we do. John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum makes a pretty immaculate, almost indefensible, case for itself. The obvious criticism of the film is that its sound and fury signifies nothing, and that this film is so well-mounted and anointed that it can’t really register any suspense. That’s all true: we watch hundreds of people try to kill John Wick, and we delight as he kills them. In a sense, though, Wick’s over-modulated hollowness isn’t really so much a decrement as a sheer fact. While the film may seem empty on first blush, it might rather be that Wick refuses the injunction to make meaning out of its cornucopia of senses and perceptions. John Wick does not unearth some divine essence beneath all the madness, nor does it pluck any manna from heaven that unlocks the film’s mysteries for us. It just is.

Early in Uncut Gems, writer-directors Josh and Benny Safdie (they co-wrote with Ronald Bronstein) gift us, and themselves, a visual metaphor that is simply too irresistible to pass up. After a prologue set in the blood-diamond mines of Ethiopia, a telephoto lens zooms deep into the crevices of an iridescent gem, as though excavating the soul of the diamond. The image becomes an increasingly amorphous, abstract canvas of raw colors and even rawer conundrums, an obliquely sublime carnival of sheer sensory overload. Before, that is, it finally mutates into the innards of a scan of protagonist Harold Ratner’s colon. A wonderfully grotesque metaphor for the film’s ability to find beauty in the detestable and atrociousness in the beautiful, it’s also a recognition of the ease with which the audience might overlook the violence that undergirds the artifacts of late capitalism. The cloacal excursion is a surprisingly pure encapsulation of the film itself, a sojourn into this man’s psychological innards that expose the webs of social entanglement that both construct him as himself and that invite him to believe that he can actually mobilize them for his gain before finally setting him adrift in a void of delusional egotism.

The film? It works pretty well. It’s a bit of a pity that it never develops beyond this initial, beautifully lurid metaphor, or finding variations on it. I can’t help but feel that something got lost, an intangible something missing somewhere between the anus and the mine, betwixt the film’s play of the absurd, the wonderful, and the violent. The Safdie Brothers’ Good Time was nearly my favorite film of 2017, a scintillating acid-bath of 21^st century brutality and a frayed raw-nerve of psychological and architectural disarray. Uncut Gems is bigger, has more polish, and is at times more intoxicating, but it essentially repeats and in some ways reduces the formula, and like the gem at the center of the tale, it sometimes feels a bit more like the crystalline craftsmanship hides a black hole. It plays at larger thematic and geopolitical concerns, but these were already present in the earlier film, lodged between a dye pack and a hard place, and making the gestures explicit doesn’t necessarily make the film itself smarter. While it hits the ground running, it also has only, essentially, one tonal note to play from beginning to end. Despite the opening metaphor, Uncut Gems sometimes seems to work like its protagonist, so blinded by the rush of its own momentum and the thrill of its own formal beauty that it cannot quite see the full picture, let alone recognize how trapped in holding pattern it may be.

The rush is a rush, admittedly, and the thrill is, for the most part, honestly earned. This is a film that does everything in its power to evoke the choking atmosphere of sheer possibility, the way that the belief that we have an open field of play actually compresses us and squeezes the life out of us. It has a forbidding forcefield of a sonic palate that somehow manages to constrict us in the act of opening itself up, like a carnivorous plant releasing spores of sparkling metallic dust drawing any intrepid wanderer into its vise. Daniel Lopatin’s exquisite synthesizer score often seems like a demonic emanation from the gem itself, an alien artifact that is seldom seen but which organizes lines of human physical and mental energy in its name. The gem, like the score, weighs on us even when it remains invisible. When Howard cuts through the New York City streets at a pace between a strut and a shuffle, unable to stop or even look in another direction, the metallic glisten of the score takes on a gravitational quality, ever pulling him toward a forward that is actually just a spiral.

 Add to that a sound mix that summons a swarm of voices and competing dialogues always threatening Howard’s supremacy in the frame, and the film starts to seem like an anti-Altman film that utilizes a dense, heterogeneous soundscape not to spread out and wander (as Altman does) but to narrow in on us and imply tightening forces that are only semi-visible but that sculpt and shrink its protagonists’ field of possibility nonetheless. The Darius Khondji cinematography is also pretty thorny, a harsh melding of vicious realism and garish ethereality, New York City greasiness and gossamer glow. For a film that traces unexpected lines of connection between all forms of matter and the entrails of one man’s belief that he can transcend them by riding the chaos of the international market to his betterment, this is stellar, pointed filmmaking. Each of these tools evokes the sense of raw potential in the air, some dormant energy all around us that invites us to search for it and weaponize it even as it is secretly using us, like a strange shimmer beckoning you that is secretly a shiv at your throat.

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.