Steven Spielberg adopts the tropes and tone of John le Carré novels and Cold War thriller films and contorts them to fit a conflict with a wildly different power differential.

A Hitchcock-inspired thriller complete with a Hitchcock Blonde named Rebecca. There’s an unusual tone but, like Anne Hathaway’s Rebecca, there’s a strange seductiveness to the whole thing even while you begin to wonder if the shoe is ever going to drop.

The titular ghoulies don’t do anything! Jonathan (Peter Liapis) summons the ghoulies to serve but all they do is hang out in the background chuckling menacingly.

It’s such a shame that THE CREATOR’s script isn’t strong enough to support its weighty themes because it’d be great to see a good high-concept sci-fi blockbuster that is as resolutely anti-American as this.

The insensitively-titled WHITE SETTLERS is a low-budget representation of how culturally afraid the English are of the Scottish. Released during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, director Simeon Halligan spoke in an interview about “a sense that there is an intolerance or a lack of understanding from both sides” and that bland centrism comes across in the film’s confusion about what point it wants to make, if any, about Anglo-Scottish relations.

Emerald Fennell follows up her debut with another black comedy dealing with a vector of privilege: this time, the British class system.

Deliciously tense and delightfully staged, the uncharacteristically wobbly camerawork and rapid-pace dialogue all build tension so well.

A lot of flashbacks, early-’00s montages, and repetition to hide the fact that there’s really not much to this movie. It’s desperately aspiring to be SEVEN but lacking the care and attention to character that Fincher brings to that film.

A deeply strange kaleidoscopic caricature of the culture clash between Lynch’s deep-rooted Americanness and his Francophilia. Comes very close to the comedic tone of a proto-Twin Peaks.

It’s a phenomenal move to start the film with Mark (Sam Neill) already driven mad by the claustrophobic suspicion of the Cold War and his role as a functionary of repressive state apparatus.