THE AGE OF INNOCENCE is as much about what is unspoken as KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON. Where KILLERS deals with an unspoken murderous racist conspiracy, INNOCENCE explores the unspoken labyrinth of social rules, mores, and traditions in which Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) eventually becomes trapped. Scorsese portrays a world in which every dinner table is a battleground and devastating social violence is enacted through declining an invitation. Michelle Pfeiffer is terrific as someone who deliberately eschews all the ritual and tradition but there’s a quiet power to Winona Ryder’s performance that only becomes apparent towards the end. Her blankness throughout is starkly brought into contrast in the scene where the power dynamics between May and Newland are flipped in an instant and the scene is wonderfully choreographed to assert her character’s dominance by having her kneel before Newland.

The film adaptation of Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws. Unsurprisingly this is much more subtle, clever, and effective than SCREAM (2022). SCREAM (1996) riffs on the ‘80s and ‘90s market saturation of horror films and slashers in particular in a way that feels authentic to the postmodernity of the ‘90s while also ensuring that the characters are well-drawn and have emotional cores. Wes Craven’s camera, especially in the opening scene, is far more interesting than in the requel with dynamic movements and subtle fisheye lenses. I was delighted to discover that characters opening doors while the music heightens and then there’s no killer behind the door is a franchise staple.

Postmodernity and irony requires self-knowledge and it’s very easy for that sense of knowing to come off as smug. That’s the case when SCREAM ironically riffs on the idea of the legacy sequel, the requel, but does so without the core of sincerity that something like THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS or STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS has. The film is best when it’s good stabby fun and it’s not jamming in emotional crescendos for characters who have only just turned up. The scene of Wes (Dylan Minnette) opening multiple doors and the music heightening only for it to be a fake out every time could have gone on for hours and delighted me every time.

The Deserter in Disco Elysium talks about “[t]he mask of humanity fall[ing] from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone—everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed.” The horror in KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON is how little the mask slips even as Osage people are murdered and brutalised. Black Wall Street and the KKK are backgrounded and instead the film is driven by the percussive bass beat of a more insidious form of racism: Hale (Robert De Niro) and Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) don’t hate the Osage—they learn their culture and their language—but they never view the Osage as people. Through their eyes, Osage are not capitalist subjects worthy of wealth but objects standing in the way of the money they view as their birthright as white men. Then in the film’s closing scenes, Scorsese turns the camera around to expose his own complicity and the film’s (predominately white) audience’s complicity in the ‘true crime’ exploitation of the Osage Nation even as he, too late, centres the experience of Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone) before passing the frame to the Osage as a final gesture.

A haunted house story with the vibe of creepypasta, specifically the Backrooms. This has a lot of the DNA of THIS HOUSE HAS PEOPLE IN IT, SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE, and House of Leaves. The constant low-angles and extreme close-ups of the digital cameras act like an eerie inversion of CCTV which leaves you tantalisingly unable to perceive the whole space. The quasi-experimental form messes with the pacing somewhat but it’s rare for me to find a horror film that genuinely scares me and there are slow pans in this that are more terrifying than any rapidly edited jump scares.

Martin Scorsese crafts a terrifically entertaining film that also manages to explore the intersection of identity and community in contemporary USA. From its opening moments, THE DEPARTED is focused on the interlocking (and overlapping) communities of American life—ethnic communities in Irish- and Italian-Americans; religious communities; professional communities in cops and criminals—and how the complexities of these communities both form and subsume individual identities like that of Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) who is desperate by the end of the film to rediscover who he actually is. It feels like the film owes a huge debt to The Wire in how it presents the interlocking of communities to form the tapestry of US American society. Most thrilling is how bold the filmmaking is: there’s barely a scene that goes by where Scorsese doesn’t make some minor but nonetheless exciting unconventional choice in cinematography, editing, music, or simply how his camera paints the narrative.

Martin Scorsese’s HUGO and Steven Spielberg’s THE FABELMANS would make a fascinating double-bil: one showing an artist in his late period exteriorising his love of cinema and the other interiorising it. Though THE FABELMANS starts a little saccharine for my tastes, the film matures along with Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) and goes on the same psychological journey from the naïve depiction of film as a medium for discovery of truth in the world to exploring how a director shapes reality through documentary editing and makes an active choice as to how their film portrays people and the world. The most poignant moments are where Spielberg reaches through the screen to point out to us how the pursuit of art has mediated the experience of his life for good—the final camera tilt—and ill—Sammy seeing himself in the mirror filming his parents’ divorce. David Lynch playing the greatest living filmmaker is meta perfection.

Who doesn’t love a movie built around a consistent rule scheme?: GREMLINS, THE PURGE, the Final Destinations. FINAL DESTINATION 5 made me wonder about a hypothetical Final Destination that exploits the internal logic of strictly ordered deaths such that, as long as the person in front of you in the death queue is kept alive, you could do whatever kind of dangerous stuff you wanted. Combine this idea with SAW and you could put that person in a safe room or a medically-induced coma and could in that way become functionally immortal.

Despite being a B-movie horror with a terrible script mostly set in a single back garden, I was struck by how much the whole film is elevated by having a well-trained canine actor playing Thor (Primo). In a cinema landscape filled with obviously-CGI animals like in the dreadful trailer for ARGYLLE, it’s notable how much emotional and narrative weight an animal actor can bring to a film. It makes even a werewolf flirting with his own sister seem more real.

The metaphorical linking of werewolves and menstruation seems so obvious and natural that it’s astonishing in retrospect that I’ve never seen it before, similar to the linking of vampirism and Catholicism in Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass. From a bumpy start that feels very ‘90s, GINGER SNAPS very effectively hides its low budget with some dynamic filmmaking, committed performances from Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins, and a great script with some deep thematic resonance around menstruation, womanhood, sisterhood, and the patriarchal social treatment of young women discovering their sexual hungers. The very smooth werewolf creature gave me the ick in a way that a traditionally hirsute werewolf never has.