To call something beguiling is to say that it’s unexpectedly captivating. That’s an apt description for this movie because it’s got all of the classic ingredients of a boring period film, and yet it’s much more than that.

The film is set in 1864 Virginia. The Civil War is going hot and heavy, but Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman) and Miss Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) are doing their best to ignore it while they run their school for girls, though only five students remain (the eldest of whom is played by Elle Fanning). While out picking mushrooms for dinner, one of the students happens upon Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell), a Union soldier that has been shot in the leg and won’t last on his own. She helps him to the school, where Martha cleans and stitches the wound. She seems to do a good enough job, and John starts to get better.

After some discussion about how to handle the situation, the women decide that the best course of action is to let McBurney stay as long as it takes for him to recuperate, and then to hand him over to become a prisoner of the Confederate Army. To do it too soon would risk his health, but they’ve all heard stories of soldiers raping and pillaging helpless women. But it turns out that John is polite and charming, and is a source of sexy and dangerous fascination for each of the ladies. And when he’s well enough to start moving around, he pitches in to help with the chores. And then something happens to make everything change.

For most of its 93-minute runtime, it’s a basic period drama. There’s nothing too remarkable about it, except that for some reason, it’s just really good. It proceeds slowly, but somehow it doesn’t feel slow. All of the adults and a few (but not all) of the students are thoroughly developed. Each of the women takes to McBurney’s presence a little differently, but they’re all drawn to him in some way, and it creates a bit of a rivalry.

Then the movie cuts to black for a moment. It’s a harsh, abrupt cut that feels very out of place with the rest of the film. But it comes back, and you’re wondering whether it might have just been an editing mistake that slipped through the cracks. But then you realize that things are a little different now and that the hard cut was appropriate and is intended to be off-putting. It’s skilled filmmaking masquerading as clumsiness, and it makes the movie all the more impressive.

I haven’t seen the 70s version of the film with Clint Eastwood as the wayward soldier, so I can’t make any comparisons between the films. But even though I’m a big fan of several of director Don Siegel’s other movies, it’s hard to imagine it being as slick as what Sofia Coppola has given us. But now I’m eager to find out how the earlier film stacks up.

Going into Band Aid, I had two assumptions: that the movie might have something to do with a music groupie (based purely on the use of the term for that purpose in Almost Famous), and that with a name like Zoe Lister-Jones, the film’s writer, director, and star must certainly be British. Neither turned out to be the case.

Jones plays Anna, a thirtysomething woman who was expected to be a great writer. She had a book deal all lined up before things fell apart, so now she drives for a ridesharing service. She’s married to Ben (Adam Pally), who was himself a promising artist, but now makes a living designing corporate logos, and trying to do as little of that as possible. They tried to have a baby a couple of years ago, but Anna had a miscarriage, and that really didn’t help their relationship. Things really aren’t going well for them, and their counseling sessions don’t seem to help.

It also doesn’t help that all of their friends do have children and that Anna and Ben get invited to a lot of their birthday parties. One such party has a musical theme and features toddler karaoke, and Anna and Ben improvise a performance. They enjoy themselves and decide to start a band and use their fights as the inspiration for their songs. Their sex-addicted next-door neighbor (Fred Armisen) helps them out on the drums as they try working out their relationship problems through music.

When the movie is focused on their music, it’s actually pretty good. The songs are funny, and they’re much more likable people when their arguments are set to music. The only problem is that the movie doesn’t focus nearly enough on the music. It’s got a good, solid idea to work from, but it instead chooses to be a pretty run-of-the-mill struggling relationship drama with loser characters who are mostly into weed and self-pity. I think that it’s trying to be a comedy, but there’s nothing funny about it except for the too-infrequent songs. They try to mine Armisen’s character’s sex addiction (with assistance from Jamie Chung and Erinn Hayes), but that falls flat every time. The occasional cameos don’t help, either, and they mostly just come off as desperate.

Like its characters, Band Aid is just a lot of squandered potential. In many ways, it feels like a weaker version of Ricki and the Flash, and we already have enough of those kinds of movies.

I’m usually not a fan of uncomfortable comedies. Occasionally, one comes along that’s funny enough to allow me to get past the awkwardness, but rarely do I actually embrace it and find that it benefits the movie. Beatriz at Dinner is a comedy whose humor depends entirely on its awkwardness, and although I’m not completely enamored with it, it’s a lot better than it could have been.

Beatriz (Salma Hayek) is a holistic healer who spends a lot of time working with cancer patients and their families. Cathy and Grant (Connie Britton and David Warshofsky) met her when their daughter had cancer, and Cathy took a real liking to her. Beatriz is also a gifted masseuse, so Cathy takes advantage of her services from time to time. Like when she needs to relax on the night before Grant’s big business dinner party. Grant is in the construction business, and he’s done extremely well for himself. They’re celebrating a deal with mega-super-ultra-rich real estate mogul Doug (John Lithgow), lawyer Alex (Jay Duplass) who helped push the deal through, along with their wives, Jeana (Amy Landecker) and Shannon (Chloë Sevigny).

After the massage session, Beatriz finds that her car won’t start. Cathy considers her a family friend, so she invites her to join the dinner party. As the evening progresses, it’s clear that Doug is an immense, entitled asshole who doesn’t care about anyone but himself, and who is hated by pretty much everyone who’s come in contact with him in a situation in which they didn’t stand to directly profit from it. With the help of several glasses of wine, Beatriz is more than willing to tell him off.

There are a number of admirable things about this film. Lithgow, who has plenty of experience playing the bad guy, absolutely nails his part. He boasts about his various illegal and immoral accomplishments as a way of showing off for the intended dinner guests while being completely indifferent to and dismissive of Beatriz and society in general. Conversely, Hayek plays Beatriz as a much stronger character than you would imagine, refusing to let herself be bullied or intimidated.

On the other hand, while I can buy the stilted “oh please don’t let me say something to make the richest guy here even slightly uncomfortable” vibe most of the other diners seem to have, Jay Duplass seems to be actively trying to make you hate him with his incredibly annoying performance. And it works. I was also put off by the ending of the movie. I get it, and I agree that it’s probably a realistic way of approaching the situation, but I still found it overly artsy and unsatisfying, and it’s hard to say more about it without giving anything away. It’s still a movie worth seeing, but I just wish it had found a way to go out on a different note.

Every year, it seems that there’s some giant hit of a movie that I can’t stand. A couple of years ago, it was Mad Max: Fury Road. A few years before that, it was Spring Breakers. The Bad Batch feels like some horribly mutated love child of those two films, and it has plenty to dislike about it.

The movie is set in some desert wasteland that was carved out of Texas. It’s populated with criminals, illegal aliens, and people who have just been deemed unlikely to contribute to civilized society. Those people are called “bad batchers”, and Arlen (aka bad batcher 5040, played by Suki Waterhouse) seems to be in that latter category. She’s tattooed with her identifier and tossed out into the middle of nowhere with nothing but the clothes on her back and a gallon of water.

Almost immediately, she’s attacked by a couple of cannibals, who for some inexplicable reason are called “bridge people” despite living in an airplane graveyard with no bridge in sight. They capture her, tie her down, and amputate one of her arms and one of her legs for food (perhaps over an extended period of time rather than all at once; the movie isn’t clear about that). Before they can perform any more surgery, she escapes and manages to drag herself away. This time, she’s picked up by a nomadic loner who deposits her at the gates of Comfort, a kind of permanent Burning Man that many of the bad batchers have set up. After a little recuperation and an artificial leg, Arlen sets back out into the desert, seemingly intent on revenge.

I realize that my description might make it sound like things happen in the movie, but that’s mostly an illusion because The Bad Batch is the most utterly boring and completely uneventful film I’ve seen in quite a while. It’s like they took the world of Fury Road, removed any shred of action from it, and plopped in a Spring Breakers-esque drug-fueled rave in the middle of it for no good reason. Everything progresses at an excruciating pace, and it mostly leaves you guessing about what’s going on. There is absolutely no excuse for its two-hour runtime, although maybe a 70-minute version could be tolerable.

I suppose that it’s worth mentioning the other notable people in the film. Jason Momoa and Jayda Fink play a father-daughter pair who are the other major characters in the movie and comprise the only semblance of a plot in the second half of the film. Keanu Reeves is the movie’s James Franco. Jim Carrey is virtually unrecognizable as the desert wanderer, and Giovanni Ribisi is all too recognizable in his role as the village idiot and least necessary character in the film.

Even reading this, it’s hard to reconcile the fact that things actually do happen in the movie with the fact that it is one of the most boring films ever made. Perhaps a much shorter version would have condensed its essence into something worthwhile, but in its current form, it’s just an utter waste of time and energy trying to keep your eyes open.

Syria is in the Middle East, surrounded by Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon, so it’s not stranger to conflict. In 2011, civil war broke out when citizens rebelled against President Bashar al-Assad. Years of violence ensued, with the government engaging in frequent bombing runs, assisted by Russian military forces. Far from surgical strikes intended to take out strategic targets, they seem to have been very haphazard, affecting civilians as much or even more than people actively involved in the rebellion. They seem to have no problem with taking out hospitals or residential areas.

All of this bombing caused a lot of destruction. Buildings collapsed, often with people inside. A group of men who call themselves The White Helmets have taken it upon themselves to become a search and rescue squadron. They go to bombing sites to excavate rubble, hoping to find survivors. Sometimes they get lucky, but more often than not, they only dig out dead bodies, and those are often not intact. This is dangerous work, not only because the bombed-out buildings are jagged and unstable, but also because the Syrian and Russian forces seem to delight in targeting areas where people group together.

If you have any doubts about the depths of human assholery, this documentary will put them to rest. You’ll see far too many dead children, including infants, being pulled out from beneath collapsed buildings. You’ll see Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, repeatedly lit up with bomb strikes, including what are called barrel bombs and certainly appear to be just barrels full of explosive material dropped out of planes and helicopters. You’ll see people (again, often children) suffering from malnutrition and lack of medication as supply lines have been cut off. You’ll hear of the futility of trying to escape, as nearby countries like Turkey close their borders. And you’ll see a complete lack of any kind of outside assistance as the people suffer under what appears to be a brutal, oppressive regime directly aided by Russian military forces.

But it’s not entirely horrific. You’ll repeatedly see these men putting their lives on the line, working hard and sustaining injuries, to help their fellow citizens. You’ll see people emerge alive after being dug out from the rubble, and children reunited with their parents. You’ll see the comradery of the rescuers in the moments of downtime, and the way that people pull together in times of crisis. The film feels a bit slow at times, but in retrospect, those moments are just as vital to the documentary, allowing you to get a better sense of who these people are, and giving you a break from all of the awful things being shown.

Last Men in Aleppo is a very difficult documentary to watch. You’re not going to have a good time, and you’re going to see things that you don’t want to see. But it is an important film because things like this need to be brought to light in the hope of making the world a less terrible place.

In 2008, the U.S. economy was in danger of collapsing. Some of the largest financial institutions, including Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Citi, were found to have been engaging the in the illegal and dangerous practice of bundling a bunch of high-risk mortgage loans together and billing them as great investments. This helped make a few number of people a lot of money, but when the bottom fell out, the government ended up giving them billions of dollars and a slap on the risk because they were “too big to fail.”

The Abacus Federal Savings Bank was founded by Thomas Sung, who immigrated to New York City as a teenager and grew up to become a successful lawyer. He noticed that other banks were happy to accept deposits from Chinese people, but weren’t so welcoming when they came asking for loans. Abacus catered to New York’s Chinatown population and did well enough that they were able to open six branches. That’s certainly respectable, but with something like 2600 larger banks in the country, the government saw them as decidedly not too big to fail.

The problems started when Abacus learned that one of their loan officers had been accepting bribes and skimming money from customers. They fired him immediately and reported the infractions to the appropriate organizations, who decided to jump at the opportunity to have a scapegoat for the whole credit default swap scandal. Members of the Sung family, along with a few other bank employees, were arrested and charged with several serious crimes. At best, they’d have to spend millions of dollars in legal fees to defend themselves. At worst, they faced fines and prison time.

It’s a fascinating documentary, even if you’re not particularly interested in finance. It’s certainly a one-sided presentation, and we’re given less than ninety minutes to look at a trial that lasted for months, but it certainly seems like a David and Goliath-type battle in which the government was desperate to point to at least one bank that they had actually punished instead of bailed out. The filmmakers aredefensepushing you to believe in the bankers’ innocence, and the segments in which government representatives argue to the contrary seem like they have been hand-picked to sound weak.

I was also frustrated by the substantial amount of time spent on tangents not directly related to discussing guilt or innocence. The biggest offender here is the defence argument that no one was hurt by the loans in question, and that even if some of the loans had been obtained with false information, all of the clients had faithfully repaid those loans. This seems irrelevant and counterproductive, since arguing that there were no adverse consequences to an illegal activity has a very different connotation than arguing that they had no involvement in that activity. Nonetheless, this argument was made in court, and it’s appropriate for the documentary to have included it, but it felt like they dwelled on it too much.

On the other hand, the film does a good job of making you feel close to the Sung family and sympathizing with and relating to them. It’s far from impartial, but it is informative and entertaining, and it’s worth checking out if you get the chance.

The 1932 version of The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff, is phenomenal. It’s one of the best monster movies ever made. There have been many mummy-related films since then, but I haven’t seen any that come close to the original. The 2017 version should be ashamed of itself for even thinking that it’s fit to share the same title.

A long, long time ago, an Egyptian princess named Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) wanted to summon Set, the god of death. She was caught, mummified while she was still alive, and entombed in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), far away from Egypt. In modern times, Nick (Tom Cruise) and Chris (Jake Johnson) are soldiers who are involved in a black market operation to find antiquities and sell them on the black market. They come across Ahmanet’s tomb, but their commanding officer (Courtney B. Vance) gets to them before they can loot the grave. He brings in Jenny (Annabelle Wallis), an expert on Egyptian culture to help with the excavation, which Nick screws up by releasing the magical chains that kept the mummy in check. And now Ahmanet wants to kill Nick and use his body as the vessel for Set’s return. Also featuring Russell Crowe as Jekyll and Hyde, because apparently, the movie wasn’t quite terrible enough when it just stuck to the mummy storyline.

It’s pretty appalling how stupid this movie is. There are so many things that don’t make any sense or that are completely contrary to anything resembling logic. Some of these are explained away by magic and destiny and Egyptian gods and stuff, but I guess most of the time, we’re just supposed to go along with it without asking any questions. We don’t need to know why these delicate, centuries-old items are so well preserved and so durable. We don’t need to know why there are zombies in a mummy movie. We don’t need to know why Nick can fire an automatic rifle but seems terrified of holding a pistol. We don’t need to know why Nick goes from annoyed at Jenny to utterly in love with her at the drop of a hat.

The film is also annoyingly schizophrenic. Sometimes it wants to be Indiana Jones. Sometimes it wants to be The Da Vinci Code. Sometimes, it wants to be a monster movie, although it can’t even manage to stick to one kind of monster, and it definitely doesn’t do “mummy” very well.  Sometimes, it wants to be a superhero movie, and by the end, it definitely feels like it’s an origin story for some kind of analog to X-Men or The Avengers or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The only thing that’s really consistent throughout the movie is just how bad it is.

The British seem to live for bureaucracy. Their fondness for queueing is known far and wide, and if things like Yes Minister, In the Loop and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are to be believed, they also love rules and paperwork. But apparently even the British have their limits, and I, Daniel Blake is a terrific and terrifying look at them.

Daniel (Dave Johns) used to be a carpenter, but then he had a heart attack that forced him to stop working for a while. He had been getting the British equivalent of workers’ compensation until some government stooge decided that he was healthy enough to work, despite multiple doctors saying that was very much not the case. So now he’s in a bureaucratic nightmare where he can’t work, doesn’t have any income, has exhausted his savings, and he has fallen through the cracks of a system staffed by people very intent on following the rules to the letter and that actually punishes people who try to use reason and compassion.

But Daniel isn’t alone. During one of his many trips to the Department of Not Helping People, he encounters Katie (Hayley Squires). She’s new to the area, a single mom with two children (Daisy and Dylan, played by Briana Shann and Dylan McKiernan), and she’s also having trouble keeping her head above water. She can’t find a job and can’t get any help. She managed to get a run-down apartment but can’t afford electricity, and soon she won’t even be able to buy food. Daniel befriends her, and he’s able to help her fix up the apartment, show her some tricks for making do without all of the essentials, and take care of her kids while she goes out looking for work. But things aren’t getting brighter for either of them.

This is one of the most anxiety-inducing films I’ve seen in quite a while. It’s not quite as over the top as something like Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, but it feels just as bleak and even more realistic and relatable, and it’s easier to connect with the characters on a deeper level. It’s pure drama without any humor or suspense to lighten the mood, and while there’s plenty of stupidity to go around, it’s not played for laughs. It’s got a message, and I expect that message gets through just as well to us Americans as it does to the British.

And to make the film even more horrific, there are several scenes in which Daniel, very much a pencil and paper guy, needs to use a computer and can’t figure it out, so he turns to others for help. I’ve been lucky enough in my life to have never had serious concern about where my next meal would come from, but I’ve been on the receiving end of many clueless people asking for technical assistance while being firmly committed to remaining clueless. These scenes got my heart rate up even more than anything else in the film, which is really saying something.

I, Daniel Blake is phenomenal, but I’m honestly not sure I’d recommend watching it if the subject matter hits too close to home. You can tell yourself that a horror film is only a movie, but if you’ve got some of these real-life concerns going into the film, they’ll probably just get amplified by watching it. Maybe immediately following it with something light, stupid, and fun will take the edge off.