Vox Lux might be great. I’ve watched it three times now; each time I’ve become more convinced of this notion. And if it is great, its greatness derives in no small part from the voiceover narration of Willem Dafoe.

There’s no reason Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse should work, really. It mucks about with concepts that only deep readers of the comic books will be familiar with. It introduces half a dozen new characters in an incredibly short amount of time. It is brought to life in an odd animation style that serves as an implicit rejection of the super-slick Pixar/Disney ideal that has come to dominate animated films in recent years.

With The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, director Yorgos Lanthimos has become something of an awards-season/top-ten-list darling, one of those auteurs whose shots are rigorously framed and whose work lacks sentimentality and whose worldview is dark, dismissive of humanity’s humanity.

I’m not sure Creed (95 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes; 82 from Metacritic) was quite as good as everyone makes it out to be, but it was certainly better than it had any right to be.

Widows is well cast and perfectly acted, tells a compelling story about how corruption aids outright criminality without being overly didactic about it, and is directed with a firmness one might expect from an Oscar-winning director whose command of visual storytelling verges on the total. If it weren’t for the fact that there’s one twist too many, it would be a nearly perfect movie.

There are two shots in The Front Runner—one complicated, one less so—that drive home the film’s visual language and thematic content.

It feels as though director Luca Guadagnino looked at the original Suspiria, decided it made too little use of its setting (a ballet academy), and said to himself “What if the original had fewer trashy kills, less provocative and expressionistic lighting set ups, a duller soundtrack, and way, way more dancing?”

The Shape flits about the edge of my vision, darting hither and yon. The music swells and a silhouette streaks by. The movements are surprisingly quick and agile, the shadows on the floor seemingly independent from the lights on the screen projecting David Gordon Green’s sequel/soft-reboot of Halloween. The Shape remains obscured—we’ve yet to get a good look at him, at his face. And then, a flash of light! The Shape is illuminated. It stares right at me, piercing my soul with his eyes, black as night.