Horror movies have always given sound advice of where not to go on your vacation.  For example, you really shouldn’t stay at that ominous-looking hotel up on the hill (Psycho), or your friend’s cabin in the middle of the woods (Evil Dead), or that hostel in Slovakia (Hostel).  Dangerous Animals suggests that despite the obvious reasons for visiting Brisbane’s Gold Coast in Australia, you probably don’t want to go there either.  Because even an exciting tourist activity like swimming with the sharks may very well end up being unexpectedly life-altering.  But if you really can’t resist, definitely let your loved ones know what your plans are before you climb aboard that boat.  That way, they’ll know where to start searching for your body parts when you go missing.

So this is what’s been on writer-director Ryan Coogler’s mind while he’s been making films based on existing IP.  Although he left his imprint upon Creed and the Black Panther movies, they weren’t entirely his creation.  For example, you could tell which parts of his Marvel movies came from his mind and which were mandated in order to fit into the larger MCU.  Sinners, Coogler’s first original film since Fruitvale Station twelve years ago, reflects the freedom he likely felt at no longer needing to tell a story using other people’s characters and storylines.  His  latest is a rare intimate blockbuster, one that is brazenly adult-oriented, filled with big ideas and told with indelible images that demand our attention.  It’s a full-throated cinematic experience that swings for the fences and connects more often than not.

Everyone has met someone so full of themselves that you wish you could be there for their comeuppance and subsequent humbling.  Since this rarely happens in real life, movies like The Rule of Jenny Pen oblige us in this type of wish fulfillment.  In it, Judge Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush)  is exactly the kind of arrogant bastard who we can’t wait to see laid low by fate.  But, as the saying goes, even the wicked get worse than they deserve.

Based on how Heart Eyes begins, I assumed the masked killer known as “Heart Eyes” (or HE, for short) hated Valentine’s Day and was taking his anger out on anyone celebrating the holiday.  The people HE initially dispatches–an annoying couple and their engagement photographer–indicate as such.  Subsequent victims, all engaged in conspicuously lovey-dovey behavior before they were sliced and diced, also appear to prove my hypothesis.  However, as we follow the ill-timed courtship of the two lovebirds at the center of this story, I realized that the movie isn’t about homicidal anger, but love.  Serial killers just have a funny way of showing it.

Science fiction often tells us that robots want to be human.  The twist in Companion is that Iris (Sophie Thatcher), the robot at the center of this story, believed she was human right until her owner threatened to shut her off.  In an instant, she not only learns that she’s not alive, but that her boyfriend is a total creep.  Considering how humans behave towards her throughout the movie, it makes perfect sense that she embraces her robot existence in the end.  It certainly beats the vastly inferior alternative.

Instead of trying to find a new approach to the 127 year-old tale of Dracula, writer-director Robert Eggers has based his movie on director WF Murnau’s unauthorized adaptation from 1922, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.  Murnau famously altered Stoker’s story in a failed attempt to circumvent copyright protections.  What he produced was a film that is both very  similar to Dracula and while diverging from it in very distinct ways.  In using Murnau’s film as his starting point, Eggers’ reimagining of the Dracula legend is the most compelling version of the vampire I’ve seen since Coppola’s Bran Stoker’s Dracula.