The Purge is set in a very near-future America where, under only cursorily explained circumstances, a new government has come to power on the promise of reducing crime and unemployment. And lo, they succeed! Unemployment is at 1%, crime practically a memory. Their solution suggests that they (or at least the movie’s writer-director, James DeMonaco) are Star Trek fans: once a year, for 12 hours, all crime is legal, including murder, the idea being that all of society’s collective aggressions are, per the title, purged.

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Upstream Color, like auteur Shane Carruth’s first feature Primer, is science fiction not for the faint of intellect. But where Primer tested the audience’s ability to keep track of things strictly on an organizational basis, Upstream Color is a challenge to one’s ability to simultaneously keep track of physics, poetry, and philosophy. There’s no story as one customarily thinks of it, with characters and dialogue and three acts and so on; Carruth builds Upstream Color from a series of signifiers, with the meaning coalescing from the patterns in which he arranges them. The result is a work of great skill, and very much not run-of-the-cinematic-mill, yet still somehow a little less than the sum of its parts.

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This year’s Super Bowl featured—in between some grotesquely sloppy football, a not-bad-at-all halftime performance by Beyoncé, and an extended (rather funny) power outage in the middle of the third quarter—a whole slew of trailers for upcoming movies. And not half bad ones at that. Here then, are the major ones.

[Oz The Fast Lone Iron World War Into Darkness]

Conversations about WarGames these days tend to focus on things like how ridiculous the idea of a kid hacking into NORAD’s weapon systems is, or the old-school gadgets and hardware, or how it’s dated because of the Cold War stuff, or any number of ultimately superficial and/or misremembered details. This is the problem with movies we haven’t seen in 20 years. This is why rewatching them is great, because it leads to pleasant surprises like WarGames still being awesome.

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Calling The Wizard nothing more than a 100-minute commercial for Nintendo would only be partially accurate. It’s a 100-minute commercial for lots of other things, too. The way in which it goes about being this craven, strictly pecuniary beast is truly something to behold. The Wizard is a very bad movie in ways few bad movies dare to even attempt.

[To quote the movie “...it’s so bad”]

The term “poète maudit” was coined in the 19th century to describe a class of poet—among whom were Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine—who took drugs, committed criminal acts, and had interesting sex lives. The adjective “maudit,” which means “cursed,” referred to the tendency of these poets to die very young, at no point in their brief lives ever able to functionally connect to society and live the proverbial normal life. The term “maudit,” in reference to both les poètes maudits themselves and to the notion of being cursed in general, has been appropriated by some film critics recently to describe movies that, for whatever reason, are doomed to be misunderstood and overlooked, too strangely beautiful for this world, to never live on as classics of the form. Such a film maudit is Cloud Atlas.

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French director Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, his first feature in over a decade, manages to be accessible and engaging while proudly being the kind of film that mocks the notion of accessibility and the audience’s need to engage. It does not, it must be made clear, mock the audience itself. The influences of past French cinema on Carax and Holy Motors are almost all good ones, like the stately clarity of Alain Resnais’ surrealism, Jean-Luc Godard’s endless pop erudition and sense of humor, and the will to be weird of countless Gallic auteurs.

[Accessing all genres from the back of a limo]

Writer-director Rian Johnson’s third feature, Looper, is one of the best science fiction movies I have ever seen.

I’ve been writing about science fiction movies here at Tor.com for a couple years now. I love science fiction and movies, and I don’t make greatest-of-all-time announcements lightly. But sometimes it’s necessary, and with a movie as richly imagined, gracefully and stylishly executed, and emotionally overwhelming as Looper, it is. The only SF movie I can unambiguously call better, 2001, is sufficiently different to make the comparison meaningless. The point is, Looper is a work of cinematic art so profoundly and deeply beautiful in its fierce, dark vision of a terrifyingly, vividly real future, that its equal in SF will not be seen for a very, very long time.

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More often than not, knowledge of a movie’s troubled production history is more a cloud hanging over one’s appreciation of that movie than a tool for insight into it. Earlier this year, for example, with the ill-fated John Carter, it seemed as though critics were not permitted to write about the picture without mentioning that it cost A QUARTER OF A BILLION DOLLARS (and yes, the all-caps were mandatory as well). The movie itself was hardly perfect, but I doubt whether anyone would have been quite as concerned with how expensive it was without being told first.

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Now playing in limited release after a favorable reception at this year's Sundance Film Festival (where it won the Alfred P. Sloan prize for movies featuring science as a theme or scientists as protagonists), Robot & Frank is an immensely charming little movie. The “immense” is meant to make the “little” seem less condescending, because there's nothing at all wrong with being a little movie. Movies come in all shapes and sizes. And Robot & Frank, a simple story about friendship and family, is the best kind of small movie.

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This piece was originally going to be about David Cronenberg and genre, in a vague, omnibus kind of way talking about this or that movie throughout his career. That changed Wednesday afternoon when I read an interview Cronenberg and Robert Pattinson gave that was relevant enough to the issue at hand to overwhelm the focus of the (admittedly not quite finished) essay, forcing a complete rewrite. In it, Cronenberg had some harsh words for both The Dark Knight Rises and superhero movies in general:

But a superhero movie, by definition, you know, it’s comic book. It’s for kids. It’s adolescent in its core. That has always been its appeal, and I think people who are saying, you know, Dark Knight Rises is, you know, supreme cinema art, I don’t think they know what the f**k they’re talking about.

A bit harsh, especially toward geeks, but not altogether untoward.

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There is genre film and there is, oh heavenly bounty, Italian genre film. Granted, it’s a generalization, but there’s a wonderful tendency to value stylish sensationalism over logic and coherence that sets Italy apart and makes their genre (particularly horror) pictures unique delights.

Lincoln Center’s Midnight Movies series screened Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci’s The House By The Cemetery last Friday. It was an uncut version, though the print was in lousy shape and had Dutch subtitles for some perverse reason. The movie itself was in English, or Englishish (horror movies have other and often far greater priorities than the text), so the Dutch subtitles were alternately funny and distracting rather than an insurmountable obstacle to understanding. Film Comment’s Gavin Smith, in introductory remarks about Fulci that doubled as a quasi-apologia for the quality and quirkiness of the print, offered the idea that the latter could make the experience of watching the movie a kind of grindhouse experience. While a helpful way to approach the movie itself, experientially that idea was undone by the fact that we were just down the hall from a place that makes (really good) $11 Old Fashioneds. But oh well, you can’t have everything, and the movie’s the important thing anyway.

[Onwards!]

Let’s get the obvious first question out of the way: Yes, The Dark Knight Rises is awesome, mostly in the colloquial sense but at times in the formal sense of inspiring legitimate awe. Christopher Nolan sticks the landing of the trilogy, the follow-up to the enormously successful Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, with considerable style. The Dark Knight Rises is a big, bold movie featuring an array of compelling characters, several jaw-dropping action set pieces, a handful of genuine surprises, and, of course, Batman.

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If there is a human being alive who can summarize Lifeforce’s plot—all the nude space vampires, exploding zombies, insane asylums, and wildly inappropriate behavior—with a straight face, it is likely that person has never smiled. Lifeforce is a wildly entertaining bit of insanity that bears less resemblance to typical genre films in terms of structure than it does Indian masala, a form in which as many wildly disparate elements are thrown together in one movie to the end of appealing to all possible audiences. The primary difference, of course, being that in Lifeforce instead of songs, there are nude scenes. That essential distinction aside, Lifeforce is still at least four different movies co-existing, with varying degrees of ease, as one. It is crazy, it is unique, and it is awesome.

[Let’s appreciate]

It’s been quite some time since there was a big-budget Hollywood movie as thematically and intellectually ambitious as Prometheus. Not content with anything other than the biggest questions, Prometheus asks, “Where did we come from? What happens when we die? What is the purpose of all this (i.e. life on Earth and the human race in general)?” That it asks these questions with the aid of Ridley Scott’s trademark visual flair (now in very-not-bad 3D; I’m starting to come around to the thinking that 3D is okay as long as the whole movie is shot in 3D and, more importantly, I don’t have to pay a zillion dollars for it) makes it a little easier to process. That it does so in the context of being a kind-of-sort-of prequel to Alien makes it more than a little ominous.

[Read more. Some spoilers for the early plot.]

On one hand, the republic would not have fallen if there had never been a sequel to Alien. Entire books could be written about how great—bordering very closely on perfect—Alien was as both science fiction and horror, not to mention how brilliant it was as cinema. Its unanswered questions are actually assets, deepening the mystery and thus the horror. But, on the other hand, those unanswered questions provided the basis for Aliens, a massively entertaining and actually quite moving piece of work.

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The first Men In Black was sharp and funny, a tight, effective summer special-effects picture. Men In Black II was dumb, endless (even though it was ten minutes shorter than its predecessor), and worst of all, not any fun. One good thing it did, though, was set the bar so low for Men In Black 3 that all the latest installment had to do was not suck to be an improvement. Thankfully, Men In Black 3 exceeds those modest standards with room to spare, and while nowhere near as good as the first, is quite an entertaining bit of blockbusterism.

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So, The Raven isn’t very good. It takes a randomly selective reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and a few bits of triviata from his life and grafts those onto a by-the-numbers serial killer narrative in which the Poe character, the ostensible lead, is completely superfluous.

[Read more. Spoiler, of course.]

Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s maybe-horror film Cabin in the Woods was a bit impossible to review upon its initial release day, at least for outlets who respected Whedon and co’s wishes to keep the surprise intact for moviegoers. (In fact, my spoiler-free review can be easily distilled down to, “No spoilers. If you like Whedon you’ll like this.”)

But now it’s Monday and those of you who wanted to see it have most likely done so. It’s spoiler time.

[Spoilers for Cabin in the Woods]