Black Mass Rising 

In The Women and the Murderer, directors Mona Achache and Patricia Tourancheau center women—the very demographic true crime is designed to appeal to.

For those tranquil houses with white fences, what is happening behind every closed door?

It’s no wonder Peele won an academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. His script is layered with perspective and subtlety. Through a terrific vision, Peele creates the gift that keeps on giving. The clues and symbolic representations are aplenty, and as each viewing passes, you are destined to find something new. That’s a mark of great cinema.

Michael Shanks’ Together is a queasy, hilarious, and surprisingly heartfelt body-horror trip that fuses love and terror in the most literal sense. Starring real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie, this midnight gem twists Plato’s soulmate myth into a gory, darkly funny tale of codependency, cults, and chainsaws — equal parts romance and nightmare.

Mark Anthony Green was unable to connect all of the pieces in his debut feature film, leaving Opus as a middling entry in an already oversaturated genre.

Its predictability shouldn’t distract from the enjoyment that the pure cinematic imagination behind the camera elicits. It is a movie of crises both moral and mortal, oozing with CGI, and thoroughly enjoyable.