Fountain 

The horror franchise that had moviegoers watching behind their fingers but on the edge of their seats. The Conjuring quartet released its final installment this year, and it did not disappoint.

The final installment in the rebooted X-Men franchise.

When long-time couple Jenny and Nate break up so Jenny can pursue her journalism career, Jenny leans on her two best friends for one last epic night in the city. 

The new biopic 'Elvis' highlights the beginning and end of the career of this rock and roll legend. The audience is taken on this journey knowing the tragic ending but not so much about what led him there. A large topic of discussion is the influences on Elvis that made him who he was as a singer, musician, and performer, which were blues, gospel, and country. Many of the songs that rose him to fame were songs by Black artists he heard growing up in primarily Black settings.

The Gates, John Burr’s new thriller film, is a disturbingly realistic portrayal of three Black twenty-somethings - Derek (Mason Gooding), Kevin (Algee Smith), and Tyon (Keith Powers), as they accidentally take a wrong turn into a gated community that’s more like a modern-day sundown town. The three friends witness a variety of crimes in their new surroundings, including an attempted homicide and an attempted rape. As they attempt to alert the authorities and do the right thing, they are thwarted at every turn by the worst horror stories of American conservatism - racist white suburbanites, reckless gun violence, corrupt police, religious mania, and a megalomaniacal pastor. 

The problem isn’t that it’s bad. It's good. But it fails to stand out from a crowd of similar films.