Cocaine Bear is directed by the abundantly talented actress Elizabeth Banks, whose previous turns behind the camera include the very successful Pitch Perfect 2 and her 2019 stab at Charlie’s Angels with Kristen Stewart. It’s written by Jimmy Warden, who shares a credit on the very bad Netflix film The Babysitter: Killer Queen, and is loosely (extremely loosely) based on a real incident in which a drug runner dumped a bunch of cocaine out an airplane and then parachuted after it. For reasons probably less dopey than what’s seen in Cocaine Bear, he failed to open his chute and died. The drugs landed in Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest, where a bear found it, ate it, and also died.

The film does not stick too closely to the facts, trying instead to invent a Fargo-esque carnival of dumbass criminals, cops, and civilians all tangling with a ferocious bear whacked out on coke. There are some aspects that really work. One thing to admire throughout is how the picture leans into the scuzz. Right from the beginning there are little kids (Brooklyn Prince, from The Florida Project, and the extremely amusing Christian Convery) with potty mouths who intentionally and happily swallow some of the cocaine. In a world where comedy is so bland and safe, it’s good and right to be reminded that some movies—especially movies called Cocaine Bear—don’t really care if they offend. [Jordan Hoffman]

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At a mere 130 minutes, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 is the shortest of the eight films in the Harry Potter series. But for better and worse, it never feels like it. Director David Yates (who helmed the previous three installments of the series as well) and screenwriter Steve Kloves (who scripted all the films except Order Of The Phoenix) start the film exactly where Part 1 left off, and with the same moody, somber, unrushed tone. But what dragged endlessly in Part 1 simply seems appropriate here, as the story gently reabsorbs viewers before taking off. Then Yates and Kloves ramp the action up to manic levels—even including two cartoonishly brash sequences at the Gringotts bank that hearken back to Chris Columbus’ two Potter films—and find ways to draw out the final battle, extending it beyond J.K. Rowling’s original novel. [Tasha Robinson]

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The first Hunger Games movie came out in the spring of 2012, just before the summer of The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises. It grossed more than $400 million in North America—just slightly less than the Batman movie and way more than the final Twilight film, which came out later that year. The Hunger Games wasn’t Battle Royale. Pleasantville director Gary Ross couldn’t film grisly scenes of children murdering each other and still get the requisite potential-blockbuster PG-13 rating, so he resorted to choppy editing and Bourne-style shaky-cam whenever it was time for kids to start dying. It was messy. But Ross’ adaptation still effectively communicated the idea of an entire society set up to watch poor kids kill each other for the entertainment of the ruling class. The movie wasn’t as bracing as it needed to be, but it was still as bracing as a mass-market early-’00s blockbuster could be. [Tom Breihan]

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Whannell’s The Invisible Man is a sleek upgrade of his past horror work—and, for that matter, of Upgrade, the fun genre exercise he concocted a couple of years ago. As bloodier mayhem ramps up, the scares feel less jumpy and cheap than in an Insidious sequel; the cinematography by Stefan Duscio and musical score by Benjamin Wallfisch are polished to a particularly unnerving gleam to match Adrian’s glassy, shadowy compound. That said, the smooth surfaces don’t quite reach the edges of the film, where some of the supporting characters have a B-movie roughness in both their writing and performance. The Invisible Man is striking and tense, but not exactly rich; even some of the warmer characters like James and Sydney are mostly just peril fodder.

Moss, though, classes things up considerably. If there’s something a little bit queasy about turning a Universal monster movie into a domestic abuse/stalker thriller in the Sleeping With The Enemy vein, her performance functions as a dose of anti-nausea medicine. As with her less genre-friendly work with Alex Ross Perry, Moss combines skittish vulnerability with mesmerizing steeliness, the former stabilizing into the latter for moments of cornered resourcefulness. Her targets include some additional non-rampaging men who still earn Cecilia’s ire: She memorably describes one as the “jellyfish version” of her hateful ex. Moss also strengthens the notion that this is a monster movie unusually interested in looking past the toxic-male machinations of its famous character and toward the lasting horrors left in his wake. In other words, the stuff that previous movies, and real life, have sometimes tried to turn invisible. [Jesse Hassenger]

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Being a John Wick movie, Parabellum still serves up sequences of terrific action, which Strahelski (working again with cinematographer Dan Laustsen, best known for his work with Guillermo del Toro) continues to direct with aplomb, making the most of Reeves’ physical commitment to the role. Wick remains an artist of the Glock, the leg lock, and the contact shot, stripping the killer cool of philosophically inclined hitmen like Collateral’s Vincent and Le Samouraï’s Jef Costello down to the level of movement. His advantage is reflex, and his reloads are smoother than melted butter; he seems to move without having to think about it. Parabellum makes the comparisons to choreographed dance obvious (see: the aforementioned ballet school), yet in many respects, the violence is ickier and more cartoonish than in either of its predecessors; the body count might be in the triple figures, and it involves a lot of skewered, crushed, and blown-off heads.

But though Parabellum delivers at least a couple of action scenes that rank with the best of the series—a throwing-knife fight in which the combatants keep having to pull blades out of their own arms and shoulders to toss back at each other, and a brawl that might set the record for the most times a character has been thrown through a glass display case—there’s a certain fatigue to its two biggest set pieces, both of which pit Wick and his allies against unending waves of faceless henchmen. Wick is unstoppable. Do the movies know where to stop? [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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In a lot of ways, Jurassic Park marks a truly magical moment in the history of cinematic illusion. Computer-generated images had only just started to appear in big, mainstream films, and often clumsily, as in the psychedelic virtual-reality gimmickry of The Lawnmower Man, or even to enhance the hand-drawn animation in Aladdin. Terminator 2: Judgment Day had made computer imagery seem spectacular, in part by limiting it to brief flashes of screen time and by using it to render something truly alien. But in Jurassic Park, Spielberg uses those computers to illustrate things that every kid in the audience had imagined a million times, transforming them into something tangible.

Not all the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are computer-animated. Spielberg uses animatronics and puppetry whenever possible, and he captures that technology at its absolute apex. Spielberg also hired Phil Tippett, the stop-motion artist who’d animated the ED-209 for RoboCop; when Tippett’s dinosaurs weren’t convincing enough, Spielberg had Tippett choreograph the CGI dinosaurs. (Tippett made the CGI artists take mime classes.) Ultimately, in two hours of Jurassic Park, dinosaurs are only on screen for 14 minutes, and only six of those minutes have CGI dinosaurs. But Spielberg makes those minutes count. [Tom Breihan]

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Though it may not seem so at first glance, Knock At The Cabin is something of a departure from director M. Night Shyamalan’s previous work. Adapting Paul Tremblay’s novel The Cabin At The End Of The World in a screenplay that he co-wrote with Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, Shyamalan is certainly treading familiar thematic ground, most notably visited in 2002’s Signs. But the big revelation here is that, in contrast to 2021’s Old, he has seemingly grown beyond the need to build toward shocking revelations. Knock At The Cabin reaches the credits decidedly untwisted, but that doesn’t keep the film from building horrific tension through a devastating domestic hypothetical.

As seven-year-old Wen (Kristen Cui) catches grasshoppers outside the vacation cabin her dads Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) have rented, she is approached by a large stranger who introduces himself as Leonard (Dave Bautista). Though the soft-spoken man is kind, Wen starts to realize something is wrong when three more strangers (Nikka Amuka-Bird, Abby Quinn, and Rupert Grint) also emerge from the woods, carrying bladed implements clearly designed as weapons. Despite her attempts to warn her parents, the strangers break into the cabin, subduing Eric and Andrew in the process. With a now-captive audience, the clearly remorseful Leonard presents the family with a choice: they must choose one of the three of them as a willing sacrifice, or else a series of plagues will consume humanity. [Leigh Monson]

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From the moment she was revealed, M3GAN was an instant icon for a horror fandom in love with eerily autonomous dolls. With a face planted firmly in the uncanny valley and dance moves so fluid as to be off-putting, it’s no wonder that the cybernetic horror villain became beloved meme fodder months before her film even came out. So how well does M3GAN hold up to the hype? Remarkably well, though folks expecting a film as gonzo as screenwriter Akela Cooper’s previous horror sensation, Malignant, aren’t going to get quite the same left-field intensity this time around.

After her parents die in a car accident, 8-year-old Cady (Violet McGraw) goes to live with her aunt Gemma (Allison Williams). Even though Gemma wants to live up to her late sister’s wishes to act as Cady’s guardian, she’s too bogged down by her job developing prototype robotic toys. However, inspiration strikes when Gemma decides to refit her in-development android M3GAN to act as the perfect companion to the grieving girl. As Cady and M3GAN’s connection grows stronger, M3GAN’s learning algorithm begins to contemplate the nature of death and starts taking its directive to keep Cady safe to murderous extremes. [Leigh Monson]

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For speculative-fiction fans, the least interesting part of any modern science-fiction movie is its final act. The opening of films like Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion tend to be about world-building, about creating a future and establishing its rules. The second act lets the characters explore and make significant decisions. But like Leo Tolstoy’s happy families, science-fiction movie endings tend to all be alike, a big pileup of chases and explosions. The acts are extended in Oblivion, which applies an intriguingly complicated mixture of wonder and workaday tedium to its world-building, then lays on the developments fast and thick in the discovery phase. But it all comes down to blowing things up in the end.

Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough star as a placid couple living in a spectacular, spartan glass-and-steel spire in the post-apocalyptic ruins of New York City. As Cruise establishes in a tediously overstuffed opening monologue, aliens called Scavengers, or “Scavs,” attacked Earth 50 years ago, and the battle to drive them out left Earth ravaged and unlivable. The remnants of humanity are moving to Saturn’s moon Titan, once a series of giant harvesters have turned the oceans into fuel. Cruise, Riseborough, and a handful of sinister gun-bots are the last people pulling guard duty on the planet, protecting the harvesters from the scattered Scavs until their deployment ends in a few weeks, and reporting in to mildly sinister mission controller Melissa Leo. [Tasha Robinson]

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The uncertainty that ran rampant during the first wave of COVID-19 offered plenty of day-to-day horror—a banal trip to the grocery store suddenly felt rife with things to feel afraid of. But in a new thriller from Blumhouse (and written by Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer scribe Kevin Williamson), COVID-19 exposure is a far less fearsome fate than being trapped in quarantine with a mysterious assailant.

Directed by Alone’s John Hyams and co-written by Katelyn Crabb, Sick follows two best friends, Parker (Gideon Adlon) and Miri (Bethlehem Million), travel to a secluded lake house in April 2020 to wait out a quarantine period. Soon enough, a few more friends join the group, hoping to bring some levity to their isolation period. “Quarantine can be fun,” Parker’s love interest DJ (Dylan Sprayberry) opines.

As it turns out, DJ really should have knocked on wood. When a killer silently slips into the home and begins terrorizing the group, the walls of a mansion that once felt enormous start closing in—but hey, at least he’s wearing a mask! [Hattie Lindert]

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In Terrifier, Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) terrorized a small town, targeting several women, including Tara (Jenna Kanell), her sister Vicky (Samantha Scaffidi), and Tara’s friend, Dawn (Catherine Corcoran). He chopped one naked victim in half, mutilated a couple of pizza shop employees and, after putting Vicky through the ringer, ate her face. Writer-producer-director-practical effects wizard Damien Leone never cut away from the gore in his slasher comedy, and Thornton sent chills up people’s spines as the nonspeaking, demented, seemingly unkillable boogeyman. And thus was born a cult favorite film and character (though Leone actually introduced Art, played by a different actor, in a couple of shorts that he later folded into his 2013 horror anthology film, All Hallow’s Eve). [Ian Spelling]

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Cleverly fashioned from the bones of Chris Marker’s 1962 experimental classic La Jetée—a 30-minute science-fiction reverie constructed almost entirely out of still photographs—Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys approaches the past with a similarly intoxicating mix of romanticism and dread. It’s also about a time traveler who goes back to a period before a world-altering tragedy, but The Terminator it ain’t. Changing the obdurate past here isn’t merely difficult but an exercise in futility, the road to madness. To a certain extent, the hero has to take that road—5 billion lives are at stake, after all, even though his mission is to learn about how they were lost, not put a stop to it—but the past is even more resistant to alteration than it is in 11/22/63. (You could call the past a “character” in the King’s book, a beast with claws; in Gilliam’s film, it’s more like a brick wall.) So the film instead is more thoughtful and reflective than its action beats might suggest: It’s about the mysteries of the past and the frequent seductiveness of it, too, from unexpected new passions to the simple pleasures of fresh air and 20th-century music. [Scott Tobias]

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