The January Canon: 20 good movies released during Hollywood’s worst dump month

We've sorted through the rubble to find a few January gems worth your time

By AV Club Staff, A.A. Dowd, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Alex McLevy, Clayton Purdom, Gwen Ihnat, Jesse Hassenger | January 30, 2018 | 6:00pm

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The January Canon: 20 good movies released during Hollywood’s worst dump month

M3GAN (Universal Pictures), Taken 3 (20th Century Studios), Paddington 2 (Warner Bros.), Cloverfield (Paramount Pictures) Graphic: The A.V. Club

Historically and annually speaking, January is a bad month for Hollywood movies. It’s a “dump month,” that time of year when the major studios offload the projects in which they have no faith. Sandwiched between the holidays and the Super Bowl, these four weeks are generally treated like a write-off season, as bad comedies, bad action flicks, and bad horror movies are slipped quietly into theaters to fulfill contractual release obligations, under the assumption that they’ll basically be ignored in favor of December’s holdover hits or expanding Oscar hopefuls. There are, of course, exceptions. Every once in a while, a Hollywood studio will drop something genuinely good onto the winter wasteland, either hoping to capitalize on the dearth of new competition or failing to recognize a special movie when they have it. These are the diamonds in the rough, the silver linings in the New Year clouds, the true January gems.

Hollywood has always reserved its winners for every season but winter, but the practice of getting the worst stuff out of the way early arguably didn’t go from trend to tradition until the early 1980s. So we’ve culled the best movies released before February over the last four decades and listed them in chronological order. To qualify for inclusion, a movie had to open wide (on more than 600 screens) in January. That means leaving out Silence Of The Lambs, for instance, because it only got a limited release in January of 1991, before expanding into wide release the following month. Also missing from the list below are titles singled out in The A.V. Club’s previous rundown of “salvageable flops” from January and February, so consider Matinee, Cabin Boy, The Pledge, and Haywire additions to what we’re affectionately calling The January Canon.

(January 14, 1981)

David Cronenberg, the cerebral Canadian prince of body horror, took a circuitous route into the mainstream. He started his career with a couple of sci-fi art films, moved into the genre grindhouse, and finally conjoined the two (in unnerving Cronenberg style) in the post-modernist —fittingly, a film about mind-altering transmissions coded inside violent, sadistic trash. Rushed into production without a finished script so the producers could claim it as a tax write-off, 1981’s Scanners would be his last real B-movie—a pulp sci-fi horror film in which telekinetic rivals try to (literally) blow each other’s minds. Although the ambiguous, indifferent mystery plotting in many ways presages Videodrome, the film’s true claim to fame is the vein-bulging, blood-boiling, head-popping special effects. A memorable transitional film for Cronenberg, Scanners hit theaters at a transitional moment in North American moviegoing. As the rise of the blockbusters and studio horror and sci-fi films spelled the end of the drive-in season, it also solidified the status of January (already considered an off month) as Hollywood’s dumping ground. But even then, there was gold in the dross. Released in mid-January, the low-budget Scanners became a modest commercial hit, setting Cronenberg on a path that led to , , and beyond. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

Black Moon Rising (January 10, 1986)

“Very much a January movie,” wrote New York Times critic Vincent Canby in his of this deeply silly, self-aware super-car caper. By the mid-1980s, the month of January looked a lot like it does today, filled with muttlike low-budget programmers and arthouse and foreign-language release counter-programming, give or take the occasional Woody Allen film. Co-written by John Carpenter and directed by Harley Cokliss (), a minor specialist in movies about ugly-ass futuristic automobiles, Black Moon Rising stars a young Tommy Lee Jones as a wisecracking burglar trying to recover a MacGuffin computer tape that he stashed inside of a water-powered prototype vehicle that’s been stolen by a car thief (Linda Hamilton). Even more so than Carpenter’s other writing projects (the giallo-esque Eyes Of Laura Mars, which co-starred Jones; the TV Westerns El Diablo and Blood River), the movie is an exercise in pure genre mechanics. Cokliss’ direction isn’t as stylized as the material, but the contorting outrageousness of the plot is hard to resist; the combination of nonsense and narrative geometry is nigh abstract. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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(January 31, 1986)

What’s rarer than a good Hollywood comedy in January? How about a good Hollywood remake of a classic foreign comedy? With Down And Out In Beverly Hills, writer-director Paul Mazursky updated a French stage play, previously adapted by Jean Renoir as 1932’s Boudu Saved From Drowning, for the go-go 1980s, with Richard Dreyfuss as the bourgeois Los Angeles family man who rescues a suicidal hobo (Nick Nolte) from his backyard swimming pool, only to watch in horror as the homeless interloper seduces his wife, daughter, and maid. Far from dumbing down the source material, Down And Out In Beverly Hills gives it sharper edges, amplifying the phony altruism of Dreyfuss’ rich protagonist and making Nolte’s vagrant less of a boorish tramp than a sociopathic social chameleon, surviving by virtue of his ability to play whatever role his potential benefactors might desire. Broad and witty, the film ended up turning enough profit to inspire a sitcom spinoff, which holds the very January-worthy distinction of being the first show ever canceled by Fox. [A.A. Dowd]

(January 19, 1990)

Tremors Original Trailer (Ron Underwood, 1990)

When Tremors first came out back in 1990 no one really knew what to make of it. It was such a huge disappointment at the box office that Kevin Bacon thought his career might never recover. But you already know how this story ends. As more and more people, from film scholars to casual horror fans, started to re-evaluate the film on its own terms it became a cult favorite. It eventually spawned a whole franchise that currently includes five sequels, a prequel, and a television series. The appeal is obvious when you go back and watch the original now. Based on an idea screenwriters Brent Maddock and S. S. Wilson had for a monster movie tribute about “land sharks,” Tremors combines humor and thrills against a dusty, sundrenched Southwestern backdrop. The buildup and release of tension is impeccably paced, and the town of Perfection feels like a real place populated by interesting characters, like the gun-toting Gummers played by Michael Gross and Reba McEntire. Bacon and his on-screen brother Fred Ward both understood the assignment. This is a film that knows exactly what it is, and admirably never tries to be anything else. [Cindy White]

From Dusk Till Dawn (January 19, 1996)

From Dusk Till Dawn | ‘To Your Family’ (HD) - George Clooney, Quentin Tarantino | MIRAMAX

Rodriguez was not the star attraction of From Dusk Till Dawn upon its January 1996 release. The movie was received as a zenith of middle-to-bottom-drawer Quentin Tarantino projects that tried to capitalize on the success of Pulp Fiction without actually following it up directly. It’s got everything: Two guys pointing their guns at the camera; criminals using familiar Tarantino phrases (“Be cool”); a shot positioned from the inside of a trunk. Perhaps most importantly, it has Tarantino casting himself in a prominent role that’s half self-deprecating (he plays a loathsome rapist and murderer who gets punched out by George Clooney), half self-glorifying (he still gets to shoot people and have Salma Hayek stick her foot in his mouth). The movie comes by its cheap-knockoff roots honestly: The script was Tarantino’s first paid assignment (commissioned to flesh out an idea from producer and effects whiz Robert Kurtzman), and became one of several collaborations with his buddy and fellow grindhouse enthusiast Rodriguez, who agreed to direct. The result is a stranger and more direct hybridization of the two filmmakers’ styles, which have more often been juxtaposed in anthology-style projects like Four Rooms and Grindhouse. If it has any message, it’s a genre-appropriate one that dismisses the romance and tragedy often ascribed to vampires: Sometimes the real triumph is just making it through the night. [Jesse Hassenger]

(January 26, 1996)

Another story from the perpetual motion machine of sci-fi adaptations, Philip K. Dick, Screamers is a grimy and blood-soaked variant on many of the author’s usual themes. War, illusion, and machines turning on their creators all get a workout in this tale of a group of soldiers on a distant and ravaged planet where the balance of a war has been tipped by “screamers”: self-replicating and artificially intelligent machines that hunt and kill soldiers on one side of the battle. When that side offers a truce, a core of exhausted opposing soldiers led by Peter Weller’s commanding officer set off across the dangerous terrain to meet and secure the peace. What they don’t yet realize is that the screamers have evolved and can now disguise themselves far better than anyone realized. The claustrophobic and harsh atmosphere is well-served by Christian Duguay’s steamroller direction (and Alien writer Dan O’Bannon’s script), plunging viewers into the midst of a war-torn scenario and letting everything slowly, thrillingly fall apart. [Alex McLevy]

(January 24, 1997)

Nearly a decade after A Fish Called Wanda, its half Monty Python, half American farce team of John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, and Michael Palin reunited for a non-sequel companion film. Fierce Creatures is best known today (to the extent that it’s known at all) as a footnote to the earlier comedic masterwork, and no, it’s not nearly as hilarious or brilliantly made as Wanda. But it does work as a warmer flip side to its merciless predecessor, and as evidence that time (and a baggier screenplay) could not diminish the central quartet’s chemistry. Cleese again plays an uptight Brit besotted with another smart, scheming woman (Curtis) and bedeviled by another brash American jackass (Kline, also playing his character’s imitation-Rupert Murdoch father), this time attempting to save a modest zoo. While Wanda generated sparks from a U.S./U.K. culture clash, Creatures is a homier and more English affair. But its satire of corporate consolidation still has some zing over 20 years later. [Jesse Hassenger]

(January 30, 1998)

Reimaginings of Sherlock Holmes are practically network filler these days, but one of the smartest contemporary (and unofficial) riffs on the character is Jake Kasdan’s little-seen Zero Effect, whose initially slept-on January release probably helped turn it into a cult classic. Frequent Baxter and one-time president Bill Pullman gets a showcase role as detective Daryl Zero, a brilliant shut-in who solves cases with minimal interpersonal contact. His Watson is Steve Arlo (Ben Stiller), introduced in a sequence that alternates his hyping of Zero’s abilities to a potential client (“He has a deeply nuanced and thoroughly functional understanding of human behavior”) with his complaints about his boss in a bar (on Zero’s amateur songwriting: “His metaphors are thin, his imagery is cliched”). That’s the movie in a nutshell: an exacting little mystery with some very funny oddball comedy, perfectly yoked together by Zero’s fascination with the inscrutable-to-him Gloria (Kim Dickens from ). Kasdan made plenty of likable comedies since, but none with Zero’s sneaky originality and wit. [Jesse Hassenger]

(January 18, 2008)

The J.J. Abrams school of tantalizingly vague movie marketing began in earnest with Cloverfield, a project so shrouded in secrecy that its first teaser didn’t even reveal the title. The strategy paid off nicely, as months of online buzz, amateur detective work, and media speculation (was it a stealth Godzilla reboot? A live-action Voltron?) helped a modestly priced monster movie triple its budget—and in January, no less. Thankfully, the film itself was pretty good, too. Directed by Matt Reeves, who would later take over the Planet Of The Apes series, and written by ’s Drew Goddard, Cloverfield squeezes all the city-destroying mayhem of a classic kaiju flick into the viewfinder of a handheld video camera, offering an intimate, ground-level vantage on the destruction of New York City. And while not especially credible as found footage (T.J. Miller’s wisecracking camera-bro character has the mad skills of Emmanuel Lubezki), the film also works as a dark mumblecore parody about self-involved Tri State hipsters getting a skyscraper-sized priorities check. They need exactly what Cloverfield provided the giant-reptile genre: a change in perspective. [A.A. Dowd]

Taken (January 30, 2009)

Taken (2008) - Official Trailer

“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.” With that one, iconic speech, Liam Neeson completely redefined his entire career. Neeson had dabbled in many genres before Taken, but at that point he was still best known for dramas like Michael Collins, Kinsey, and Schindler’s List. The unexpected success of Taken, however, suddenly made him a bankable action star. Even Neeson was surprised. It’s not a particularly good film, even by the forgiving standards of the action genre, but it is a satisfying one. Director Pierre Morel, a former cinematographer who had worked closely with Luc Besson, follows Neeson’s character around Paris with an unsteady camera as he punches bad guys of vague Eastern European descent in the throat to save his kidnapped daughter. The film didn’t just open up new opportunities for Neeson, who would go on to play different versions of this character in several subsequent films and two direct sequels (the second of which also premiered in January), it practically created an entire subgenre of its own. [Cindy White]

(January 8, 2010)

As was recently , the genre films of Ethan Hawke often succeed through sheer dint of the actor’s commitment to the material. Hawke’s unexpected latter-day career as one of the masters of the American B-movie (horror, sci-fi, supernatural, action, you name it) was unofficially launched with this deft yet gonzo potboiler, in which a world run by vampires is rapidly running out of human blood. That high-concept blend of ecological apocalypse narrative and horror tropes sounds ludicrous but works thanks in large part to Hawke’s wide-eyed commitment to playing a middle-manager type in way over his head when the bullets start flying. Much like its corporate bloodsuckers, Daybreakers eventually bleeds its various ideas dry, though not before exploring issues of class resentment, scarce resource allocation, and the perpetual greed of the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, just with the added benefit of a bunch of vampires running around causing mayhem and gore. [Alex McLevy]

(January 29, 2010)

EDGE OF DARKNESS | Official Australian Trailer

Mel Gibson’s first comeback attempt cast the star as a Bahston-accented cop trying to uncover the shadowy military-industrial conspiracy that killed his daughter. Although is more conventional than the mystically paranoid 1985 British miniseries on which it’s based, we feel that The A.V. Club went too hard on the movie in our original review; directed with typical cold-blooded determination by Martin Campbell (), who also helmed all six episodes of the original series, it’s bleak in outlook and punctuation, even by the standards of the genre. While nothing-left-to-lose revenge thrillers are often “about” death, the suddenness with which Campbell handles the film’s violence is unsettling—which actually gives its political pessimism some bite. That, and the man knows how to direct a good hand-to-hand fight. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

(January 27, 2012)

: The Grey is a four-star movie. Joe Carnahan’s surprisingly meditative survival thriller didn’t make bank, maybe because its R rating kept away some of the target audience for a movie about Liam Neeson battling wolves. But it comes closer to art than most January genre offerings and much closer than any of Neeson’s other aging-asskicker star vehicles. His character, whose “particular set of skills” this time includes a suicidal acceptance of his own mortality, is a bereaved huntsman leading the survivors of a plane crash through the frosty Alaskan wilderness, a pack of wild canines in hot pursuit. Hawksian in its macho poignancy, Herzogian in its pitting of human will against harsh natural elements, The Grey subverts multiplex conventions at every turn, offering something much more fatalistic than its star, premise, and release date might suggest. Even the whole Neeson-puts-glass-between-his-knuckles-to-punch-a-wolf part doesn’t go how you think it will. [A.A. Dowd]

(January 18, 2013)

January is a lucrative month for horror, because who doesn’t feel a little homicidal after the holidays? Unfortunately, the almost-foolproof success of scare fare during this timeframe has severely lowered the bar, making the first month of the year a safe haven for cheaply, indifferently made crap like and . Helmed by Argentine writer-director Andy Muschietti and produced by Guillermo Del Toro, Mama is a blessed exception: an effective potboiler about a pair of orphans rescued by their uncle (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his girlfriend (Jessica Chastain) from the forest cabin where they were abandoned. What neither adult knows is that the girls were looked after by a phantom guardian—a spectral parental figure that’s followed them out of the boonies and into their new home. Plot-wise, Mama is no great shakes. But the monster effects are inventive, the set pieces are inspired (one involving is especially good), and Chastain brings a real conviction to a stock horror-heroine role. The film’s success, critical and commercial, certainly paid off for Muschietti: His next project would become the . [A.A. Dowd]

(January 16, 2015)

Blackhat can feel like “minor” Michael Mann, fodder only for those devotees who would follow him down any lurid, neon alleyway. But for those who do, it’s a feast of sensory thrills: the violent rattle of assault rifles in a cement quarry; moody late-night hookups between doomed loners; men and women in immaculate suits tersely discussing the play of data and money in a global economy. Follow the pulpy plot, if you care to—Chris Hemsworth plays a hacker pulled out of prison to trace down some rogue software—or just follow Mann’s stylistic impulses, which trace his familiar skylines and synth lines down new digital rabbit holes. The result is one of our premiere genre stylists operating on his weirdest and most singular wavelength. There’s nothing minor about it at all, in that respect. [Clayton Purdom]

(January 20, 2017)

Even before dropping its final, franchise-establishing surprise, last year’s Split felt like a callback to M. Night Shyamalan’s heyday—the kind of wildly entertaining thriller that once positioned him as a 21st-century Hitchcock disciple, not a walking punchline whose name above a title inspires groans from the peanut gallery. Running with the high-concept hooey of its premise, which pits three kidnapped teenagers against the 23 distinct personalities of their captor (James McAvoy, in the tour-de-force performance(s) of his career), Split is essentially Shyamalan’s Psycho: a low-budget, career-rejuvenating pulp thriller that mines cruel, visually imaginative shocks from an outlandish depiction of dissociative identity disorder. (In this case, the expository psychiatrist character gets a whole subplot, not just one load-bearing scene.) But it’s also just pure Shyamalan, reviving the values of his , including an evocative use of color, a reliance on a strong cast, and a closing twist that’s so mind-blowing it threatens to overshadow the rest of the gripping horror movie it punctuates. [A.A. Dowd]

(January 12, 2018)

The most recent collaboration between star might also be the best one yet. Much in the vein of the pair’s previous , The Commuter is a delightfully (and unabashedly) flashy B-movie dressed up in sly political allegory. Collet-Serra has mastered the art of the twisty, faux-Hitchcockian pressure-cooker thriller, and delivers maximum crowd-pleasing tension as both Neeson and the camera pace frantically up and down the aisles of a packed rush hour train throughout this exercise in all-is-not-what-it-seems mystery. Neeson’s former cop is an insurance agent who’s just been laid off, and as he gathers the nerves to go home and tell his wife, a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga) sits down opposite him, and offers a deal: $25,000 to simply go look for a bag in a bathroom, and then $75,000 to figure out who doesn’t belong on the train. The ending may quite literally go off the rails, but for more than an hour, this satisfying film delivers shades of De Palma, Fincher, Spielberg, and more—any stylistic flourish to push the daffy intensity of the story further along. There are inevitable bumps along the way, but it’s one hell of a ride. [Alex McLevy]

(January 16, 2015) and (January 12, 2018)

Releasing the Paddington movies in January is a brilliant bit of off-market promotion: Sending these charming, family-friendly movies out after the busy holiday season had passed—but with kids still climbing the walls and parents ready to toss them into the nearest snowdrift—practically insured that the series would be a hit (though the sequel isn’t quite keeping up with its predecessor, in terms of box-office). The Paddington movies are sweet but not sugary, whimsical but not foolish: The cozy, colorful domestic splendor of the bear’s English world is a wonderful place to hang out in the dead of winter, whether he’s riding a bathtub down a stairway or turning a bleak prison into a pastel-hued bakery. The villains add necessary sharpness and wit, with Nicole Kidman as a twisted taxidermist and Hugh Grant doing his best work in years as a stage diva at odds with the marmalade-loving bear. Even better, Paddington offers a non-cloying message about the importance of kindness: a valuable year-launching reminder for kids and adults alike. [Gwen Ihnat]