Flat characters cipher through a thinly plotted array of science fiction concepts which are new enough to the non-reading public to make the movie palatable on novelty alone. Since novelty may be the only thing that counts in what is bracketed as SciFi — look at Interstellar being undeservedly panned — a movie whose emotional range begins and ends with a side plot of a dying child now has a shot at the Academy Award. Also, and it feels wrong to even have to write this, there are other ways to elicit emotion in your audience than killing off children, dear movie-makers of 2016.

Respect where it is due: passing of Hawkeye as a plausible physicist — by having him not talk about physics the entire movie, but still — and floating the idea of world unification in anno domini 2017 are admirable feats. Not enough to offset the hours wasted on walking through a hallway and 80s-style montages, though.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve, 2016

A dour movie about dour people living dour lives in a dour New England town. The camera is static and so are our hero’s faces. Long periods of voyeuristic shots of everyday life are punctuated by rare expressions of minimal emotion. Answers to all our questions are quickly revealed and dramatic tension never builds up.

That kind of direction is fine if you are talking about a man’s mid-life crisis, but disturbing when your movie involves three children burning to death. Is seeing a couple of good acting performances worth subjecting yourself to emotional trauma that doesn’t result in a meaningful message (and anything on stoicism of the Irish can hardly count if the Simpsons have already done it)?

Medical things of note: congestive heart failure is a diagnosis as broad as lower back pain (i.e. not a real diagnosis at all); would anyone not work it up further, never mind that it is in an otherwise healthy 40-something; and do they not have ICDs in Manchester, MA? Coach should not have died, least of all because without his death we wouldn’t have had this movie.

Directed by Kenneth Lonergan, 2016

Although a movie that involves traveling through time, Looper is hardly a time-travel movie. Bruce Willis says as much when he brushes off any attempts to discuss the mechanics, implications, paradoxes, etc. for reasons of expediency. So, Primer, Predestination, or even Back to the Future II this ain’t. Groundhog Day is more like it, only with shotguns, telekinesis, and a far messier ending.

That’s unfortunate for me, since I prefer pure time-travel movies; and there isn’t enough — or any, really — Bill Murray in Looper to justify comparing it to that other category. JGL spends too much time pretending to be Willis, who in turn phones it in. Elevator/hallway action scenes are good, but don’t come close to the peak of the genre (or even the western take, which was fundamentally a feature-length interpretation of that one scene from Oldboy).

There is, in fact, nothing new to see here, and the movie feels as flat as the Kansas plain it is set in. The one interesting thing about it is that, in what is the complete opposite of the director’s previous movie, Looper might be better appreciated in a vacuum.

Directed by Rian Johnson, 2012

Stylized but not psychedelic, quirky but not disturbing, borrowed liberally from The Prisoner of Azkaban but with good effect. It’s one of Tim Burton’s better Tim Burton movies.

Yes, yes, the plot has holes, and some of the characters’ motivations are… peculiar (har har). The more important thing is this: after seeing it, Dora wanted to fly.

Directed by Tim Burton, 2016

The title fools you into thinking the movie’s central conflict is between youth and old age. Turns out, the generation gap is only a setup for the real fight — that of authentic versus fake. It culminates with (old, authentic) Ben Stiller neurotically rollerblading into Lincoln Center, hoping for a catharsis after he reveals to his documentary film-making giant of a father-in-law that (young, fake) Kylo Ren based parts of his own documentary on alt-facts.

“Things change”, replies Mr. Breitbart, minutes after giving a speech on honesty in filmmaking. “Different things matter now.”

A sadly prescient moment in a sadly prescient movie.

Directed by Noah Baumbach, 2014

Keira Knightly pulls off the sweater-wearing, guitar-wielding singer-songwriter nicely. Adam Levin doesn’t pull off acting — good thing none was needed for his cipher of a character. Kathleen Keener and Mark Ruffalo reprise their roles from every other movie they made.

Fluffy, predictable, forgettable.

Directed by John Carney, 2013

The Little Miss Sunshine of the twenty-teens is a wet dream for a certain kind of liberal: a family that is smart, good-looking, self-reliant, and self-aware; in which the eight-year-old knows both the content and the significance of the Bill of Rights, and the eighteen-year-old has his pick of Ivy League schools but chooses to go to Namibia; in which a Lolita-reading teenager unironically asks what is Coca-Cola, and gets poison water as an answer; in which the fireside homeschool-assigned reading session (Guns, Germs, and Steel; Brothers Karamazov; The Fabric of the Cosmos) breaks for a family drum circle.

Sadly, mom kills herself while hospitalized for depression far away in New Mexico, a road trip ensues, thoughts, feelings, and inadequacies of their lifestyle are exposed. The setup is better than the second act, during which 1) the captain of the freshly single-parent household is predictably un-fantastic, and 2) the middle-crassness of his extended family is blown out of all proportion. The payoff is better — if nothing else, it will make its New Yorker-reading audience think.

Vigo Mortensen was, apparently, destined to be in this movie. The question is: wouldn’t it have been better — and truer to its message — as a book?

Directed by Matt Ross, 2016

The difference between loving homage and gross parody can be subtle, and what the movie ends up being usually depends on whether the author(s) actually like the genre they are spoofing. It is an easy guess, for example, that Edgar Wright likes zombie apocalypses and buddy cop movies, or that Joss Whedon is into horror films.

The people who made this thing must truly hate romantic comedies. It doesn’t wink at rom-com tropes — it blows them out of all proportion, the acting is even cheesier, camera work blander. I could pick out clips for these, but its’s the entire movie. Moreover, the comedies it references are dated, going with When Harry Met Sally (1989), You’ve Got Mail (1998), and Notting Hill (1999) over the more recent and even more ridiculous Love Actually interconnected plot wannabes. And the jokes are just too obvious.

Making fun of something that is easy to make fun of is easy. Making a good movie that is also a parody is hard. They Came Together (ha ha) is a decent parody.

Directed by David Wain, 2014

A haunted house movie where the house has a morgue in the basement (America is weird) and the ghost is lying on a stainless steel cart, all peaceful and symmetrical until a father-son team of coroners begins slicing into her. Roose Bolton is again to blame, in a way, but has more sense at the end of this one while leaving room for a sequel (The Autopsy 2: Richmond Horror, a working title that I just made up, so you can stop googling it).

It’s a nice—if short—ride that would be much scarier for those who never attended an autopsy, but between the pacing, the acting, and the near-absence of jump scares, it’s the best horror movie I’ve seen since It follows. It gets extra points for being truer to the genre—no hipster soundtracks here.

And no, you can’t put a think chunk of freshly brain under a microscope and see cells, much less figure out if a neuron is alive just by looking at it for 1.5 seconds. Brian Cox can sell anything, though.

Directed by André Øvredal, 2016

Twenty-somethings here are playing SoCal high-schoolers who talk like they are on the set of The Maltese Falcon; but it’s not Bugsy Malone with a slightly older cast, and it’s not sort-of-like film noir, either. This is a film noir, complete with a Gordian knot of a plot, gritty textures half-concealed in darkness, and telegraphed archetypes (the loner, the vamp, the femme fatale).

The teenagers seem parentless—save for a comic relief scene or two featuring the mom of our archetypal kingpin serving the boys cookies and OJ—and the few other adults in the world treat them as equals. Clearly a fantasy, but you will have suspended your disbelief long before then.

It fares well when compared to the competition—but then, most of it had been made in the 1940s, so I wouldn’t call it a fair fight.

Directed by Rian Johnson, 2005