Overview: When tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) meets cocktail waitress Frida (Naomi Ackie) at his fundraising gala, sparks fly. He invites her to join him and his friends on a dream vacation on his private island. It’s paradise. Wild nights blend into sun soaked days and everyone’s having a great time.

No one wants this trip to end, but as strange things start to happen, Frida begins to question her reality. There is something wrong with this place. She’ll have to uncover the truth if she wants to make it out of this party alive.

Verdict: “I forgot to remember to forget,” sang Elvis Presley in 1955, and similar mental gymnastics are required to figure out what’s actually happening — or has been happening — in this upscale twisty-turny horror thriller. But although it raises serious and intriguing questions about hot-button issues and features a top-notch cast that couldn’t possibly be bettered, Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut winds up leaving us to ponder more moral conundrums than it can properly answer in the format of high-end genre film.

The premise is a very good and timely one (think of a female-fronted Get Out), but the script doesn’t exactly follow suit, taking the well-trodden M. Night Shyamalan route to its big reveal.

One of its plus points is the casting of the excellent Naomi Ackie as Frida, a stoic but dispirited gig-economy hospitality worker (is there any other kind?) who spends her evenings doom-scrolling on her mobile and wondering how to make the rent. Her gloom lifts somewhat at the news that millionaire tech bro Slater King (Channing Tatum) is going to be at one of her events, to the extent that she is warned not to be as forward with the talent as she has been in the past.

Frida is not perturbed, even though she has seen his Reels confession on Instagram, apologizing for his “regrettable behavior”. What this ever actually entailed will be left to the viewer’s imagination, but we do learn that King has decided to step down as CEO and spend time thinking about what he did while serving penance on his private luxury island. “I have chickens,” he offers as proof.

Frida has a soft spot for Slate, but she also seems to be a magnet for men with fragile egos, as her needle-sharp best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) tries to tell her: “You’re not a human phone charger,” she snaps. “Have some self-respect.” Both women, however, get giddy in the company of Slater King, and matters accelerate when Frida snaps a high heel, bringing her to his attention.

There’s a cute Cinderella moment, and suddenly the pair are deep in conversation, even after the event has obviously ended. King has to return to his island paradise, but at the last minute he circles back to Frida. “Do you guys wanna come?”

This question is perhaps the essence of Blink Twice; that spur-of-the-moment decision that can go any which way. Being broke, and flattered, they do wanna go, and their introduction to the high life — along with three other similarly random women plucked to balance out King’s inner circle of men — is more than they could have imagined.

Time stops. Every day is a holiday, with endless refills of champagne, gourmet dinners, and psychedelic drugs on tap. Jess is cautious. “Don’t you think it’s weird?” she wonders. “I don’t think it’s weird,” says Frida. “I think it’s… rich.” Soon, however, the novelty wears off, and when Jess disappears, Frida wakes up to danger she might have put herself in.

Overview: While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonizers come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe.

Verdict: The seventh entry in the Alien franchise is directed by Fede Alvarez (“Don’t Breathe”/”Evil Dead”) as a horror story in outer space. Though competently made, it’s not offering anything new in the alien world– preferring to play it safe.

But to its credit is a throwback to the great original Alien (1979) and the outstanding second film. Its CGIs are marvelous, even if it’s dialogue is only serviceable and its supporting characters are only thinly developed. Alvarez co-writes the sci-fi thriller with Rodo Sayagues Mendez as if stuck in the past and not willing to get unstuck.

The exploited space colonist, the 20-something Rain (Cailee Spaeny), lives on an inhospitable corporate owned mining colony planet with no sunlight, with her friendly android “special needs” bad pun telling brother Andy (David Jonsson).

Her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) and his sister Kay (Isabela Merced) are escaping from this corporate prison with the rebel space colonists Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and his girlfriend pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu), to a more livable and brighter planet, Yvaga, and invite her to take with them the year-long flight.

But before taking off, they must fly to an abandoned space station that has drifted above their planet to steal its hypersleep chambers, needed to secure the flight to Yvaga. But they are confronted by the sinister Xenomorph aliens and creatures called facehuggers, as things turn into a nightmare. In a powerful scene, with jump scares, the group is chased through the space station’s corridors by a bunch of leaping facehuggers (creepy creatures we have seen before in other sequels).

Overview: Bill Skarsgård takes on the iconic role of THE CROW in this modern reimagining of the original graphic novel by James O’Barr. Soulmates Eric (Skarsgård) and Shelly (FKA twigs) are brutally murdered when the demons of her dark past catch up with them.

Given the chance to save his true love by sacrificing himself, Eric sets out to seek merciless revenge on their killers, traversing the worlds of the living and the dead to put the wrong things right.

Verdict: “Do you think angsty teens will build little shrines to us?” Shelly (FKA Twigs) asks her fellow troubled-lover-on-the-run Eric (Bill Skarsgård) – which is an appropriate question, verging on too meta, to ask during a long-developed, sparsely attended remake of The Crow. That’s exactly what angsty teens did to the first adaptation of James O’Barr’s goth comic book from 1994, not least because of the real-life tragedy at its center.

The on-set death of star Brandon Lee, days before shooting concluded, made his performance doubly haunting, anchoring a movie that, in some ways, probably shouldn’t have existed. Somehow, we got to see it anyway – and ghoulish as it is, The Crow makes clear why Lee’s family signed off on that unveiling.

He’s an unforgettable presence: physically beguiling, scary, sad, funny. He earned those shrines from the angsty teens, whether goth kids in love with the makeup, theater kids digging the performative strangeness, or aggro kids digging the righteous violence.

Lee also helped assure that future versions of The Crow would seem like they shouldn’t exist either, for the exact opposite reason: Without Lee, and without the 1994 film’s immersive urban-decay visuals, any retelling would feel disposable. (In fact, even with one of those elements intact – returning production designer Alex McDowell created a different but similarly vivid world for The Crow: City of Angels – it felt like a dicey proposition).

The 30-years-later 2024 version of The Crow isn’t precisely an exception. As untrustworthy as fanbases can be, it wouldn’t be closeminded to dismiss this remake out of hand; the same was true of director Rupert Sanders’ last foray into unassailable youth-culture classics, his 2017 remake of Ghost in the Shell. The man must be a glutton for a particular brand of internet-era punishment.

Yet like his Shell remake, the Sanders Crow makes something oddly compelling out of a bad idea. The basic story remains the same: Eric and Shelly’s youthful passion is cut horrifically short by murder (though no sexual violence component this time around), and an initially befuddled Eric returns from the dead, imbued with physical invincibility and guided (vaguely) by a crow, eventually seeking revenge against his – and, especially, Shelly’s – killers.

But while the 1994 film jumped right into Eric’s year-later return, filling in the rest via flashbacks (in part a necessity given the circumstances of Lee’s death), the new one spends a fair amount of time with the couple before tragedy strikes. No longer a rock star and his activist girlfriend, Eric and Shelly now meet as haunted-past guests in a strict rehab facility that often resembles a stylized, Arkham-like asylum.

If this sounds a bit like the Joker and Harley Quinn, wait until you get a load of Eric’s face tats. That’s not just an opportunistic knock-off: Lee’s performance had Joker vibes, too, a kind of otherworldly drollery that isn’t worlds away from the Clown Prince of Crime. Between his tattoos and leather jacket, Skarsgård may look like he could be playing the young CW-series version of Jared Leto’s Joker from Suicide Squad, but he and Twigs unlocked a doomed romanticism that the earlier versions of Eric and Shelly didn’t have time for.

He’s not as magnetic as Lee, but his wounded dirtbagginess is complemented by Twigs, who plays Shelly as an artsy type who hasn’t yet located her muse (or genre). For a revenge thriller, the movie takes its time with their relationship. They’re not exactly going out for long and thoughtful dinners – their first real date is a rehab break-out – but their connection pulls the movie along.

The Crow also involves an overtly supernatural villain, after years of crime lords and corrupt cops who only looked and/or acted like demons (and often evinced a surprisingly keen knowledge of crow lore for supposed humans). Surprisingly, the movie doesn’t use this to build toward a bigger, more formidable showdown with the powered-up Eric. (The bad guy, for all of his creepy power, is still just Danny Huston in a suit).

For much of the movie, Skarsgård is endearingly clumsy with his body, pushing through bullets, breaks and slashes with more determination than skill. In a particularly emo touch, the 2024 Crow more overtly explains that the repeated mangling of Eric’s body, like those visited upon Wolverine, hurt and heal in equal measure. Even his craziest rampage, late in the movie, features blood-soaked body horror and slasher-style kills. (Why did it take so long to give the Crow a sword?)

Sanders sets that sequence at an elegant opera house, a neat inversion of the usual Crow environment of industrial-gothic wreckage. It’s one of only a few instances where the movie bothers to replace the defining Crow aesthetic with anything else in terms of memorable production design.

The rest of the time, it opts out; there’s something intensely jarring about a Crow movie that cuts to generic daylight, establishing shots of a real city skyline. Sanders dots the movie with more cost-effective dreamlike touches – the pink uniforms the rehab inmates must all wear, for example, or the in-between train-station world where Eric gets advice from a mysterious, purgatorial stranger (Sami Bouajila) – without ever achieving the hallucinatory liftoff of the first film.

It’s an unnecessarily timid decision, likely egged on by the sense that the filmmakers could create something more grounded in human emotion, rather than the uncanny or the nightmarish. Indeed, The Crow 2024 is, as indicated by that teen-angst line, more self-conscious about its youth-culture bona fides; there’s not a single sympathetic (human) character who registers as a genuine fully grown adult, even if the soundtrack largely jumps back to pre-grunge rather than trying to find the contemporary equivalent.

Overview: Global superstars George Clooney and Brad Pitt team up for the action comedy Wolfs. Clooney plays a professional fixer hired to cover up a high profile crime. But when a second fixer (Pitt) shows up and the two lone wolves are forced to work together, they find their night spiraling out of control in ways that neither one of them expected.

Verdict: The discussion around whether or not we’ve run out of bonafide movie stars seems to reoccur every few months within the film industry, usually linked to whichever bright young thing is lighting up the screen or whatever building Tom Cruise has thrown himself off on any given weekday. Naysayers claim that the industry is in a charisma crisis, and that very few actors are capable of trading on name recognition alone. Even once bankable names aren’t bringing in the big bucks like they used to. But if there were ever two stars with the power to get bums on seats, it’s Brad Pitt and George Clooney, reliably entertaining and effortlessly charismatic screen personas (the less said about Clooney the director the better).

They’ve been friends for years, starring in the Ocean’s franchise on three occasions, but it’s now 16 years since they last worked together (on the Coen Brothers’ zippy caper Burn After Reading) and in that time the film landscape has altered dramatically. Case in point: Apple TV+ – founded in 2019 – financed Wolfs, the new non-IP project from Spider-Man director Jon Watts (though a sequel is already in the works, so it’s become IP) and both Clooney and Pitt put money back into the project to support a theatrical release rather than a straight-to-streaming roll-out, indicating both actors still clearly believe in the spectacle and value of the cinema experience. (That this would need to happen seems absurd given that Watts’ Spider-Man trilogy earned Sony a cool $4 billion, but this is where we’re at in Hollywood I guess!).

Wolfs – referring to both the lone wolf mantra of its co-leads, but incidentally a nod to Pulp Fiction’s famous fixer Winston Wolf – sees Watts take a bring from Sony’s web-slinging cash cow, as New York DA Margaret (Amy Ryan) finds herself in an unfortunate bind one night and prevails on a mysterious stranger (George Clooney) to come to her hotel suite and fix it. There’s just one snag – the hotel’s owner, Pam, is aware of what’s happened and also sends a guy to clean up the situation (Brad Pitt). Margaret’s Man and Pam’s Man are indignant, responding to the notion they work together with all the enthusiasm of two small children forced to do group work with a kid they don’t like.

There’s nothing particularly taxing about the plot of Wolfs, which unfolds in a predictable manner as Clooney and Pitt bicker their way through their reluctant assignment. Margaret’s mess proves much harder to clean up than either of them expected when they discover a large quantity of heroin in her room and are inadvertently tasked with returning it to its owner (explained away blithely as the Albanian mob). While the mysterious finer details of Clooney and Pitt’s characters are willfully obscured on account of their guarded professionalism, it’s a shame that the film paints in such broad strokes more widely, as this doesn’t leave much room for substantial character development or emotional investment.

There are a lot of riffs about Pitt and Clooney getting on in years too, like them having bad backs, or needing to wear reading glasses to inspect a piece of paper, which naturally have diminishing returns. Watts’ sense of humour is fairly mundane, and while there are some occasionally fun quips, the script doesn’t offer much within itself, instead relying on its star wattage to do the heavy lifting. Pitt’s performance doesn’t feel particularly off-piste – we’ve seen him play quietly confident, hyper-competent professionals before – but Clooney, considerably grumpier than he usually appears on screen, is quite delightful, and although the pair’s real-life friendship might impede their believability as two strangers who take an immediate dislike to one another, there’s certainly a sensation of being in a safe pair of hands.

Overview: Beetlejuice is back! After an unexpected family tragedy, three generations of the Deetz family return home to Winter River. Still haunted by Beetlejuice, Lydia’s life is turned upside down when her rebellious teenage daughter, Astrid, discovers the mysterious model of the town in the attic and the portal to the Afterlife is accidentally opened.

With trouble brewing in both realms, it’s only a matter of time until someone says Beetlejuice’s name three times and the mischievous demon returns to unleash his very own brand of mayhem.

Verdict: A big problem with sequels that come decades after the original film is that they tend to rehash the same story points. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice looked to do just that based on the trailers, but thankfully it is a mostly pleasant surprise when it comes to being something new from the Ghost with the Most.

With the introduction of Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), a big action movie star turned afterlife detective, a string of murders involving a bunch of slurped-up corpses, and a suspect that has made it abundantly clear that they are looking for Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), the run-of-the-mill routine of dying and taking a number at the DMV of the afterlife has become more than a little hectic.

Back in the world of the living, Charles Deetz has died. This reunites Lydia (Winona Ryder) and Delia (Catherine O’Hara) but takes some convincing from Lydia’s daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega). Lydia has made a living based on her ability to talk to ghosts, but Astrid is a science major in college who thinks ghosts are a figment of her mother’s imagination. She hates her mother for not being able to allow Astrid to speak with her deceased father.

As Lydia struggles to organize her affairs, Astrid opens the door to the afterlife, which leads Lydia to turn to Beetlejuice for help.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice embraces mostly practical effects, which is a huge deal these days. The sequel incorporates a ton of stop-motion animation, which only authenticates that morbid Tim Burton stamp of approval. The moments of CGI contained in the film, like the sequence of social media influencers being sucked into their phones, are understandable but noticeably less appealing. Visually, practical effects not only look better but stand the test of time far longer. Tim Burton knows this so it pays off here.

For those unaware, Jeffrey Jones, the man who portrayed Charles Deetz in Beetlejuice, is a sex offender and was arrested in 2002 for possession of child pornography. Despite having acting roles after that, Jones’ career was never the same. What they do with the Charles Deetz character in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is nothing short of brilliant.

Charles gets a stop-motion animated sequence that explains how he died which is also narrated by Catherine O’Hara. It’s a long-winded story that is as amusing as ridiculous, but it culminates with Charles getting his head and shoulders bitten off by a shark. Charles stumbles around the afterlife with a piece of his spinal cord showing that spurts blood when he speaks; complete with a gurgly voice. He shows up sporadically throughout the film; gloriously headless and portrayed by someone new.

The sequel mostly capitalizes on what made the first film so entertaining. There’s a decent balance between horror and comedy as there are just as many potential scares as absurd bits. Performance-wise, the returning cast is great. Michael Keaton is having just as much fun here as he did 36 years ago and Catherine O’Hara is as fantastic as ever. Willem Dafoe outshines every other new cast member as Jenna Ortega’s Astrid is far more interesting than the modern version of Lydia.

There are several shortcomings in Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice and most of them come down to the film’s writing. Many of the characters are written in questionable ways. The trauma aspect of Lydia’s character wouldn’t be out of the question, realistically speaking. A demon traumatized her and her family as she realized that she could see and contact the dead.

But Lydia is such a pushover in this sequel. She does whatever anyone tells her to do and goes with anything thrown at her despite how illogical it may seem. She’s turned her paranormal communication talent into a TV monopoly; she’s romantically involved with the biggest douchebag in the film, and she agrees to a marriage proposal in the wake of her recently deceased father. Lydia has become everything her younger self would hate.

Speaking of Lydia and her bad romance, Rory (Justin Theroux) is atrocious. He is Lydia’s current manager who somehow turned their association into a relationship after they met at the same therapeutic center. Rory embodies sleaze as he makes every situation in the film about himself. He’s like a hippy who got promoted to corporate hippy. You know he’s up to something shady from the start and it’s more annoying than anything that Lydia goes with it. His fate is nowhere near as gruesome as it should be.

Delores (Monica Belucci) is an interesting character even if she’s a recycled version of Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride. She’s a soul sucker, which means she can walk up to someone and inhale their soul leaving them like an empty and crumpled-up juice box.

She has a connection to Beetlejuice, which has her chasing after him the entire film. The issue is that it isn’t exactly clear if she wants to devour his soul or get back together with him. It doesn’t help that Delores exits the film in the most anticlimactic way imaginable.

The original Beetlejuice is known for having fun with lip-synching and silly dance numbers, but the sequel takes it a bit too far. The film’s end utilizes the Richard Harris song “MacArthur Park” from 1968. The song is over seven minutes long and Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice uses it in its entirety. The sequence starts fine but goes on entirely too long.

Overview: When an American family is invited to spend the weekend at the idyllic country estate of a charming British family they befriended on vacation, what begins as a dream holiday soon warps into a snarled psychological nightmare.

Verdict: Do they even have toxic masculinity in the Netherlands? Don’t send me angry messages—I’m being facetious. But I ask this nonsense question that I already know the answer to because Danish director Christian Tafdrup somehow managed to make, what I consider to be, a horror masterpiece with his 2022 version of Speak No Evil without resorting to what is kinda becoming the cliched boogeyman of our age as its Big Bad.

But the 2024 remake from Eden Lake director James Watkins that hit theaters this past weekend—the one notable for rightly exploiting James McAvoy’s many, many bulging muscles in its ad campaign—decided instead to go the most routine of routes. Basically, at every turn. And so 2024 Speak No Evil does manage to become its own thing outside of the shadow of the original, but by paying the price of being a far less interesting film.

Also, don’t get me wrong—toxic masculinity certainly has it coming. I have nothing against toxic masculinity getting a thousand pies in the face. That was certainly there happening in the sidelines of Tafdrup’s film, for sure. But that rot was only part of the original film, which accused our entire culture of a moral malfeasance from tip to toe. The problem was systematic—the film’s title was a furious accusation of middle-class complacency. The turning of blind eyes nearly as weaponized as Jonathan Glazer did in his Nazi Family Holiday picture The Zone of Interest.

If one has or wants to choose, I recommend seeing the original film, pitch-black as night as it might be, far above and beyond seeing the remake. At least see the original first. Tafdrup’s film rewired my brain. Watkins’ version, while certainly containing plenty of small cinematic pleasures, which we’ll get into (I did already mention James McAvoy’s muscles, right?) accomplished no such feat. It’s fine, kinda meaty fun, but nothing we haven’t seen a million times since Straw Dogs in 1971.

So the story in both films remains the same, save some small particulars that eventually turn into bigger ones as they roll down the hill of the story, but we’ll get to that. We have ourselves a family of three—cuckolded dad Ben (Scoot McNairy), high-strung mom Louise (Mackenzie Davis), and their anxiety-riddled tween daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler). Americans who’ve recently moved to London, we meet them on vacation in a pornographically amber-colored corner of Italian countryside.

Despite the beauty surrounding them, there is very clearly an unspoken tension lurking between this threesome. And so when they spy a robust and happy-making family of three across the pool at the same villa—papa Paddy (McAvoy), much younger mama Ciara (Aisling Franciosi of The Fall and The Nightingale), and their boy Ant (Dan Hough) who seems to be roughly the same age as Agnes—they feel shabby by comparison. And yet extremely drawn to them as well. If those people can have such fun here maybe we can catch some of it, they seem to be thinking.

The six-some do quickly bond, in the way of those impermanent vacation relations we’ve all had. But a tossed-off invitation from Paddy to the Londoners to come visit his farm in the remote English countryside seems kind of absurd. Until it doesn’t. Now back in London Ben and Louise find themselves slipping back into their unhappy routines, so when a postcard from Paddy and fam arrives reiterating the invite a second time, they make a slightly rash decision to take it up. A long weekend in the country will surely do them all some good again, right? (Yeah, think again. We’ve seen this movie before!)

At this early point, the 2024 version of this story has already changed a few beats—ones that become pretty important down the line, so I feel the need to note them. The biggest one is that in the original film, it’s the father who makes the decision to take up the invite, bypassing his wife entirely. Tafdrup’s movie makes it wildly, crystal clear that this is out of his repressed attraction to the other man. The sexual tension between those two is played to the hilt, y’all. And so the original becomes essentially a tale of this father’s repression dooming his family. It can be argued (and I certainly would) that internalized homophobia is the original film’s villain; the quicksand that ultimately devours them all. That’s interesting stuff!

But in the remake it’s Louise who makes the choice that the family should go on this second trip, all because she’s feeling guilty about having recently cheated (by text!) on Ben. This certainly gives Mackenzie Davis more to do in this version of the film than the actress playing this role did in the original, and I can’t knock that. Davis is one of our most underrated actors, and she and Franciosi are the film’s acting MVPs, in my eyes. (For different reasons, but yes, we’ll get to that.)

But as far as “blame” can be assigned for what happens to the family in the film, it’s far less interesting to make the dynamics of their situation be those of a harridan-ish wife and her cuckolded husband learning to be proper spouses and parents. The lesson simply becomes one of rah-rah heteronormative self-improvement here. Ben’s got to learn to be a “man”—just the right kind of man. Not the James McAvoy kind. He needs to be the kind of man who lets his wife hit dudes in the head with hammers too, dang it.

If it wasn’t immediately obvious—is there anyone who didn’t see the ten billion ads they ran for this movie that gave away the entire plot?—Paddy is not the good guy they all think he is. And his invite to Ben and Louise and Agnes was not made with their family’s wellness in mind. And much of the middle portion of the remake goes exactly the same as it did in the original, with the small niceties of human relations playing their roles as the individual steps down unto the ninth circle of Hell. Both versions make an absolute feast out of our ability to doom ourselves by not speaking up when we need to, due to the overwhelming feeling of obligation we have to be polite.

It’s here where the actors really get to shine. The rubbery extent that Mackenzie Davis’ wondrous face is capable of contorting through in the span of a sentence is here wielded brilliantly and is truly something to behold—she is hilariously funny playing a woman for whom swallowing her derision takes every gangly limb’s worth of effort to do. And James McAvoy is himself having a grand old time chewing the scenery—he says he modeled his performance on British shitheel Andrew Tate, and it shows (although Tate wishes he could have 1/1000th of this charisma).

The thing is though, making all of this entertaining, that’s a big choice! One that robs us of the sinking fatalistic miserablism of the original that I found so genuinely disturbing. The only person in the cast who underplays, and brilliantly, is Franciosi—for ninety percent of this telling we have no idea what Ciara’s role is in all of this. So even as a noted fan of the original, I could not pin down where Franciosi was taking this woman. And then when it is all out there it comes as an actual gut punch; one that gives the remake’s last-act swing into over-the-top action theatrics some genuine heft and meaning. She makes the stakes feel real, and as horrific as they ought to feel.

If I’ve left out McNairy’s turn-up until now it’s because his performance, and what the remake does with his character, is the least interesting thing about it all. Ben is simply a weak man who needs to learn to be strong, but the right amount of strong that balances out correctly with his decency. He’s choosing the Tim Walz path, not the JD Vance one, which yeah, huzzah, do that. Everybody do that, please!

Overview: In pursuit of a serial killer, an FBI agent uncovers a series of occult clues that she must solve to end his terrifying killing spree.

Verdict: Those expecting to walk out of writer-director Oz Perkins’ “Longlegs” feeling all warm and fuzzy on a nice, breezy summer day should probably look for an alternative activity. Because “Longlegs,” which is already in the conversation as one of the best movies of the year, is equal parts inspired by “Se7en” and “The Silence of the Lambs,” which means you’re more apt to leave the theater feeling, uh, not great.

But if that sounds like your vibe and your game for a maniacal, off-the-wall Nicolas Cage performance, not to mention a hip nineties aesthetic usually reserved for a David Fincher movie, “Longlegs” is a masterful exploration of building dread and anxiety from some truly disturbing circumstances.

Perkins (son to Another Perkins of “Psycho” which is notable here) has delivered what will no doubt be the eeriest movie of the summer. A tense, serial killer procedural that builds on the atmospheric qualities of the filmmakers best movies, including “Gretel & Hansel” and the underrated gem “The Blackcoat’s Daughter,” “Longlegs,” contrary to what media reports will tell you, isn’t the “scariest movie of all time,” but is slow and methodical in its approach to the material. It’s a fully realized piece of artistry with two commanding lead performances that guide us down an icky, unnerving rabbit hole.

Led by Makia Monroe, who feels like the de-facto leading lady of the indie horror scene following turns in “It Follows” and “Watcher,” plays Lee Harker, a strange and often distant FBI agent who is tasked with tracking down a killer who goes by the name Longlegs. But he doesn’t fit the average profile and, in fact, doesn’t even conduct the killings.

He manages to build lifelike dolls that are delivered to children on their birthdays (always on the 14th) and soon thereafter the fathers slaughter everyone in their family. Longlegs is never even at the crime scene. Harker feels a connection with him and the borderline satanic killings, but can’t quite figure out why.

As Longlegs, Cage is wonderfully demented and a strange character who moves in the shadows, takes the back roads of rural Oregon and screams at the top of his lungs. Sporting a high-pitched, crackling voice, a pale white face, and puffy prosthetics, Cage is borderline unrecognizable, but the actor keeps things unpredictable and helps usher in one of the best cinematic serial killers alongside greats like Hannibal Lector.

Perkins isn’t rewriting the genre playbook (and plays with familiar themes of the occult and trauma), but Cage gives it an edge and he’s wisely not overused in the movie. We don’t even see his face until about 50-minutes into the movie. He just looms in the background, like a bad sickness you can’t shake.

He’s matched by Monroe and a solid supporting turn from Blair Underwood (who I was thrilled to see on the big screen again) playing Harker’s boss, Carter who might not always trust his colleagues intuition, but is game to follow leads and hunches that, as the movie progresses, reveals some unnerving discoveries.

Overview: Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Kate Cooper, a former storm chaser haunted by a devastating encounter with a tornado during her college years who now studies storm patterns on screens safely in New York City. She is lured back to the open plains by her friend, Javi (Golden Globe nominee Anthony Ramos, In the Heights) to test a groundbreaking new tracking system.

There, she crosses paths with Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), the charming and reckless social-media superstar who thrives on posting his storm-chasing adventures with his raucous crew, the more dangerous the better. As storm season intensifies, terrifying phenomena never seen before are unleashed, and Kate, Tyler and their competing teams find themselves squarely in the paths of multiple storm systems converging over central Oklahoma in the fight of their lives.

Verdict: After the subtle, graceful, and sensitively directed humanist drama “Minari,” filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung pulls a massive 180 shift with the blockbuster-sized “Twisters,” a summer event/epic disaster movie that proves he has the chops to create extravagant action set pieces and popcorn-friendly spectacle, but at the expense of his intimate personal touches and affinity for anything resembling complexity.

“Twisters” attempts to do it all: cineplex thrills, deadly serious viscerally dramatic treatments to harrowing sequences, lighthearted laughs, a burgeoning romance, and deep trauma from the past. But all these tones don’t gel together quite convincingly and are either cliché or don’t work at all, especially in the laughs department, where most of the movie falls flat. Moreover, as written by Mark L. Smith (“The Revenant”), “Twisters” features creaky, sometimes cringe-y dialogue, holds almost no surprises, and escalates conventionally and formulaically after you’re introduced to all the players in the story. You know where this storm is headed and what precipitous weather you’ll get. And maybe that will appease “Twister” die-hards but may leave everyone else wanting.

“Twisters” starts with a prologue and muscular action set piece that’s supposed to be the lingering emotional weight of the movie and the psychic baggage and trauma the leads can’t shake. Storm chaser and near-PhD level researcher Kate Cooper (a mostly wasted Daisy Edgar-Jones, who is much better than this material), and her colleagues Javi (Anthony Ramos), Addy (Kiernan Shipka), Praveen (Nik Dodani), and boyfriend (Daryl McCormack), are trying to “tame tornadoes.” Yet, Cooper is nearly obsessed with pushing things into the danger zone so she can get a grant to pursue her dreams of calming tornadoes with a mix of science and technology. But bullish on it all, she goes too far, and most of her team is killed, including her paramour.

Chung’s movie then cuts to five years later. Haunted by the devasting incident, Kate has abandoned storm chasing to become a meteorologist in New York, the polar opposite of her Oklahoma stomping grounds. But like clockwork, Javi suddenly visits and lures her back into the field with the promise of big tech and big dollars behind him, plus a groundbreaking new tracking system that can do much good and potentially save lives. Initially reluctant, she’s soon persuaded to go back home, as Javi convinces her, no one has the natural instincts and savvy to read weather in real time like she can (a bit eye-roll-ish to be honest).

Once back in Oklahoma, Kate joins Javi’s corporately sponsored StormPar team and his stiff and humorless business partner Scott (David Corenswet) to start chasing storms and collect important weather data that could be a game-changer for early repones cyclone warnings. But there’s also a cowboy crew in town, led by a cocky and arrogant Tyler Owens (Glenn Powell), a famous “tornado wrangler” or, as one character puts it, “a hillbilly with a YouTube channel.”

Tyler’s crew is predictably wildcard and pretty much the cliched version of a ragtag motley crew squad. Uncouth and untrained, this troop relies on a mix of bravado and reckless fearlessness; yeah, man! There’s Boone (Brandon Perea), the videographer and social media lead; drone operator Lilly (Sasha Lane), a rugged mechanic; Dani (Katy O’Brian); and one sole, mildly eccentric scientist, Dexter (Tunde Adebimpe). Adding one more odd-man-out to the mix is Ben (Harry Hadden-Paton), a British journalist profiling Tyler for his smug and heedless antics. But none of these actors have more than one note to play.

Unsurprisingly, the two crews clash, the rock n’ rollers vs. the squares, with each team behaving in the familiar pattern of their one-dimensional shape. Tyler’s company is rash and volatile, lighting off fireworks in the middle of a tornado for adrenalin kicks and YouTube views, and Javi’s team are straight-laced metric nerds that are all business and no fun. And, of course, it’s windstorm season, so conveniently, there’s a tornado to be found every five minutes.

But everything is not what it seems on the surface, though often telegraphed in groan-worthy scenes; Tyler’s crew actually cares for the communities affected by the destructive storms, despite all outward looks to the contrary. Javi’s StormPar company is being bankrolled by a real estate tycoon and opportunist trying to profit off the locals’ misfortunes, which strains his relationship with Katie. Goodness, ethics, and bonds are tested, but it often feels like a black-and-white kindergarten version of morality lessons.

Eventually, as you can easily surmise, everyone joins forces, in the end, to fight the mother of all twisters and save lives. But the bulk of the film is an increasing series of escalating tornado dangers with a few side detours for melancholy reflection (haunted past alert!) and a slowly budding romance between Tyler and Kate, who clearly hated each other at first, much like any routine romantic comedy.

A spiritual sequel to Jan de Bont’s 1996 “Twister,” something of an escapist popcorn classic, and not directly tied to it, this new iteration more or less feels like a modern remake with many of the same kind of dynamics and colorful supporting characters. And maybe your nostalgia mileage may vary, but “Twisters” just isn’t as fun, entertaining, and light on its feet. Sure, it aims for those moments here and there, especially in the beginning, with Tyler acting like the most obnoxious form of vainglorious showboating and his team being the wild bunch, but “Twisters” often takes itself far too seriously.

Rather than delivering entertaining excitement, it goes grim and darker with distressingly dangerous, deadly, somber sequences (with some sequences just a little too exhaustingly drawn out). A little more countrified than the original, a soundtrack featuring Luke Combs, Miranda Lambert, Lainey Wilson, etc., this is really only the minor distinction from the original other than being a little too dour in spots.

So much of “Twisters” feels too familiar. Powell plays basically another version of the cocksure character he played in “Top Gun: Maverick,” and most of the characters have an insufferable “we have a need for speed!” mien. And with a “story-by” credit from filmmaker Joseph Kosinski, you can see the parallels to ‘Maverick,’ but it’s a poor man’s “Top Gun” sequel, missing the magic and expertly balanced mix of four-quadrant thrills and delights.