Alonso Duralde

Where legendary film director Ernst Lubitsch was famous for his “touch,” Iñárritu’s aesthetic style is more akin to a Godzilla-sized stomp.

There’s a lovely central story in Forgotten Island, about two lifelong best friends whose relationship may or may not survive one of them going abroad for college, and the movie buries that story in so much plot, mythology, magical creatures, and mini-quests that it dares viewers not to lose the thread.

Director David Ayer and first-time screenwriter Cameron Alexander aren’t reinventing the wheel when it comes to survival tales, but they do so with unsparing efficacy, delivering moments of both suspense and compassion. It immediately joins the ranks of Field of Dreams and Saving Private Ryan as a movie that allows men to cry.

Like Hannah Einbinder’s character in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, hired to breathe life into “zombie IP,” director and co-writer Zach Cregger brings his trademark horror-comedy combo to the goings-on at the Umbrella Corporation, resulting in a sprightly, terrifying, and utterly entertaining hunk of blood-candy that will no doubt give the franchise brand new life.

The finished product shares many of the original film’s flaws, from careening shifts in tone to not enough screen time for Stockard Channing and Dianne Weist as Sally and Gillian’s wise, eccentric aunts.

There’s a way to make a bloody shoot-em-up like this entertaining and even enjoyably disreputable, but the overwhelming result of Onslaught is ennui.

For all the style that director Ridley Scott can muster -- and, admittedly, that’s a whole lot of style -- The Dog Stars serves up a post-apocalypse with a heavy sense of familiarity.

Familiarity, in fact, is what makes the Insidious saga special, as it continues to involve screen legend Lin Shaye, who brings both heart and intensity to the spooky goings-on of Insidious: Out of the Further – at eighty-plus-years-old, she’s the franchise’s superhero.

Coyote vs. Acme comes close to Roger Rabbit’s heights, using the legal-thriller structure in which an underdog (or in this case, an under-coyote) faces off against a ruthless corporation.

There’s nothing wrong with this kind of homage per se, but by the end of the movie, it’s clear that Spielberg would have done a far better job at spinning all the plates and managing all the tones that Mitchell is attempting to balance.