​Darren Aronofsky has put some bonkers imagery onscreen over the course of his career, but it’s never weird for the sake of weird.  Every refrigerator monster is on purpose and in service of the hapless characters running through Aronofsky’s wringer.  His seventh film, mother! (hereafter referred to as Mother for the sake of simplicity), is the first where that might not be the case.  A naked allegory for biblical history, Mother doesn’t have characters so much as it has symbols.  Even Aronofsky’s tackling of the story of the flood in Noah was still grounded in the titular patriarch and his family.  Mother is no less powerful and memorable than a film like The Fountain or Black Swan, but it’s the most elemental in the unpleasant and uncomfortable feelings it dredges up.  However, what it lacks in characters who exist as individuals, it more than compensates in its level of bonkers, as this is the closest to a filmed nightmare that I’ve ever seen.  Mother is so visceral and so potent that its allowed some amount of shirking in the character department.

Exactly no one believed that prolific director Steven Soderbergh’s retirement from filmmaking would stick.  Soderbergh took a few years to dabble in television, with exceptional results, and he finally returns to the big screen with Logan Lucky.  His latest revisits the grand heists of Ocean’s 11, replacing the gawdy glitz of Las Vegas with the drawls of West Virginia.  Soderbergh roars back to life as surely as the NASCAR vehicles featured in a film that retains the charm and humor of his other caper films while adding levels of earned sentimentality that his work has often been too cool to engage with. 

​Taylor Sheridan has made his name as the writer behind crackling Southwestern thrillers like Sicario and Hell and High Water.  After this productive period, he returns behind the camera for Wind River, a film far from the desert but as bleak as those landscapes are dry.  There are striking similarities between all three, like culture clashes, communities in decline, and a female outsider butting up against entrenched and male-dominated systems, but why change what’s been working?  Sheridan maintains his above-average credentials with Wind River, another quality entry in the emerging genre of the contemporary wilderness Western kicked off by No Country For Old Men.

​Having directed the groundbreaking action flick John Wick together in 2014, stuntmen-turned-directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch parted ways three years later.  With each releasing their own films in 2017, Stahelski and Leitch invited a friendly contest between them.  Stahelski’s John Wick sequel was more of the same, stylish but drained of the emotional throughline that made the original’s high body count somewhat meaningful instead of outright exhausting.  With Atomic Blonde, Leitch appears to be uninterested in repeating himself outside of capturing more visceral, bone-crunching action.  His film trades the criminal underworld for Cold War espionage, casts a far-better actor in the lead, and retains a passable amount of resonance, all combining to demonstrate that he’s the more talented director of the two.