Most modern horror films don’t have as much patience or trust in their audience’s intelligence as The Babadook does. While most work on a surface level that mainly involve knee-jerk reactions and amped up music cues, there is a select class of films like this one that work on an intimate psychological level of dread and discomfort. For those reasons, among others, it stands out as one of the best horror movies of the past few years and certainly the most unique that I’ve seen this year.

Essie Davis stars as Amelia, a struggling widow and mother of a troubled seven-year-old named Samuel, played by Noah Wiseman. Through an early flashback, we find that Amelia’s husband Oskar, played by Benjamin Winspear, passed away the night of Samuel’s birth as he was rushing to drive Amelia to the emergency room. It’s made clear that the seven years of single parenthood haven’t been easy on either Amelia or Samuel and when a macabre pop-up book titled “Mister Babadook” begins appearing around the house, it unleashes the titular supernatural force that cruelly threatens to rob them of their sanity and their lives.

While the creature is only seen briefly during its moments in the film, its ominous silhouette alone creates a lasting impression and when seen in full, the Babadook reminded me most of a twisted combination of Nosferatu and Jack the Ripper. This archaic aesthetic is fitting, as the lighting and staging in the most climatic scenes feels like a throwback to silent era films. Even the majority of the effects are practical as opposed to computer generated, which lends a more realistic and grounded approach to scenes that may have otherwise come off as cheap or lazy.

Grounded is also a good word to use when describing the storytelling as well, which does involve supernatural elements like ghosts and monsters but is rich with subtext on human issues like the persistence of grief and the hardships of single parenthood. Amelia’s feelings of resentment and exhaustion towards Samuel exist long before the Babadook arrives in their home and director Jennifer Kent does a great job at materializing these impulses in a way that feels psychologically convincing and dramatically satisfying. While some scenes may be a bit too on-the-nose when tying the allegorical elements together, it’s hard to fault a debut film that’s striving to push an entire genre into more narratively complex territory.

It’s difficult, too, to understate the importance of Essie Davis’ performance to the film’s success. She’s a marvel to watch, conveying depths of anguish and rage underneath the guise of a mother trying to put on her best face for her child. When moments of brutal honesty do arrive, Davis delivers them with a frightening amount of conviction. She, along with director Jennifer Kent, have created a very special scare-fest that I hope will haunt audiences for years to come.

The final entry in the Hunger Games series has arrived and in the tradition of the hugely successful Harry Potter and Twilight films, it has been split into two parts with the final film being released a year from now. While I haven’t read the books and can’t tell you if Part 1 creates a viable stopping point for the final film, I can say that this standalone portion of Mockingjay feels quite stretched at feature length and I have a hard time believing that this material couldn’t be skillfully condensed into one movie. Clearly this was a financial decision on the part of Lionsgate to milk their $1.5 billion (and counting) franchise as long as they can.

Mockingjay picks up right where we left off from Catching Fire, with our heroine Katniss Everdeen, played by Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence, living in the bombed-out District 13 and still reeling from the outcome of the Quarter Quell. Her actions in those Games have sparked uprisings and civil unrest throughout the Districts and the President of 13 Alma Coin, played with conviction by Julianne Moore, hopes to mold Katniss into a symbol of united revolution against the Capitol. She agrees under the condition that her lost love Peeta, played by Josh Hutcherson, be retrieved from the clutches of the Capitol and its corrupt President Snow, reprised with grinning menace by Donald Sutherland.

The film has taken away what I always thought was one of the least interesting things about the previous entries, the Games themselves, but it hasn’t replaced them with much exciting material either. Fans of the series will likely be put off by the Katniss-less action in Part 1, in which the main character fires exactly one arrow in combat, although it does produce one of the movie’s most satisfying, trailer-ready shots. The majority of the material here is comprised of characters brooding or explaining or plotting, which may prove worthwhile for Part 2 but doesn’t leave us with much for now.

All of the characters, Katniss included, feel sidelined and underutilized, often waiting for things to happen as opposed to moving the story along themselves. If that was a conscious decision on the part of director Francis Lawrence, it comes off more as spinning its wheels rather than organically building tension. The acting here is similarly dubious; I never imagined that Josh Hutcherson would give a more convincing performance than Jennifer Lawrence in this film (or any film, really) but it’s sadly the case here.

Despite this, Mockingjay is not without its share of inspired moments. There are thankfully some beats of levity in a scene that finds Katniss botching her lines for an overproduced propaganda film that has cheeky notes of political satire embedded. I was most taken with a quietly poetic scene in which soldiers infiltrate the Capitol to retrieve previous Tributes, which frequently reminded me of the Abbottabad raid sequence in Zero Dark Thirty. Here’s hoping that the finale has more gripping scenes like this one but for now, it feels like we’re stuck with the world’s most expensive bookmark.

Based on the worldwide best-selling novel, Before I Go To Sleep is a serviceable amnesiac thriller that doesn’t reinvent the wheel but does enough to make it a worthwhile entry in the genre. Writer/director Rowan Joffé faithfully adapts the novel but while the movie is a brisk hour and a half, it somehow loses the propulsive, page-turning energy that the book maintains throughout. The film routinely sidesteps the slow reveals of the source material in favor of Twists with a capital “T” that can come off as more manipulative than intriguing.

Nicole Kidman plays Christine Lucas, a forty-year-old English housewife who wakes up every morning thinking she is still in her mid-twenties with no memory of her current self. She wakes up next to Ben, played by Colin Firth, who says they have been married for years and that he has been taking care of her since the accident that caused her anterograde amnesia. When Ben leaves for work, Christine gets a call from Dr. Nasch, played by Mark Strong, who says he is a neuropsychologist who has been working with her to restore her memory by maintaining a secret video diary every day.

These entries serve as the narrative backbone of the film, allowing Christine to build a foundation from the blank slate that awaits her every morning and allowing the audience to catch various clues and hints that are presented. When she asks the same question on two separate days and gets different answers, mistrust forms and she knows that she is not being told the full story of her accident and what has happened since. This setup leads to a series of developments that range from tediously melodramatic to genuinely suspenseful, the latter applying most often to the film’s final act.

Kidman is very good here, finding creative layers of despair and confusion in a role that could have easily been repetitive and monotonous. Firth and Strong do what they can but they are ultimately pawns in service of the film’s twisty plot line. The look and feel of the film is generally chilly and removed, as evidenced by the steely blue color palette that it works from. While the story that it presents is indeed sad, the film does take itself quite seriously and perhaps some humor could have been injected to give things a more human and less sterile feeling.

Seeing this movie after having recently re-read the book, I was glad to see that the movie followed so closely with the original story’s revolving plot. Even though I knew the ending going in, I was re-taken into the story and somehow still surprised at points. Still, some deviations still managed to irk me, in particular a poorly-judged scene that involved a character’s misreading of a name tag and the triggering of a flashback that felt forced and contrived. Overall, Before I Go To Sleep is an admirable, if not totally memorable, effort.

Dan Gilroy’s dynamic directorial debut Nightcrawler finds Jake Gyllenhaal in the middle of a fascinating character study that also manages to operate as a first-rate crime thriller and a piece of well-tempered social commentary. Gyllenhaal finds one of his very best roles in Louis Bloom and he crafts a visceral and vicious performance that should merit Oscar consideration in the coming months. Bloom is, above all, an opportunist. He observes the world from a detached, objective point of view devoid of any semblance of moral or ethical code. He steals anything from copper fencing to an unattended bicycle with no remorse and the sole intention of getting ahead of the pack.

One evening, he happens upon a fiery car accident and takes intense interest in the video journalists that quickly swarm the scene. He engages one of the “nightcrawlers,” played by Bill Paxton, and soon enough, he finds himself hitting the Los Angeles streets with nothing more than a video camera and complete lack of journalistic integrity. After a series of increasingly provocative news tapes, he piques the interest of the city’s most desperate local news director, played by Rene Russo. He also takes on a struggling homeless man as his oft-berated and beleaguered assistant, played by Riz Ahmed.

Bloom’s obsessive workmanship often plays like the demented confluence of every self-help and success based audiobook played on repeat. He has every conversation as if it’s a job interview and even lectures a potential employer about promise of job loyalty from generations past not being afforded to the current job market. Clearly he has drive but it’s never made clear what he’s ultimately after. This kind of empty ambition seems like the making of a potentially dull character but Gyllenhaal somehow makes Bloom compulsively watchable throughout, much like the footage that his character films every night.

Gilroy makes it clear that we’re in antihero territory throughout this film and as that’s the case, it boasts the kind of narrative thrust and frantic unpredictability of other genre greats like Taxi Driver and There Will Be Blood. We are shown these men doing, saying and thinking terrible things, but we can’t look away. We want to see them get it but we’re also still somehow rooting for them, if only for the fact that the director has taken away all other rooting interests. I’m admittedly not the biggest fan of car chase scenes but I would count the one in the film’s third act as one of the year’s most effective, mainly because I still cared about Lou’s fate throughout.

My main misgiving with Nightcrawler comes down to the music score by James Newton Howard, who is obviously an accomplished film composer but simply out of his element here. The electric guitar motif on the title track is far too hopeful and proud to represent a character like Bloom and oboe/string combination that underlies a scene between Gyllenhaal and Russo is incredibly maudlin and unnecessary. In fact, I would have preferred more scenes with less or no music to interfere with Gilroy’s well-crafted dialogue. That aside, Nightcrawler is a transfixing thriller with plenty to recommend.

Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig are together again and it’s a beautiful thing. The Skeleton Twins reunites the Saturday Night Live alums after the success of their roles in the 2009’s Adventureland, but while that film relegates them to husband-wife comic relief, Twins aims for something richer and more meaningful. Here they play estranged siblings Milo and Maggie, who are brought back into each other’s lives by their near-simultaneous suicide attempts. During their first meeting together in 10 years, they share the type of jaded banter that you would except from long lost friends but their past bonds soon come to light when Maggie asks Milo to move in with her to recover.

We then meet Maggie’s adoring but oblivious husband Lance, played hilariously by Luke Wilson. He’s the kind of guy who uses the word “amigo” liberally and treats the world as a mountain to be climbed but Wilson finds a way of somehow grounding this character and making him believable as Maggie’s spouse. Ty Burrell is also strong as Rich, a teacher from Milo’s past with whom he tries reconnect. Those expecting Phil Dunphy-esque pratfalls may be disappointed to find a much more subdued and tortured performance.

Despite these characters, Hader and Wiig really are the reason to see this movie. The exceptional chemistry between them allows not only for one liners and dry sarcasm but also moments of real tension and poignancy. Maggie and Milo clearly have plenty of issues to work out, both in the present and the past. Like true brothers and sisters, they know just how to find each other’s triggers for humor and pain alike. The best example of this is the climatic bonding scene, which finds an upset Maggie reluctantly joining in on Milo’s grandiose lip-sync of Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.”

Writer-director Craig Johnson, who co-wrote the script with Mark Heyman, does indulge indie comedy clichés from time to time but also does a commendable job of balancing black comedy with penetrating family drama. He’s wise not to over-direct his actors, especially in scenes of confrontation that really ring true. While the film goes to the well once too often with water imagery, it also has a muted visual style that suits the material nicely. The fall setting also allows for a well-timed Halloween party that contributes to the primary theme of nostalgia.

The film’s title is referenced in dialogue-free flashbacks of the twins spending time with their father as children, in particular a scene in which they’re gifted a set of matching skeleton figures. This fits in well with the Halloween theme but also hints at the theme of death that permeates the film. There’s a sense of unmitigated sorrow within both Milo and Maggie that somehow both separates and solidifies them. Despite this sadness, The Skeleton Twins is able to inject plenty of well-judged humor to create a bittersweet and memorable family affair.