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Shape of Water:  A pietistic bore readymade for those searching only to reinforce their worldviews, with cursory caricatures rather than living/breathing characters. Shannon’s zealous goon is laughably empty, the type of strawman scoundrel that real life goons are sure to hate without seeing any attribute  of themselves reflected back. Don’t even get me started on his wife and kids. The creature is similarly shapeless and nondescript, just another messiah to suffer our sins. Spare me the shabby platitudes. The road to Oscar glory is paved with good intentions.

A Quiet Place: It’s hard to not hold this whole Krasinskian notion that horror needs elevation against this movie. He cites Get Out, Don’t Breathe, The Witch, and The Babadook as modern examples of the genre being classed up (or at least that’s how I’m interpreting). To be fair, it seems he’s saying that these movies plugged this unlikely naïf into the genre, the gateway drugs to the depths where the good stuff hangs around. A Quiet Place opens with a family inaudibly rummaging for food and supplies in an abandoned rural market, the scene ends with an accidental death, one that leaves each character with a generous amount of fear and guilt and limited resources to air them out. Despite all of this, the parents decide to conceive a child, without a failsafe plan for either giving birth or anything thereafter. I normally wouldn’t give a shit about this type of oversight but it was written into the plot and therefore I think it’s fair to question both the logic (at least) of such a decision. If you’ve witnessed your young child being eaten by a monster why risk the same fate for the other two kids? Krasinski poses the question; if you can’t protect kids, why have them in the first place? If only the movie could hang its hat on this. It can’t. Being an “elevated” horror film has its pratfalls and sometimes packing half-cooked ideas and metaphors into what should/could be an otherwise streamlined thriller plot about survival and parenthood is a curse in disguise. There are suddenly new itches to scratch and not enough hands. Krasinksi doesn’t fuss over the details that led to this invasion. He spares us exposition, coddling us instead with a goofy whiteboard that leads to an inadvertently funny finale where a character’s disability conveniently unlocks the method of vanquishing of these CGI beasts. This segues to my main problem with A Quiet Place, the monsters aren’t scary. To my recollection, I have yet to be truly scared of any creatures composed by a computer. Frankly, I’m curious as to how anyone could be. What good are you if you can’t scare us?

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri: Cognitive dissonance in which the enemy of our most reprehensible enemy will become our friend and we will ride out into the sunset. Thus, cops who beat all forms of marginalized caricatures to near death will find absolution in their shared hatred for men who rape and burn young girls alive. Like Shape of Water, McDonough prefers his characters to be manifestations of his feelings towards things like the Catholic church, rape, snowflake liberals, alt-right hypocrites, etc. I’m not necessarily opposed to McDonough’s exasperation with virtue signaling slacktivists and chastising moralist cowards, but his schtick is tired, trite, and oh so proud of itself. This was among the worst things I had seen last year.