When the going gets tough, the tough get going. But when the going gets tough for Matthew McConaughey, he gets going to the beach.

In the first few months of this still-young year, McConaughey has already starred in two films geographically overlapping in the Florida Keys, and yet worlds apart. January’s Serenity starts out as a smoldering neo-noir before hooking a hard left into a weird ontological parable, while March’s The Beach Bum is a shaggy ramble following an eccentric law-breaker’s aimless flight from justice.

The former maintains a po-faced seriousness even as it tumbles into high-concept lunacy, while the latter is a film about taking it easy that takes it easy. Any differences of genre or tone, however, cannot diminish the fundamental, ineffable McConaughey-ness that courses through both films.

This quiet one-two punch has returned McConaughey to his wheelhouse, which is located somewhere between Serenity’s palm-tree-slung hammock and The Beach Bum’s cabana bar. In both films, he plays overgrown slackers, men content to work just hard enough to finance a lifestyle of vice and relaxation. As Serenity’s Baker Dill, he fishes for profit, drinks for fun, and beds a grateful local played by Diane Lane for a little bit of both. In The Beach Bum, McConaughey’s mad poet Moondog appears to be more comfortable behind a bong than a typewriter, speaking like he doesn’t know where a sentence will go once he’s begun it.

McConaughey’s looseness extends to his body language in both films, at times swaggering with a stoner’s wobbliness, and at others gliding through his scenes with the fluid grace of Bruce Lee. McConaughey has always been at his best when he decides to be instead of do, in roles radiating such beatific relaxation that the audience is liable to cop a contact high.

But the oeuvre of McConaughey has held more twists and turns than one of the dusty Texan roads he grew up on. He was the Next Big Thing during the ’90s, before becoming a seeming casualty of poorly reviewed, lowest common denominator rom-coms for the following decade. Although a resurgence termed the “McConaissance” returned him to critical esteem at the top of the 2010s and culminated in a pivotal Oscar win in 2013, he’s struggled to parlay his second coming into continued success, resulting in a string of misfires that Serenity and The Beach Bum have now broken.

The latest phase of the actor’s filmography gets him back to basics, effectively relaunching the stalled McConaissance. After a few years of petering out, his comeback needed a comeback of its own, and he pulled it off by doing what he does best — that is to say, as little as possible. That’s what viewers love about the perpetually tanned, easygoing McConaughey: He gets older, but his onscreen persona stays the same age.

The rise-and-fall (and rise) narrative couldn’t last

As recently as five years ago, the trajectory of McConaughey’s career was easy enough to chart. Point A was a promising start as a naturalistic, agreeable presence, the kind of guy who could score his first big film role simply by sidling up to a casting director at a bar. His performance as aging skirt-chaser Wooderson in 1993’s Dazed and Confused made him an overnight star, his clarion call of “alright, alright, alright” becoming a mantra for all those going with the flow.

That role would come to define him on- and off-screen up to the present day, but he spent the remainder of the ’90s demonstrating his range and reliability as a movie star. He cut a dashing figure as a lawyer in the classical Grisham mold in A Time to Kill, and helped guide the film to a massive blockbuster payout in 1996. (Roger Ebert confessed to being “moved” by McConaughey’s big monologue near the tail end of the film.) The next year, he got Steven Spielberg’s seal of approval with a clutch supporting role in the slave ship drama Amistad, even generating Oscar murmurs.

Point B spread out across the Aughts, as McConaughey took a sojourn through the wilds of mediocrity. His name grew synonymous with a pitiable strain of rom-com that channeled the actor’s charisma into a more approachable, dateable persona. The Wedding Planner, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Failure to Launch, Fool’s Gold, and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past made their star into a punch line between 2001 and 2009, but because the ticket sales remained robust, there was no cause to mess with success.

Even when McConaughey tried something different — as in the Al Pacino-led 2005 sports gambling drama Two for the Money — his output lacked the luster of those revelatory early turns. (An “acting chore” slightly less arduous than “carrying every grain of the spring’s miserable Sahara,” raved USA Today.) While this time would prove financially lucrative for McConaughey, and many rom-com devotees saw no issue in his chosen work, he didn’t command the crossover respect from the critical establishment enjoyed by, say, a Brad Pitt.

A tertiary appearance in 2008’s Tropic Thunder hinted at the path to the McConaissance that would span from 2011 to 2014. As talent agent Rick Peck, he repurposed his butter-smooth personality as something oilier and more unsavory, playing a knowing riff on the rascally-charmer type he’d originally made his stock-in-trade.

Offering a slant on the unflappable image he’d cultivated in Dazed and Confused and again as a dreamboat in Boys on the Side, his performances in the post-Tropic Thunder years would yield some of the most fascinating work in his filmography, and ultimately restore his former stature. He excelled at revealing the dark, broken parts concealed by the steely exteriors of the cowboy archetype.

The title character of 2011’s Killer Joe was a sociopath in a black 10-gallon hat, while the eponymous role of 2012’s Mud hid a lifetime of regret behind McConaughey’s piercing gaze and molasses drawl. As Dallas in 2012’s Magic Mike, he’s playing an outsize parody of masculinity who knows he’s a parody, just as hip to the artifice of the whole good-ol’-boy act as we are.

Hollywood loves a comeback narrative, and McConaughey delivered. The first component of his two-pronged, 2013 return to the mainstream from the indie outskirts was a tour de force on True Detective as a desiccated husk of his usual form. The expanded canvas of HBO’s miniseries gave him ample room for image rehabilitation, allowing him to reintroduce himself as an intense actor unafraid to plumb some dark depths.

That same year, he also went for the Academy jugular with his turn as Ron Woodruff in Dallas Buyers Club. The true story of a homophobe reformed by his own AIDS diagnosis had all the trappings of an awards-caliber showing: a topical angle, a historical basis, a clear character arc with lots of room for highlight-reel monologuing. It worked, too. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor — and his career is only now recovering.

The McConaissance buzz led its subject astray

When an actor sweeps the awards circuit, the unspoken reward is that they get their pick of the auteur litter as big-name directors line up for the privilege of collaboration. As he basked in the post-Oscar glow, it made sense that McConaughey would take high-profile gigs with past award-winners such as Gus Van Sant and box office mainstays like Christopher Nolan. But the years in the wake of his new acclaim were studded with bad bets, films that affected the appearance of prestige without following through on quality.

With the marked exception of his poignant 2014 Interstellar performance, McConaughey spent this four-year period moping through plodders that stifled his charisma. Van Sant’s 2015 film The Sea of Trees sullied the “suicide forest,” sending McConaughey into Aokigahara as a ponderous and mildly insufferable man who finds the will to live via helpful Japanese ghosts.

In 2016, Gary Ross’s Free State of Jones likewise missed the mark, saddling McConaughey with a Confederate-turned-abolitionist white savior narrative and the haunted visage to match. That same year, McConaughey sported a combover and girthy paunch to play a modern-day prospector in Stephen Gaghan’s Gold, but a flimsy script hobbled the lead performance. He made a lunge at blockbuster glory with the big-ticket Stephen King adaptation The Dark Tower in 2017, but the self-fashioned franchise was dead-on-arrival.

They all faceplanted with critics and ticket-buyers alike, calling McConaughey’s cachet into question. (The less said about his vocal contribution to 2016’s execrable animated film Sing, the better.) As a good-for-nothing small-time gun-runner in 2018’s White Boy Rick, McConaughey showed a glint of his old hell-raising charms, but he’s only recently gotten back in sync with himself.

Films like The Sea of Trees, Free State of Jones, Gold, and White Boy Rick replicated and magnified the core imbalance of Dallas Buyers Club, giving McConaughey a seemingly meaty role without a film capable of sustaining it. They’d use the same mannered, lumpy humorlessness as a stand-in for depth, unaware that the key appeal of fast-living Ron Woodruff was how he reminded us a bit of the man playing him.

America responded to Woodruff and True Detective’s Rust Cohle because they were distinctly McConaughey roles — hard-drinking, devil-may-care men of the south — that allowed him to play against type, creating something new, bracing, alienating, and captivating.

For some actors, success can be its own obstacle

McConaughey made the same post-Oscar miscalculations as previous winners like Cuba Gooding, Jr. or Adrien Brody did. Namely that a good actor is a “serious” actor, and that serious acting is necessarily good acting. (Call it the Sullivan’s Travels delusion.) Six years out from his unexpected Supporting Actor win for Jerry Maguire, and Gooding was still trying to get awards-friendly vehicles like the horrifically miscalculated Radio off the ground.

Brody tried to refashion himself as a blander sort of leading man by playing action-hero for Peter Jackson’s King Kong, and while the film was a hit, a forgettable performance contributed to him falling out of favor with the arbiters of cinematic taste who once celebrated him. Many actors experience this as a phase they then snap out of; there’s a direct line to be drawn between Brie Larson taking the Oscar for Room and the lamentable, somber-faced adaptation of The Glass Castle she signed on for shortly afterward. (She has since bounced back in a big way, albeit by diverting toward the Marvel blockbuster route.)

Success can leave a person mixed-up about how they achieved it. Box-office domination rerouted the career of Chris Pratt; an idiot-puppy-dog energy made him unique in Parks and Recreation and again in Guardians of the Galaxy, but films like the critically savaged Passengers and the flagging Jurassic World franchise sanded that quality down in the interest of making him broadly palatable to the widest audience possible. McConaughey has the experience and smarts to know how to pull out of this tailspin simply by being himself.

McConaughey’s at his best when he’s cutting loose, exploring the weird spontaneity of his acting style, getting in touch with his physicality and rhythms of language. And for the first time in years, Serenity and The Beach Bum give him that outlet to do so. He moves through the roles of Baker Dill and Moondog like liquid silver, untouchable and constantly changing shape.

They’re low-stakes performances that find brilliance by refusing to look for it, discovering along the way that just chilling can foster genius of its own. They’re too outré to drum up much awards talk, with too many odd angles and frayed ends. But that’s the McConaughey way, in its best and purest form. If he does things that only make sense within the confines of his addled brain, don’t worry about it, at least he knows what he’s doing. At last, McConaughey has resubscribed to the Tao of alright, alright, alright.

You’ve got to be in at least 11th grade if you want to buy a ticket to Eighth Grade.

Bo Burnham’s new coming-of-age comedy began its theatrical run this past weekend, but prospective moviegoers in the same age bracket as lovably awkward protagonist Kayla (Elsie Fisher) were plum out of luck: In their infinite and highly arbitrary wisdom, the Motion Picture Association of America saw fit to brand the film with an R rating, barring all viewers under 17 years old unaccompanied by a parent or an adult guardian.

Their rationale: a bit of salty language involving four-letter words and coarse slang terms, a situation more accurately described as sexually charged than sexual, and one painful, hilarious scene in which our hero does some intrepid YouTube searching on blow job technique. Even Common Sense Media, the organization whose entire mission is sniffing out objectionable content in family-geared entertainment, called the film “a good (if slightly cringeworthy) movie to watch with your teen.” Regardless, for this, the scarlet R.

The frustrating, paradoxical notion that the average teen cannot handle a frank account of being 13 years old until four years after the fact is nothing new, however. It’s just the latest reminder of how the MPAA’s highly specific hang-ups can restrict some spheres of film while taking a laissez-faire attitude to others. And it’s the youngest class of ticket-buyers who are paying for it — or, rather, being forbidden from paying for it.

The MPAA has a tendency to get skittish around adolescent subject matter

Eighth Grade is far from the first high school-set film slapped with a prohibitive rating on questionable grounds, despite being leagues removed from the full-bore raunch of a Superbad or a Blockers. There was nary a boob to be seen in 2016’s Hailee Steinfeld vehicle The Edge of Seventeen, but a handful of F-bombs, some scenes of underage drinking, and a recitation of one particularly frank sext were enough to earn the dreaded R rating. The same fate awaited 2014’s Boyhood, an even tamer film dinged for a bit of sailor talk, some mild birds-and-bees conversations, and scattered underage drinking and cannabis smoking.

Then there’s the curious case of the 2012 screen adaptation of Stephen Chbosky’s bildungsroman novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower: The MPAA initially went for the R, for language as well as a nonjudgmental depiction of acid use and the scandalizing sight of Emma Watson clad in a white bra for a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The producers appealed the rating, and ultimately got it bumped down to a PG-13 for “mature thematic material, drug and alcohol use, sexual content including references, and a fight — all involving teens.”

In all these instances, the material in question is handled with sensitivity and delicacy befitting films unabashed about their intent to speak directly to youth audiences. Aside from a bit of uncomfortable shifting in their seat, any high school sophomore could safely watch them alongside Mom and Dad.

This raises the question of following the law’s letter versus its spirit, whether the undefinable quality of a film supersedes the superficial criteria placed on it. Pursuing that line of inquiry leads to some sticky deliberations in the Escher-style labyrinth that is the MPAA’s standard operating practice.

Teen movies’ R problem is symptomatic of deeper issues with the film rating system

The MPAA adheres to an arcane, not fully known set of rules occasionally verging on the ridiculous. The classic example: One utterance of “fuck” will slide in a PG-13 release, but a second places it firmly in R territory. (Though the MPAA’s official Classification and Rating Rules allow for extenuating circumstances based on the context of the dialogue, pending a two-thirds majority vote. One such beneficiary of this policy: Adventures in Babysitting.)

In a recent interview with Julie Taymor and Evan Rachel Wood about their time working on 2007’s Across the Universe, they mentioned that they could get away with one exposed breast and manage a PG-13, but revealing a complete pair is apparently grown-up business and accordingly would’ve gotten them an R. Because the MPAA is not required to specify for the public precisely how it arrives at its conclusions, viewers are often left wondering how Boyhood ends up with the same classification as Natural Born Killers.

That Oliver Stone’s hallucinogenic bloodbath got downgraded from an initial rating of NC-17 with the excising of four minutes of footage is a testament to the MPAA’s amenability where violence is concerned. The American fetish for barbarism has seeped into the national film culture with a quiet insidiousness, creating a governing body that writes off mass destruction as no biggie while going for the fainting couch at the sight of a second nipple.

A recent review of the PG-13 blockbuster Skyscraper pointed out that it contains exponentially more death and destruction than its clear antecedent Die Hard, but the Christmastime classic landed an R rating due to its bloodshed. The new Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson tentpole includes suicide bombings, civilians mowed down by gunfire, and weeping children facing down the business end of a firearm — but hide the hemoglobin, keep the tone light, and you’re a PG-13 film in good standing.

Contrast that with the MPAA’s positively puritanical attitudes toward sexuality at the movies, a subject thoroughly explored in the 2006 investigative documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated. Sex scenes are picked through with a fine-toothed comb, any detail — a wiping of the chin, a moan too emphatically acted, any maneuver beyond the most vanilla standards — sufficient to bump a film up to the R zone and limit its reach.

The deliberators at the MPAA have also demonstrated clear biases with regard to female and queer pleasure. The Michelle Williams-Ryan Gosling romance Blue Valentine ended up the topic of controversy back in 2010 when the MPAA broke out the seldom-used pornographic NC-17 rating on account of one cunnilingus scene. A strong counterargument from Gosling and, uh, another guy proved that the board rules more punitively when women seem to be enjoying themselves, and the rating was overturned.

All the same, it was a small win, and the underlying issue persists today. A little sexual curiosity and experimentation is a perfectly normal part of the adolescent experience. Grievous bodily harm, one hopes, is not.

It’s time for a commonsense movie classification policy

All things said, we’ve come pretty far. Our current ratings system is a vast improvement over the blanket censorship of the Hays Code that the MPAA’s ratings were created to replace. Long gone are the days when married couples were mandated to sleep in separate beds, left in the past along with the pre-PG-13 era in which the glue-huffing, dummy-blowing Airplane! squeaked through with a PG.

But the MPAA is still a highly imperfect organization, and because it’s not a governmental agency, it’s difficult for regular folks to lobby for improvements. (Though that much is probably for the best; a state-operated body of cultural censorship, under this or any administration, would be a step or five backward.)

So let this be a call for commonsense policy on the hot-button issue of what sophomores are permitted to watch after school. In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of hardcore pornography, “I know it when I see it.” The instantly immortal quote was his shorthand argument that though he may not be able to explain why, it’s clear to anyone who watches Louis Malle’s The Lovers that it’s more than common smut.

Likewise, though films like Eighth Grade may contain mature elements, their execution renders them more palatable for a younger class of viewers than an R rating would suggest. Intangible qualities like a sense of gentle empathy, candid humor, and tasteful camerawork mark the invisible line between trauma fuel and a safe vicarious taste of early adulthood. The elastic clause that safely cleared a way to theaters for Adventures in Babysitting needs a workout.

A bit of cussing and sex chatter is a standard, arguably even essential component of most people’s teenage years, and many kids first start to wrap their heads around the concept via the remove of movies and TV. In no small way, that’s the moral of such stories erring on the side of the developmentally instructive: It’s cool that you can’t stop thinking about sex, don’t worry that you’re so awkward and sweaty, the instinct to test your limits is healthy.

Barring Eighth Grade’s Kayla from her contemporary real-world works-in-progress cuts them off from an emotional resource that, for some, can be truly precious. When she gets an eyeful of a smiley-faced instructor demonstrating her methods on a dildo, she reacts with horror, just as one of her fellow 13-year-olds might. It’s what the film does with that reaction that sets it apart from the glut of R-rated releases. Both the script and the camera treat Kayla’s discomfort as completely reasonable, and she almost comes off a little brave for asserting herself and growing at her own pace.

It doesn’t take a lot of emotional intelligence to see that this would be a positive example for anyone at the same juncture in life. Those hindered from joining Kayla on her stumbling journey through puberty are precisely the viewers who would benefit the most. In other words, won’t somebody please think of the children?

It is no longer enough to label a film a Christmas movie. The sheer volume of entries in the genre demands a more specific taxonomy: There are the standard-issue comedies (Santa Clause, Jingle All the Way), canonized classics (Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life), Yuletide horror (Black Christmas or the more recent Krampus), and mistletoe-decked rom-coms in the vein of Love Actually. Hell, A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas even brought the stoner-flick genre into the fold. That’s not to mention such essential viewing as the Rankin-Bass stop-motion TV specials, The Grinch, and miscellaneous Christmas-set genre pictures that get tangentially caught under the umbrella. (Call it the Die Hard effect.)

Hanukkah has Eight Crazy Nights and The Hebrew Hammer. That’s pretty much it.

Every year when the holiday season rolls around, Jewish pop-culture addicts find themselves left out in the cold. The dearth of movies centered on Hanukkah has grown especially glaring as Hollywood has expanded to make room for a wider diversity of filmmakers and stories across racial, sexual, and gender lines. It’s almost suspicious that a culture with such a rich history and vibrant present would go almost entirely ignored by the movies — after all, we do supposedly control the media — though the underlying cause may have less to do with the fact that only around 2.2 percent of American citizens are Jewish, and more to do with the holiday itself.

The Hanukkah movies we do have only barely engage with the holiday itself

The province of Hanukkah entertainment has historically been television, where nodding to a Jewish viewership doesn’t demand such a great expenditure of time or resources. Plenty of shows have shifted focus for an episode to a token Hanukkah-observant character so that they may share their customs and provide a little background on the holiday.

Friends poked fun at the tough sell of Hanukkah over the flashier, more popular Christmas with Ross’s feeble attempts to get his son jazzed over his dual-religion heritage using the “Holiday Armadillo.” Saturday Night Live’s “Christmastime for the Jews” sketch turned a Phil Spector-styled girl-group song into an ode to the joys of avoiding Christmas. Who could forget the Rugrats Hanukkah special, in which Tommy Pickles and his infant buddies travel back to the time of Judah the Macca-baby to learn about the strife of the ancient Hebrew people? And of course, The O.C.’s “Chrismukkah” episode remains one of the cornerstones of Western art. (Or at the very least, a pretty deft take on increasingly common multiculturalism within a single family unit.)

Out in the bigger arena of the movie biz, however, Hanukkah has gotten an unreasonably short shrift.

Adam Sandler has taken up the unofficial mantle of the Festival of Lights’ primary defender, drafting his much-beloved “Hanukkah Song” specifically as pushback against the paucity of Jew-friendly holiday entertainment. He continued on with his mission in 2002 with Eight Crazy Nights, his equally misanthropic and sophomoric cartoon about one screw-up’s attempts to scrape his life back together during the holiday season. In addition to co-writing the script with three fellow comedians, Sandler voices Davey, an ill-tempered wastrel with a taste for booze and destruction of public property. In between set pieces of scatological majesty (one incident involving a port-a-potty, a water hose, and a deer isn’t easily forgotten), Davey bitterly shuts out the world and undergoes a fairly standard redemption narrative.

The extent to which Sandler and the film actually interface with Hanukkah and its significance is questionable. The holiday pops up all over the film; Davey’s parents died during a childhood Hanukkah, and the card they left to him represents his one link to his lost loved ones. As the title makes clear, the events of the film play out over the course of a single Hanukkah, and in a pivotal moment, it’s the nebulously defined “spirit of Hanukkah” that guides Davey back to his senses. But mostly, the film’s ostensible reason for being gets reduced to set-dressing and wordplay for the many musical numbers.

Lesser known and less critically loathed, The Hebrew Hammer trades Cuban-link chains for Star of David pendants to send up blaxploitation cinema. The comic chronicle of a mensch-Superfly named Mordechai and his heroic exploits is packed with inside jokes for the in-the-know faction of viewers, mining punchlines from bar mitzvahs, Manischewitz, and ritual circumcision.

A perfectly cast Adam Goldberg blends silky-smooth 1970s panache with the neuroses endemic to cultural depictions of Jewish men as he foils a plot from a power-mad Santa Claus (Andy Dick) to permanently cancel Hanukkah. But all along, director Jonathan Kesselman places more emphasis on absurdist gags (a key character is named Mohammad Ali Paula Abdul Rahim) than on faith itself. At a key moment, Mordechai starts to explain the importance and meaning of Hanukkah to Andy Dick’s evil Kris Kringle, but realizes he has no follow-up.

At first blush, it’s baffling that these two films comprise pretty much the entire canon of what could be accurately deemed Hanukkah movies. Where’s the CGI-heavy studio adaptation of Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins, which was read to me annually as a child? Where’s the heartwarming Hanukkah family dramedy? The modern Jewish family experience certainly appears ripe for comedy and pathos — everyone has that kooky relative that would make for some colorful comic relief. Family is a cornerstone of Jewish community, and that should translate to crowd-pleasing seasonal entertainment.

Hanukkah doesn’t easily lend itself to seasonal cheer. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.

In her 1995 article “Jewish Humor, Self-Hatred, or Anti-Semitism,” published in The Journal of Popular Culture, Nancy Jo Silberman-Friedman states that “while [Hanukkah] is relegated by the rabbis to a relatively minor status among other Jewish holidays, in America it has taken on a ‘Jewish Christmas’ element.” Hanukkah is a fundamentally different holiday than Christmas, however, with a radically opposing set of animating principles that may help explain its relative absence in the holiday-movie realm.

The story of Hanukkah is that of suffering and hardship: The Maccabees had just survived a brutal conflict with the Greeks, when the ragged surviving Heebs made their last pittance of lamp oil stick for eight days. The great miracle of Christmas is the arrival of the savior, but the great miracle of Hanukkah was keeping the lights on in the rubble-strewn aftermath of a costly war.

To varying extents, all Jewish holidays are oriented around austerity and guilt, which don’t lend themselves as easily to screenplay-friendly warming sensations as peace on earth and goodwill toward men. An honest Hanukkah movie would almost necessarily be a movie about taking a long, hard look at yourself and your choices, which is the last thing most audiences want at this time of year. It’s the stuff of great drama and blackly sardonic comedy, but not exactly spritely seasonal cheer, which box-office receipts have determined to be the prevailing tone for holiday movies.

Setting aside the fact that the vast majority of Americans identify as Christian, Christmas also happens to turn on such bottom-line-friendly sentiments as forgiveness, hope, new beginnings, and salvation. And while Hanukkah has dreidels and latkes and a goodly amount of fun, the celebration’s underpinnings just don’t strike the same sort of jolly chord, one that viewers want to return to (and pay for) season after season.

Reconciling the solemn roots of Hanukkah with the upbeat spirit that holiday movies demand remains a challenge for some enterprising screenwriter, but one eminently worth undertaking. For one, it’d make a lot of Jews who are tired of rewatching a cartoon Adam Sandler make poop jokes very happy to get some fresh material. (Most of us have eight nights of family time in need of filling, for Judah’s sake.)

Beyond that, though, there’s rich narrative ground in the Jewish heritage waiting to be broken, and good stories deserve to be told. The time has come — Hollywood’s ready for The Schlep Around the Corner.

Before Beyoncé Knowles was a living hit factory/fertility goddess, she beat the snot out of Ali Larter.

In the distant past of 2009, when both Knowles and her co-star Idris Elba were on a somewhat lower tier of fame, it made sense for them to take the leading roles in the studio-fronted erotic drama Obsessed. They played a married couple terrorized by Larter’s unstable interloper, a secretary who spontaneously develops an insatiable desire for Elba’s power executive.

The film is pretty wild: There’s drugging and woman-on-man rape and a performance from Elba that was shockingly excellent to anyone still waiting to get around to those DVDs of The Wire. But in the modern pop cultural memory, Obsessed has primarily been reduced to the movie where Beyoncé head-butts Ali Larter.

Eight years later, it looks like the same fate could very well befall the new Unforgettable, the directorial debut feature from Denise Di Novi that opened to an anemic box office take in its first weekend. “It just didn’t resonate with the intended audience,” said Warner Bros.’ Jeff Goldstein of the disappointing debut — a statement that says a lot about the languishing state of the sexy psychological thriller and viewers’ opinion thereof.

Which isn’t to say Unforgettable is working in an entirely outdated mode. The new film tweaks the classic psychological thriller dynamic just a touch: The flaxen-haired psycho position is now filled by ex-wife Tessa (Katherine Heigl, in a sinfully amusing turn that hopefully heralds a coming Heiglssance), and the target of her rage is her former spouse’s new fiancée Julia (Rosario Dawson, also perfectly cast). The added family matters aren’t incidental to the film, and end up giving Unforgettable much of its stealth dramatic power.

For as much as Unforgettable is indeed the film in which the former Grey’s Anatomy starlet attempts to dead-ass murder Rosario Dawson, it is also a film of valid ideas and sound drama. I’d like to preemptively beg forgiveness for the following phrase, but Unforgettable is one film that does not deserve to be forgotten — or, more pressingly, remembered as a hokey camp artifact.

Unforgettable is the last of a dying genre breed

Unforgettable excels at something that has become perilously uncool to excel at. It wasn’t so long ago that psychological thrillers laced with a healthy dose of deviant sex appeal were relatively common in Hollywood. In the ’80s and ’90s, horny cat-and-mouse games like Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct dominated the box office and spawned an entire cottage industry’s worth of pale imitators hoping to leech a little bit of their earning power by association. The best of the genre didn’t go over the top, but instead raised the top by operating within an exaggerated sort of reality.

These pictures had to ask a lot of their audience in terms of suspended disbelief. Once a viewer accepted that a homicidal hottie was not outside of the realm of possibility, however, the folks at home were richly rewarded with lurid fun that could also terrify without a protective shell of irony.

But present-day audiences don’t always know what to do when films straddle the blurry line between melodrama and regular drama, most especially where sexuality is involved. Consider the curious case of Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, who scored a hit with Basic Instinct (word-of-mouth buzz about Sharon Stone’s intimate anatomy didn’t hurt), only for the public to turn on him with the massively misinterpreted Showgirls. Critics and audiences alike rejected the film as an overblown train wreck without a shred of self-awareness, amusing by way of schadenfreude, failing to recognize Verhoeven’s exaggeration as being in service of a vicious satire on the garishness of American entertainment.

Like that go-for-broke paean to the sexual image, Unforgettable blows right past the so-bad-it’s-good classification, and resists simple, ironic camp appreciation. Simply put, it’s good, but good at a specified mode of entertaining that takes some acclimation for those who aren’t used to it. Rolling Stone’s in-house critic Peter Travers dunked on Di Novi’s film with the opening diss, “Unforgettable is definitely the wrong title for a movie you want to erase from your memory the second it ends.” The A.V. Club’s review lamented, “With its formulaic story and hackneyed dialogue, all there is to do in between moments of self-aware outrageousness is admire the decor.” Variety’s review tellingly described Heigl as “so icily sociopathic that it’s too bad the borderline-campy movie wasn’t willing to go full tilt into B-movie ‘psycho-Barbie’ territory.” 

Unforgettable has a functional brain plugged into its smokin’ bod

Breezing past Di Novi’s film as an object of derisive laughter that shamefully fails to lean into full camp means missing out on some surprisingly well-measured perspectives on the sort of mature themes that often go unexplored in mainstream studio films. And the fact that Unforgettable will be one of a minuscule number of female-fronted studio productions this year speaks volumes about how seriously the mainstream is willing to take art created by and ostensibly geared toward women.

As much as we may wish otherwise, Unforgettable isn’t just 100 minutes of Katherine Heigl trying to gouge out Rosario Dawson’s eyes. The film also happens to contain a plot and characters, two of whom happen to be well-shaded women with recognizably real insecurities. Di Novi probes both sides of a difficult personal transition, as Julia and Tessa struggle to accept their new roles as stepmom and ex-wife, and fight to break out of cycles of trauma.

Long assigned the thankless role of the humorless shrew to her doofy male counterpart, Heigl slyly subverts her own onscreen persona by taking it to a chilling extreme in Unforgettable. But even as she conjures a villain for the ages (everything about Tessa fits together perfectly, from her tight self-knotted ponytail to her immaculately kept home to her milk-white wardrobe), she exposes a frail human beneath. She can’t help but be intimidated by Julia, the new model whom she sees as her younger, sexier, more accomplished competition. Conversely, former on-the-go internet writer Julia fears she can’t provide sound mothering to her new stepdaughter, an anxiety that Tessa identifies and subtly exacerbates until Julia comes undone.

Julia and Tessa also share the lingering psychical scars of abuse, and the anxieties that accompany them. We’re informed that Julia lived through a relationship marred by domestic violence a few years prior to the events of the film, and she can’t bear to tell her husband-to-be for fear of being looked down on as damaged goods. Likewise, the shadow looming behind Tessa’s Type A neurosis takes the form of her implacable, austere mother. Any Psych 101 vet can trace the line between Tessa’s mother’s constant insults and the intense expectations Tessa places on her daughter. Though they’re filtered through a Hitchcockian plot of gaslighting and deception, both women’s emotional motivations tell a more mature story than the pulpy content belies.

Curiouser still is how Unforgettable and its ilk court and yet refuse to engage with the recurrent question of race. Both Di Novi’s latest and Obsessed pit a crazy white lady — an aggressively white lady, at that — against a woman of color. In the case of Obsessed, where Knowles and Elba seethe with a sexual heat largely and regrettably absent from Unforgettable (excepting one sweltering montage of coatroom coitus cross-cut with laptop-assisted masturbation), the white intrusion feels especially conspicuous. The 2015 thriller The Perfect Guy put a slight spin on the concept by placing a woman in a lethal love triangle with Morris Chestnut and Michael Ealy, and tweaked the racial subtext through a light-skinned/dark-skinned dichotomy between black men.

But in all instances, the knotty issue of race goes entirely unremarked upon. By ignoring these dynamics while simultaneously placing them front and center, the films have their politicized cake and apolitically eat it too. Those so inclined to see a charged parable of white envy toward black success can do so, and everyone else remains none the wiser.

With Unforgettable, Di Novi encodes the faint suggestion of subversion into an American studio film in the year 2017, and better still, she uses the veneer of disreputable throwaway entertainment as her cover. It’s both covert and overt, too stylistically heightened to scan as truly radical, but simultaneously resistant to usual Hollywood typifying.

Unforgettable carries too much significance to be mocked or disposed of

A curious case study from any angle, Unforgettable contains multitudes: a refreshing change of pace from an increasingly hidebound studio system, an affecting thriller that uses catfighting as a Trojan horse to smuggle in earnest depictions of the struggles women face in middle age, a launching board for the Katherine Heigl comeback we never knew we needed.

Above all else, however, Unforgettable is a film without scare quotes. The true-blue fear in Dawson’s eyes when she encounters her abuser after years apart cannot inspire foot stomping from midnight madness crowds looking for a for a target of ironic derision.

Di Novi plays the game, tossing in pregnant pauses and sinister musical cues that fashion Tessa into something along the lines of Norman Bates with a membership in the First Wives Club. But as she gets her kicks and delivers on the trailer’s promise of supreme-bitch theatrics, not a single moment in Unforgettable gives the impression that Di Novi is ashamed or even self-conscious of the film she set out to make. She believes in the great clash between carnal rivals, between the dark past and the promising present, between blondes and brunettes. Why shouldn’t we?

With Hollywood studios force-feeding audiences brand expansions mandated by nothing more than their own bottom line, it’s understandable that we’ve gotten a little dubious of sequels. Responses to the news of a beloved film going franchise tend to range from cautious optimism at best to bafflement and rage at worst. It feels like just yesterday that cries of “Who could have asked for The Nut Job 2: Nutty By Nature?!” echoed all across America, though it’s possible that may have been just me.

It came as a refreshing change of pace, then, when the news that the 2014 Keanu Reeves action vehicle John Wick would get the sequel treatment broke to general rejoicing. Even now, with the much-touted John Wick 2 two days from wide release, the overall mood surrounding the sequel has remained upbeat and eager, bolstered by breathless tweets from early press screenings.

No wonder; the original John Wick enjoys a sterling critical reputation and an ardent fan base, somehow having achieved cult-object status about 20 minutes into its first showings at public cineplexes. Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key lightly spoofed it with their big-screen vehicle Keanu last year. The fanboy-favorite pop culture outlet Birth Movies Death is currently in the middle of “Wick Week,” a multi-day salute to the new heir apparent to the action-franchise throne.

It’s not hard to see what the fuss is about either. John Wick rules.

That’s pretty much all that comes to mind when someone asks you to explain the film’s charms: that it hauls all manner of ass. Its pleasures feel self-evident, simple, and immediate. The movie is good because the action is good, easy as that.

But while that feeling of simplicity is key to why John Wick works, less apparent factors also figure prominently into its overall appeal. Judiciously curated influences, a perfectly chosen leading man, and elaborate choreography masking its own intricacy all combined to make this film in particular stick in the cultural landscape. John Wick hits with the blunt force of a shotgun blast, but crack open any firearm and you’ll find it houses some deceptively sophisticated mechanisms.

John Wick got off on the right foot by taking inspiration from the East

As career stuntmen, Chad Stahelski and David Leitch were the ideal men to bring John Wick to life. The co-directors brought years of combat experience to the table when they set out to make John Wick, and like any action junkies worth their salt, they had cultivated an obsession with the tradition known as “gun fu.”

As the name suggests, the combat style fuses the hyperkinetic physicality of martial arts with live ammo for one violent yet graceful onslaught. Filmmaker John Woo, a professed influence of Stahelski and Leitch on the film, birthed the gun fu genre during the late 1980s and brought it to prominence with such films as The Killer and Hard Boiled during the early ’90s. Woo turned Hong Kong into the epicenter of a fascinating and highly influential movement in action filmmaking, with his countrymen Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark also conducting mad experiments with death-defying stunts.

The distinctive techniques popular in the Hong Kong action style soon caught the attention of filmmakers stateside. The Wachowski siblings ransacked Woo’s cinematic bag of tricks for The Matrix movies (on which Stahelski and Leitch both worked), adding the digital innovation of “bullet time” to the weightless shootouts. It’s all right there in the legendary lobby showdown: the dual-wielding pistols, the indoor sunglasses, the slow-mo wall running. And, ever the magpie, Quentin Tarantino wholesale ganked a handful of shots from The Killer for the bullet-strewn finale of Django Unchained.

The gun fu tradition lives on in John Wick’s simultaneously brutal and nimble method of fighting, in which each shot is as precise and purposeful as a jab or kick. Wick doesn’t just shoot the scores of Russian gangsters who cross his path of revenge — he dispatches them. Clad in a black suit that wouldn’t look out of place on Chow Yun-fat, Wick moves with an almost superhuman agility that earns him the title “Baba Yaga” among the gangsters who still revere and fear him. He’s a wuxia warrior by way of Charles Bronson in Death Wish.

John Wick reminded audiences what Keanu Reeves does best

John Wick screenwriter Derek Kolstad has confessed that he had Paul Newman in mind while drafting the script. But given that Newman’s been dead for some time now, the producers decided to go in a different direction, and it was to the film’s benefit that they did.

The role of John Wick plays to Keanu Reeves’s highly specific strengths as an actor. J-Wick’s tense stoicism gelled perfectly with the actor’s dialed-back mode of performance, his restrained anguish a natural pose for Reeves to assume. Though his retaliatory rampage is fueled by the sacred bond between a man and his dog, John Wick presents himself as a remorseless and impersonal force of death. The notion that he’s no mere mortal enhances the shock-and-awe aspect of his bloody campaign (and is reinforced when he takes several shots and appears undeterred), and what’s more, it helped jump-start Reeves’s flagging career.

Memories of Reeves from the Matrix set were still clear in Stahelski and Leitch’s minds when they tapped him for the part, and accordingly, they remembered him as he was rather than as what he’d become. The years since Reeves’s turn as blank-slate killing machine Neo had not been particularly kind to him, and his work had substantially thinned out around the start of the 2010s. His IMDb profile was getting clogged with little-seen indies and critical failures, but John Wick got him back on his game.

Reeves’s guns-blazing somersault back into his wheelhouse added a cathartic undercurrent to John Wick; it was thrilling to see a skilled professional allowed to get back to doing what he’s best at.

The role opened up a world of opportunity for Reeves moving forward, as he has since scored clutch roles in The Neon Demon, the upcoming oddity The Bad Batch, and the fabled next project from Shane Carruth, The Modern Ocean. Keanu’s thinking he’s back, and John Wick gave him one hell of a welcoming party.

John Wick approaches spectacle like a musical, with point-blank shots instead of high C’s

John Wick excelled by knowing when and how to get out of its own way. The co-directors understood that the fight sequences would be their film’s main selling point, and the script obliged by constructing a story that exists mainly to cue up massive melees.

This is where many lesser action films have faltered, unable to ferry their hero from fisticuff to fisticuff without lapsing into implausibility or stupidity. The bare-bones plot of John Wick, however, feels merely unobtrusive rather than thin or ill-formed. We meet John, he gets a rudimentary but sturdy backstory in his dead wife and support pup Daisy, an extremely foolhardy thug kills the pooch, and it’s off to the races. John Wick knew exactly what its audience wanted, and it won them over by giving and giving and giving, with minimal lag time between.

The prioritization of spectacle for spectacle’s sake didn’t just shape John Wick’s plot structure; it dictated the visual makeup of the movie as well. The co-directors shoot John Wick’s most extensive whuppings like grand production numbers in one of Hollywood’s opulent old musicals, keeping the focus on the finely detailed blocking above all else.

Take the rightly vaunted nightclub scene, in which Wick shoots a charging heavyweight three times in the chest to stop him in his tracks, and then once more in the head to confirm the kill before letting him fall into the pool. It all takes place in roughly one and a half seconds, and the camera stays on Reeves just long enough to catch the move and then follow him through the multilevel facility. Leitch and Stahelski always direct the viewer’s sightline toward an element of motion in the frame — you always keep your eye on the dancer’s feet.

The co-directors maximize the impact of their balletic fight routines by privileging the movement of the characters rather than the movement of the camera. They make logical and economical cuts that follow the paths of bodies through space, establishing a coherent visual layout and leading the viewer through it.

The nightclub scene is much more involved than one might realize upon first viewing, wending through a half-dozen rooms and hallways across three floors. Break it down shot by shot, and you’ll find that every edit serves to follow the focal point of combat, the usual pattern being the cut from John Wick striking an enemy to the reverse shot of that enemy falling into or out of something. So long as they stay sharp-eyed, viewers won’t miss a single second of the action.

It’s the mark of a great film to make what has been intensely labored over feel effortless in its execution. The most seductive quality of John Wick is how easy it makes this all look, as if constructing a brilliant action flick required little more than picking someone cool and setting them loose on an all-out killing spree.

Filmmakers rarely stumble into excellence, however. Stahelski and Leitch calculated each and every move, synthesized influences with their personal artistic style, and in doing so they pulled off some dizzyingly complex set pieces. It was no minor feat to elevate the act of totally owning into a refined art form.

With every passing year, the moviegoing calendar inches closer to being subsumed by the twin titans of blockbuster season, when studios trot out their priciest and most specially effected franchise breadwinners, and awards season, when the prestige pictures arrive to return a bit of dignity — and hopefully some golden hardware — to those same studios. The dividing lines have been sliding progressively outward over the past decade, to the point where early April marks the first rumbling of superhero mayhem and the starter’s pistol for the mad Oscar dash is fired at the outset of September.

This expansion is a cause for concern. If these two seasons continue to bloat, they could threaten to eclipse the greatest moviegoing time of all: the wilds of January, February, and early March.

Conventional Hollywood wisdom has unfairly branded these months as the movie calendar’s no-man’s-land, but closer inspection reveals them to be the most richly varied and unpredictable time to hit the theater. There’s a lot to appreciate, and even when the grab bag yields a dud, it’s usually a more memorable failure than most. The beginning of the year is the unheralded sweet spot of moviegoing, where oddities can infiltrate unsuspecting neighborhood multiplexes.

The season’s reputation as a dumping ground overlooks the nature of movie distribution models

The popular consensus, founded in industry common sense and box office math, looks down on January and February as a toxic swamp for new releases. When distributors push a buzzy release from a date in October or November to shortly after the new year, that’s a red flag that they’ve got a stinker on their hands, know it, and would like to bury it where it can do minimal damage.

The perennial post-holiday dip in movie attendance makes it the perfect dumping ground for properties that studios don’t want to waste valuable summer real estate or advertising dollars on. Stakes are lower in January: The all-time highest opening weekend for a January release belongs to American Sniper with $89 million, a paltry sum compared with that June’s staggering $208 million from Jurassic World, May’s $207 million from The Avengers, or The Force Awakens’ mind-boggling $247 million take in December.

This perception of January and February as a time to catch your breath and pass on new movies is off base, however, so long as audiences are willing to look closer and keep an open mind.

For one, staggered distribution models mean that for many viewing markets, January and February reap the best films that December had to offer. Studios will often usher well-regarded releases into hasty limited runs in New York and Los Angeles in December so that they may qualify for that year’s awards consideration, and then gradually expand to theaters across the rest of America in the following weeks.

It can be maddening for movie lovers not living on either coast, but the vast majority of viewers have been made to wait weeks for such critical darlings as Martin Scorsese’s virtuosic religious epic Silence, Jim Jarmusch’s low-key existential sestina Paterson, Mike Mills’s period piece (pun intended) 20th Century Women, or the righteous, barrier-breaker Hidden Figures. And then there are the movies that get PR bumps from Oscar nominations in late January and go into rerelease or wider release, trickling down from the metropolitan areas to chain cinemas in smaller communities.

Kindly reviewed festival favorites from the previous year also tend to roost in these early weeks, enjoying the lessened competition that comes with a slightly sparser slate. After bouncing between private engagements for months, films that have been raved about in early reviews and on social media finally become available to the general public of cinephiles.

For example, this January sees the rollouts of some highlights from the Cannes 2016 class: Palme d’Or winner I, Daniel Blake take its anti-bureaucracy screed to American shores, the enigmatic Staying Vertical will debut to inevitably bewildered domestic audiences, and Iranian master Asghar Farhadi returns with his searing The Salesman. The tenderhearted Japanese family drama After the Storm arrives in February, and Kristen Stewart goes arthouse once again with Olivier Assayas’s beguiling ghost story Personal Shopper in March. And from the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival come the essential James Baldwin bio-doc I Am Not Your Negro and Ben Wheatley’s lunatic shoot-’em-up Free Fire.

The beginning of the year is also prime season for genre movies, especially horror

This presumed scheduling wasteland also provides a valuable haven for the oft-underappreciated genre film, which tends to be suffocated by higher-profile releases later on in the year. Horror, smaller-scale action, sci-fi, and outliers of other sorts (like the Coen brothers’ madcap Tinseltown comedy Hail, Caesar, which brightened up last winter) flourish in the early months, when curious viewers will be more likely to give something off the beaten path of star vehicles a shot.

It was just last February that the rigorously designed scary story The Witch introduced American filmmaking to its newest prince of horror, Robert Eggers, and this year’s offerings are poised to dwarf 2016. And at present, the horror genre in particular is staring down what could be the most fruitful season for original, creator-driven visions in years.

An embarrassment of terrifying riches has converged on the first couple of months in 2017. It begins this week with M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, which drew atypically positive reviews for the director out of its Fantastic Fest premiere, and James McAvoy appears to be having a blast in the trailer for the psycho-horror creepshow.

Shortly thereafter comes Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness, a handsome-looking cross between In the Mouth of Madness and Shutter Island. (Around this same time, audiences in the UK will get a release of Prevenge, the homicidal fetus movie we’ll all hopefully be gawking at later this year.) And that still leaves the combo race satire/surreal horrorshow — and the directorial debut of Key and Peele’s Jordan Peele — Get Out, the hotly anticipated zombie flick The Girl With All the Gifts, the all-woman anthology picture XX, and the long-awaited gothic chiller The Blackcoat’s Daughter.

Even the season’s bad movies tend to be more interesting than the rest of the year’s bad movies

It would be disingenuous to pretend that January and February are entirely free of the turkeys that have come to be associated with the mid- to late winter. The weeks to come will undoubtedly bring us some bad movies, and not even bad in a faintly redemptive way, or bad in the way that’s rebranded as “misunderstood” a few years down the line. We’ll never truly forgive January 2016 for Dirty Grandpa, as well we shouldn’t. But the complex nature of what defines a “bad movie” is the key to the unfairly maligned season’s reputation.

January and February regularly host films that draw lukewarm-to-negative reviews — and perhaps rightly so — but, as flawed expressions of their idiosyncratic creators, still deserve to be watched. These are your Blackhats, your Jupiter Ascendings — the Wachowski sisters’ space opera being a perfect exemplar of this phenomenon. The movie is messy, incoherent, and at times patently ridiculous. But those are all also instrumental aspects of its overall charm; the sheer enormity of the Wachowskis’ vision commands admiration, and the sillier parts fit in with their “cyberpunk 4 Non Blondes music video” aesthetic. It’s indulgent, but to call it “bad” would be reductive.

The open expanses of the early months allow for more specific sorts of films that can afford to cater to more specific tastes. This is where the cult favorites of tomorrow can have room to breathe and amass a following. Don’t be surprised if movie geeks still hold 10 Cloverfield Lane (released March 11, 2016) near and dear 10 years from now.

Even some of the season’s more unambiguously bad movies still have more incidental appeal than the megabudget disasters of summer. Soul-deadening releases like 2016’s Suicide Squad or Batman v Superman felt focus-grouped to death, as if all the spontaneity and personality had been mechanically siphoned out. In contrast, the releases orphaned during the current season challenge the audience to ponder how they even came into being; this is the depth of their spectacular miscalculation.

For example: Say what you will about last year’s Gods of Egypt (“utter nonsense,” “hamstrung by gratuitous, bizarre CGI,” and “full of white people” would all be valid criticisms), but watching space god Geoffrey Rush command a computer-generated slug made of clouds to eat the sun every dawn or whatever the hell might have been going on there — that stays with a person.

If a movie is going to be awful, the least it can do is have the decency to be awful in a way that is fascinating, or amusing in spite or itself, or just endearing in its sincerity. The reviews for the new family film Monster Trucks, for example, do not inspire confidence. But watching the movie, it’s apparent that someone, somewhere along the line, truly believed in the concept of a monster that lives inside a truck’s engine. There’s something sort of beautiful about that.

From bad-movie connoisseurs to cutting-edge cinephiles who don’t live on the coasts, there are certain types of moviegoers who live for the alleged dead space of January and February. The holiday movie season has hit like a massive meteorite, wiping out all the big-budget dinosaurs and leaving the weird little cinematic mammals to come out of the underbrush.

It may not have the nuance and prestige of awards season or the raw filmmaking firepower of blockbuster season, but Everything Else Season is even more precious, offering something increasingly rare: a time when audiences can still be genuinely surprised at the movies. Viewers can walk into a cineplex cold and walk out with a wild-eyed warning for their friends, a new so-bad-it’s-astonishing guilty pleasure, or a lifelong favorite they never saw coming.