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You know you've either seen a great film or a terrible film when you're at a loss for words upon leaving the theater. While not a brilliant entry in the canon of horror comedies, Zombieland: Double Tap is not a tragic piece of garbage either.

What's up, everyone?! My name is Will Smith, and I can still do it all. I can even play two characters at once! That's the main message I came away with after watching this technological action thriller.

Oscar-nominated actor Joaquin Phoenix (The Sisters Brothers, 2018) gives his naturally idiosyncratic edge to the title role in this film offering a psychologically twisted and disarming origin story of Batman's greatest arch enemy. Phoenix plays an ordinary man working as a party clown with an unusual sense of humor and zero friends in a dirty, graffiti-covered, 1970s Gotham city. The continuous violence, loneliness, and aloof neglect surrounding him gradually push him into an eternal carnival ride of madness that is shaky, dangerous, revolutionary, and bloody.

It's films like this that make me grateful for unique international voices who offer independent and genuine stories outside U.S. borders. Asian American writer-director Lulu Wang (Posthumous, 2014) entered this film in Sundance where it gained wider distribution and opened in limited release in July this year.

Something about space often entices filmmakers to pair the eternal vastness of the universe with the comparatively tiny insignificance of human life and relationships. Kind of like how my poor insignificant body always seems to be paired with the endless supply of pizza and nachos that are slowly destroying me. Past films that explore this dichotomy of small mankind with infinite space include Interstellar (2014) and Contact (1997). Ad Astra, a Latin phrase meaning "to the stars", is another epic space adventure with a consistent emotional trajectory.

I've seen one of my favorite films of the year so far, and I hope more people go to the theater soon to watch this beautifully honest story.

Co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (V/H/S, 2012) have another entry in the canon of the horror/thriller genre that is one half Agatha Christie mystery and one half bloody hunting contest. An innocent bride marries into a super-rich family that have built their multi-generational fortune on board games. But instead of honeymoon bliss, the wedding night is a night of initiation for the new bride who is lured into a deadly game of hide and seek to follow an important family tradition.

The Kitchen is centered on 3 women who's husbands are in the Irish mafia in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of 1970s New York City. When the husbands are arrested and sent to prison, these 3 women start managing parts of the family business at first to put food on the table for themselves and their children. But it doesn't take long for them to usurp the entire (or mostly entire) male-dominated leadership to control the whole operation of gangsters, debt collecting, intimidation, and murder.

Oscar-winner Hilary Swank (The Homesman, 2014) leads an all-star cast of wonderful performances as she plays a woman returning home to chilly Chicago to help take care of her mother battling dementia (played by a terrifically fragile Blythe Danner, Hearts Beat Loud, 2018). Swank's character also has to convince her staunch, bullheaded father (Robert Forster, London Has Fallen, 2016) to place her ailing mother in a special care facility. What They Had was first released in November 2018 and is now available on a personal movie viewing platform of your choice.

Despite the fatigued title, director Quentin Tarantino's (The Hateful Eight, 2015) 9th, full-length, mainstream film is an interesting and fond revisiting of 1960s California and a strange interpretation on a historical tragedy.