I think we can all agree that at some point we’ve all managed to make a fool of ourselves in the name of love. It’s almost a rite of passage so to speak. As for that forbidden love, well, I’m not so sure how many people will be so eager to admit to this one. When it comes to the film My Cousin Rachel, it’s a love story, but far from what you’d find on the Hallmark channel. Instead this is a film about the nightmare of what love can be and what it can do to you. Back in the 90’s, Roger Michell directed one of the sweetest and optimistic romances of that decade when he did Notting Hill.Now it’s 2017 and his return to romance could not be any more bleak, but how beautifully bleak it all is.

Philip (Sam Claflin) gets us up to speed in the film’s opening narration where he discusses becoming an orphan and being taken into custody by one of his cousins, Ambrose, a cousin who seems to have embraced the novel idea of bachelorhood. Philip manages to be raised just fine by his cousin, that is till things change and Ambrose falls ill and has to move from the English countryside to Italy, and during his recovery he meets a mysterious woman, Rachel (Rachel Weiz). His cousin continues to write Philip and tell him about his growing relationship with Rachel, till things take a turn for the worse and in the following letters his cousin goes on to believe Rachel is attempting to kill him. Concerned for Ambrose, Philip ventures off to see what has happened to his cousin, and upon his arrival he discovers that he is too late and that Ambrose is dead.

A large majority of horror fans would agree that when sitting down to screen a horror film, they are not accustomed to being challenged intellectually. Sure, horror films might have a message that you can theorize about, but you can just as easily turn off your brain and watch the carnage mindlessly. That is not the case with It Comes at Night:  it demands your full attention from the start and then intensifies like a white-hot light. Cut from the same cloth as The Babadook and It Follows, It Comes at Night is a film that confronts you with very real anxieties that permeate our modern-day societies. Where its predecessors are concerned with maternal guilt and vulnerabilities involving sexual intercourse (respectively), It Comes at Night asks audiences to confront their anxieties about the unknown, what it means not to know, and how we make a choice to remain ignorant, or attempt to understand what is just beyond our reach.

The film tells the story of Paul (Joel Edgerton) and his family (Carmen Ejogo and Kelvin Harrison Jr.), and the trials they must endure to survive a world doomed by a mysterious virus. As they try to enjoy what little peace they can muster in their home, they are confronted with a new threat: a new family looking for water. Adhering to the horror genre, Paul and company are immediately suspicious of their new guests, as “you can’t trust anyone but family.” Over time, tensions rise between the families, creating an inescapable rift of terror and paranoia.

Armies have been using dogs in battle for thousands of years. The Romans would turn the dogs on their enemy as a signal of the approaching legions, hence the expression “Let loose the dogs of war”. But in recent decades dogs have found a new, perhaps more noble calling during wartime. Dogs have been used to search for lost soldiers. They have been trained to assist wounded soldiers. They have also learned to sniff out explosives, helping to clear mines and saving the lives of their handlers and hundreds of soldiers and civilians. That's the kind of dog Rex is. And you'll fall in love with him just as the titular character Megan Leavey did. The movie Megan Leavey is a bit of a character study, and one of those characters is a German Shepherd.

Kate Mara stars as Megan Leavey. Her life has been pretty much a screwup, and she's facing pressure to get it together. She decides to join the Marines. At first it appears she's going to fail at this choice, too. But slowly she begins to get her training on track and starts to make the grade. Her inspiration? She is attracted to the canine unit, where she is first sent for punishment, but discovers Rex. Rex is a dog the vets don't think is trainable. He's aggressive, and very much like Megan, has a mind of his own. So Megan puts in the extra effort in the hope she can join the unit and work with Rex. Of course, she ends up getting her wish, and the two are sent to Iraq, where they are able to save lives by finding mines so they can be disarmed. It's a dangerous job, and their number ultimately comes up. It seems the enemy targets these dogs to protect the minefields. Wounded, the pair return home where the true battle is fought. The vet has labeled Rex unadoptable, and Megan fights to allow him to retire with her.