The first and most egregious flaw in I Want Your Money is its failure to mention the four (four!) times Ronald Reagan raised taxes between 1982 and 1984, the first of these being the largest tax hike Americans had seen since WWII. It also casually omits the gigantic financial windfall that US citizens with aims toward investment enjoyed at the hands of… Jimmy Carter, when he cut the capital gains tax in 1978 — a cut that Reagan-era Republicans were only too happy to completely take credit for. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Barry Munday (Patrick Wilson) has a goatee and tucks his shirt into his jeans. He likes boobs. He likes picking up women during happy hour at chain restaurants. He likes to watch his porn old school-style: on DVD while sitting on the couch, instead of streaming free on the internet. He really likes boobs. And soon into the film Barry Munday, an angry father assaults his crotch with a trumpet in a movie theater, because Barry is flirting with the man’s daughter. Barry wakes up in a hospital, his memory of the attack vanished along with his testicles.

Animal Kingdom is an Australian film about a dysfunctional crime family. Absolutely joyless, its primary interest is in its formal ambition (more about this later). The film begins with the sounds of chirping birds and a barking dog, the latter of which recurs throughout. Following that, we watch J (a stoic James Frecheville) as he watches TV on the couch next to his dead mother. We don’t at first realize that she’s dead, but the shot holds too long. Then the paramedics show up. She’s OD’ed, and J doesn’t know what to do.

In early Christian lore, the Egyptian monk Anthony traveled to the Saharan desert in search of St. Paul, but instead encountered a host of demons who tormented him physically in order to test his enduring faith. For reasons known only to 4th century masochists, this piece of arcana is commonly referred to as “The Temptation of St. Anthony.” Because of the graphic demon battles and underlying implications of lust and desire, surrealist painters from Hieronymus Bosch to Salvador Dalí have felt compelled to depict this story in painting.

The American is a thriller that prefers the precision of a sniper rifle to the anarchic splatters of stray bullets. I didn’t try, but I’d imagine you could count the rounds fired during the film on your fingers and toes. Unlike most pairings of firearms and film, each shot matters here, and nearly as much for director Anton Corbijn’s lens as for the film’s gunslingers.

The Town is a great crime film. Like all action flicks of its ilk, this one works primarily because it enacts certain cultural fantasies: robbing banks, shooting cops, outrunning the Feds, using and seducing women, fighting friends, beating people who don’t deserve it. (While I would’ve guessed such a set to represent masculine fantasies almost exclusively, for what it’s worth, most of my fellow theatergoers were female-male couples.) Suspense is generated by threats of apprehension and recognition; the tensest moments are those in which to be recognized is to be apprehended.