Building a TV series around a location made famous in stories without actually adapting those stories is a strange choice, but for Hulu’s Castle Rock, it’s proven rewarding. Created by Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason and executive produced by J.J. Abrams and Stephen King, among others, the show is set in the fictional Maine town of Castle Rock, which is the setting for many King stories. Castle Rock incorporates elements from King’s fiction, but it leaves the novels that made the town famous largely untouched, apart from the occasional passing reference to the town’s history with killer dogs and serial killers.

The series isn’t King’s work, but it’s storytelling that aspires to be on King’s unmistakable wavelength. It’s hard to think that this approach would work for many other authors. You could set, say, a legal procedural in the American South and load it with Easter eggs referencing John Grisham’s work, but is there a Grisham feeling to imitate? If so, could it be sustained over the length of a TV season?

The King vibe resonated throughout Castle Rock’s first season, which brought in one recurring King character (Alan Pangborn, the town’s retired sheriff, played by Scott Glenn) and landmark King locations like Shawshank Prison, all in service of a story about a mysterious prisoner whose release upends the lives of several Castle Rock residents. The vibe also remains strong in the first half of the series’s second season, a slow-burning mystery where supernatural elements recede into the background for long stretches, then reappear in shocking moments. (Hulu provided critics with five of the second season’s 10 episodes.)

Starting over with an all-new cast, season 2 draws heavily from two of King’s best-known novels, but it often references them to subvert fan expectations. The first episode, “Let the River Run,” opens with a blood-soaked teen carrying a box to the edge of a lake. Then, the same character — now a little older and played by Lizzy Caplan — engages in a multiyear, cross-country ramble with her daughter Joy (Elsie Fisher), taking a series of nursing jobs that invariably end with her loading up on stolen meds, swapping out one set of license plates for another, and moving on to the next town. Her name: Annie Wilkes, the writer-entrapping protagonist of Misery. As her journey draws to a close, an accident ensures she’ll end up spending more time than planned in Castle Rock, Maine, and in the neighboring town of Jerusalem’s Lot, which is the setting of King’s 1975 vampire novel ’Salem’s Lot.

Castle Rock has bigger plans than merely mashing up two well-known King novels, however. The second season wants to explore parts of Castle Rock that viewers have never seen before. Much of this involves the not-quite-legal enterprises of Reginald “Pop” Merrill (Tim Robbins, taking over the “Castle Rock actor who appeared in a famous King film adaptation” slot from Sissy Spacek in season 1). Pop owns the Emporium Galorium hardware store, and he’s the driving force behind much of the town’s shady business. (The character previously appeared in King’s novella The Sun Dog.)

Pop has raised four children, none of them his biological offspring. Two are his adopted nephews: the violent-tempered John, better known as “Ace” (Paul Sparks), and Ace’s mild-mannered brother Chris (Matthew Alan). The others, Abdi (Barkhad Abdi) and Nadia (Yusra Warsama), are Somali refugees he took in as teens. As adults, Nadia is a doctor, while Abdi is preparing to build a new shopping complex catering to the town’s Somali population, a growing demographic that’s been a source of tension among the town’s more close-minded longtime residents. Abdi’s time learning the business from Pop has an expiration date, however: Pop is suffering from cancer that chemo doesn’t seem able to beat.

For long stretches, Castle Rock is more focused on exploring the working-class realist side of King’s fiction than the side that produces, say, malevolent spirits shaped like evil clowns. Annie and Joy settle into low-rent housing run by Ace, offering glimpses of life on the economic fringes. Annie’s false identity — she’s fleeing a past that isn’t fully revealed until mid-season — cuts off her ability to get treatment for mental illness, compelling her to find ways to steal the medication she needs to keep her visions and voices at bay. The series’s excursions into the Somali immigrant community are even more compelling, exploring an aspect of small-town American life rarely depicted on television or in King’s fiction.

But Shaw, Thomason, and the writers haven’t forgotten that King’s Castle Rock stories are best known for finding horror just beneath the surface of small-town life. They also haven’t forgotten the stories that inspired the show; they just aren’t entirely beholden to them. Characters disappear then reappear with a newfound sense of purpose, comings and goings that have something to do with the spooky, ancient Marsten House that overlooks Jerusalem’s Lot and Abdi’s new development. Then there’s Annie, who seems always on the verge of snapping.

Castle Rock, and Caplan’s vivid, wild-eyed performance, pay homage to the familiar aspects of Misery as a book and film, including Kathy Bates’ unforgettable take on the character. But Annie’s fate still doesn’t seem preordained. (For starters, the series is set in present day, making it not-quite but not-quite-not a Misery prequel.) Meanwhile, whatever’s happening at the Marsten House seems monstrous but free of bloodsucking — at least for now. (Another nod: one episode plays in part like a truncated version of “The Body,” the King story that inspired Stand by Me.)

This is the world King’s fans know and more. At times, it can feel like too much more. The first half of the season has to do a lot of work just to establish all of the players, their pasts, and their relationship to various aspects of Castle Rock and Jerusalem’s Lot life. Some of these episodes forget about whole groups of characters while turning their focus elsewhere. It’s a lot of setup that will have to cohere in the second half of the season in order to pay off, but it’s compelling enough to make it worth seeing where it all leads. Even if it leads nowhere — and it certainly wouldn’t be the first King or King-adjacent project to whiff the payoff — or fails to produce an episode as strong as season 1’s Spacek-spotlight “The Queen,” Castle Rock remains an atmospheric, grippingly acted series that captures the feeling of King’s fiction while exploring corners of his world that even he might not have imagined existing.

Season 2 of Castle Rock premieres on Hulu on Wednesday, October 23rd.

Shazam! takes place in the same universe as other films adapted from DC Comics, but writer Henry Gayden (Earth to Echo) and director David F. Sandberg (Lights Out) seem determined to turn that universe upside down. Or at least, they want to blow a raspberry at the glum-and-glummer world established by the Zack Snyder trilogy of Man of Steel, Batman V. Superman, and Justice League, plus their neck-tattoo-sporting companion piece Suicide Squad. The first big-screen starring vehicle for one of the oldest superheroes in existence, a kid who can turn into a superpowered grown-up with the help of a magic word, Shazam! would be tough to turn into a grim-and-gritty DC story.

And that’s because it’s too deeply based in childhood fantasy. One moment, Billy Batson (played as a teenager by Asher Angel, and in his superhero form by Chuck star Zachary Levi) is an ordinary kid with a difficult history. The next, he’s a beefy, cape-wearing hero capable of flying through the air and shooting bolts of electricity from his finger. He’s barely able to convey the joy he takes in his newfound abilities. It’s almost as if superhero stories were at heart about wish fulfillment. It’s almost as if they’re allowed to be fun.

It’s certainly easier for some superhero stories to tap into this kind of gleeful power trip than others. Created by artist C.C. Beck and writer Bill Parker, Batson first appeared in the second issue of Whiz Comics, which hit newsstands in late 1939 as part of the flood of comic books inspired by Superman’s success. In the original comic, a wizard grants Batson the ability to turn himself into the hero Captain Marvel by saying the word “Shazam,” an acronym of “Samson, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus and Mercury,” whose powers contribute to his might. Over time, Captain Marvel picked up a supporting cast that included other kid heroes and a talking tiger, as well as nemeses like the fiendish Dr. Sivana and Mister Mind, an alien worm who headed the Monster Society of Evil.

Fawcett Comics aimed Captain Marvel’s adventures squarely at even younger readers than those devouring rival superhero stories, and he became a hit, outselling even Superman for a good stretch of the 1940s. But interest in superheroes waned at the end of the decade, and a copyright-infringement lawsuit launched by the company now known as DC Comics proved an enemy even Captain Marvel couldn’t defeat. His adventures temporarily ended. But by the early 1970s, Captain Marvel and his extended family had been absorbed into the DC Comics universe. He’s stayed there ever since, though he’s been retrofitted as “Shazam” to avoid confusion with that other Captain Marvel, who’s also just gotten a big-screen debut.

In Gayden and Sandberg’s film, though, Billy’s superhero alter ego remains nameless, even by the end of the story. Billy and his pal Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer) keep cycling through name possibilities, which are mostly awful (“Thundercrack,” for one, is quickly rejected), which serves as a thematically appropriate running gag. Shazam! is the story of a boy trying to figure out what kind of hero he wants to be — and, by extension, what kind of man he should become. He screws up a lot in the process.

With or without the name, the spirit of the old Captain Marvel adventures is very much at the heart of Shazam!, even amid a lot of just-barely PG-13 violence and a couple of gags about a strip club. That’s part of what makes it such a gleeful alternative both to the grimness of past DC films — a tone the company seems eager to shed — and the cosmos-in-the-balance stakes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Whether played by Angel or Levi, Billy is just a kid. It’s fun to watch him take delight in his new powers, and a little frightening to realize how little control he has over them. And where Batson’s earliest comics adventures gave him a big city to treat as a playground, Shazam! does the same with Philadelphia. His pleasure at bouncing around the city proves infectious, even though he always seems to be on the verge of accidentally leveling a city block.

His joy is all the more exciting to watch because joy doesn’t come naturally to Billy, who’s had more stacked against him than most teenage boys. He’s spent much of his childhood running away from one foster parent after another in search of the mother he hasn’t seen since he drifted away from her at a carnival at age three. Shortly after the film opens, he lands in what he expects to be another temporary living situation: a Philadelphia group home overseen by a married couple (Marta Milans and Cooper Andrews) who used to be foster kids themselves.

They’re also looking after Freddy (who’s developed a gift for wisecracks as a defense mechanism against those who bully him for using a crutch), college-bound overachiever Mary (Grace Fulton), hug-enthusiast Darla (Faithe Herman), and a handful of other kids. It’s a chaotic but loving environment that instantly embraces Billy — literally, in Darla’s case. Billy can’t wait to flee it. He’s been searching for a home so long, he can’t recognize it when he sees it, with or without superpowers.

That feeling starts to change after his fateful encounter with a wizard named Shazam (Djimon Hounsou, under a lot of facial hair). Confused by the new superheroic abilities Shazam grants him, Billy recruits Freddy to help him explore his own possibilities. After a poky start, Shazam! kicks into gear as the two try to figure out what he can and cannot do with his new powers, whether that’s flying, or buying beer without an ID.

Gayden and Sandberg attempt a difficult balancing act with Shazam! They have to fulfill a lot of superhero-movie obligations, from introducing an evil arch-nemesis to designing a climactic showdown. Mark Strong — a frequent screen heavy easing back into superhero films for the first time since playing Sinestro in 2011’s misbegotten Green Lantern — makes for an unsettling Dr. Sivana, a man given powers by the Seven Deadly Sins. He’s never as clownish as the Sivana of the comics, but his unbending malevolence makes him a fine foil for the big-screen version of Batson, whose goofiness plays nicely off his nemesis’ scowls. But even when the filmmakers let their project come across as a little frightening, they also have to find a way to stay true to the original comics’ fun, kid-friendly spirit.

It wouldn’t be out of the question for the filmmakers to put a dark spin on this material. Alan Moore’s Miracleman found a definitive way to make the Billy Batson idea nightmarish and haunting. If Gayden and Sandberg truly wanted a film more in line with the Snyderverse entries, they could have made it. But Shazam! super speeds in the opposite direction while nodding at the other films in its franchise. Billy’s world is packed with Batman and Superman merchandise, but their adventures seem to take place far from the world where he lives. Gotham and Metropolis get superhero icons who rarely smile. Philly gets a goofball, and that turns out to be a lot more fun.

Sandberg draws on the horror skills he developed through films like Annabelle: Creation. Sivana’s allies include manifestations of the Seven Deadly Sins that wouldn’t look out of place in a much more graphic movie. And though Sandberg retains the shadowy imagery of previous DCEU films, he uses that dark palette to make Billy’s shiny red suit and glowing lightning-bolt chest insignia stand out even more. If Batman branding criminals in Batman V. Superman has a polar opposite moment, it’s Batson’s unnamed hero identity smiling and dancing to “Eye of the Tiger” at the top of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s steps while shooting lightning from his hands, to the delight of the tourists around him. This is the rare superhero film that gets more whimsical as it goes along, up to and including the final fight, a battle royale that mostly unfolds at a Philadelphia Christmas carnival.

But whimsical isn’t the same as frivolous. Both Angel and Levi play Billy as a boy who’s never had the support he’s needed, and the film suggests there’s no easy fix for his traumas, even if he’s both dropped into a supportive environment, and suddenly able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. (Or in Billy’s case, almost leap a tall building in a single bound.)

That’s the subtext resting beneath Shazam!’s broad humor, fun spirit, and scary monsters. The film suggests that wish fulfillment will only get people so far, and power alone can’t change what’s damaged inside. Captain Marvel (or Shazam, or Thundercrack, or whatever you call him) might be one of the simplest superheroes ever created, but Shazam! both gets what makes that simplicity so appealing, and understands the complications stirred by the common wish to grow up too fast and assume powers you don’t know how to control.

Roma lets viewers hear its world before they see it. The latest film from Children of Men and Y Tu Mamá También director Alfonso Cuarón opens with a long shot of a tile floor. It’s situated in the courtyard driveway of an upper-middle class family in early 1970s Mexico City, but the audience doesn’t initially know that — Cuarón only offers them a gorgeous, static image. Like the rest of the film, it was shot by Cuarón himself, in black-and-white 65mm, on an Arri Alexa 65. It’s a digital camera that has captivated even some filmmakers usually enamored with shooting on film. Eventually, that camera does move. But initially, as the opening credits stretch out, it just soaks in the tile and the sounds of a neighborhood going about its daily business: shuffling feet, barking dogs, scrubbing brushes, and the occasional car swooping by. Then water covers the tile, reflecting the image of a plane passing overhead, and seemingly waking the film up to the larger world around it.

Roma’s world was built out of memories of a time and place that no longer exists, but Cuarón can’t seem to leave them behind. There’s a precision to his details — the atmosphere of a movie theater during a weekend matinee, the between-song announcements on the radio station that plays in the family car, the bustle of the neighborhood during a summer evening, the alluring men’s magazines positioned at the eye level of a boy on the verge of adolescence. They only could have come from someone on whom the past still exerts a powerful pull. Few studios would back such a bold personal vision, particularly from a director of color. But we live in unusual times, movie-wise. Enter the streaming giant Netflix.

Roma is more episodic than driven by a propulsive narrative, which makes it a tough sell in the mainstream marketplace of movies. So does the fact that it’s a 135-minute, black-and-white Spanish (and Mixtec) language film. But Cuarón comes with a significant pedigree: he’s a six-time Oscar nominee, with wins for Best Director and Best Editing on 2014’s Gravity.

And Netflix would like an Oscar, please. That goal has been obvious from the beginning of its film-producing phase, when it entered the original-film business not with a would-be blockbuster, but with Cary Joji Fukunaga’s child-soldier drama Beasts of No Nation. In 2017, the company made a serious push with Dee Rees’ excellent drama Mudbound, which earned four Academy Award nominations, though it won none and was shut out of most major categories, apart from Mary J. Blige’s Best Supporting Actress nod. The company has won two Oscars — for Best Documentary Short Subject in 2017 and Best Documentary Feature in 2018. Neither is a small accomplishment, but Netflix clearly has more ambitious designs.

Conventional wisdom has it that part of Netflix’s difficulty in earning an Oscar in one of the top five categories comes from the film industry’s distaste for streaming services. Until this year, Netflix has prioritized its subscribers over any potential theater viewers, skipping its original films past theaters entirely, or giving them a token day-and-date release in theaters commissioned for the express purpose of awards qualifications. 2018 saw a shift in strategy. Paul Greengrass’ 22 July and Tamra Davis’ Private Life enjoyed wider-than-usual releases for Netflix films. Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs appeared in some theaters a week before its Netflix premiere. Roma is seeing a platformed series of theatrical releases ahead of its streaming premiere on December 14th, with a no-doubt strenuous awards push to follow.

To be fair, it’s a bit ungenerous to suggest that Netflix’s leaders just want a Best Picture Oscar. They clearly want to be in the quality film business. An Oscar would just be a legitimizing sign that their efforts have been worthwhile. Will Roma get them there and allow them to reap the benefits? That will be a matter of debate for awards-season prognosticators from now until the envelopes are opened. But for now — and for as long as streaming services keep trying to create prestige cinema worthy of rave reviews and attendant awards — the viewers are the ones who benefit most from Netflix deciding to put its money and influence behind great filmmaking. Every film like Roma, which likely wouldn’t have made it to such a wide audience without Netflix’s help, is a victory for the audiences who get to see it, and for an industry that sometimes struggles to support distinctive and daring work.

If there’s ever been any doubt that the company could put its name behind a truly great film — and those doubts wouldn’t be fair, given some of the titles listed above — Roma should lay it to rest. Put simply, Roma is a masterpiece, a deeply personal examination of the past from a director who challenges himself with each new project. It’s more biographical than autobiographical. It’s set in 1970 and 1971, when Cuarón was nine going on 10, and its Cuarón surrogate mostly remains on the margins. Instead, he dedicates the film to exploring a life he didn’t live: that of the family’s live-in nanny, a woman from Oaxaca named Liboria “Libo” Rodríguez, to whom Cuarón dedicates the film.

Her surrogate here is Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio, who, like most of the cast, is not a professional actress), a young woman who does much of the cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing for Sofia (Marina de Tavira) and Antonio (Fernando Grediaga). When Antonio leaves Sofia — which she tries to hide from their children — Cleo assists with keeping the family going, too. Cleo’s own life is squeezed into the moments around her work for Sofia’s family, a life they don’t see and to which they seemingly give no thought. But dramatic developments on both her personal front and the historical stage eventually bring all their lives crashing together.

Cuarón treats Cleo’s world, and the setting of his own childhood, as territory that can be as perilous in its own way as the vacuum of space he explored in Gravity. Participant Media produced the film, but it probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day if Netflix hadn’t picked up distribution rights for the completed film. And it certainly wouldn’t have gotten the wide release and awards buzz it’s currently getting.

The marriage between Cuarón and Netflix is awkward in some ways. The film has already prompted debate about whether it has to be seen on the big screen, and Cuarón has asked Netflix viewers both to have patience with its deliberate pace and to please, please turn off motion-smoothing. It’s clear that he accepted the company’s distribution offer not because he loves being able to binge whole seasons of Fuller House, but because he felt Netflix would give his deeply personal film the care and handling it deserves.

For a generation of artistically ambitious filmmakers, Netflix distribution may seem like their best option in an era when small movies struggle to get seen, mid-sized movies struggle to get made at all, and theatrical moviegoing increasingly belongs to big-budget special-effects extravaganzas. For everyone from Nicole Holofcener and Noah Baumbach to Martin Scorsese (whose next film, The Irishman, will be a Netflix release), it’s seemingly been a compromise worth making.

One of the great promises of Netflix in recent years has been that it can provide a home for daring visions. (The way those daring visions disappear into the recesses of the Netflix library after a brief moment of promotion is another issue.) Will this habit continue? Is the moment in which a staggering achievement like Roma can appear preceded by the familiar Netflix “ba-boooom” noise a vision of the future, or a window destined to close if the company’s interest shifts to focus less on earning little gold statues? Only time will tell, but it’s a story worth watching because, for the moment, it’s leading to stories that are impossible to forget.

More than three decades after Orson Welles’ death, he’s joined the ranks of famous directors making movies for Netflix. At age 25, Welles made his directorial debut with 1941’s Citizen Kane, which completely changed the language of filmmaking. His final fully produced project, The Other Side of the Wind, was recently completed after years of attempts to assemble the existing footage, and on November 2nd, it’ll debut on the streaming giant that’s spent the last few years expanding its reach as a source for new movies. That means Netflix subscribers will be among the first to see a film that, for many years, was more rumor than fact. The project has largely been glimpsed in strange bits of footage that surfaced in documentaries over the years, but due to a tangle of creative and legal logistics, it seemed unlikely it would ever be completed. But curious Netflix subscribers are likely to find it an extremely peculiar viewing experience, especially compared to comparatively easy Netflix viewing like Sandy Wexler or the latest episode of Big Mouth.

Understanding the story behind Other Side of the Wind helps. In 1970, after spending years working in exile in Europe, Orson Welles came home to Hollywood. Sort of. Born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Welles had a troubled childhood that took him from Chicago to Madison, Wisconsin; to Woodstock, Illinois; then to Ireland; then back to Woodstock; all before he made his way to New York and stardom on the stage. He’d worked and lived in Los Angeles for a couple of stretches. And he ended up dying there in 1985, at age 70. But calling it home was a stretch.

Besides, the place had changed since his youth. After losing control of his troubled production of Touch of Evil, Welles fled the city. The old Hollywood system was cracking, and the kids had started to take over, with their wild visions and new ideas. In 1967, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde brought the influence of the French New Wave crashing down on Hollywood. A few years later, the studios stood by baffled as big-budget spectacles failed, while Dennis Hopper enjoyed tremendous success with younger viewers via the strange, low-budget Easy Rider. A new generation had arrived. They revered Welles, but they also respected the European art films that flooded arthouses in the 1950s and 1960s. And they had notions of their own, fueled by the insurgent counterculture, with its new drugs and free love, which had a way of making everything that came before it look a little square. If Hollywood was home, Welles didn’t recognize it by 1970.

But maybe he did see it as the sort of place where he could get some work done. Welles had spent the preceding decades starting projects he couldn’t complete for reasons ranging from cast deaths to budget issues: an ambitious take on Don Quixote and a thriller called The Deep; a Merchant of Venice to join his Macbeth and Othello. When he did manage to get movies fully funded and shot, like The Trial and The Immortal Story, they sometimes went largely unseen. Chimes at Midnight, a particularly towering work, disappeared in murky legal disputes.

But Welles kept pushing forward, always believing his next project could reverse his fortunes. With The Other Side of the Wind, he hoped to do that by turning his lenses on Hollywood itself, via the story of Jack Hannaford, a famed director attempting to make a comeback in the new Hollywood of the early 1970s. But the theoretical comeback required him to actually finish the film. Welles worked on his attempted revival project off and on between 1970 and 1976 — often more off than on. The interruptions came for a variety of reasons, most of them tied to Welles’ difficulty in securing financing (and keeping the money he did line up), with post-production interrupted by even stranger causes.

Josh Karp’s 2015 book Orson Welles’s Last Movie and Morgan Neville’s new documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead — which will premiere on Netflix simultaneously with The Other Side of the Wind — do a decent job of spelling out those causes, and how complicated the film’s production became. Welles was never able to finish an edit of The Other Side of the Wind, which seemed destined to become one of cinema’s great lost works. As usual, money was a factor — but so was the Iranian Revolution, which locked the existing footage in a legal battle, due to the fact that it was funded in part by Mehdi Bushehri, the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran. Finally finishing the film in 2018 took a high-profile crowdfunding effort, a big influx of Netflix cash, and a team that included Frank Marshall, a powerful producer whose early time in Hollywood included working as a production assistant for Welles. Working from a rough cut and Welles’ detailed notes, Marshall and his team were finally able to complete the project.

The Other Side of the Wind unfolds on two planes at once. Co-written by Oja Kodar, Welles’ romantic partner for the final decades of his life, it follows famed film director Jake Hannaford on his final night, a 70th birthday party that includes the screening of footage from his latest film, The Other Side of the Wind. On one plane, there’s Hannaford’s film, a kind of dreamy pastiche of European art cinema seemingly inspired in equal parts by Last Year at Marienbad, Persona, and Michelangelo Antonioni. It’s revealed in a series of screening sessions that begin in a studio screening room, and end at a drive-in.

The film-within-a-film’s narrative, such as it is, concerns a young man (Bob Random) who follows a beautiful woman (Kodar) through a barren cityscape to a trippy nightclub to a Hollywood backlot. If Welles was attempting to parody art films, he failed; Hannaford’s film is too beautiful to be a send-up of anything. It contains some of the most stunning images of Welles’ career, and it pushes boundaries in ways that seem perfectly suited to the era, including a long, explicit sex scene in a car that’s sensuous to a degree never previously seen in a Welles film.

On the other plane, there’s Hannaford’s raucous, booze-soaked celebration, a party filled with New Hollywood types and others of the generation that succeeded his. Some, like Dennis Hopper, Claude Chabrol, Henry Jaglom, and Paul Mazursky, play themselves. Others are actors playing characters inspired by Pauline Kael, John Milius, Robert Evans, and others. Then there’s Peter Bogdanovich, who plays a Hannaford acolyte who’s become more successful than his mentor. (Bogdanovich took on the role after the original actor, celebrity impressionist Rich Little, left the movie under disputed circumstances.) His character occupies a gray zone between fact and fiction.

Really, the whole film exists in that zone. Welles denied that The Other Side of the Wind contained any autobiographical elements, but the parallels are hard to ignore, Welles’ tendency to self-mythologize doesn’t sit comfortably next to Wind’s not-so-flattering depiction of a director struggling to hold onto his place. And it’s hard to get around the parallels between his own life and the story he crafted about a director trying to make a comeback in a changed Hollywood that may no longer have a place for him.

For a while, it even looked like Welles would play the Hannaford role. He initially filmed without a leading man, playing Hannaford so other actors could react to the character, until his friend John Huston — probably the only person as capable of playing a larger-than-life, as-much-myth-as-man filmmaker as Welles — assumed the part. What’s more, blurring the line between what’s real and what’s created is part of the design of the film. That party footage makes a stark contrast to the beautifully composed footage of Hannaford’s film. Ostensibly taken from footage shot by the journalists and film freaks at the gathering, it’s Cloverfield years before Cloverfield, even though it’s more concerned with rampaging egos than rampaging monsters.

Those egos — the outsized, Hemingway-esque machismo of a certain type of male artist — are the subject at the heart of the film, even more than a changing Hollywood, or the echoes of Welles’ life. Hannaford blusters and berates those around him, as if for him, making art depends on keeping everyone around him in their place. His failures enrage him — particularly his leading man’s decision to leave the film. He alternates drinks with cutting remarks. He’s earned a reputation as a genius, but sustaining that reputation has started to wear on him. And if he can’t keep it going, what awaits him but death?

Does the movie work? That might not be the right question. The footage of Hannaford’s film is breathtaking, but it’s also too narratively wispy to stand on its own. At their best, the party scenes have a kind of haunted quality. They’re foreboding for reasons other than their honoree’s impending death. They also contain so many half-developed characters and subplots, it’s hard to imagine that Welles’ actual planned final cut wouldn’t have found a way to cut through some of the noise. By the time little people in cowboy boots show up, it’s all become a bit exhausting.

But as frustrating as The Other Side of the Wind can be, there’s really nothing else like it. The restored film captures an artist trying to push at the boundaries one more time, determined to become part of the future instead of a fixture of the past. In 1970, it seemed like Welles had failed. In 1975, the American Film Institute honored him in an event broadcast on national television, and his acceptance speech doubled as a plea for money to finish his movie. Nobody bit, and Welles spent the last decade of his life moving from talk-show appearances to wine commercials and other work-for-hire projects. But here we are in 2018 talking about this movie, a movie unlike any other, and a project no one else could have made — or would have dared to attempt. Failure doesn’t always last forever.

On a short making-of documentary included on the Blu-ray release of the 2013 film The Purge, writer-director James DeMonaco says, “If it sparks any kind of discourse about violence in society, I think that’s a good thing. If people just enjoy it, great. But if they want to talk about violence, guns in our society, that’s great, too.” That kind of half-commitment to the film’s political elements defined the series until now, with the audacious 2018 prequel The First Purge. The Purge and its sequels — The Purge: Anarchy in 2014 and The Purge: Election Year in 2016, both written and directed by DeMonaco — all tiptoed up the line of delivering a loud, clear political message, but both films retreated before their subtext became explicit. The First Purge, directed by Gerard McMurray from a DeMonaco script, takes a different tack — it throws subtlety out the window, filling the film with images inspired by specific events like the 2017 white nationalist gathering in Charlottesville and the Charleston church massacre.

Four films into the Purge series, DeMonaco seems to have lost his taste for subtext. The First Purge ends with the none-too-subtle suggestion that the only way to prevent a racist, classist, authoritarian dystopia from coming to pass is by taking to the streets, ideally with weapons in hand. It’s a bold development, bringing themes to the surface that have been bubbling under since the first movie. And while it continues the sequels’ mounting sense of urgency, it also marks The First Purge as the first Purge film of the Trump era, when coyness has come to seem passé, messages can only resonate when sounded at the loudest possible volume, and the possibility of a norms-shattering totalitarian takeover is less of a matter of chin-stroking speculation than it once was.

In that sense, 2013 seems like a long time ago. Released during Barack Obama’s second term, The Purge is at heart a home-invasion thriller heavily inspired by Bryan Bertino’s great 2008 film The Strangers, which pits an innocent couple against a trio of intruders wearing creepy masks. DeMonaco’s innovation doesn’t come from the narrative or its execution, so much as from the world in which it takes place. The action unfolds at the sprawling home of James Sandin (Ethan Hawke), a security expert who’s gotten rich outfitting the privileged with security systems to keep them insulated from the Purge, a 12-hour period in which all crime has been made legal. The New Founding Fathers of America, the political party that’s seized control of the government, claims the Purge lets society evacuate its violent impulses in one frenzied night. But even security experts can’t keep the Purge at bay forever. When James’ son Charlie (Max Burkholder) takes pity on a stranger (Edwin Hodge) who’s about to be killed by Purge participants, James’ house is besieged by young people demanding James give them the stranger so they can exercise their legal right to murder him.

At heart a story of wealth inequality, The Purge would make a fine double feature with another 2013 film, Inequality for All, a documentary in which former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich explores the growing disparity between America’s haves and have-nots. For the haves, the Purge has mostly become one more alarming element of the modern life from which money keeps them isolated. For the have-nots, it’s yet another life-threatening peril. The Purgers who surround James’ house wear school uniforms that suggest their youth and privilege. They call their would-be victim a “dirty homeless pig.” A subhuman, in short. The fact that he’s black and a veteran just makes him, by their reckoning, that much more removed from the world of real people who matter — their monochromatic world of privilege and power.

The Purge plays like a worst-case-scenario extrapolation from the events of the day, a darkest timeline that still seemed distant five years ago. So does The Purge: Anarchy, which broadens the scope of the film’s world and introduces some new themes. Set against a Purge Night in Los Angeles, it pits a diverse group of unfortunates against roving street gangs, gun-toting lunatics, hardened right-wing extremists with military-grade arsenals, and millionaires who pay handsomely for the right to murder their victims within the safety of controlled environments.

The film reveals a mounting resistance movement (including Michael K. Williams as an underground leader, and Hodge as the stranger from the first film), and complicates the racial dynamic by making one set of antagonists a black street gang (led by a then-little-known Lakeith Stanfield) motivated not by patriotism or an urge to kill, but by a rare opportunity to rake in huge profits within the bounds of the law. But Anarchy’s cleverest touch, carried over and expanded from the first film, is the way it uses media. Voices of dissent make it to the air, but they’re drowned out by pro-Purge voices. The New Founding Fathers control the overarching narrative while maintaining the illusion of a free press. Those looking for the real story have to look elsewhere, to sources like online protest videos that repeat the theme of the first film, that the Purge is about “one thing: money.” Even worse, the already-skewed game is further rigged against the poor by government commandos who pose as Purge participants to exterminate the underclass.

Released during the 2016 election season, The Purge: Election Year transplants the action to Washington, DC and more or less repeats that approach. It does introduce some intriguing new elements, particularly the “murder tourists” who travel to the US for the Purge, and dress as grotesque caricatures of American iconography for the occasion. But it also inches closer and closer to our reality by pitting a female presidential candidate (Elizabeth Mitchell) against the New Founding Fathers, who conspire to win the election by assassinating her under cover of the Purge. In an age of extensive legal election-rigging in the forms of gerrymandering and voter suppression, Election Year takes election rigging to its most blatant and violent form. The film echoes the real world in ways DeMonaco couldn’t have predicted at the time. Yet for all its 2016 resonances — intentional and otherwise — Election Year is curiously the least political of all The Purge films, the sort of franchise entry that appears once a series’ formula has started to ossify.

By contrast, The First Purge goes all-in with its politics. Set on Staten Island, which has been chosen as the site of an initial one-night Purge experiment, the movie’s heroes include Nya (Lex Scott Davis) and Dmitri (Y’Lan Noel) a drug kingpin for whom the night becomes a kind of violent political awakening. The heroes are all people of color. The villains are the New Founding Fathers of America and the puppets, witting and unwitting, they use to enact their agenda.

The film turns one night on Staten Island into a compression of the last few years of real-world American horror, a place where random violence seems like less of a threat than armed white supremacists and a government that sees them as allies in an ongoing culture war. Over the course of the film, a few scattered murders committed by unstable or spiteful people give way to waves of well-organized, government-backed death squads, dressed in Klan robes and Nazi-evoking trenchcoats. A church becomes a refuge for a handful of people who refuse to participate in the Purge, but the refugees are wiped out in an armed attack. It’s a place where even a place of worship is no longer safe from gun violence. (In a telling detail, a prologue filling in some details of the NFFA reveals the party came to power with the NRA’s help.) And under such extraordinary circumstances, the only choice is to fight back. In one scene, Dmitri strangles an attacker wearing a mask inspired by blackface caricatures. McMurray lets the death play out in one, long, unsparing shot that goes on well past the point of comfort. Amid recent hand-wringing about when, if ever, it’s okay to punch a Nazi, and the current debate over the place of civility in political conversation, this revenge-fantasy against the literal face of racism sounds a clear note: some threats are existential, and should be recognized and treated as such. It stirred applause in the screening I attended.

And it’s just one of many ways The First Purge abandons restraint and makes more direct connections to recent events than the previous movies. One fight sequence pointedly evokes Donald Trump’s infamous “Grab ‘em by the pussy” line from his Access Hollywood tape, as a protagonist fights off a sewer-dwelling attacker. The scenes of hired Purge gangs storming into Staten Island’s streets, covered in white supremacy symbols, echo recent news footage of openly racist rallies and marches. By tapping into the violence inherent in so much current political messaging — like Trump calling immigrants “animals” — The First Purge has finally delivered a Purge entry as provocative as the series’ premise.

And that feels like a significant step away from DeMonaco’s previous “If people just enjoy it, great” stance. The previous Purge films straddled a line between entertainment and political commentary, but with the latest installment, the political message is so heavily foregrounded, DeMonaco and the others seem to be forcing viewers to consider the implications of inhumane governing and a political system openly biased against poorer citizens. The approach fits into the tradition of exploitation films that use genre movies to comment on current events, much in the way George Romero used his many zombie movies to comment on racism, social inequity, and the changing state of the world. Or the way ‘70s blaxploitation films piled on the action, but often doubled as tours of neighborhoods torn apart by economic inequality and government neglect.

On the other hand, the filmmakers could also just be exploiting current events, using fashionable wokeness to extend the franchise — in The First Purge, the closing credits pause mid-roll, leading into an advertisement for a soon-to-arrive Purge TV series. But there are safer ways to keep a series going than turning up the politics. While the film ends on a hopeful note, sounded by nothing less than Kendrick Lamar’s protest staple “Alright,” the film’s structure is a call to action. The Purge film that most closely mirrors our own reality is the one set at the point where its fictional United States is taking its most drastic turn toward fascism and dystopia.