We are halfway through the year, if you can believe it, which means it’s a fitting time to look back at the past six months and assess what’s been good about them. Not much! But at least movies-wise, there have been some bright spots amid the drudgery of Grogu and the miseries of the Bride. What were those highlights? Allow me to list them below, in order of release—from January 1 to June 12.

Primate

Just in time for the brutal, bitter bite of January (at least in a New York! What a hellish winter it was) there was this mean little bad-ape movie from director Johannes Roberts. The film is about a family whose pet chimp contracts rabies and goes about terrorizing a house full of young people. One might expect a movie like this to pull its punches a little—to secure a PG-13 rating, to not offend the animal rights folks—but Primate pretty much does the opposite. Primate is a gnarly, borderline hopeless movie, with a few really gross kills that I found surprisingly satisfying. I say surprising because I don’t always go in for that kind of stuff, especially when it’s young people being snuffed out. But something about this movie’s barely perceptible wry smirk makes all the gruesomeness fun instead of horrible. It also made me rethink my relationship with my own pet chimp, who come to think of it I haven’t seen in a few hou— 

28 Days Later: The Bone Temple

It’s really a shame that Nia DaCosta’s best film—and one of the best in this franchise—was such a flopperino at the box office. I guess it was hard to market, and needed its immediate predecessor to have been more of a zeitgeist hit. (Or, perhaps, they could have spaced out the two a bit more on the release calendar.) My hope is that audiences have since found Bone Temple wherever it’s streaming and have come to appreciate its weird tones and textures, the way it eschews shivery jump-scares for a slower dreadfulness and, conversely, a curiously humane portrait of a man and a zombie becoming dope-fiend friends. The humane part of the movie features Ralph Fiennes in a role that, in less capable hands, easily could have tilted into over-articulated, tic-heavy oddity. Fiennes, though, finds the subtlety in the endeavor, and in so doing gives one of the best performances of his 21st century career. Jack O’Connell is no slouch either; cast that guy as the villain in everything.

Send Help

Dylan O’Brien continues his leading-man ascendance and Rachel McAdams reaffirms—and also maybe slightly realigns—her movie-star profile in Sam Raimi’s kicky, funny, well-observed survival thriller about a bad boss and his mistreated employee experiencing a major power-dynamic shift on a deserted island. O’Brien’s character is awful but not without his humanity, while McAdams’s character is empathetic but also kind of annoying. Raimi has a grand old time making neither particularly likable, nor wholly loathsome. He finds a sweet spot in between those two poles, setting the stage for a death match of ego and will and ability that twists and turns on rails. I’d like a dozen more movies like it in the coming years, but I know not to get greedy about such things these days.