As a way of acknowledging the brief time they'll likely stay in theaters, here are brief ruminations on four all-but-abandoned late-August titles, in escalating order from not-awful to actually-pretty-great.

“Yeah, we're Off the Lawn,” says Ballet Quad Cities Artistic Director Courtney Lyon. “We were asking ourselves, 'What are we gonna call it?' As a joke, kind of tongue-in-cheek, someone said, 'Ballet Off the Lawn'? And we were like, 'Ummm … okay!' Because it has the same feeling as the Ballet on the Lawns – it has great energy, and everything's really engaging and theatrical. It's just gonna be indoors.”

Alison Brie's and Dave Franco's arguably inappropriate chemistry might make this supremely clever, enjoyably gross body-horror comedy stronger than it would've been without them, because even when their characters are at their lowest communal ebb, you sense that these two will always fundamentally stick with one another. And stick with one another they do. They very much do.

Given that it's the latest feature by Ari Aster, you can bet that the writer/director's Eddington, as it nears its conclusion, will boast startling violence and at least one memorable death. Yet none of the imagery in the film's climactic scenes quite compares to the gasp-inducing shock presented some 10 minutes in, when a disheveled, babbling, obviously unhealthy vagrant tumbles onto Joaquin Phoenix and coughs – hacks – directly on his face.