Almost no one, in retrospect, likes a misleading trailer, and I don't know anyone who enjoys a trailer that seems to give away a narrative's contents from points A to Z, making you feel like you've seen the movie months before you actually see it. (Ordinary Angels, anyone?) Yet I reserve a special kind of irritation for trailers that wind up almost exhaustively descriptive of the eventual experience simply through the predecessors they choose to plug.

Just what is it going to take for Joel and Ethan Coen to end this silly separation of theirs and get back together? An online petition? A generous gift basket? A promise to reconsider the merits of Intolerable Cruelty?

I wondered how my pals from the '80s might've collectively reacted to director Zelda Williams' and screenwriter Diablo Cody's new horror comedy had it actually been released in the year of its 1989 setting. My guess is we would've thought that it was pretty lame but had some decent laughs; that Heathers and Beetlejuice did the same sort of thing much better; and that the movie was only worth our time because we got to see it for free.

The rare intellectual exercise that's also an emotional gut punch, writer/director Ava DuVernay's Origin delivers its most emblematic sequence toward the end of its 140 minutes, when all of the movie's many varied themes seem to intertwine in a heartrending, enraging true tale about a little boy and a swimming pool.