As the advance publicity and trailers for mother! were deliberately vague, it was impossible to know quite what to expect from Aronofsky's follow-up to his Ark-etypal epic Noah, and I presume that a lot of people, like myself, imagined it was going to be some kind of updated Rosemary's Baby with Jennifer Lawrence doing a Mia Farrow and Michelle Pfeiffer in the Ruth Gordon role. And I'd still pay big bucks to see that movie.

This past Labor Day weekend might be the new standard-bearer in the annals of cinematic renunciation, because here were our only new – or rather, “new” – cineplex options: the 40th-anniversary release of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (a magnificent work, to be sure, but a 1977 one); Marvel's Inhumans (the pilot for a TV series); and Tulip Fever, a period drama shot in the summer of 2014 originally scheduled for release in November of 2015. Since then, the latter title – one boasting a quartet of Oscars winners in Alicia Vikander, Christoph Waltz, Judi Dench, and co-screenwriter Tom Stoppard – has had its release postponed an additional four times before being blithely tossed at the masses on Hollywood's least-favorite weekend of the year. You'd actually feel terrible for director Justin Chadwick's abused outing if the movie itself weren't quite so stupid.

I hope I'll be forgiven for not wanting to review the movie so much as hug it, because this thing absolutely made my month. Ceaselessly engaging, subtly hilarious, unexpectedly exciting, and, in the end, almost embarrassingly moving, Soderbergh's latest is just what I needed – and maybe what we all need – in the wake of so much recent, national horribleness.

David F. Sandberg's horror prequel isn't terrible. In truth, it's considerably better than the creepy-porcelain-doll antics of 2014's dreadful Annabelle. It's even an improvement over last summer's The Conjuring 2, whose 2013 precursor gave us our first look at the franchise's titular “character”: a house-dressed Chucky with dead eyes and blond braids. But while it would be easy to over-praise this genre outing merely for not sucking, Annabelle: Creation still emerges as only moderately effective at best – a late-summer chiller that finds a demonically possessed plaything the only truly believable thing about it.