James Ransone in Sinister 2SINISTER 2

You know the feeling you get when you go to summer camp and make a great new friend, but he/she isn't there the next summer, or the summer after that, and you end up forgetting about that friend until the next summer, when, all of a sudden, there he/she is? I don't, because I never went to summer camp. But I'm betting that sensation is similar to what I felt in the first minutes of Sinister 2 once I recognized James Ransone, who played Ethan Hawke's adorably dippy deputy pal in 2012's Sinister. Although the actor has amassed a bunch of film and TV credits since then (albeit not in anything I've seen), I can't say I've thought of him even once since the release of that low-budget horror hit. Yet the second Ransone's character showed up in director Cirián Foy's follow-up, with his chronic awkwardness and puppy-dog eyes and intense likability, it was like being reunited with a long-lost buddy whom you're ashamed to have let slip away. Ransone's presence here - as our romantic lead, no less! - was a hugely welcome surprise. That Sinister 2 didn't at all suck might've been a bigger one.

Chris Klein in We Were SoldiersWE WERE SOLDIERS

We Were Soldiers is, in many ways, the oddest war movie I've ever seen. It's set during the Ia Drang battle of the Vietnam War, but it's performed and directed with such resolute patriotism and heroism that it feels like a product of World War II, or rather, movies about World War II.