I think my favorite thing about movie season this year is that I’m remembering what I love about movies. Last year was very much a year of being afraid that I’d become too much of a critic and forgotten that I love this medium.

Turns out that the movies just weren’t as good last year.

Friday night Aless and I went to see Crimson Peak. The idea of a haunted house and naked Tom Hiddleston was too much for us to resist, plus we’d both heard that Guillermo Del Toro had made the movie with “the sensibilities of bookish 14 year old girls in mind.” In that aspect, he absolutely succeeded.

Crimson Peak takes every gothic cliche, and throws it at the wall. Our heroine Edith Cushing is a spunky American heiress who wants to write spooky stories. She falls in love with Sir Thomas Sharpe, a penniless aristocrat who speaks in broody cliches. Thomas’s sister Lucille is a monstrous spinster control freak. Edith has a childhood sweetheart in the beautiful young doctor Alan. If you even have a passing familiarity with the Bronte sisters, you can see every twist coming, but that doesn’t make them less fun.

More and more, I’m coming to accept that Del Toro, in addition to making beautiful movies, knows how to make a movie be exactly what it should be. Pan’s Labrynth is childhood horror incarnate. Hell Boy is everything wonderful about indie comics. Pacific Rim is the best possible movie about giant monsters fighting giant robots.

This cast is also a delight. It is impossible not to be in love with Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain is terrifying. Mia Wasilkowska is appropriately blank. (The Gothic Heroine should be something of a blank space, for the reader to project herself onto her. It’s the Bella Swann principle, but on purpose.) And Charlie Hunnam is…well, he’s awfully dreamy. (Hunnam is like, not a great actor you guys.)

Aless and I walked out of the movie giggling for about twenty minutes straight. The movie is perfect. It’s campy, ridiculous, sort of scary (the ghosts themselves are twisted and horrifying and rank high on Del Toro’s creations) and exactly what it needs to be. A whole generation of kids who shop at Hot Topic are going to be wildly obsessed with this movie and rightly so.

Rankings!

1. Straight Outta Compton
2. Crimson Peak
3. The Man From UNCLE
4. Ant-Man
5. Mad Max: Fury Road
6. Inside Out
7. Trainwreck
8. Tomorrowland
9. Jurassic World
10. Ricki And The Flash
11. Avengers: Age of Ultron
12. Minions
13. Fantastic Four
14. Terminator: Genisys
15. Entourage
16. Pitch Perfect 2

Trailers

The Forest, which I will not be seeing, looks interesting. Among other things, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Natalie Dormer in regular clothes. But why does a movie about a Japanese forest have an entirely white cast?

Victor Frankenstein, actually looks good. I thought it seemed really stupid. But I’m definitely going to see it. And in Aless’s words, “It can’t be worse than that one with Aaron Eckhart.” Oh, too true.

Krampus. Is Taco in this? Oh, you mean it has nothing to do with The League? Then why did you make this movie?

Star Wars. Cried. So excited. Apparently we’re getting a new trailer this evening. Who’s excited?????