Aubrey plaza

Thirty years after it was first released in America, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is returning to theaters, appropriately enough for a Halloween re-release. (It also serves as a soft preview for Coppola’s newly announced passion project, Megalopolis, an epic drama starring Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza.) It is hard to overstate what a difference the past three decades have made in Dracula's popular reception. Although it was a significant commercial hit upon release, thanks in part to Annie Lennox’s enormously popular theme tune "Love Song For a Vampire," it was critically derided as poorly acted, overblown, excessively bloody without being frightening and a travesty of the original novel.

Black Bear is one of those indie dramas that is meta on so many levels you can either sit with it afterwards or, if you’re weak like me, you’ll immediately turn to the internet for an explanation and may even find yourself buried deep in one of those Reddit threads that will make you wish you’d had the strength to just do the sitting. This is a compelling film in its way, and it’s well performed, with a surprising reset midway through, and you don’t have to fully understand a film to enjoy it. But if I’m honest? I do feel a little bit cheated when an interpretation or ending isn’t fully nailed down. My limitation, I’m sure.