Decades of botched dubbing and goofball interpretations in the West have reinforced the idea that Godzilla movies are kids’ stuff—or, worse, just “guys in rubber suits”. Either way, the idea is that these films are not to be taken seriously, a bias that’s evident in Variety’s nod to Ishirō Honda’s 1954 franchise-starter on its recent list of the 100 best horror films of all time. (In short, Godzilla is deemed “tacky” and “kitsch,” while King Kong “retain[s] every bit of [its] wonder.”) But if you revisit Godzilla in its new 4K digital restoration from the Criterion Collection—which, it should be said, has always handled the picture with the appropriate respect—with your cinephile glasses on, you’ll find a monstrous metaphor of unusual depth and nuance.

The standard line is that Godzilla is a metaphor for the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that is true. But it’s only the tip of the kaiju iceberg. As Stephen writes, while “it is easy to see it as a clear allegory… this film percolates with so much more. Every symbolic layer can be read in different ways, with evocations so wide that [its] scope becomes novelistic.” Gojira itself stands not just for national trauma but also national guilt and shame over the atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII.

The monster embodies “spirits of the forgotten dead, coming back in rage, awakened by incautious and cavalier testing of the H-Bomb, demanding that we the horrors that were unleashed the last time,” says Threepenny, who reflects on Honda’s film through the lens of J. Robert Oppenheimer and American Prometheus in an insightful review. In fact, several draw parallels between Oppenheimer and Godzilla’s Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), scientists who are both humbled and haunted by the apocalyptic potential of the technologies they developed.

Add Honda’s “impressionistic and somber” ground-level observations of ordinary Tokyoites confronting unstoppable forces of death and destruction—one woman laments that she survived Nagasaki, and now she has to deal with this?—and Godzilla takes on yet another layer as a plea for collective global responsibility for our nuclear future. “I’m still reeling over how sad this movie is,” Elijan reflects, and it’s true—just as it’s true that this thoughtful, multilayered elegy became so popular and impactful, it eventually morphed into a lighthearted film series for kids.

Convoy is another oddball in its director’s filmography, but for completely different reasons. There’s no point in mincing words, so let’s get right to it: By the time he directed Convoy, Sam Peckinpah was a terminal alcoholic. His inability to focus on work is why this old dog is so dang shaggy. “Rumor has it that old Sam spent most of this shoot completely out of his gourd in his trailer,” Mosquito Dragon writes, adding that “most of the actual directing was carried out by the AD, who happened to be none other than James Coburn.”

So yeah, Peckinpah’s signature style doesn’t come across very strongly in Convoy. But that’s fine—I always found his brand of bullet-ridden machismo noxious, anyway. What we do get instead is a sweaty, sexy, Hamm’s-swilling ode to the working class whose politics are as incoherent as the cutting in its action scenes, but who’re such a good hang that neither of those things really matter. (Each of the truck stunts is filmed from multiple angles, so the effects budget wasn’t wasted, at least.) Convoy’s solidarity crosses gender and racial lines: on the open road, we’re all equals. Well, except for the cops.

If you watch them back-to-back, like I did, Heavenly Bodies becomes a feminine companion piece to Convoy’s rugged masculinity. On a serious note, both films are about working-class strivers battling for their place in a hostile world through the power of pure bullheaded sexiness. More frivolously, they’re both sweaty as hell. (If nothing else, you’ll walk away from this movie with a profound respect for star Cynthia Dale’s energy levels. I was tired just watching her.) They also share, let’s say, a lack of regard for standard narrative structure. Heavenly Bodies is a musical in spirit, if not in letter, and Jake describes it as “90% montage; 100% heart.”

Canada’s answer to Flashdance is aware of its place in the ’80s dance-movie canon: Early on, a character stands outside a movie theater, hands on her hips, and observes the poster for Adrian Lyne’s similarly high-energy hit. The plot, roughly, fits BulletproofQpid’s quip calling it “the Rocky of jazzercise films”, accompanying irrepressible aerobics instructor Samantha (Dale) on a classic underdog arc that evolves from low-key realism to a “save the rec center”-style ’80s head rush. It’s kind of a goofy movie, ittedly. But it’s just so gosh darned charming, in that earnest, self-effacing way that only Canadians can pull off.

Letterboxd happily get into the spirit of the thing, frequently describing Heavenly Bodies in awestruck . Dublincore calls it “pure bliss”, comparing the film’s athletic physicality to martial-arts films of the era. “When she sees her life flash before her eyes and that guitar music picks up during the final showdown, I nearly fainted,” Sidney says. But my favorite review of Heavenly Bodies comes from Morgan, whose description is so poetic I have to quote it at length:

Reading through Letterboxd reviews of The Blair Witch Project, you begin to notice a generational gap. like Zoë, who saw the movie around its initial release in 1999, express a clear nostalgic affection for the film: “Genuinely do not think I knew fear until I watched this at a sleepover in my pitch-black unfinished basement at 2am when I was ten years old,” she writes. That’s how I first encountered the feral grandmama of found-footage horror, too; I didn’t catch it early enough to actually think it was real, but I did watch TV news reports about people who did. That buzz gave it a whispered power, priming me for getting the absolute crap scared out of me when it finally came out on video.

Tony tells a similar story, describing watching the movie on VHS at a friend’s house. “I got scared. I’m talking about the kind of scared I had not felt since I was a kid,” he writes. “The people on the screen kept getting more and more lost in those woods and when I looked outside, all I could see were woods… It all just seemed so damn real that, even though I knew it wasn’t, it was really easy to let myself believe it was.”

“Watching it on VHS really sells the whole enterprise, especially in the nighttime sequences,” SilentDawn adds, saying it “places the audience right in the middle of a campfire tale” with “jagged edges and pixels” and “suffocating darkness beyond a few feet of relative safety”. Revisiting the film again as an adult, first about a decade ago and again in the buildup to Halloween, it’s these empty spaces—between pixels, and out there in the woods—that still freak me out. We never see what makes Heather scream, “What the fuck is that?!” as she flees the campground in the middle of the night, but the ragged terror in her voice makes us believe that, whatever it is, it must be horrifying.

The character of Heather, who gets a lot of hate (personally, I find her realistic in her faults and contradictions), is emblematic of changing attitudes towards The Blair Witch Project. Although nostalgia-tinged odes to the film’s fright factor abound on Letterboxd, the most popular reviews are let down by the hype. In fact, there are a whole series of who are mystified that a movie that’s just three annoying characters squabbling in the woods for an hour could be considered one of the scariest movies ever.

In this way, The Blair Witch Project was a victim of its own success. After that initial wave of hype came a deluge of rip-offs and parodies, which dulled its edge by ruining the illusion of reality. It’s because the movie was so popular that, as a phenomenon, it can never be repeated—partially because social media would fact-check the lore within minutes, and partially because audiences in 2024 understand shaky hand-held footage of people running and screaming through the woods at night to be a legitimate form of cinematic grammar.