Makoto Shinkai only has three proper titles (or four, if you count 1999’s She And Her Cat) under his belt, and only one of those is a true full-length film, but he’s already been announced as the new Hayao Miyazaki.

I’ll admit, I’ve done my fair share of stoking that particular fire, due my effusive praise for Voices From A Distant Star (2000) and The Place Promised In Our Early Days (2004). But when you consider Shinkai’s work, with its lush and evocative animation and artwork, and its equally emotional storylines, the only name that readily comes to mind is that of anime’s grand master.

That being said, I get the sense after watching 5 Centimeters Per Second that Shinkai is at something of a crossroads. Though barely an hour in length, 5 Centimeters Per Second is such a perfect encapsulation of the themes that Shinkai has been exploring in his work to date that one can’t help but wonder what’s left there for him to explore, and wonder where he’ll go from here.

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Shinji Aramaki’s previous Appleseed movie (my review) was much more than met the eyes. On the surface, it was an ultra-flashy, CG-powered anime movie that utilized motion capture and facial imaging to give the animation—and the countless explosions and mecha battles—a greater degree of realism.

Below the surface, however, was a surprisingly engaging storyline that blended tragedy and melodrama with the exploration of some thorny ethical issus such as cloning. In other words, you could enjoy it simply for the mechanized mayhem, of which there was an awful lot, but there was no need to call it a guilty pleasure on that part.

Appleseed Ex Machina, on the other hand, is a completely different kind of film. And no, that’s not a positive thing. Not at all.

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I often find that I need to give a movie a “break” before I see it, if I’ve heard too much about it beforehand. Perhaps I’ve heard so many good things about the movie, and I worry that my expectations are too high. Or maybe I’ve heard so many troubling things that I worry that my opinion may be predisposed to be negative. Whatever the case, it often means that I miss out on seeing it in the theatre and have to settle for DVD, but I feel it’s the only way that I can give the movie a fair shake, that I can judge it on its own merits.

I suppose it’s an odd little quirk of mine, but it’s served me well in the past. And so I did it for Stardust, an adaptation of what is most certainly my favorite of Neil Gaiman’s works. I had read some troubling things—e.g., negative reviews that pointed towards disturbing changes to the storyline—but I resolved to watch the film as fairly as possible, keeping in mind all of the usual caveats concerning literary adaptations. It was an endeavor that proved pointless about thirty minutes into the film: Stardust was much worse than anything I had steeled myself for.

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I suppose that, had I seen No Country For Old Men on any other day, its unrelenting bleakness would have seemed unnecessarily maudlin—or even worse, comically absurd. But just a few hours before my wife and I walked into the theatre, we read news stories about two shootings in Colorado that ultimately left four people dead. And just a few days earlier, a troubled young man walked into a posh shopping center in my old hometown of Omaha and killed eight people before turning the gun on himself.

Suddenly, No Country For Old Men‘s vision of humanity caught in the clutches of an unstoppable and incomprehensible evil that leaves its few survivors—if you can call them that—reeling and shocked seemed less absurd and all too real. The world depicted on the silver screen looked a little too much like the world I’d left outside the theatre walls.

The latest film from the Coen Brothers—adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed novel—bears many similarities to their previous films. There’s that ear for quirky dialog, the obvious love for characters’ idiosyncrasies, and the brief flashes of absurdist humor. But those are merely on the surface. Arguably, they’ve never done anything this unremittingly bleak. Not even Fargo with its wood chipper wanders this far into the wasteland.

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