If you see one spicy depraved satirical thriller this year that’s a cross between “Mean Girls” and “The Craft” and something far darker, by all means make that movie “Forbidden Fruits.” It’s an agreeably sharp-witted black-as-midnight comedy about four young women from Texas who work in a clothing-and-knickknack boutique at the Highland Place mall. They aren’t just friends; they’re part of a coven. Does that mean they’re actually witches? Maybe, maybe not.

What we can say for sure is that they’re shopping junkies obsessed with signifiers of their femininity (skimpy chemises, bracelets with charms, designer cupcakes), that their banter is peppered with the kind of slang (gorge, perf, vom) you’d expect from a movie that has Diablo Cody as one of the producers, that at one point they do a willowy dance to an EDM cover of Bryan Adams’ “Heaven,” and that three of them are under the spell of their ringleader, Apple (Lili Reinhart), a cold vixen in long straight red hair and stiletto heels who controls their every move with agendas of her own.

Each of the girls is named for a different fruit. In addition to Apple, there’s Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), who in earlier age would have been the “ditz,” because she’s got a sensual innocence (she spends every Wednesday afternoon boinking a different dude from the food court), but she’s actually as sharp-tongued as the rest of them. There’s Fig (Alexandra Shipp), the most serious and skeptical. And there’s the mysterious newbie, Pumpkin (Lola Tung), who’s working at a candied-pretzel store called Sister Salt’s when Apple taps her to join the coven (though she doesn’t put it quite that way). She leads Pumpkin into the girls’ shared immersion in the ways of fashion and jargon and backbiting, their filtering of life through a scrim of pop, and the way that Apple layers her “sisterly” directives with an academic feminist righteousness. That, in fact, is what makes the film original — its perception that for these girls, progressive anger is now inseparable from fashion. 

If they are in fact witches, what’s the witchcraft about? In comedies like “The Craft” or “Practical Magic,” witchcraft has mostly been a free-floating expression of female power. But in “Forbidden Fruits,” Apple, the group’s Regina George, uses her status as head witch to enforce her rules about the way things should be. (You’re only allowed to text a dude using emojis.) Periodically, she’ll send one of her comrades into the dressing room that serves as a “confessional,” where the one you’re confessing to is the spirit of Marilyn Monroe. Why Marilyn? Because Apple considers her the ultimate female martyr, and says “no one could control her, not even the president.” Apple has a JFK assassination theory about Marilyn. According to the theory, Marilyn was murdered — by JFK — precisely because she couldn’t be controlled. In Apple’s eyes, the ghost of Marilyn now hovers over every dance of power between a man and a woman.

Cherry, promiscuous and confused, actually seems to have a bit of Marilyn in her. But what of the others? As Fig pursues a romance, which Apple tries to squelch, we realize that Apple, with her fear and loathing of men, is a witch of the spirit. Yet Lili Reinhart plays her with a diamond-hard smirk and a gleam of perception that lights up the screen. She’s like Parker Posey crossed with Ann-Margret. She has the potential to go far.        

At first, cued by everything in “Forbidden Fruits” that’s reminiscent of those earlier films, we think it’s all for fun: a high-camp giggle trip. But the film’s first-time director, Meredith Alloway (who co-wrote the script with Lily Houghton), has a vision that’s less facile and more contemporary than that. She has made a screw-loose comedy of stylized youth attitudes that doesn’t pretend to be “real,” but it’s also a serious movie that asks: What do young women today want? Love or justice or power? Or all three? And is any one of the three more powerful?

The movie takes a turn into suspense when Apple leads the others in putting a hex on someone, and the hex appears to work. What happens is unnerving, at which point the film passes through a looking glass of fear. There’s something new at work — a cultural hairpin turn — in the way that Apple is made out to be a figure of commanding but toxic damage. “Forbidden Fruits” goes over-the-top into shock and violence (which is staged with great wit), but what drives the movie forward is how it tries to pull its characters out from under the influence of someone whose witchery has made men the enemy. The movie says: It’s time to break that spell.

If there is one thing Sean (Adam Scott) would like to make perfectly clear, it’s that he’s only ever had the best intentions. He’s no bigot. He doesn’t buy into far-right propaganda like his parents (Ron Perlman and Colleen Camp) do. And he’s been nothing but hospitable to his new Airbnb guests, Jahan (Nazanin Boniadi) and Amir (Theo Rossi). If it happens that he finds them suspicious, it’s certainly not because they’re Middle Eastern. It’s only because there’s just something off about them, somehow.

As Sean eventually learns the hard way, though, good intentions can only ever count for so much. His movie, too, is proof of that. The premise of The Saviors, a genre-defying thriller written (with Travis Betz) and directed by Kevin Hamedani, is undeniably timely, exploring the way faulty assumptions about some unknown Other might have disastrous, even apocalyptic consequences. But an emphasis on broad ideas over nuanced detail yields a film that’s more interesting in theory than in practice.

Sean’s increasing fear of the Razi siblings isn’t the only problem he’s got going on. The only reason the place is being rented to begin with is because he and Kim (Danielle Deadwyler) are preparing to divorce and the mortgage needs paying off. No surprise, then, that Kim is initially skeptical of Sean’s conspiracy theories, assuming her aimless husband to be fixating on trivial nonsense. But as Kim also starts noticing odd things — including a missing journal and an alarming map, to add to the strange electrical equipment and unexplained lights Sean’s been trying to tell her about already — she slowly comes around.

The Saviors pitches its tone somewhere between horror, thriller and comedy, and there are elements of all of those in the slightly unnerving sense that Kim and Sean almost seem to need Amir and Jahan to be up to no good. The excitement of nosing around the siblings’ stuff, comparing notes afterward, hiring a private investigator (Greg Kinnear as Jimmy Clemente, who looks and acts exactly as you’d want a Greg Kinnear character named Jimmy Clemente to look and act) and planning to take their findings to the FBI rejuvenates their relationship like nothing else has. During a bout of make-up sex, Kim even asks for a change of position so they can both keep staking out the backyard while they screw.

But like much else in The Saviors, that almost psychosexual component is an intriguing idea that, once presented, just sits there. It’s not carried to some surprising logical extreme, nor deepened into rich character work. You can see what the film is trying to say about a political climate in which the best unifier is a common enemy, but it’s not expressed with enough finesse or confidence to hit a nerve.

The Saviors does not even tell us much about Sean and Kim, since despite Scott and Deadwyler’s affable chemistry — too affable, maybe, considering they’re about to split — the characters are so vaguely drawn that it’s never clear what brought this couple together in the first place, or what’s pulling them apart now. The real, meta reason for their coupling seems to be that the filmmakers wanted a Black woman to ever so slightly complicate the racial dynamics, calling Sean out for “living in a white bubble” when he fails to comprehend why these visitors might seem skittish in their lily-white town.

That she eventually starts to buy Sean’s thinking is rooted in another shrewd and salient observation, about the contagion of prejudice. The rank bigotry of a neo-Nazi newsletter filters through folks like Sean’s parents and sister (a very funny Kate Berlant) — which is to say conservatives, but mostly amiable ones. That, in turn gets spread to nice white liberals like Sean, then even more left-leaning skeptics like Kim. But once again, The Saviors undermines its own relevance by handling its characters like props being used to make a point, rather than people with their own complex motivations or contradictions.

This extends as well to Amir and Jahan, despite an impressive performance by Rossi that manages to convey the depth of Amir’s emotions long before we understand what’s behind them. The siblings are cryptic and unknowable by design, and Jahan even more so for her silence. (She’s deaf, Amir explains early on, but can lip-read.) The script does a decent job of keeping us guessing as to their true goals, playing on the tension between our desire to see them proven innocent and our gnawing realization that they’re clearly up to something strange.

Once the truth is out, however, and it becomes possible to piece together how the past several days have looked from their perspective, The Saviors just stops. It’s made its point — loudly and bluntly, including in a line of dialogue that might as well have been presented with a flashing neon caption reading “This is the theme of the movie” — and has nothing more to add. In fairness, it’s a message that’s always worth remembering, and one that sadly feels more essential than ever. If only it had been delivered in a package sturdy enough to really sell it.

As Sunday’s Oscars ceremony approached, it seemed to be shaping up to be a showdown between the vampires and the revolutionaries, between Sinners and One Battle After Another. In the end, One Battle After Another won both best picture and best director, but it was a very good night for Sinners, too, including an original screenplay award for writer and director Ryan Coogler.

There were some surprises over the course of the evening, including a rare tie in the live action short category, a remembrance of Robert Redford that included Barbra Streisand singing a bit of “The Way We Were,” and Jimmy Kimmel stepping in just long enough to make some pointed comments about media censorship. But let’s go over some of the major takeaways.

A celebrated director gets his Oscar.

Paul Thomas Anderson won best director for One Battle After Another after three previous nominations for There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza. Anderson had already won several major Oscar precursor awards this year, including top directing prizes at the BAFTAs and from the Directors Guild of America, so he was the odds-on favorite. The other nominees in the category were relative newcomers: Ryan Coogler, Josh Safdie and Joachim Trier were all first-time directing nominees; Chloé Zhao was nominated (and won) for Nomadland at the ceremony in 2021.

Michael B. Jordan won a rare acting award for a genre movie.

Michael B. Jordan won best actor for his portrayal of twin brothers in Sinners.

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Sinners is a drama, but it’s also very much a genre film. It’s horror. It’s vampires. Those are not the kinds of films that most often win Oscars for actors. But Jordan, with his first nomination, won over performers from much more traditionally awards-friendly films. Three of those actors (Leonardo DiCaprio, Timothée Chalamet and Ethan Hawke) already had multiple acting nominations before this year.

The last actor to win for a genre film might have been Joaquin Phoenix for Joker, since that was technically a comic-book movie, but that one did away with most of its genre trappings and pressed itself into a dramatic mold, which Sinners emphatically does not. Before that, while definitions of genre aren’t bright lines, you might have to go all the way back to … Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, if you consider that horror? Maybe even further? At any rate, it’s a great win for an actor who has been beloved at least since The Wire almost 25 years ago, who’s been doing rich and varied work ever since. His victory is also a win for his lengthy and fruitful collaboration with Ryan Coogler in Sinners, but also in Fruitvale Station, Creed and Black Panther.

Amy Madigan, the award-winning straight-up monster.

Amy Madigan won best supporting actress for her performance in Weapons.

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(We don’t mean Amy Madigan the person, of course.) Madigan won best supporting actress for her deeply unsettling and entirely singular performance as Aunt Gladys in Weapons, which is even more fully a horror movie than Sinners. While the nominated cast members from Sinners — Jordan, Delroy Lindo and Wunmi Mosaku — play regular people who are swept into an unreal situation, Madigan is playing, essentially, the boogeyman (boogeywoman?). It’s thrilling to see the Academy recognize a performance that is as weird and funny and scary as just the last few minutes of what Madigan does in Zach Cregger’s terrifying story of a town that sees a whole classroom full of its children disappear.

The casting Oscar makes its debut.

Cassandra Kulukundis won the Academy’s first award for achievement in casting for her work on One Battle After Another.

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This was the first year that there was an Oscar for casting, which is very much overdue — there have been casting Emmys for ages. It was easy to argue for any of the nominated casting directors. Marty Supreme and The Secret Agent both deploy nontraditional actors in some roles, Sinners and One Battle both use a wide variety of well-known and well-regarded stars in interesting ways, and Hamnet places most of the weight of an enormously heavy story on the shoulders of just a couple of performers, including best actress winner Jessie Buckley.

Cassandra Kulukundis, who won for One Battle After Another, not only has been working with Paul Thomas Anderson for ages, but she also worked on casting (get this) for both The Brutalist and Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle. But all the nominees have tremendous resumes. Francine Maisler, who was nominated for Sinners, was the credited casting director for Arrival, Creed, Baby Driver, Widows, and Challengers! Honestly, the biggest problem in the category was that everybody couldn’t win.

A first in the cinematography category.

Autumn Durald Arkapaw accepts the award for best cinematography for Sinners.

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Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who won best cinematography for her work on Sinners, was only the fourth woman, and the first woman of color, to be nominated in the category. She becomes the first woman to win. Sinners is a sumptuously, inventively, beautifully shot film, and the cinematography is one of the core crafts that makes it so effective.