What is there to say? That Kristen Stewart can act — that she can inhabit a character perhaps more naturally than any actress of her generation? Okay. That if you want some raunchtastic talk and desperate, grindy onscreen sex in the current cinecultural climate, you’re more likely to find it between same-sex partners? Okay again. That Ed Harris’ face has become such an unforgiving landscape of craters, caverns, and ravines that it spookily echoes the brutal desert outside of town in which the bodies have been piling up lo these many violent years under his bug-lovin’ reign? I say again, okay. And one last affirmative: there is good grit and texture here — perhaps exemplified by the loving attention paid to the world of women’s bodybuilding — and a nasty, unsentimental reality that makes the loopy fantasy imagery at the end either a triumphant break from or a goofy undoing of all that’s gone before. (The audience at the screening laughed heartily; I’m not sure that was the effect for which the story was going.) But after all that, there isn’t much more to say, except that bad people tend to do bad things, and that whatever happens to love, lots of people wind up bleeding as a result. Not exactly a revelation. Once you get the interior ugliness of everyone involved, you may be able to chuckle at some of the violence, ha ha. (2024) — Matthew Lickona