If there’s one thing young moviegoers seem to fear these days, it’s the idea of the in-between. The term liminal horror has gone from niche internet speak to Hollywood trend, thanks to the acclaimed TV show Severance and the recent smash-hit movie Backrooms. Stories like these mine the unsettling feeling of nondescript office corridors and basement halls that seem to self-replicate into infinity; this spring also saw the U.S. release of the excellent Japanese film Exit 8, a video-game adaptation about someone getting trapped in a subway station with seemingly no way out. Now there’s It Ends, a low-budget bit of creepy cleverness with a punchy pitch: What if you got lost driving down a road that never ends?

That this type of premise has grown more commonplace makes sense. Such a film typically needs only one set (for example, a long, lonely road, flanked by trees), a small cast of characters, and a spare, intentionally circular script. It Ends uses that scrappy charm to its advantage, the lack of frills dialing up a sense of realism. The film, written and directed by the newcomer Alexander Ullom, follows James (played by Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Tyler (Mitchell Cole), four friends who are headed on a celebratory graduation road trip. Their drive is occupied by the sort of nonsensical, wandering conversations young people love to have; there’s no real sign of anything being wrong until Tyler notices that he’s missed his turn.

The horror builds gradually, spikes, then slows to an existentially brutal crawl. The group realizes that there’s no way off the road, but when they get out of the car to look around, swarms of people emerge from the woods and fight to enter their vehicle. As the friends continue on in search of safety, they notice that the gas tank never goes empty, they never feel hungry, and nobody needs to sleep. They’re in a sort of limbo, condemned to keep moving despite having no destination. It’s essentially a Gen Z take on Sartre’s No Exit, a gentle riff on hell being other people, with a few jump scares tossed in for fun.

[Read: The eerie comfort of liminal spaces]

But while prior small-scale horror movies such as The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity had an unseen villain guiding the scares, It Ends thrives on an utter lack of information about what is happening and why. The terror of liminality is how effortlessly it evokes the creepiness of a bad dream, the kind that begins in the middle of the story and seems just off. There’s no monster around the corner, no demonic puzzle to be solved. The characters of It Ends initially debate what’s going on, keeping track of patterns occurring around them in search of some explanation. While James keeps doing so as a way of staying sane, the others start to accept their frozen existence; the strangers in the woods, it seems, are also confined to the road’s environs.

That Ullom manages to squeeze a feature-length movie out of such a mundane premise is impressive; it helps that his cast is charming enough to carry it off. As the film plods on, it starts to skip further and further ahead in time, warping the viewer’s sense of chronology. It Ends is more aggressively aimless than other recent entries in the genre: Exit 8 sees its heroes try to figure a way out of their infinite subway station (it was based on a video game, so some resolution is built into the plot); the protagonists of Backrooms discovered a world of non-Euclidean corridors and lobbies in a basement, then found out that opportunistic corporate villains were plundering it; such a revelation hints at sequels that could expand its lore.

The simplicity of It Ends, by comparison, is wonderful and jarring, as is the total inability for future properties to spill out of it. Part of the dread that liminal horror mines is the drudgery of the never-ending scroll, a familiar feeling for anyone who’s been on social media; no matter how much you look, you’ll never hit bottom, only summon more of whatever the algorithm wants to serve you. It Ends is set entirely outdoors but captures that same fear of being stuck without any touchstones to distinguish simulation from reality.

If there’s one thing young moviegoers seem to fear these days, it’s the idea of the in-between. The term liminal horror has gone from niche internet speak to Hollywood trend, thanks to the acclaimed TV show Severance and the recent smash-hit movie Backrooms. Stories like these mine the unsettling feeling of nondescript office corridors and basement halls that seem to self-replicate into infinity; this spring also saw the U.S. release of the excellent Japanese film Exit 8, a video-game adaptation about someone getting trapped in a subway station with seemingly no way out. Now there’s It Ends, a low-budget bit of creepy cleverness with a punchy pitch: What if you got lost driving down a road that never ends?

That this type of premise has grown more commonplace makes sense. Such a film typically needs only one set (for example, a long, lonely road, flanked by trees), a small cast of characters, and a spare, intentionally circular script. It Ends uses that scrappy charm to its advantage, the lack of frills dialing up a sense of realism. The film, written and directed by the newcomer Alexander Ullom, follows James (played by Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Tyler (Mitchell Cole), four friends who are headed on a celebratory graduation road trip. Their drive is occupied by the sort of nonsensical, wandering conversations young people love to have; there’s no real sign of anything being wrong until Tyler notices that he’s missed his turn.

The horror builds gradually, spikes, then slows to an existentially brutal crawl. The group realizes that there’s no way off the road, but when they get out of the car to look around, swarms of people emerge from the woods and fight to enter their vehicle. As the friends continue on in search of safety, they notice that the gas tank never goes empty, they never feel hungry, and nobody needs to sleep. They’re in a sort of limbo, condemned to keep moving despite having no destination. It’s essentially a Gen Z take on Sartre’s No Exit, a gentle riff on hell being other people, with a few jump scares tossed in for fun.

[Read: The eerie comfort of liminal spaces]

But while prior small-scale horror movies such as The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity had an unseen villain guiding the scares, It Ends thrives on an utter lack of information about what is happening and why. The terror of liminality is how effortlessly it evokes the creepiness of a bad dream, the kind that begins in the middle of the story and seems just off. There’s no monster around the corner, no demonic puzzle to be solved. The characters of It Ends initially debate what’s going on, keeping track of patterns occurring around them in search of some explanation. While James keeps doing so as a way of staying sane, the others start to accept their frozen existence; the strangers in the woods, it seems, are also confined to the road’s environs.

That Ullom manages to squeeze a feature-length movie out of such a mundane premise is impressive; it helps that his cast is charming enough to carry it off. As the film plods on, it starts to skip further and further ahead in time, warping the viewer’s sense of chronology. It Ends is more aggressively aimless than other recent entries in the genre: Exit 8 sees its heroes try to figure a way out of their infinite subway station (it was based on a video game, so some resolution is built into the plot); the protagonists of Backrooms discovered a world of non-Euclidean corridors and lobbies in a basement, then found out that opportunistic corporate villains were plundering it; such a revelation hints at sequels that could expand its lore.

The simplicity of It Ends, by comparison, is wonderful and jarring, as is the total inability for future properties to spill out of it. Part of the dread that liminal horror mines is the drudgery of the never-ending scroll, a familiar feeling for anyone who’s been on social media; no matter how much you look, you’ll never hit bottom, only summon more of whatever the algorithm wants to serve you. It Ends is set entirely outdoors but captures that same fear of being stuck without any touchstones to distinguish simulation from reality.

This has been a terrific year for movie theaters. Cinemas are on course for their best financial year since before the coronavirus pandemic, powered by large-scale hits such as The Odyssey and surprise small-budget smashes, particularly Obsession and Backrooms. Fears about the decline of the big-screen experience amid the rise of at-home streaming seem to have begun dissipating. But one theatrical stalwart is showing serious signs of weakness: the superhero movie, which helped keep blockbusters afloat for most of the 2010s. Marvel’s most anticipated title last year, The Fantastic Four: First Steps—which reintroduced the fan-favorite comic-book team—failed to meet the studio’s lofty expectations; this June’s DC Comics adaptation of Supergirl was an out-and-out bomb.

By those metrics, one might have predicted a similar slump for this summer’s new Spider-Man sequel, subtitled Brand New Day. Instead, it has broken nearly every box-office record imaginable.

That the film has been able to defy mounting superhero fatigue may seem unexpected. After all, Brand New Day is the fourth Spider-Man entry set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which owns the rights to the character; it’s Tom Holland’s seventh time playing the character. Whereas its predecessor, 2021’s No Way Home, sold itself on bringing back heroes and villains from prior Spider-Man entries, Brand New Day promised a general reset. Its story also feels smaller, the action confined to the hero’s hometown of New York City, where he faces off with more street-level villains. Given the public’s declining appetite for the MCU—long gone are the days when an installment starring a relatively unknown character could make more than $1 billion worldwide—Brand New Day’s streamlined focus seemed like an audience gamble.

[Read: The Dark Knight changed Hollywood movies forever]

Not so: The movie earned $360 million domestically during its opening weekend, shattering a record set by Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Endgame was the grand conclusion of Marvel’s initial saga, featuring Spider-Man alongside every other popular character in the company’s wheelhouse. Yet Brand New Day, with its far less cataclysmic stakes, could be the first-ever film to make $1 billion in the United States and Canada alone; if it doesn’t break the all-time worldwide box-office record held by Avatar ($2.9 billion), it will at least come close. Its popularity is proof that for some costumed do-gooders, the exhaustion with superheroes just doesn’t apply. Maybe the simplest rule of thumb is that although audiences are losing interest in most comic-book adaptations, Spider-Man will always endure.

He initially set a famous box-office milestone back in 2002, when Spider-Man—the character’s major-feature debut, starring Tobey Maguire—grossed more than $110 million domestically during its opening weekend. Since then, even as other actors have assumed the role (including Andrew Garfield and an animated version voiced by Shameik Moore), Spider-Man has remained the most consistent of comic-book movie stars. Sony, which owns the film rights to the Spider-Man franchise, has attempted to build offshoot storylines that don’t feature him but has consistently failed; though the Venom trilogy did well enough, the spin-offs Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter were commercial failures. (Critics hated all of them too.) Yet Spider-Man himself has proved indestructible to theatergoers: The 11 films in which he stars have made nearly $11 billion worldwide.

Brand New Day’s colossal success can’t just be attributed to the hero’s appeal, however. The genius of the co-creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s comic-book invention was that he was more grounded and familiar than DC Comics’ godlike figures, such as Superman and Wonder Woman, or the multibillionaire Batman. Spider-Man, in his original incarnation, was really just a nerdy teen named Peter Parker who readers could relate to, and the installments starring Holland have replicated that zippy, youthful energy. Spider-Man’s brand has also been savvily extended to fans of all ages: Projects such as the wildly popular cartoon Spidey and His Amazing Friends appeal to preschoolers, featuring villains including the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus downgraded from homicidal to simply mischievous; the studio Insomniac Games’ three video games focused on the character are best sellers.

[Read: Steve Ditko’s ordinary people]

Beyond that, the star power of Holland and Zendaya, who plays Spider-Man’s girlfriend, MJ, is on a level few other young actors can claim. They both feature in the summer’s other biggest hit, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and although they largely keep their real-life relationship private, it adds to the authenticity of their romance on-screen. Zendaya in particular has proved exceptionally good at getting young viewers to show up for more daring movies, such as this spring’s The Drama; comparatively, something as broadly crowd-pleasing as Brand New Day is a layup.

The film’s achievements will likely not be taken for granted. Marvel’s next movie, Avengers: Doomsday, will be released in December and stands to benefit from the hype around Brand New Day. The studio is also soft-rebooting the franchise following next year’s Avengers: Secret Wars, in part by leaning on another well-known superhero team—the X-Men, one of whom is deployed as Brand New Day’s surprise antagonist. The industry will probably never return to producing the relentless glut of comic-book adaptations that buttressed the past decade-plus in Hollywood—which is a good thing, because a diversity of genres and cinematic experiences is the wisest thing to have on offer. Perhaps Brand New Day could kick off a more stable new phase for superheroes. No matter what, Spider-Man will keep on swinging.

This has been a terrific year for movie theaters. Cinemas are on course for their best financial year since before the coronavirus pandemic, powered by large-scale hits such as The Odyssey and surprise small-budget smashes, particularly Obsession and Backrooms. Fears about the decline of the big-screen experience amid the rise of at-home streaming seem to have begun dissipating. But one theatrical stalwart is showing serious signs of weakness: the superhero movie, which helped keep blockbusters afloat for most of the 2010s. Marvel’s most anticipated title last year, The Fantastic Four: First Steps—which reintroduced the fan-favorite comic-book team—failed to meet the studio’s lofty expectations; this June’s DC Comics adaptation of Supergirl was an out-and-out bomb.

By those metrics, one might have predicted a similar slump for this summer’s new Spider-Man sequel, subtitled Brand New Day. Instead, it has broken nearly every box-office record imaginable.

That the film has been able to defy mounting superhero fatigue may seem unexpected. After all, Brand New Day is the fourth Spider-Man entry set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which owns the rights to the character; it’s Tom Holland’s seventh time playing the character. Whereas its predecessor, 2021’s No Way Home, sold itself on bringing back heroes and villains from prior Spider-Man entries, Brand New Day promised a general reset. Its story also feels smaller, the action confined to the hero’s hometown of New York City, where he faces off with more street-level villains. Given the public’s declining appetite for the MCU—long gone are the days when an installment starring a relatively unknown character could make more than $1 billion worldwide—Brand New Day’s streamlined focus seemed like an audience gamble.

[Read: The Dark Knight changed Hollywood movies forever]

Not so: The movie earned $360 million domestically during its opening weekend, shattering a record set by Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Endgame was the grand conclusion of Marvel’s initial saga, featuring Spider-Man alongside every other popular character in the company’s wheelhouse. Yet Brand New Day, with its far less cataclysmic stakes, could be the first-ever film to make $1 billion in the United States and Canada alone; if it doesn’t break the all-time worldwide box-office record held by Avatar ($2.9 billion), it will at least come close. Its popularity is proof that for some costumed do-gooders, the exhaustion with superheroes just doesn’t apply. Maybe the simplest rule of thumb is that although audiences are losing interest in most comic-book adaptations, Spider-Man will always endure.

He initially set a famous box-office milestone back in 2002, when Spider-Man—the character’s major-feature debut, starring Tobey Maguire—grossed more than $110 million domestically during its opening weekend. Since then, even as other actors have assumed the role (including Andrew Garfield and an animated version voiced by Shameik Moore), Spider-Man has remained the most consistent of comic-book movie stars. Sony, which owns the film rights to the Spider-Man franchise, has attempted to build offshoot storylines that don’t feature him but has consistently failed; though the Venom trilogy did well enough, the spin-offs Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter were commercial failures. (Critics hated all of them too.) Yet Spider-Man himself has proved indestructible to theatergoers: The 11 films in which he stars have made nearly $11 billion worldwide.

Brand New Day’s colossal success can’t just be attributed to the hero’s appeal, however. The genius of the co-creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s comic-book invention was that he was more grounded and familiar than DC Comics’ godlike figures, such as Superman and Wonder Woman, or the multibillionaire Batman. Spider-Man, in his original incarnation, was really just a nerdy teen named Peter Parker who readers could relate to, and the installments starring Holland have replicated that zippy, youthful energy. Spider-Man’s brand has also been savvily extended to fans of all ages: Projects such as the wildly popular cartoon Spidey and His Amazing Friends appeal to preschoolers, featuring villains including the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus downgraded from homicidal to simply mischievous; the studio Insomniac Games’ three video games focused on the character are best sellers.

[Read: Steve Ditko’s ordinary people]

Beyond that, the star power of Holland and Zendaya, who plays Spider-Man’s girlfriend, MJ, is on a level few other young actors can claim. They both feature in the summer’s other biggest hit, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and although they largely keep their real-life relationship private, it adds to the authenticity of their romance on-screen. Zendaya in particular has proved exceptionally good at getting young viewers to show up for more daring movies, such as this spring’s The Drama; comparatively, something as broadly crowd-pleasing as Brand New Day is a layup.

The film’s achievements will likely not be taken for granted. Marvel’s next movie, Avengers: Doomsday, will be released in December and stands to benefit from the hype around Brand New Day. The studio is also soft-rebooting the franchise following next year’s Avengers: Secret Wars, in part by leaning on another well-known superhero team—the X-Men, one of whom is deployed as Brand New Day’s surprise antagonist. The industry will probably never return to producing the relentless glut of comic-book adaptations that buttressed the past decade-plus in Hollywood—which is a good thing, because a diversity of genres and cinematic experiences is the wisest thing to have on offer. Perhaps Brand New Day could kick off a more stable new phase for superheroes. No matter what, Spider-Man will keep on swinging.

In their fledgling but fascinating career thus far, the director Jane Schoenbrun has been consumed by the pop culture that consumes us. They’ve already proved to be an urgent voice on the matter: Their first feature, the low-budget We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, focused on the allure of online “creepypastas” and weird YouTube rabbit holes that despondent teenagers might go down. The second, I Saw the TV Glow, examined the psychological fallout of two isolated adolescents obsessed with a cult television series. Schoenbrun’s newest movie, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is similarly interested in nostalgia: It follows Kris (played by Hannah Einbinder), a queer filmmaker tasked with rebooting a gruesome slasher franchise from yesteryear called Camp Miasma. As she does so, the past and the cynical present blend into a transfixing dilution of Schoenbrun’s interests and fears about identity and self through the prism of mass media.

Schoenbrun’s previous films were intensely melancholic affairs, and it’s immediately clear that Camp Miasma is having a bit more fun with the same themes. It jabs at Hollywood’s impulse toward rampant intellectualization—and corporatization—of the cinematic junk food of decades past. Kris, who has a minor Sundance hit under her belt, endeavors to create a “woke” and hip take on Camp Miasma without alienating its enduring fan base. A charmingly stylized early montage establishes the franchise as akin to many 1980s VHS cult classics, garishly mixing gore, nudity, and an eerie campfire vibe. The film’s many sequels yielded diminishing returns, and the series eventually stooped to wacky concepts à la Friday the 13th—the main monster, Little Death, who carries a spear and wears a mask shaped like a cubic air vent, traveled to Manhattan, then space, and so on. At her hotel, Kris watches the original film and eagerly takes notes; during a cheesy sex scene, she scribbles DESIRE in her notepad and underlines it forcefully.

Yet Kris, despite her intent to take a cerebral approach, also comes at the project with a teen sensibility. Any movie nerd might recognize her behavior: When she stops off at a gas station on a work trip, she grabs fistfuls of candy and then lazily spins through the cheapo DVD rack, excitedly calling a friend when she finds a junky Camp Miasma installment for sale. The opportunity to visit the now-abandoned sleepaway camp where the first entry was shot is both useful to her as a director and delightful to her as a fan.

[Read: Make culture weird again]

The film mostly takes place there, and Kris spends a bizarre weekend with Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), a reclusive actor who starred in the original Camp Miasma but refused to participate in any of its follow-ups. Billy, however, now lives at the campground with the goal of giving herself what appears to be a peculiar form of exposure therapy. Anderson, herself a towering legend of genre television and cinema, is an imperiously fun and sexy figure for Einbinder’s nervous and dorky character to bounce off of. Billy seems both enticed and exhausted by Kris, who professes her struggle to bring an academic eye to the world of Camp Miasma. Billy reminds her that the franchise’s initial appeal was straightforward: The draw was “flesh and fluids.”

As Kris spends more time with Billy, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma metamorphoses from an industry satire into a dreamlike reflection on how what we watch can shape us, no matter how lowbrow. Schoenbrun renders the desolate grounds with beautiful matte-painted backgrounds; as Kris and Billy watch the old film, the fuzzy visuals and synthy score bleed away into contemporary CGI blood and carnage. Both the throwback and present-day imagery look surreal; even though Kris can identify the obvious tropes in Camp Miasma, she can’t seem to face the power that familiar scripts hold over her. And in a fantastical twist, Little Death somehow finds its way out of the Camp Miasma movies, emerging from the on-site lake.

But this is not a tale of cinema coming to life and invading the mundane real world; it’s more about two different styles of storytelling blending into one. As past and present, “fiction” and “reality” swirl together for an inscrutable final act, Schoenbrun finds a fresh way to make an incisive observation about 21st-century life: Today’s moviegoers are immersed in their screens and hungry for pop culture, to the point that a trashy flick such as Camp Miasma can feel intrinsic to Kris’s sense of self. Someone like Kris may want to interrogate that relationship over and over in search of meaning, but perhaps it’s best not to subject what we watch to endless analysis and meta-critique. Instead, we may be better off embracing how we feel.

In their fledgling but fascinating career thus far, the director Jane Schoenbrun has been consumed by the pop culture that consumes us. They’ve already proved to be an urgent voice on the matter: Their first feature, the low-budget We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, focused on the allure of online “creepypastas” and weird YouTube rabbit holes that despondent teenagers might go down. The second, I Saw the TV Glow, examined the psychological fallout of two isolated adolescents obsessed with a cult television series. Schoenbrun’s newest movie, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is similarly interested in nostalgia: It follows Kris (played by Hannah Einbinder), a queer filmmaker tasked with rebooting a gruesome slasher franchise from yesteryear called Camp Miasma. As she does so, the past and the cynical present blend into a transfixing dilution of Schoenbrun’s interests and fears about identity and self through the prism of mass media.

Schoenbrun’s previous films were intensely melancholic affairs, and it’s immediately clear that Camp Miasma is having a bit more fun with the same themes. It jabs at Hollywood’s impulse toward rampant intellectualization—and corporatization—of the cinematic junk food of decades past. Kris, who has a minor Sundance hit under her belt, endeavors to create a “woke” and hip take on Camp Miasma without alienating its enduring fan base. A charmingly stylized early montage establishes the franchise as akin to many 1980s VHS cult classics, garishly mixing gore, nudity, and an eerie campfire vibe. The film’s many sequels yielded diminishing returns, and the series eventually stooped to wacky concepts à la Friday the 13th—the main monster, Little Death, who carries a spear and wears a mask shaped like a cubic air vent, traveled to Manhattan, then space, and so on. At her hotel, Kris watches the original film and eagerly takes notes; during a cheesy sex scene, she scribbles DESIRE in her notepad and underlines it forcefully.

Yet Kris, despite her intent to take a cerebral approach, also comes at the project with a teen sensibility. Any movie nerd might recognize her behavior: When she stops off at a gas station on a work trip, she grabs fistfuls of candy and then lazily spins through the cheapo DVD rack, excitedly calling a friend when she finds a junky Camp Miasma installment for sale. The opportunity to visit the now-abandoned sleepaway camp where the first entry was shot is both useful to her as a director and delightful to her as a fan.

[Read: Make culture weird again]

The film mostly takes place there, and Kris spends a bizarre weekend with Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), a reclusive actor who starred in the original Camp Miasma but refused to participate in any of its follow-ups. Billy, however, now lives at the campground with the goal of giving herself what appears to be a peculiar form of exposure therapy. Anderson, herself a towering legend of genre television and cinema, is an imperiously fun and sexy figure for Einbinder’s nervous and dorky character to bounce off of. Billy seems both enticed and exhausted by Kris, who professes her struggle to bring an academic eye to the world of Camp Miasma. Billy reminds her that the franchise’s initial appeal was straightforward: The draw was “flesh and fluids.”

As Kris spends more time with Billy, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma metamorphoses from an industry satire into a dreamlike reflection on how what we watch can shape us, no matter how lowbrow. Schoenbrun renders the desolate grounds with beautiful matte-painted backgrounds; as Kris and Billy watch the old film, the fuzzy visuals and synthy score bleed away into contemporary CGI blood and carnage. Both the throwback and present-day imagery look surreal; even though Kris can identify the obvious tropes in Camp Miasma, she can’t seem to face the power that familiar scripts hold over her. And in a fantastical twist, Little Death somehow finds its way out of the Camp Miasma movies, emerging from the on-site lake.

But this is not a tale of cinema coming to life and invading the mundane real world; it’s more about two different styles of storytelling blending into one. As past and present, “fiction” and “reality” swirl together for an inscrutable final act, Schoenbrun finds a fresh way to make an incisive observation about 21st-century life: Today’s moviegoers are immersed in their screens and hungry for pop culture, to the point that a trashy flick such as Camp Miasma can feel intrinsic to Kris’s sense of self. Someone like Kris may want to interrogate that relationship over and over in search of meaning, but perhaps it’s best not to subject what we watch to endless analysis and meta-critique. Instead, we may be better off embracing how we feel.

Tony follows a very familiar sort of 19-year-old menace—the kind of character coming-of-age movies like this were made for. He’s someone you might have crushed on in college: He sulks around with worldly paperbacks stuffed into his rear pockets, dresses in leather jackets even if it’s unseasonably warm, and seems to wear a permanent glower. Yet Tony, as played by Dominic Sessa, is more than just a pretentious bad boy; he’s starting to work his way toward something meaningful. His full name also just so happens to be Anthony Bourdain, who the audience likely knows will one day become a renowned chef and author, tapping his back-of-house experiences for material; eventually, his celebrity as a TV personality will transcend his punchy writing about the life of a cook.

The film, directed and co-written by Matt Johnson, should be hamstrung by this conclusion. On paper, Tony sounds like it requires the audience to understand something that doesn’t happen during the movie; it saves calling Tony by his full name until its final moments. This often irritating, barely grown dilettante will become someone important when he does a little more maturing, off-screen. The truth about Bourdain, however, is that he really was a cinematic figure, even in his wayward adolescence—at least if his evocative writing on that period is to be believed.

Tony draws from Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s 2000 best seller that laid bare the rough-and-tumble world of haute cuisine from the perspective of a jaded yet passionate New York chef. But the screenplay adapts only the early chapters, which cover Bourdain’s tentative beginnings in the cooking profession, including one teenage summer he spent, frequently hungover, working in the kitchen of a seafood restaurant on Cape Cod. Presenting that appetizer as a rich, earthy main course somehow comes together beautifully. Tony is not burdened by the complex details of Bourdain’s adult life, and Sessa is not asked to imitate a well-known man who spent the latter half of his career on TV. Instead, he just has to capture the feeling of possibility, wrapped up in the recognizable foolishness of youth. He and Johnson both do a beautiful job of it.

[Read: The missing pieces of Anthony Bourdain]

The viewer meets Tony at Vassar College, where he spent two years before dropping out. The school year is over, and he’s hoping to gain a summer writing fellowship that will impress his ditzy dad, Pierre (played by Rich Sommer), and his far more judgmental mother, Gladys (Dagmara Domińczyk). When that falls through, Tony instead follows a crush named Nancy (Emilia Jones) to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she has a summer job; he eventually stumbles into a gig washing dishes at the Flagship, a seafood spot. The staff is made up of the hard-partying guys one might expect (including a garrulous Stavros Halkias and a brooding Leo Woodall). For much of the run time, Tony is an observer, sucking up what knowledge he can while trying to project a precious aloofness—a trait that beguiles many a young man in search of inspiration.

His muse is found, primarily, in a character simply called “Chef” (Antonio Banderas). He’s a wise, older Brazilian man who silently greets the ocean every morning and still loves his trade enough to make his own ketchup rather than buy bottles of Heinz. Banderas could play this role in his sleep: the meditative, somewhat elusive mentor, delivering advice with simultaneous bluntness and poeticism. But he might actually be the best actor alive who could inhabit that sort of sensei role without it feeling clichéd and off-the-rack. Chef exists mostly to invest Tony with a sense of pride in what he does, even if it’s the manual labor of cooking rather than whatever intellectual pursuits Tony thinks he should follow. Johnson understands that this respect for artistry was what made Bourdain such an enduring figure.

That inherent empathy is how Tony gets away with being a biopic that ends in the early chapters of a person’s life. It’s an origin story for how a man became a chef, yes, yet it’s more concerned with how someone might fall in love with a scrappy culture and the beautiful way that cuisine blends the highbrow and the low. Tony is learning how to create shellfish delicacies; at the same time, he’s cracking open oysters and cleaning plates. (He’s also holding his own among seedy, profane company, the kind of ribald back-and-forth that Johnson can present with hilarious immediacy—be it in his prior biopic, BlackBerry, or in the riotous Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.) Although Tony is a necessarily minor piece of storytelling, it feels deceptively major nevertheless—and is infused with just enough of its subject’s real-world charisma.

Tony follows a very familiar sort of 19-year-old menace—the kind of character coming-of-age movies like this were made for. He’s someone you might have crushed on in college: He sulks around with worldly paperbacks stuffed into his rear pockets, dresses in leather jackets even if it’s unseasonably warm, and seems to wear a permanent glower. Yet Tony, as played by Dominic Sessa, is more than just a pretentious bad boy; he’s starting to work his way toward something meaningful. His full name also just so happens to be Anthony Bourdain, who the audience likely knows will one day become a renowned chef and author, tapping his back-of-house experiences for material; eventually, his celebrity as a TV personality will transcend his punchy writing about the life of a cook.

The film, directed and co-written by Matt Johnson, should be hamstrung by this conclusion. On paper, Tony sounds like it requires the audience to understand something that doesn’t happen during the movie; it saves calling Tony by his full name until its final moments. This often irritating, barely grown dilettante will become someone important when he does a little more maturing, off-screen. The truth about Bourdain, however, is that he really was a cinematic figure, even in his wayward adolescence—at least if his evocative writing on that period is to be believed.

Tony draws from Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s 2000 best seller that laid bare the rough-and-tumble world of haute cuisine from the perspective of a jaded yet passionate New York chef. But the screenplay adapts only the early chapters, which cover Bourdain’s tentative beginnings in the cooking profession, including one teenage summer he spent, frequently hungover, working in the kitchen of a seafood restaurant on Cape Cod. Presenting that appetizer as a rich, earthy main course somehow comes together beautifully. Tony is not burdened by the complex details of Bourdain’s adult life, and Sessa is not asked to imitate a well-known man who spent the latter half of his career on TV. Instead, he just has to capture the feeling of possibility, wrapped up in the recognizable foolishness of youth. He and Johnson both do a beautiful job of it.

[Read: The missing pieces of Anthony Bourdain]

The viewer meets Tony at Vassar College, where he spent two years before dropping out. The school year is over, and he’s hoping to gain a summer writing fellowship that will impress his ditzy dad, Pierre (played by Rich Sommer), and his far more judgmental mother, Gladys (Dagmara Domińczyk). When that falls through, Tony instead follows a crush named Nancy (Emilia Jones) to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she has a summer job; he eventually stumbles into a gig washing dishes at the Flagship, a seafood spot. The staff is made up of the hard-partying guys one might expect (including a garrulous Stavros Halkias and a brooding Leo Woodall). For much of the run time, Tony is an observer, sucking up what knowledge he can while trying to project a precious aloofness—a trait that beguiles many a young man in search of inspiration.

His muse is found, primarily, in a character simply called “Chef” (Antonio Banderas). He’s a wise, older Brazilian man who silently greets the ocean every morning and still loves his trade enough to make his own ketchup rather than buy bottles of Heinz. Banderas could play this role in his sleep: the meditative, somewhat elusive mentor, delivering advice with simultaneous bluntness and poeticism. But he might actually be the best actor alive who could inhabit that sort of sensei role without it feeling clichéd and off-the-rack. Chef exists mostly to invest Tony with a sense of pride in what he does, even if it’s the manual labor of cooking rather than whatever intellectual pursuits Tony thinks he should follow. Johnson understands that this respect for artistry was what made Bourdain such an enduring figure.

That inherent empathy is how Tony gets away with being a biopic that ends in the early chapters of a person’s life. It’s an origin story for how a man became a chef, yes, yet it’s more concerned with how someone might fall in love with a scrappy culture and the beautiful way that cuisine blends the highbrow and the low. Tony is learning how to create shellfish delicacies; at the same time, he’s cracking open oysters and cleaning plates. (He’s also holding his own among seedy, profane company, the kind of ribald back-and-forth that Johnson can present with hilarious immediacy—be it in his prior biopic, BlackBerry, or in the riotous Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.) Although Tony is a necessarily minor piece of storytelling, it feels deceptively major nevertheless—and is infused with just enough of its subject’s real-world charisma.

The subtitle of the newest Spider-Man movie, Brand New Day, implies a grand reset. Yes, this is the fourth Spider-Man installment starring Tom Holland as the spindly hero, not including the other Marvel projects he’s popped in for. This sequel, however, purports to bring the character back to basics, offering a street-level adventure after far too many big crossovers. Its predecessor, No Way Home, mixed up good and bad guys from three different iterations of the Spider-Man franchise for a ridiculous phantasmagoria of clanging action figures. But it ended with a magic spell that made Spider-Man’s true identity (as Peter Parker) unknown to all, even his loved ones; instead, he became an anonymous, local do-gooder battling bank robbers and costumed thugs around New York City. And Brand New Day pretends to tell that story, for about 20 minutes.

The simple, rather depressing, and completely overwhelming fact of the matter is that the Marvel Cinematic Universe cannot be ignored, even as superhero fatigue has definitively set in at the global box office. Spider-Man: Brand New Day briefly aspires to be unconcerned with the plotty goings-on of the Avengers and their ilk, yet as Destin Daniel Cretton’s movie drags on, it’s used as a launchpad for future projects. That Marvel is relying on its best-loved hero—who consistently attracts wide swaths of moviegoers to theaters—to spark some later success makes sense; the approach used to work very well for the MCU. But it has become progressively more exhausting for viewers. Worse still, the sections of Brand New Day that do focus on Spider-Man are maudlin—they dial up his loneliness and malaise while forgetting about the screwball joie de vivre that often sets him apart from the rest of the Marvel catalog.

That tendency toward downbeat storytelling has befallen many Spider-Man films over the years. The character, created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, is fundamentally unlucky—repeatedly besieged by public scorn, or money troubles, or romantic turmoil—but he bears that misfortune with spirit and grace; he gleefully swings via web across skyscrapers while the city tosses problem after problem at him. In Brand New Day, though, Peter Parker has become a workaholic. He dons the Spider-Man costume to beat up bad guys, seemingly because he has no social life or family at home.

[Read: Why Spider-Man still matters]

Peter’s beloved Aunt May (played by Marisa Tomei) died in No Way Home, and his girlfriend, MJ (Zendaya), and best pal, Ned (Jacob Batalon), had their memories of him wiped away for their own protection. Brand New Day’s script, by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, emphasizes Peter’s growing sense of alienation by having him go through a spider puberty of sorts: He begins to spurt uncontrollable web-fluid from his wrists and experiences total sensory overload every time he goes outside. The idea that Spider-Man is becoming a little too much of an arachnid at the cost of his own humanity could be a fun one, with a nice dollop of body horror. Instead, it mostly involves Peter gloomily walking the streets, gazing at MJ from afar, and then getting sucked into various MCU quests that are hard to feel too invested in.

That includes some business with the Punisher (Jon Bernthal), a hardened antiheroic assassin who has been softened for Brand New Day’s PG-13 environs. Now he’s an outer-borough crank who lives in a tugboat and barks at Spider-Man to stop being such a softie. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), a.k.a. the Hulk, makes an appearance, helping Peter puzzle out the scientific mysteries of his ongoing transformation. Then there’s the new, mysterious character played by Sadie Sink, introducing a major element of MCU lore that has very little to do with Spider-Man. I won’t reveal the details for the spoiler-phobic, but it’s dispiriting that Sink’s entire storyline not only feels forced in but also seems desperately cribbed from Stranger Things, the show on which the actor first made an impression.

For much of the baggy running time, Spider-Man is less of a likable urban superhero and more a friendly neighborhood bystander. Holland’s performance in this role has always been winning; he has a Marty McFly–esque chirpiness that suits Peter’s inherent nerdiness, and he’s just as capable of delivering a puppy-dog stare as befits the big, broad emotions of comic-book storytelling. Despite numerous outings, however, Holland’s Spider-Man has never really gotten the chance to save the day on his own. His entries have always been besieged by cameos from popular characters such as Iron Man, Nick Fury, or, as in No Way Home, the Spider-Men that preceded Holland’s take. Brand New Day opens with a montage of Spider-Man duking it out with villains solo in New York, yet it feels almost meant to be skipped past.

A prior Marvel film, last year’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps, made that same mistake. It, too, kicked off with a sequence for the fans, showing some favorite comic-book heroes and villains getting quickly dispatched before the actual story revved up. In both cases, the assumption is the same—that theatergoers aren’t there for traditional superhero derring-do, only a cavalcade of Easter eggs and teases for upcoming installments to keep the Marvel gravy train running at full steam. No doubt Brand New Day will make billions and prove that strategy somewhat correct. But for a genuine fan of the kind of throwback these movies could offer, it might be somewhat sad to behold.