The best thing about Ghost Stories and there are a lot of good things is the confidence of its directors.

[Girlfriends] applies refreshing layers of honesty and genuine perplexity to the characters’ stories. Age is an engine of Girlfriends. But so is empathy.

The sensationally gifted writer-director Ari Aster may tip his hat to the horror canon (Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining), but he has no interest in making a coy, winking exercise in horror pastiche. With breathtaking deliberation and quiet, unshowy mastery, he spins a devastating portrait of an American family in sudden, inexplicable decline.

It’s full of music that makes the case for its subject’s pre-eminence—he played with the intensity of a highest-category hurricane—and has an interesting slant on the issue of cultural appropriation; Butterfield was white, and the blues he played were, and remain, indelibly black.

Not just a love letter to Ashman’s extraordinary talent, but those who will not give up until a story has all of their own imagination, heart, and empathy.

In My Skin is a bitingly poignant, if cluttered, coming of age story