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Editor’s Note: The following story contains spoilers for “Longlegs” and “Cure.”

The oozy, hypnotic dread of “Longlegs” may be scaring up dreams of “Seven” and “The Silence of the Lambs” as a mid-‘90s-set thriller about the games between a serial killer and an FBI agent. But there’s another movie Osgood Perkins’ Nicolas Cage-starrer (now a record-smashing box office hit for Neon) shares a darker kinship with.

That’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cure” from 1997, a gruesome serial killer tour de force the Japanese director himself was inspired by David Fincher’s “Seven” to make. “Cure,” a dripping-with-atmosphere philosophical crime thriller also about a seemingly psychic (and in this case amnesiac) killer a la Cage’s title character in “Longlegs,” stars the great Koji Yakusho as a Tokyo Metropolitan Police detective on the trail of a string of bizarre slayings that defy explanation. Each crime scene finds the killer close by,...

"People like to think a crime has meaning. But most of them don't." Criterion Collection has launched a new trailer for a 4K restoration and re-release of the Japanese horror masterpiece called Cure, from filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa. This originally premiered in 1997, and played at the Tokyo Film Festival, San Francisco & Toronto Film Festivals, though it never had a release in the west until 2001. Praised by Martin Scorsese, it's a "hypnotic & psychological" cinema experience that is "part atmospheric crime film and part philosophical meditation." The story follows a detective investigating a string of gruesome murders where an X is carved into the neck of each victim, and the murderer is found near the victim of each case and remembers nothing of the crime. The film stars Kōji Yakusho, Tsuyoshi Ujiki, Anna Nakagawa, and Masato Hagiwara. As always, there's no better time than to catch up with films like this than now...

**Massive spoilers for every Godzilla movie, with the exception of the 2014 reboot, and Mothra follow**

August 6th and 9th, 1945 forever changed the course of history. When the first nuclear bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, World War II ended, but a new fear was born that dominated the thoughts of all men, women, and children for decades to come. The Cold War, atomic bomb testing, a cartoon turtle telling children to “duck and cover”, and this new technology that had the actual potential to literally end the world changed the perception of what was scary. Art reflects life, so cinema began to capitalize on these fears. Gone were the days of creepy castles, cobwebs, bats, vampires, werewolves, and the other iconic images that ruled genre cinema in film’s earliest decades. Science fiction was larger than ever and giant ants, giant octopi, terror from beyond the stars, and...