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The 28 Best Movies Released During the January Dead Zone


January is often thought of as Hollywood’s prime “dump month” — but sometimes it surprises us.

Could Steven Soderbergh’s spare, intense action flick starring Gina Carano as a wronged former Marine and black ops agent plowing her way through an assorted series of dudes (including Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, and Ewan Mcgregor) have been better suited for release in a more high-profile month? A modern horror classic, Andy Muschietti’s chiller — about two orphaned, lost kids who are raised by a demonic ghost that then pursues them when they are reunited with their relatives — is not only filled with heart-stopping jump scares, it also features one of the more complex, scary, and sensitively drawn monsters in recent genre memory. Despite the cult phenomenon of This Is Spinal Tap, one could argue that it was this Christopher Guest mockumentary — a now-beloved, gently sidesplitting portrait of a small-town theater company’s attempts to stage a ridiculously ambitious historical pageant — that really established the deadpan aesthetic and humanist ethos of this particular subgenre, which would go on to include such classics as A Mighty Wind and Best in Show.

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