Master of Nun: IMMACULATE and THE FIRST OMEN

Immaculate is all about Sydney Sweeney. This Euphoria and White Lotus highlight has taken a whirlwind tour of genres on her way to movie-stardom in the last couple years, starring in the compelling true-crime transcript-play Reality, the amiably junky B-level superhero flop Madame Web, the charming sleeper-hit rom-com Anyone But You. She’s turning into something of a reliable leading lady. Now here she’s a novice nun from Detroit assigned to small-town Italy. And then she turns up pregnant—an immaculate conception whispered about in hushed tones. If you guess there’s some kind of gnarly Catholic conspiracy underway, with she the unwilling victim, you’d be right on the mark. This puts the entire film’s stress on her increasingly frightened face, framed in tight habits and tighter close-ups as she escalates a freak-out. It’s a neat little horror package that manipulates its religious iconography with sick twists and subtle jabs until it all spills out in quick splatters and some nasty, if conspicuously out-of-frame, implications. Sweeney holds the screen in every scene, stretching her big eyes and quivering lips, teasing out a fine compliment of hushed confusion, squeamish doubt, and burgeoning realizations. One believes she’s slowly awakening to the depths of danger in which she finds herself. Director Michael Mohan proves a steady genre hand on the reins, finding the slippery sinister angles, burbling choral echoes, and artful arrangements of blood and violence to keep the convent creepy. His previously collaboration with Sweeney was a similarly small-scale horror effort The Voyeurs, which similarly resuscitated an older mode—in that case the sexy thriller—with some red-blooded earnestness. It’s fun to see Mohan and Sweeney really going for it with some nunsploitation, and, though it misses opportunities to make the other characters pop more memorably or really ramp up the sleaze, they once again turn up some modestly enjoyable echoes of old thrills.

Even better is The First Omen. This is a strong work of horror iconography attuned to genuinely gripping and upsetting consequences. It takes the expected trajectory of a franchise play and uses its familiar trappings to actually dig down deep into the creepiest and most unsettling corners of its premise. It also might be one of the most Christian movies in recent memory, especially if you count how many times it made a squeamish audience member in my screening murmur, “Oh, Jesus.” This much-belated prequel to 1976’s blockbuster creepy-kid, childhood-of-an-antichrist horror picture takes its ideas as seriously as its genre, and therefore earns every shivery image. (Once you see from where a ghostly hand emerges, you won’t soon forget it.) Its images aren’t just free-floating fear, but add up to a movie awash in the implications of a young woman losing control over her mind and body, with many hands wanting to interfere in her reproductive potential for devilish purposes. 

Director Arkasha Stevenson’s feature debut creates a palpably paranoid setting, the austere Gothic architecture and winding cobblestone streets of Old World seriousness jangling with a period-appropriate flurry of student protestors and conspiratorial heretics and Catholic whistleblowers and nervy novitiates and troubled teens and cute Italian paramours and prickly priests. She pushes the camera into blocking and art direction posed with a casual sense of shivering suspense, the characters seemingly drawn inexorably into the terrible fates that await them. There’s a wooziness to the film, a nightmarish quality that sleepwalks into darkness from its extreme slow-motion opening violence to its eruptive finale. Between is pure, stylish unease. And that’s a hazy contrast infecting an otherwise precise eye for the procedures and rituals of the time and place—and then the fiery and bloody effluvia that spouts off in the most unsettling moments. It has a handsome, filmic look that makes the shadows stormy with danger, and the close-ups freckled with slow-dawning emotional confusions. The innocent nun at the center is Nell Tiger Free, whose severe stare betrays brewing doubts even as she draws closer to what she thinks is a kind of spiritual salvation, all-too-slowly aware of the hellish designs these evil clergy have in store. Though our knowledge of the franchise might keep us ahead of her, Free’s steady embodiment of her character’s emotional and spiritual state is so compelling, and the ensemble of expert character actors around her (Sonia Braga, Ralph Ineson, Bill Nighy) so commanding, that the inevitable somehow feels surprising anyway. If only all prequels played so vivid and pointed and involving.

Time is on His Side: ABOUT TIME

It was Pauline Kael who said “melodrama with a fast pace can be much more exciting - and more honest, too - than feeble pretentious attempts at drama.” So it is with About Time, the new film from Richard Curtis, the writer-director of Love Actually, that sentimental hydra-headed Christmastime romantic comedy that some say drowns in sappiness as if that’s a bad thing. His new film is a romance about falling in love with a woman, but even more so about falling in love with life itself, helped along by important relationships and Big Moments – births, deaths, weddings, funerals – that make one stop and appreciate time as it goes by. To this is added a light dusting of high concept sci-fi that’s at once easily digestible and, just below the surface, as incomprehensible as any time travel plotting can grow when one stares at it for too long. But anyway, this isn’t a movie that one experiences with the head, intending to chart it out for one’s date afterwards, arranging straws into timelines on the dinner table. This is a movie that socked me in the heart early and often, terrifically emotionally manipulative and much more involving than feebler fare.

It starts with Tim (Domhnall Gleeson, a Weasley son) turning 21 and learning a family secret, so secret neither his mother (Lindsay Duncan) nor sister (Lydia Wilson) knows. His father (Bill Nighy) calls him into his study, sits him down, and says that all the men in his family can travel through time. “It’s not a joke,” he so flatly states it must be true. With this information comes knowledge of the ability’s restrictions, learned, we’re meant to assume, through generations of trial and error. He can only travel within the space of his own lifetime. He can only travel backwards, other than returning to the present, of course. He can only return to places and times he knows. To achieve this feat, he simply has to stand in the dark, clench his fists, and think his way there.

It all sounds so simple, and in practice it is. The film uses the sci-fi hook to power its storytelling and uses the rules to keep the plot from spinning out of control. It’s silliness treated if not literally seriously, than emotionally seriously. It helps that Nighy is such a warm presence, eager in his fatherly insistence on ethical uses of time travel. Look not for riches or manipulations, he says, but for generating more chances to do what you love. What’s he done with this gift? He says he has found more reading time, mostly.

Tim wants a girlfriend and at first sets about creating his own personal Groundhog Day in order to gather information to woo his crushes. Once he realizes that no matter how often he tries to redo moments to make them just right, others will behave in unpredictable ways, he simply moves on with his life. He moves to London, gets a low level job at a law firm, meets new friends, and falls in love at first sight with a young woman (Rachel McAdams, exuding sunny appeal) he meets by pure coincidence. In this story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl by going back inadvertently changing their meeting. He erases it, in fact.

He must win her back by going back, using his powers not to control, but only to be a better flirt and a better lover. He’ll still redo social stumbles, but he’s just as likely to jump back and relive a great moment. There’s a funny bit where he selfishly relives a Big Deal three times, and then is too exhausted to go again when McAdams asks him to. He time-traveled and didn’t even have to.

As the film progresses through moments romantic, comedic, and dramatic, it builds up a picture of a young man learning to come to terms with the finite nature of life. Sometimes the story will even take a break from its mild sci-fi possibilities and go for a stretch without bringing up its central premise at all, playing out as tasteful, sentimental melodrama. It works on that level quite nicely. Principally a romance between two characters rather charmingly portrayed (Domhnall and McAdams have an on-screen connection that instantly provoked my rooting interest) this is a movie full of tender, warm, heartfelt moments of swooping, swooning true love and all that mushy stuff. It’s a movie about learning to experience life as it happens instead of always striving for some ideal life you feel you aren’t living, but could be or should be.

About Time uses its modest time travel trappings not as plot mechanics, but as metaphor for learning how to manage and truly appreciate the time you have with those who love you. It’s a warm and fuzzy movie that tells comfortable, but no less moving, truths. It has the romance of a cozy rom com, the philosophy of a greeting card, and the sentimentality of a life insurance commercial. But the combination comes together so wonderfully that it won me over all the same. It’s all a slick and lovely artifice through which Curtis can movingly and sweetly find some great emotional resonances. A lush piano score that dances around the tune of one of my favorite Ben Folds songs ties together a story that’s small in scope, telling only of one young man’s maturation through complications both romantic and temporal. And yet its syrupy life-affirming implications are so grandly expressive. It’s a movie of broad feeling and overflowing heart.

Note: This is undoubtedly the mildest R-rated film I’ve seen in quite some time. It has a handful of stronger profanities deployed tastefully and a few non-explicit references to sex. Why that’s not considered a PG-13 here when I’ve seen worse in PG-13s past (in trailers, even), is beyond me. 

Waiting for Kuato: TOTAL RECALL

Len Wiseman’s new Total Recall, like Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 Total Recall, has a twisty, memory-bending plot. It’s about Douglas Quaid, an everyman – this time around, it’s Colin Farrell, a more convincing everyman than Arnold Schwarzenegger – who grows tired of the drudgery of everyday future life. To shake things up, he heads to Total Recall, a shady company that specializes in implanting fake memories for people who wish for a brief escape from a dull life. Unfortunately, that’s where it all goes wrong. The procedure either awakens secret agent skills and memories within Quaid, sends him stumbling into a full psychotic breakdown, or delivers exactly the thrill ride he paid for. That’s the fun mystery underpinning all of the running and shooting to follow.

Verhoeven, one of the smartest, stylish blockbuster filmmakers of the last few decades, made his Total Recall between his Robocop and Starship Troopers, two consistently underrated sci-fi action-heavy satires. Recall has no such potency for me. It has several instantly iconic moments – the triple-breasted woman, the malfunctioning mechanical disguise, the creepy Kuato – and a propulsive puzzle of a plot, but overall it feels hollow and hokey to me. There’s definite room for improvement here but Wiseman, along with writers Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback, have only mixed things up in surface ways. Now, instead of a dichotomy between Earth and Mars, the societal split in the futuristic world is between the only remaining livable land, the topside, an affluent Great Britain, and “the colony,” a rainy, dystopic Australia.

Connected by what is basically a massive elevator that shoots up through the planet core, the northern government, led by a shady, but underutilized Bryan Cranston, wants to quash a revolution led by colonial ringleader Bill Nighy, putting in what’s basically a cameo. Farrell’s Quaid gets his memory scrambled and suddenly his wife (Kate Beckinsale) is trying to kill him. She’s a secret agent too, working for the opposite side. What follows is an identity-crisis chase movie that finds soldiers human and robot alike running one step behind Quaid as he races through both cities trying to piece together who he is and what he has to do to save himself and the world. He gets some help running through high-tech security devices, flying-car chases, topsy-turvy elevator shafts, and massive gun battles (the niftiest is in zero-gravity) when Jessica Biel swoops in out of his fractured former memories and lends him a helping hand.

If that sounds a little like the Total Recall you remember, you’d be correct. I didn’t find the remake significantly better or worse, although it’s certainly a little worse without the strong personality behind the camera. This version is slick and competently put together. The special effects are top-of-the-line and the acting gets the job done. That I was relatively uninvolved in all of the above is not a factor of my memory of the original. If anything, the vague déjà vu memories of the first Recall reverberate thematically within the confines of a memory-puzzle story. No, what surprised me was how the movie draws heavy, obvious inspiration from a variety of sci-fi action films, derivative in unexpected and depressing ways:

1. The two cities in the film are so familiar I was thinking of them as Coruscant from the Star Wars movies and future Los Angeles from Blade Runner.

2. The palate’s all grim green and the screen is cluttered with sleek futurist bric-a-brac. It’s strange to think that after a decade The Matrix and Minority Report, inventive and ambitious science fiction films, are still the go-to inspirations for unambitious sci-fi.

3. The have-nots riding a giant elevator down from a gleaming metropolis had me thinking of, well, Metropolis, yet another inspiration that’s far better than this particular movie.

The point is: thinking about lots of much better films didn’t help involve me in this one. Wiseman has style, but not enough to compensate for a mishmash of borrowed substance. The film sands down the charms of the plot and keeps only the trappings that are supposed to be cool, but are simply derivative concepts. The actors, most of them generally charismatic, are dreadfully non-present here and the expected action, aside from a well-staged chase or two, failed to engage me. I sat around waiting to catch a glimpse of meaning, a reason for the movie to exist, and left with nothing.

Room and Board: THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL

In The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a group of elderly British citizens find their way to what is advertised as an affordable luxury retirement apartment complex in Jaipur, India. When they get there, they find the place is a bit run down and not much at all as they expected. But, putting on their stiff upper lips and summoning up a spirit of adventure, they decide to make the best of it. What follows is a mild culture clash film that threatens to be gently condescending, but thankfully never quite gets there. Instead, it develops into a lovely little comic drama with a beautiful travelogue backdrop. It may seem like a loose, episodic thing, but that’s only because it is. It all snaps together quite nicely in the end, though, and as we spend time with the various characters, following the ways in which they acclimate, or not, to their new surroundings, the considerable talents of the venerable actors involved creates a good deal of dramatic interest.

The seniors staying at the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the Elderly & Beautiful are a disparate bunch. There’s an old married couple (Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton), freshly retired and eager to put their meager pension to something more than an apartment with guardrails and a medical alert box in the corner. There’s a freshly widowed woman (Judi Dench) who wants the chance to open her mind to new experiences after many years in a marriage wherein much was kept from her. There’s a man (Ronald Pickup) who is looking for new women to try wooing and a woman (Celia Imrie) who thinks she can snag one more wealthy husband before her time’s up. (They don’t much care for each other, which is a welcome surprise.) There’s a retired judge (Tom Wilkinson) who grew up in India and is eager to find his long-lost first love. And, finally, there’s a crotchety, casually xenophobic, old woman (Maggie Smith) who is only on this journey for a cheap hip replacement.

These wonderful actors imbue their characters with such warmth and likability that it’s easy to get drawn into their individual plotlines. These people begin and end relationships, have squabbles amongst one another, complain about accommodations, make new friends, enjoy or reject the local cuisine, and come to appreciate (or not appreciate) their surroundings. They find work, find hope, and find companionship. They try new things. It’s all very sweet and charming with flashes of real emotional beauty and low-key humor. These are actors who can command such attention in dramatic roles, who could play Shakespeare with the best of them because they are amongst the best of them, and they play this mix of small-scale drama and gentle humor with incredible sincerity and emotional engagement. They’re such naturally watchable and likable screen presences that these quickly become characters that are easy to spend two hours with.

My favorite storyline, however, belongs to the irrepressibly optimistic manger of the hotel, played with continual charm by Dev Patel. He’s unflappable – when confronted about the fact that his hotel is not exactly as advertised he smiles and says that his brochures merely advertise the future – but he has tremendous unrest bubbling up underneath. His mother (Lillete Dubey) comes by, turning up her nose at his attempts to fix the crumbling failed business his father left behind. She says she’s simply here to visit her favorite son. When he expresses doubt she admits, “Okay, my second favorite son.” She’s here looking to close the hotel and take her son back to live with her while she finds a more suitable match for marriage than the gorgeous call-center employee (Tena Desae) he’s been seeing. Patel inhabits his character’s half-thwarted romantic and business longings within a personality that’s so relentlessly rosy. He’s stuck halfway between the life he has and the life he wants, but he’s confident he’ll get there.

Director John Madden, working from a screenplay by Ol Parker that is based on the novel These Foolish Things by Deborah Moggach, keeps things moving along quite nicely. We end up spending just enough time with each character, or combination of characters, before moving on to the next one and the next one before we’re back again. He trusts his actors are up to their tasks and hangs back. He’s never been a pushy or showy director, his films’ levels of quality rising and falling with the level of the scripts and casts he’s worked with. Here, he has a good script and a great cast to which he brings solid, glossy production value. It’s simply an attractive location shoot of a film that makes good use of the sights and sounds around its plot. I suspect that this story of these nice older people finding new experiences in a new location reinvigorating and relaxing, especially a story that’s so well-photographed and that so gently puts across its message of multicultural open-mindedness, could drive tourism to India for many years to come. It’s just a shame that, upon booking a trip, you couldn’t specifically request a charming British thespian as a travelling companion.

Reindeer Games: ARTHUR CHRISTMAS

Arthur Christmas is a bright, colorful, nonthreatening CGI kiddie film about Santa Claus and his family and his elves up at the North Pole. It’s adequate, passable entertainment in that it’s not actively terrible or aggressively annoying, but it’s also bland and with only faint glimmers of personality. It feels homogenized. That’s a shame. It comes from Aardman, the British animation company that brought us the droll, delightful stop-motion Wallace & Gromit films and Chicken Run. I expected more from them.

Still, it’s a perfectly acceptable film that’s in no ways insulting. It tells a sweet story about Arthur (James McAvoy), Santa’s youngest son who’s a bumbling guy always messing up the plans of his older brother (Hugh Laurie), a strict manager who makes sure Santa (Jim Broadbent) and the sleigh run on schedule. In this film the sleigh is a giant spaceship-like construction that hovers invisibly over a town, deposits thousands of black-ops elves to deliver the presents, then, mere seconds later, moves on to the next town.

The system’s perfect. Of course, any movie about a perfect system must throw a wrench in, so this Christmas Eve one present is left behind. That’s within the acceptable margin of error to the older brother and to Santa, so Arthur recruits his grandfather (Bill Nighy), a retired Santa, to help him deliver the present. They borrow some of the old reindeer and sprinkle some magic dust and away they go. Hijinks ensue, as does familial healing and a reinforcement of a deeper, warmer meaning of Christmas.

So, it’s not that bad. The set-up is fun and the follow through is more or less what you’d expect. In fact, in patches, like a fun opening sequence that follows the covert ops as a bunch of elves deliver the presents, the film runs quite smoothly and charmingly. I was expecting something with just a smidge more wit, just a smidge livelier. It’s good enough, but that just didn’t feel like enough.

After some time, I started pondering the ways of the North Pole as presented here. Santa is an honorific passed down the family line from father to son. At one point in the film he’s called a ceremonial figurehead. (Mrs. Claus (Imelda Staunton) seems to be a nickname for whoever happens to be married to Santa). The elves are a vast army of what exactly? Feudal serfs? Indentured servants? Residents of a company town? Clearly this was not what director Sarah Smith and her co-writer Peter Baynham wanted me to be thinking about, but under the low-level antics and red, white, and green Christmas palate I often found little else to distract me.

The Good, The Bad, and the Lizard: RANGO

Rango is a computer-animated family film about a lizard with no name. He bounces out of the back of a truck and crash lands his terrarium on the side of a desert highway. Looking for signs of civilization he ends up in the pint-sized wild-west town of Dirt that’s populated by poor animals who are suffering from a terrible drought. They could also use a hero. So, this lizard says his name’s Rango, a rough, tough, capable gunslinger. Naturally, the townspeople make him sheriff. It’s not like they have a better option.

It’s a film that follows easily recognizable Western tropes, but it’s even more endearingly odd than you’d expect. This is a cockeyed postmodern western that’s a total delight in its energetic entertainment. It’s also a fantastically dark and fairly complicated look at the make up of identity. Rango himself puts on a new identity when stumbling into an animal Wild West town, playing his hero role as John Wayne by way of Don Knotts. He’s a thespian who builds his reality out of fiction, much like the film itself builds a glorious feat of originality out of gorgeous homage.

Directed by Gore Verbinski, he of The Ring and Pirates of the Caribbean fame, creates a world of starkly unexpected originality. From a script by John Logan, it’s one part kids’ film, one part Chinatown, and one part sophisticated revisionist Western. I never would have thought that was a combination that could be pulled off, let alone this well. Is Rango crowd-pleasing? I’d like to think so. This is a film that’s certainly, for lack of a better term, weird. But it’s also a rather safe kind of weird. It’s not at all alienating in its unexpected strangeness. There’s great energy in its visual wit, in the inventive and spectacularly staged set-pieces that riff on classic Westerns in enjoyable ways while still remaining faithful to the colorful, accessible milieu of its own that is created. This is hardly a film so burdened down with homage that it becomes inaccessible to all but the amateur film scholars in the audience. This is closer in spirit to Tarantino; the references are there if you catch them, but they’re still just a part of a larger entertaining picture.

There’s also great energy and skill to be found in the hugely entertaining chameleon-like voice performances. It’s a rare animated film that has its big-name voice cast disappear into the texture. Other than the marquee name of Johnny Depp (the film is, after all, being sold as “Johnny Depp is…Rango”), who remains recognizable through his excellent voice work, the cast so thoroughly inhabits their parts that the end credits were a delightful surprise to find out just who had a personality provided by the likes of Isla Fisher, Ned Beatty, Alfred Molina, Abigail Breslin, Stephen Root, Harry Dean Stanton, and Bill Nighy. These aren’t camouflaged star turns. These are specific characters, detailed and quirky in their own specific ways.

The characters are also remarkably ugly, vividly so. The animation, supplied by the special-effects studio Industrial Light and Magic in their first foray into feature length cartooning, is extraordinarily detailed. These are no rounded, soft, appealing prototypes for toys. These are realistically scarred and feathered creatures with ugly lumps and awkward gestures. They’re anthropomorphized, sure. But they’re much more grotesquely animal than we’re used to seeing in films of this type.

Which leads me back to Rango himself. His character is deeply, appealingly peculiar in his fluid identity and in his naked yearning for acceptance at any cost. It turns this enjoyable genre mashup into something a bit deeper, into a story about the power of constructed identity. It’s about, if I may be just a tad highfalutin here, the tension between who we are and what we say we are, a theme that crystallizes in a scene of chilly beauty as a distraught character contemplates committing suicide through a nighttime crossing of a dangerous road while long white-and-red streaks of taillights go soaring by. That’s rather deep stuff for what seems, at least on the surface, to be and is both a raucous Western and a rip-roarin’ animated family film. Indeed, I found the experience to be rather soulful amidst its jagged edges, western tropes, sand-scored scenery, and ugly folks. Much like last March’s How to Train Your Dragon, this is a film that builds its colorful entertainment from emotions instead of solely from flippant commercialism, proving that Pixar isn’t the only American animation company capable of high standards.