Promising Young Women: SHIVA BABYand THE CRAFT: LEGACY

Shiva Baby is so drenched in social anxiety — not to mention family obligations, professional frustrations, and sexual tension — that one could practically wring it out. The whole endeavor has a palpable feeling of discomfort, the camerawork close and ever-so-slightly trembling, the score spare stabbing strings, the dialogue surface pleasant, subtextually jabbing small talk of needling relatives gossiping and hesitant strangers networking. It takes place almost entirely at a shiva for a distant relative (someone’s second wife’s sister—that sort of thing) of our protagonist, a college senior (Rachel Sennott) whose various worlds are about to uncomfortably collide. Her future looks uncertain, graduating without good prospects, to the dismay of her mother (Polly Draper) who tells her to let the other mourners think she has interviews lined up. Her father (Fred Melamed) still pays her bills since her babysitting job is so erratically scheduled. And neither know that her alleged babysitting job is a cover story for her real meager source of income: meeting men on a sugar daddy app and getting some easy money for a good time. We start the movie at the end of her latest hookup with an older man (Danny Deferrari), the better to recognize him when he enters the house. Small world. His wife (Dianna Agron) and baby are meeting him there, too. The walls are closing in.

There’s a constant sense of teetering on the edge of potential embarrassment, and Sennott capably plays the squirm, blundering forward though her insecurities and realizing only too late each escalating cringe. The tension rises as she’s bolstered by craft that keeps her tightly framed and blocking that presses her into corners or into uncomfortable exposure. In this small gathering the rooms were already full of elderly family friends (like Jackie Hoffman) prying nicely or passive aggressively into her personal life, and her childhood best friend and first romantic partner (Molly Gordon) makes eyes at her, too. Now it's only more complicated. Writer-director Emma Seligman, in a striking debut feature, has the confidence to sustain this small, well-tuned picture — a mere 70-some minutes and just a wisp of plotting to carry it — by signaling the largely interior stakes through small gestures and flushes of discomfort. The movie’s all about eye lines and furtive glances, the cold sweat of conversational awkwardness and the tension between polite fictions and outright deceptions. All the while, the whole thing plays out like a prelude to a panic attack, emotionally edging right up to the brink of a psychological catastrophe that never quite erupts. It feels like an achingly real emotional state.

You never know where you’ll find that. For instance, I just caught up with writer-director Zoe Lister-Jones' The Craft: Legacy. Who’d have thought the couple decades belated sequel/remake of the cult teen coven classic would have some emotional truth in it? I didn’t. But there it is anyway. There’s a scene in the middle, a sort of Breakfast Club misfit confession circle, in which the star teen girls who dabble in witchcraft as a form of self-empowerment — but dangers lurk, because of course they do — talk with a former bullying boy from their school. He tearfully admits his closeted bisexuality and earnestly confesses to feeling stifled by gender norms. It’s a real bolt of interesting emotional valences that changes the temperature of the scene and resonates throughout the rest of the picture. The whole thing is an amiable teen flick, with lockers and house parties and cute montages and, befitting its horror roots, a bit of dark sinister intentions lingering underneath. There are a few good creepy moments, and fine parallel plots about our new-in-town lead girl (Cailee Spaeny) getting to know her new friends and her latent powers, and her single mother (Michelle Monaghan) finding a new beau, a masculinist self-help guru and maybe-cult-leader (David Duchovny). (Some shades of The Lost Boys, there, perhaps.)

So there’s decent contrast drawn between the girl-power witches and dark forces of misogyny, and there’s the usual stuff about crushes and classes and learning to grow into oneself inherent in the teen movie of any genre. It’s a consistent through line of inquiry connecting the boy’s troubles and the girls’, a frank admission that societal expectations can hurt everyone, even those who are theoretically built up by them. Even if the movie never quite leans all the way into horror — though there’s a bit with a figure in a mirror in a darkened bedroom that’s quite spooky — and there are fleeting moments where it feels like one of those featherlight Netflix Original buzzword Mad Libs pictures, the whole project has a consistent and pleasant earnestness about its characters that makes for a modestly enjoyable effort as it coasts to its routine conclusion.

Divorcing the Mob: THE FAMILY

Luc Besson’s The Family is an odd mix of tones, a dark comedy played lightly with violence laughed off right up until we’re supposed to take it seriously. The premise is a fish-out-of-water goof about a Brooklyn family with a mobster patriarch (Robert De Niro), his mob wife (Michelle Pfeiffer), teenage daughter (Dianna Agron) and son (John D’Leo) put in witness protection under the watch of an FBI agent (Tommy Lee Jones) who begrudgingly relocates them every time good old dad reverts back to mob rage and blows his cover. Their latest stop is in a small town in Normandy, France. It’s clear right away that the family doesn’t fit in. Their first day involves lying (dad’s), arson (mom’s), and run-ins with bullying classmates (the teens’). How to fit in? The FBI’s official suggestion is to throw a barbeque and invite the neighbors. But of course the real danger is the team of hitmen on their trail, sent to kill the four of them by a mob boss who sits in jail because of their testimony. One hitman guns down a family in the opening scene, emerging gun-first out of a cloud of smoke. We know these guys mean business.

And yet this threat sits on the outskirts of the story as the movie concerns itself mainly with the family’s earnest attempts to stay out of trouble. De Niro can’t shake the need to get things done by threatening those who refuse to execute his demands in a timely and respectful matter. His wife scolds him, thinking he’s killed the plumber, but he assures her that he merely broke some bones and took him to the hospital straightaway. See? Better already. He spends his days at a typewriter, writing a memoir of his mob life that Jones gravely informs him should never be published. It’s not about an audience for this patriarch. It’s therapeutic. Meanwhile, his wife and kids try their hardest to live normal lives in unfamiliar surroundings. His wife goes to church, his daughter gets a crush on a student teacher, and his son schemes his way into his school’s black market. It’s a film about a wacky big city American crime family clashing with a slow-paced European country town and all the stereotypes you’d think that implies.

We’ve all been down this road before, including some of the cast. De Niro, so good in so many crime pictures from Heat, Goodfellas and The Godfather Part II to tongue-in-cheek spins on his gangster persona like Analyze This, here plays out a character that coasts on this recognition. He’s the wise guy who may be retired, but he still powers through every situation with intimidation and four-letter words. Pfeiffer, no stranger to being Married to the Mob, has great composed frustration bubbling beneath the surface, a complicated indignity towards her current situation she sublimates into motherly instincts. She even makes food for the agents watching the house. When she finally agrees (after assurances of confidentiality) to let the local priest hear her confession, she seems to surprise even herself by that decision. Jones can do the wrinkled stoic exasperation required of him in his sleep, which he might be here for all I could tell. The younger actors, as mob teens playing out scheming and beatings in otherwise typical teen scenarios, acquit themselves nicely.

The characters are purely cardboard, but at least the cardboard is painted with vibrant colors. The leads are appealing and, though the supporting cast doesn’t pop as much as I would’ve liked, there are still plenty of funny little asides coloring in the details. The FBI minders debate the respective merits of French and Italian cuisine. Two mobster hitmen solemnly debate killing a dog they find at a crime scene. “Boss said no witnesses,” one reasons. The priest asks Pfeiffer to leave church property saying, “Your confession has haunted me all week.” The best moment is a bit of metatextual silliness that finds De Niro sitting in a French theater watching a Scorsese movie in which De Niro is one of the co-stars. It’s not only a sequence of nested winks, but a plot point that (in conjunction with a montage of strained coincidences) kicks off the climax. In the end, it’s a movie about how the family that kills together stays together, or how you can take the man out of the mob, but not the mob out of the man. Or something like that.

For a long stretch, the film has too many plates spinning, if only because it often forgets a subplot and lets it drop away, but the likability of the ensemble and eccentricity of the off-beat plotting keeps the proceedings amiable enough. It’s all cheeky, violent, and with largely slipshod comical stakes until the climax when the action kicks up in earnest. French director and co-writer Luc Besson has always been a director better with creating concepts than fleshing them out. His visual energy carried sometimes-flimsy material early on in his career (like The Professional or especially The Fifth Element). It makes a certain amount of sense that he’s spent the last decade or so working mainly as a producer and co-writer on an astonishing number of projects. He’s serving as a sort of cultural ambassador and mentor for French action filmmakers (Louis Leterrier, Pierre Morel, Olivier Megaton, Chris Nahon) attempting to import themselves to Hollywood. In The Family, France and Hollywood are explicitly bumping into each other and that’s fun, but isn’t explored to its full potential. Besson gives the film a sense of off-kilter energy, but the plotting ultimately feels familiar and a tad too slight, no matter the nice-enough work of the cast and occasional splashes of darkly funny dialogue and visual playfulness. I can’t quite recommend it, but have some appreciation for what it does well.

Teenagers from Outer Space: I AM NUMBER FOUR

D.J. Caruso is a capable director who has helmed several middle-of-the-road efforts, none better than his 2007 Disturbia, an enjoyable suburban Hitchcock riff. He returns to suburbia for I Am Number Four, easily one of the worst of his films. It’s a dull, rote sci-fi thriller for the Twilight crowd. (Indeed, it’s based off of a teen novel by James Frey and Jobie Hughes). Here’s a cheap film that feels cobbled together entirely out of generic parts that have been shipped unaltered from the cliché factory.

It features a charisma-free performance from bland blond Alex Pettyfer as a teenage alien who was one of nine children sent from his planet to escape genocide at the hands of some things called the Mogadorians. He and the others were to be raised separately on Earth to become warrior defenders of all that is good (or something like that). His older alien protector (the usually reliably entertaining Timothy Olyphant) keeps him moving around so that humans don’t get suspicious. There’s not much on the surface to suggest that suspicion could be a big concern. Are they worried about the fact that they look exactly like normal humans?

When the movie starts, Pettyfer is flipping around on a jet ski and having a great time with the human teens until a weird symbol starts to glow underneath the skin of his leg. That’s the sign that another of his alien brethren has been killed. You see, these Mogadorians have come to earth and have apparently spent around sixteen years or so hunting down these other aliens, the last of the kind. For some never explained reason, these refugees can only be killed in a certain order. How is this order decided? Who knows? They’ve just killed Number Three. Any guess as to the identity of Number Four? Hint: check the title.

Anyways, these Mogadorians, who look like Voldemort with gills and are almost exclusively shown under the cover of darkness, are on the hunt for our protagonists, as is a mysterious blonde (Teresa Palmer) who is on her own separate search. On the run, Pettyfer and Olyphant (what a couple of surnames!) end up crashing in Paradise, Ohio where, of course, the best way to blend in is to send the alien teen to high school. There he meets cartoonish archetypes that have marched straight out of the nearest teen comedy including the inevitable romantic alluring artistic girl (Dianna Agron), the nerdy sidekick kid (Callan McAuliffe), and the antagonistic bullying jock (Jake Abel). For some reason or another, they’ll all inevitably be drawn into the looming intergalactic conflict that will play out on a depressingly small scale.

This is a movie that is never more successful than in its moments of empty-headed spectacle, but that’s mostly because it means the characters have a chance to remain silent while the plot slips even further into autopilot. It is yet another superpower metaphor in the coming-of-age story. It’s yet another low-key genre effort that’s so sleepily dull that it only makes all the more obvious its status as mere pretty product. It’s yet another achingly predictable plot that descends into a conclusion that consists of a shootout, a few explosions and the threat of a sequel.

I was so incredibly bored watching this all play out in front of me that little could be done to rouse my interest. I could not have cared less about the Mogadorians and the special numbers, the magic rocks, the stupid symbols and the plodding teen romance, though I suppose coherent exposition would have made it all go down a bit smoother. Actually, that’s probably not true. This is a movie so impersonally assembled out of prefabricated parts that little could be done to spark it to life without a complete and total overhaul featuring a bit more imagination and energy.