Bedeviled: THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER

The reason why no sequel or spinoff of The Exorcist has managed to capture the deep, raw scares of the first is that William Friedkin’s original film of William Peter Blatty’s pulp religious fright novel is the only one that feels like it’s happening in something like the real world. Friedkin gives it the ominous undertones of religious epic—from its desert opening to the light-and-shadow gloom-and-doom of Catholic symbolism in priests cloaked in righteous doubt combating a puss-spewing demonic possession. Every film after it, despite being guided by such heavyweights as Deliverance’s John Boorman and First Reformed’s Paul Schrader and even Blatty himself, is about characters in an Exorcist movie. Moral tests and creepy-crawly imagery abound, but there’s always that guardrail sense that we’re seeing someone playing in a template. The best moments let the darkness crack through authentically—a real jangling jolt in the lives of tropes, when the likes of haunted priest Stellan Skarsgaard or Robert Mitchum or weary cop George C. Scott wield their immense melancholic charisma. But there’s also a lot of stomping around in the shadows waiting for the wiggly effects and loud clanging symbolism.

The latest attempt belongs to David Gordon Green, who was once a great maker of tender indie dramas and now balances raunchy comedy with studio horror. He was last seen making a trilogy of Halloween reboots that got somewhere interesting by the end. His The Exorcist: Believer is a basically proficient possession thriller. It has two 13-year-old girls go missing in the woods after school and, upon their return a few days later, they’re slowly revealed to be inhabited by evil spirits. Green does as well as anyone has with plumbing the basic concept for broad consideration of moral dilemmas, while transposing it for a modern world that’s somehow both more “spiritual,” broadly defined, and less religious, specifically. It means to move the ideas away from one particular denomination and more to a free-floating sense of good and evil. This gives the top-line talent—Leslie Odom, Jr and Jennifer Nettles as the father of one girl and the mother of the other, and Ann Dowd as a conflicted nurse with a troubled past — room to play with faith and doubt in the face of supernatural creepiness and jump scares. They sell the parental or faith-based pain with more investment than the formulaic plotting requires.

The fault, however, is that formula; it grinds the movie through the expected with little surprise other than a few predictable twists of the knife. (If you’ve seen one possession with croaking catchphrases and supernatural scarring, you’ve seen them all, apparently.) Worst is its pandering to the legacy sequel trend, bringing back the exceptional Ellen Burstyn, star of the original, to feature heavily in a handful of scenes that could be lifted out entirely and change the picture not at all. What a shame. Still, Green’s strong enough at marshaling the performances and mood, and the unsettled mystery of the early going is too potent to dissipate entirely. All that and some Tubular Bells had me just invested enough throughout, and willing to see if Green will come up with something more inventive and original next time. Although, I’m starting to suspect that, unlike the long running slasher franchises, The Exorcists might just spring from something too singular and serious and devilish to ever really sequalize like good, goofy genre heaven. Maybe we should cede that to Russell Crowe’s Pope’s Exorcist.

Guess Who: GLASS ONION

Glass Onion isn’t exactly a sequel to Knives Out. It’s simply another complicated case for its sole returning character to puzzle through. Good thing detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is such great company, oozing Southern charm and confidence, while behaving an enlightened, affable gentleman who can slip right into any social context. He somehow stands out and blends in, the better to be underestimated as he gathers clues. And good thing, too, that writer-director Rian Johnson knows a thing or two about constructing a sequel that zigs when you’d expect it to zag, and ends up satisfying even more for giving you what you didn’t know you’d like to see. This one is a larger film, trading the first’s bickering family clad in cute sweaters, holed up in a cozy New England house while all their grievances tumble out, for a palatial mansion, with enormous sunny sets on a private Greek island filled with rich friends hanging around in sunglasses and beachwear. If Knives Out had an autumnal Thanksgiving vibe, Glass Onion is pure summer vacation.

It finds Blanc invited to a murder mystery party. He’s the ringer, and stranger, in a group of obscenely wealthy friends—a satirical send-up of every contemporary societal ill. There’s the host: an out-of-touch, and out-of-his-mind, tech bazillionaire (Edward Norton). And there are the guests: a hypocritical politician (Kathryn Hahn), a private-sector scientist-for-hire (Leslie Odom, Jr.), an alt-right YouTuber (Dave Bautista) and his girlfriend (Madelyn Cline), a ditzy model-turned-mogul (Kate Hudson) and her assistant (Jessica Henwick), and a former business partner who may be out for revenge (Janelle Monáe). It’s pretty easy to believe one of them will actually be murdered, and that they’ll all be so greedy and stupid that it might give Blanc quite a challenge. Johnson gives us a long, glittery, rambling opening hour that provides introductions to all of the characters and their dynamics. Invitations are delivered. The group assembles in Greece for the boat ride to the island. (Set during the first COVID summer, the way they wear their masks upon arrival is a big clue about their personalities.) They settle in for their first night in the mansion—a massive high-tech structure with dozens of rooms and topped with a gargantuan glass onion. The camera often pulls back to sweep around in bright establishing shots and drink it in, the sets and the setting providing a gleaming backdrop for the scheming. And throughout, Johnson, by taking his time, makes these political cartoons into bantering people we can size up and keep in mind as believable variables at play as the plot unfolds.

By the time the screenplay springs its surprises, doubling back on itself and deliberately filling in gaps I hadn’t paused to realize were left open, the film reveals it is awfully clever in a way that never stops paying out. There’s plenty of enjoyment on the surface of the movie, but when the setup reveals its full intentionality, there’s an added layer of rewards for the attentive viewer. This is a charmer of a mystery that you could practically chart on graph paper as its various setups converge with supremely satisfying reveals and conclusions. There’s an airtight clockwork construction at play, with each gear of plotting and character and humor turning at just the right time to click into place for crowd-pleasing punchlines and payoffs. Johnson’s a filmmaker with a great sense of genre play. See his straight-faced high-school noir Brick, or pretzel-logic time-travel thriller Looper, or his vivid, moving Star Wars episode. Here he’s totally at home, and clearly having fun, constructing these crafty mystery plots. They twist and turn, dangle detours and dole out tricks of perspective, but they always play fair with the audience. You can keep up with the logic, and by the end see the details close in with a pleasing snap. (It’s the dialogue and editing that does all the crackling and popping.) There’s evident delight in the construction, and that extends to the ensemble’s winning commitment to throwing themselves into the proceedings with wit and verve, too.

This has been a busy year for the whodunit movie. We got Greg Mottola’s shaggy, appealing Confess, Fletch. There was Kenneth Branagh’s opulent, excessive, and over-acted adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile; that has its velvety 70mm melodrama pleasures. We got a quaint and cozy little jewel box of a Christie homage, See How They Run; that’s a cute, winking meta-movie about a fictionalized murder mystery around the stage production of Christie’s The Mousetrap. (That movie actually brings Christie onstage, as if to say it was Agatha All Along.) But Glass Onion is head-and-shoulders above the rest. Rather than falling into homage or dutiful resuscitation of old tales, it’s the real deal itself. It’s built for maximum audience pleasure, and is quite pleased with itself, too. It’s formula without being formulaic. We return to these stories, not to be shocked and appalled or grossed out, but to take the mental exercise. Maybe it’s the cozy comfort of knowing, though the film may start with a dead body, it’ll end with a murderer revealed, and something like justice doled out.

Shadows Searching: THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK

In 2007, David Chase’s classic New Jersey mobster drama The Sopranos left us with a last supper. Now, it returns to us with The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel. It’s nothing if not consistent—a sprawling story deeply engaged with struggles of masculinity, family, moral weight, and the agonizing dissatisfying guilt the comes from a lifetime of sin. It’s religious and contemplative, torn between atonement and destruction, the holy and profane. That it’s also a multi-generational story of America in decline, a sad pack of boomers chasing the glory of their fathers and leaving less and less opportunity or exit strategy to their children, makes it uniquely suited to chronicle its moment and prefigure ours. But it’s also, at its core, and perhaps at its most appealing, a series about a husband, a wife, their children, and extended family connections; it’s the domestic dramas set up as counterpoint and intersection with the gangster plot lines that are the glue that holds the audience’s affection together. A viewer invested in them as a family, and the accumulation of character detail and thematic concerns consistently streamed forth from that font. A reason why the sudden cut to black in the series’ final episode is so shocking—still a jolt, a chill—is that it not only amplifies the ambiguity long embedded in the show’s philosophical concerns, but denies us closure on the people who, however deeply imperfect and morally compromised, have a humanity we learned to care about. Cold comfort it may be to know the cut to black is headed for us all no matter what we do. But it’s good to know life goes on and on and on and on until then, and for others after.

I like that Chase maintains the mystery of that moment, to the extent that any continuation of the Soprano family story simply had to go back in time. For a family, and a business, to concerns with legacy and lineage, it’s still a rich vein to mine. It feels haunted by future events, an inevitability that what’s set in motion here will reverberate down through the generations. There’s preordained tragedy in the mob life, a foreshortening of life and opportunity when the family and The Family are inextricable, petty crime and petty slights in the same terrible chain of cause and effect. Many Saints finds its main character in Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), a father and uncle whose absence, having long been whacked when Sopranos began, shaped some of his descendant’s actions and perspectives. Here he’s still in the prime of his life. It’s the late 60s. (Chase’s other major feature film effort, 2012’s Not Fade Away, sets its tender musical coming-of-age story against the time’s cultural upheaval.) In this new film Newark is burning. Gangsters are scheming. The world seems to be coming apart, and for the members of the interconnected Jersey crime families their underworld black market power is the thing that gives their lives structure and some sense of control. You can see why a young Tony Soprano (here played by the late, great James Gandolfini’s son Michael in a finely tuned performance) would think this time was a golden age of sorts, although the deaths and prison sentences might make one think it’s no better than his own.

This anxiety of influence as it relates to generations cycles of dysfunction and distress animates Chase’s screenplay, co-written by Lawrence Konner and directed by Alan Taylor, series' vets both. It becomes a movie about people who almost know the way to do the right thing, but, mirroring the show’s Zeno’s paradox of morality, never can get there. Here it’s Dickie, who clashes with family and rivals, gets entangled in affairs and crimes alike, and who ultimately presents himself so slickly that the more impressionable around him might see in him a reason to perpetuate what is the cause of both the family’s wealth and its doom. That Dickie is given an almost literal angel and devil dispensing advice, in the form of a father and his twin brother (in a well-differentiated dual role for Ray Liotta) emphasizes the weight of his choices, and two potential futures. (That the whole movie is narrated from beyond the grave by another character related to him—the thing literally starts floating over gravestones where we overhear ghostly monologues—gives the project that extra weight of funereal fate.) Around him is a cavalcade of character actors playing younger versions of the old guard who haunted Tony’s adulthood: his intimidating father (Jon Bernthal) and snapping mother (Vera Farmiga), his bald bespectacled—and dangerous—Uncle Junior (Corey Stoll), and young up-and-coming gangsters like Paulie (Billy Magnussen) and Silvio (John Magaro). The extra-textual sense of winking inevitability is sometimes a nudge to the fans, but is also often adds to the overarching doom that settles around the ice-blue images and the sturdy mid-century design.

The movie is a relatively brisk two hours, but rambles and expands and never quite digs in to its shuffling surfaces. There’s something uneven—at once too much and too little—about its design, tracing a standard gangster set of concerns with hits and schemes and twists, against a larger family tapestry. It slips through time a bit, and finds pockets of characterization in which to get turned around. Without the space of a season of television, the scenes of sly humor and dark juxtapositions, simple philosophizing and earnest psychologizing, take up inordinate space. Though the movie leans on its Sopranos prequel status in ways that make this particular picture sometimes incomplete, there’s something alive in its ungainly design, especially as Chase introduces Leslie Odom, Jr. as a Black associate of the mobsters. He has his own through line that criss-crosses the other plots, and serves as intriguing counterpoint and counterbalance to their privilege, as well as valuable historical context. One scene finds a hit carried out in an army recruitment center where the flummoxed solider behind the desk yelps that Vietnam’s not his fault. Another has a white man drive a car with a dead body in the passenger seat through a line of riot cops too busy pointing artillery at protestors to notice. These ideas of whose behavior is policed, and who is allowed to get away with what, is emphasized and mirrored by the story of an innocent Italian immigrant (Michela De Rossi) who is brought into the Moltisanti family and becomes part of the mob lifestyle (with all the danger that entails) even as she dutifully takes classes to improve her English and assimilate. Even here there’s a sense that the events—moments of grace, and moments of betrayal—will continue to haunt the family, casting a long shadow.

HAMILTON Tells His Story

Hamilton is a pop culture phenomenon that lives up to the hype. All but the most insanely hyperbolic are exactly right: it’s a major work. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop history musical inspired by the life of Alexander Hamilton takes Revolutionary War history and projects it forward and backward in style, giving it Shakespearean dimension and modern musicality. Like the Bard’s History Plays, it’s a moment of our national story fitted to our times as a mirror and a comment. This is where we were, as told by where we are. The sung-through musical, written in verse dense with intricate clever rhymes and swirling motifs, is staged on a well-oiled machine of a production. The ensemble of characters has a depth of relationships, politics, and personalities as they circle each other, jabbing, hoping to build up their own lives with and against the politics of their moment, setting a scramble for status and satisfaction within the birth of a nation. You’ve likely heard the story by now. Hamilton (Miranda) has a lively, hard-charging ambition that sends him straight into pivotal roles in our nation’s founding, building his legacy and his family. The first act takes off with head-spinning rapid-fire biographical sketches and events in the overthrow of colonial control. The second act settles into the knotty political entanglements of forming a new government, and the increasingly complicated personal life of Hamilton. And all along it’s narrated by Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.), who’s one part Judas, one part Iago, and two parts Salieri, whose jealousies and frustrations power his perplexed admiration for the title man.

Filmed over three days in the summer of 2016, the original cast’s performances in their original Broadway staging have been preserved in an excellent document of a movie. What prevents it from being a mere concert-film cash-in or a Fathom event live-stream is the way director Thomas Kail (also the show’s stage director) uses the camera to direct our attention and stay out of the play’s way. He uses his deep understanding of the staging to hang back in medium shot, capturing every bit of the theatricality in perfect proscenium awareness. It gives us the documentary sense of being there in the front row. But he also knows just when to get a tad closer, pushing in for a close up on a particularly emotional line, or slowly pulling back to capture the spirit of a moment. Kail allows this film’s audience to appreciate the craftsmanship and choreography, the theatricality on display, while following the fast-paced, densely plotted, endlessly quotable musical numbers and electrifying, deeply moving storytelling. The show is alive with possibility, with a haunting melancholy of historical inevitability hanging over it. Here are the founders’ great ideals, and here’s how far short they fell. In their greatness is also their fatal flaw. They were only human, after all.

We meet all sorts of characters from history books, brought down to life with human motivations and understandable urges — Washington (Christopher Jackson), Jefferson and Lafayette (Daveed Diggs), Madison and Mulligan (Okieriete Onaodowan). King George (Jonathan Groff) brings scene-stealing petulance, while Hamilton’s loves (Phillipa Soo and Renée Elise Goldsberry) get big beautiful ballads and a swaggering intro. Their lives play out on a stage that can slowly rotate subtly enhancing the blocking or emphasizing a moment. The set is simple, and props are kept to a minimum, the better to glide through time and space as quick as a couplet, and stretching, suspending, or reversing in key moments with nothing more than a flourish of melody and the glide of a dancer. This documentary recording finds the joy of live performance in every second — watch the performers belt out notes and spit out rhymes as they dance and emote while sweating (or, in the case of Groff, literally spitting); they’re astonishing — just as the show itself finds hope and solace in the potential and promise of an art form, a country, a legacy. How lucky we are to have this film keeping this production for posterity.

Wings of Glory: RED TAILS

Red Tails is a creaky, rickety World War II movie. Those are hardly rare, but what makes this one especially disappointing is the way it dives headfirst into one aspect of the war that is too rarely considered and then finds nothing new to say about it, or even entertaining ways to say the old things. The film concerns itself with telling the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, an all black squadron of fighter pilots during a time in which the official policy of the United States Army was that African Americans were unfit for combat based on nothing more than the color of their skin.

The film starts with the Airmen flying mostly peaceful patrols far from the front lines. They’re not allowed in situations for which dogfights might be a necessity, which means they’re denied the chance to go wing-to-wing with German fighters. They’re getting antsy. We meet a handful of the pilots, our ensemble of protagonists, each with their own snappy nickname. There’s Easy (Nate Parker), Lightning (David Oyelowo), Ray Gun (Tristan Wilds), Winky (Leslie Odom Jr.), Neon (Kevin Phillips), Sticks (Cliff Smith), Smoky (Ne-Yo), and Deke (Marcus T. Paulk). They’re personalities more than characters, which is disappointing, but it’s the kind of surface-level American cross-section of types that comes with the middling WWII movie territory.

They’re good pilots. Some of them are even great pilots. We first meet them flying across the fields of Italy running a routine patrol. They’ve only blown up one little Nazi truck when they cross paths with an innocent-looking train that becomes a whole lot less innocent when Nazi anti-aircraft guns in the back car open fire. They dip down and manage to not only derail the train, but to blow it up as well. But it’s all so unsatisfying. How embarrassing to be simply “shooting traffic,” as one pilot grumbles. Their commanders agree. Through the commander of their base in Italy (Cuba Gooding Jr.) to a D.C. liaison (Terrence Howard), the Airmen make their case to the stubborn, prejudiced brass.

Following the true story insofar as it affords the potential for aerial combat, the script by John Ridley (with extra, unfortunately rather personality free work from Boondocks writer/creator Aaron McGruder) pounds half-heartedly through some flavorless cardboard drama on the ground to get these heroes from takeoff to takeoff. Everything between the landings seems tossed aside and half-hearted, conflicts between characters that bubble up in a line of dialogue and disappear entirely forgotten for large periods of time. It’s strange for a movie so thin to feel overstuffed but when a subplot that’s essentially a remake of The Great Escape involves only one character we’ve previously met and lasts all of two-and-a-half scenes, it’s hard to feel otherwise.

There’s rich story potential to be mined here, but the movie skips across the surface of deeper resonance on its way to find visceral heroics. A fair amount of the movie contains clichéd fighter pilot dialogue shouted over the roar of plane engines. Anthony Hemingway, who has directed a handful of episodes in several different recent series of note (including The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, and Community), is sitting in the director’s chair and, though he’s no good at figuring out how to outmaneuver the blockheaded clichés of the script, he’s certainly good at figuring out how to stay out of the way of the Industrial Light and Magic CGI battles in the sky. 

It’s here that the influence of producer George Lucas (who, to his credit, has tried out of his passion for this under-told story to get this film made for decades before finally financing it himself) is most clearly felt. The way these planes fly about shooting at each other, with routine fighter pilot patter howling over the roar of propellers and gunfire feels awfully reminiscent of X-Wings and TIE Fighters zapping at each other in the dark of space. It’s sad to say that those Star Wars space battles are significantly more thrilling than these based-on-a-true-story dogfights, but there you have it.

The film feels weirdly inconsequential with a storyline that zips off in too many directions to really make an impact. But the look of the film is a problem too. Shot on digital in a terrible use of the medium, the image is weirdly bright and artificial and entirely textureless. It’s naturally void of the nuance of film grain but without satisfactorily compensating for it by using the unique visual properties of digital a la the recent work of Michael Mann, David Fincher, and Steven Soderbergh (whose Haywire is probably playing the next auditorium over and definitely making far better use of digital camerawork).

I was rooting for this movie. It gives me no pleasure to write this. Walking out of the theater, my dissatisfaction made me sad. All the material was in place for a great fun throwback: a terrific story, a fine cast, and a great special effects company. But the filmmakers simply failed to crack the story’s difficulties. The film lacks shape and, though it’s oddly simple and perhaps perversely upbeat, it lacks the momentum and the visceral filmmaking power of the best war films. Truffaut once said that it was hard to make an anti-war film because war looks inherently exciting on film. Not this one. It tries its hardest, and succeeds from time to time, but the thing never coheres one way or the other, or at all.