Taking Direction: PARALLEL MOTHERSand NIGHTMARE ALLEY

One of the great pleasures of seeing a new film from a director who has done good, distinctive work over many decades is the comforting feeling of knowing we’re in familiar, reliable territory. Ah, one can think, here’s that recognizable style and those usual preoccupations, done up in their confident aesthetics and in their pleasurably recognizable rhythms. So here’s Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers. The latest film from the great Spanish filmmaker is another of his intricate narrative designs that plays out so easily one can still be surprised by its emotional impact despite recognizing its moves. It stars Penélope Cruz—whose expressive features graced a half-dozen of his films—and has other frequent collaborators in supporting roles. It’s set in plush Madrid apartments painted with deep reds and blues and greens, decorated with artful textures, vintage photographs, vinyl records, and jamón on the counter. It flows with the usual sumptuous string score from Alberto Iglesias. It concerns itself with: birth and death, mistaken identity, miscommunications, mothers, daughters, sex, family secrets, fallible men, and things long buried or repressed resurfacing. It is, in other words, an Almodóvar film. For all the familiarity of the surface appeal, it also has the beguiling narrative propulsion, pulled along by powerfully underplayed melodrama, with which his most effective films work best. Watching it, one wonders what will happen next, and how the characters will react, not in an edge-of-the-seat way so much as the deep well of feeling and humanity that comes from closely observed curiosity and earnest empathy.

Here, in delicately doubled parallel narratives that draw closer, separates and draw close again, Cruz plays a single middle-aged photographer whose affair with an anthropologist is the cause of an unexpected pregnancy. She decides, given her age and prospects, to have the child. He doesn’t want to be involved, which is fine by her. She ends up, nine months later, sharing the maternity ward with a teenager (Milena Smit) whose pregnancy is similarly shrouded in the unexpected and the unspoken. They agree to keep in touch. As Almodóvar follows these new mothers, the story develops with complications both normal—women recovering from birth, navigating new living arrangements, rebalancing a career (or adolescent desires to strike out) with their familial obligations—and dramatic. The plot ultimately hinges on a couple paternity tests, dark secrets, some held too long, and others not long enough, and, finally, one big devastating turn. There’s high drama here, or at least potentially. (Almodóvar even provides a running subplot of Cruz’s search for a mass grave in her small home village, where her grandmother long claimed her grandfather was buried during the Spanish Civil War. Talk about drama!) And yet the actors present these turns with such ease and naturalism, speaking in soothing soft tones and melodic warmth even as they might be evading or obscuring their true feelings. The movie sets its enormous emotions on a soft simmer, letting the full weight of its heaviest moments push down unexpectedly in the design.

Similarly, Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley is a work recognizably his own, with a design that is its own reward. It might even be doubly familiar (or triply) to anyone who’s seen the 1947 Tyrone Power-starring adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel. It’s a noirish carnival con man picture, relishing the seedy inner workings of the freak show atmosphere. Del Toro usually works his affinity for misfits, monsters, and castoffs. See it expressed in the likes of Mimic, Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth and his Oscar-winning The Shape of Water—a real monster mash of a filmography, always asking, who’s the real freak here? In this new film, that kinship finds, in some ways, its most human expression amid the dusty tents and flickering flames of its disreputable environment. Here’s a film that looks unflinchingly at a geek in the old fashioned sense of the term, a desperate man biting the head off a live chicken for a paying audience, clenching his teeth to slowly separate vein from muscle until the neck snaps. The film wonders what kind of a life takes someone to that moment. To answer, Del Toro, with co-writer Kim Morgan, finds a winding road through eccentric characters and blustering schemes. It’s a big cast—Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Ron Perlman, and Dave Strathairn, among others—of carny types, each given loving attention to the art of their grift and graft. It unfolds the ecosystem of the traveling show so patiently and in such detail I was reminded of Ricky Jay’s histories of magicians. The people in this movie are living on the margins, but there’s some kind of mad skill to what they do wrapped in the soft deception of audience appeal. They, like the film, and like a key image in the film, are a loaded pistol in a purse.

At the center is a charismatically recessive movie star performance from Bradley Cooper, one of those magnetic work of gestures and implication that’s compelling, and then only grows in power when he doesn’t speak. He simply exists, first as a lost man stumbling into this world, and then as a figure of increasing power within his person as he turns on the charm and shines up to move in fancier circles. That gets Cate Blanchett and, later, Richard Jenkins involved as high society becomes the scene of a newer, edgier, more personal con. No more swindling quarters out of gullible folk; it’s time to put on more elaborate faux-psychic charades for the high-rollers. The trick of the movie is how easily it moves between these early-20th-century spaces—the rural outskirts and the electric urban interiors, Dust Bowl chic and Art Deco glamor—with a consistency of tone and style. Here are damaged people damaging people, but their wounded souls are attracted and repulsed by the endeavor, and each other. The movie follows suit. It takes grand delight in the low pleasures of its population, and sinks ever deeper into the melancholic romance and eerie despair, both of which are all part of the game, too. It’s not dissimilar from an Edward Hopper painting in its look and feel some of the time—figures of loneliness in the vastness of (retro) modern life. If the movie sometime feels long, it’s because Del Toro can’t pull himself out of these scenes in these visual spaces with these complicated stock of characters; they’re too well-inhabited and handsomely dressed in sets expertly designed. I didn’t mind spending that time. These days, when movies can often feel so impersonal and bland, to groove on a distinct style and mood can be a tonic.

The Caves Have Eyes: BONE TOMAHAWK

What starts as a patient round-up-the-posse Western takes a sharp turn into gore in Bone Tomahawk, a sturdy genre effort that plays like discount John Ford slowly transforming into elevated Ruggero Deodato. It’s the meatiest Western since Ravenous, if you catch my drift. Novelist S. Craig Zahler makes a fun, solid directorial debut, dry pulp with droll dialogue, amused by its own straight-faced absurdity, taking an unblinking view of exaggerated pioneer struggles. (When questioned about trespassing, a man waves his gun. “We got permission.”) We start in a tiny frontier town with the darkly funny name of Bright Hope. There a small collection of standard Western types (a sheriff and his deputies, a bartender, a doctor, and so on) are confronted with a crisis. Native Americans have abducted three people. When townspeople gather to mount a rescue a local Native gravely informs them the arrows found at the crime scene aren’t of any tribe. They are from horrifying cave-dwelling troglodytes who feed on human flesh, too terrifying to even contemplate.

Setting up a tribe of monsters as the villain is a clever-enough way to skirt the whole slaughtering-Indians tradition of the genre, making its antagonists an unstoppable weird macabre force long-hidden in the darkest corners of their remote landscape. With a nurse (Lili Simmons), a deputy (Evan Jonigkeit), and a mysterious stranger (David Arquette) missing, and probably on the troglodytes’ menu, there’s not a moment to waste. The sheriff (Kurt Russell, with impressively elaborate old-timey facial hair) rustles up his troops – a dandy Indian hunter (Matthew Fox), a handyman with a broken leg (Patrick Wilson), and a well-meaning doddering older man (Richard Jenkins) – and rides for the mountain range ready to fight. Although the creeping danger the largely unseen tribe of dehumanized monsters here could’ve been plumbed for more metaphoric weight, it’s plenty dreadful as is.

It’s a simple story on a one-way path to a bloodbath. For most of the film, Zahler takes his time, following the men as they make their way across the prairies on a three-day journey by horse. The cast has great dusty chemistry, with enough fault lines of interpersonal conflict to convince us that they might be their own downfall before they even make their destination. It’s a good old-fashioned Western hangout, men on the trail building campfires, worrying about bandits, and on the watch for everything that could spell certain doom for their rescue mission. It’s meat-and-potatoes filmmaking, understated taciturn gristle with Benji Bakshi’s soft digital scope photography flickering by candlelight or blazing under midday sun. It’s reasonably convincing oater material, with horses and rifles and crackling muscular repartee between men who look good in hats and mustaches.

Russell is the standout, looking for all the world like he’s spent his entire life ruling over his little corner of America with forceful quiet confidence. The rest of the cast falls in with fine eccentric details. Zahler takes a sideways approach to characterization, finding a little community of pioneers who have clearly survived in large part only through luck. Most of them are none too quick-witted. It’s a pleasure to listen to the characters speak, in unpredictable folksy turns of phrase and wry surprise. One character eventually sighs, “This is why frontier life is so difficult. Not because of the Indians or the elements, but because of the idiots.” Zahler undercuts heroism by denying the standard strong silent types their easy victories. He creates a scenario in which any or all of the characters could very well be dead in the dirt by the end. It’s a great ooze of dread in what could’ve been more standard fare.

So much of the film’s success rests on the payoff. That’s not to say it's not reasonably entertaining to be on the trail with the posse, but that’s thin, derivative setup. It is in the final third that Bone Tomahawk grows so brutal, wicked, and surprising in its staggeringly violent vision I almost don’t want to spoil it. Still, if you hear the words “tribe of cannibal monster people” you can guess where it’s headed: pure tortuous horror presented in organ-splitting detail. It’s all the more startling for following a quietly and slowly developing gallop across the wilderness that gets more mileage out of its period detail and talented cast’s clever lines than its action. The result is a satisfying genre hybrid, two parts The Searchers, one part a Wild West Hills Have Eyes with howling grey humanoids, tusks giving them scary guttural yelps, jumping out eager to hack off bits of our cast. An ensemble of great scenery chewers finds itself in danger of getting chewed. It’s tough to stomach, but for those who can choke back the bile, it’s a darkly enjoyable experience.

Snail's Pace: TURBO

Turbo, the latest family film from Dreamworks Animation, is stale and forgettable, but brightly colored and moves along at a brisk pace. I wish those colors and that speed told a fresher story or at least were put to use for something even halfway memorable. I better write this fast before the whole thing zooms out of my mind faster than a speeding snail. That might not sound all that fast, but Turbo clocks a snail’s pace at over 200 miles per hour. How’s that possible? The NASCAR fan snail at the film’s center (Ryan Reynolds) falls onto the highway and gets knocked into a tank of nitrus in a hotrod’s engine. A neat little sequence zooms all the way into the little guy’s atoms and shows them turning neon and zipping around faster and faster. Now he’s a super snail. Too bad he couldn’t be in a super movie.

In family film tradition, the speedy snail who names himself Turbo is alienated from his herd-mentality group of normal snails. They don’t understand his ambitions and therefore ostracize him, casting the fast-paced freak out of their snail habitat in a suburban garden. The poor fellow ends up with his still-slow brother (Paul Giamatti) at a failing strip mall in the middle of Van Nuys. There they are captured by Tito, a genial, bumbling snail racer (Michael Peña). I realize all that sounds a little strained and silly, but wait until you hear that the snail racer co-owns a Mexican restaurant with his brother (Luis Guzmán), so there’s double brotherly strife here. Turbo and Tito have big dreams that their brothers just don’t understand. Will the story bring all of these brothers closer together? Will dreams be realized, no matter how often they’re in doubt? What do you think?

The plot of the film involves Tito discovering Turbo’s speed and deciding to enter him in the Indianapolis 500. How, you might ask, does one enter a snail in a car race? Pay the entrance fee, of course. Tito raises the money from the strip mall’s other entrepreneurs (Richard Jenkins, Ken Jeong, and Michelle Rodriguez). They all seem to think that the exposure will reinvigorate their little corner of the local economy. Makes sense, I guess. If you’re going to be sponsoring a snail in a big car race, why wouldn’t you put the name of your business on the shell? Someone in Van Nuys might see that sign on that snail and think to go to your strip mall next time they want a taco. You never know, I guess.

There’s plenty of silly business along the plot’s sidelines involving the plain old slowpoke snails Tito brings along for some reason. They are a diverse collection of sluggish primary colors with the voices of Samuel L. Jackson, Snoop Dogg, Maya Rudolph, and Ben Schwartz. They’re the kind of cartoon characters that always seem to be smirking at you. I’m not sure exactly what these characters want, what their emotional journeys are, or even who they are, really. They don’t even get the typical one-trait sidekick development. By the movie’s end, they’re Turbo’s pit crew. Makes sense, I guess. There’s also a narcissistic French racing star (Bill Hader) who might not be so happy about racing a snail. Makes sense, I guess. You put in all that work to get to the top and some stupid snail is going to just zip by you like that? This is a movie built out of so many improbable plot elements that one simply has to stop questioning and go with it. The answer to any “Why?” would be “Because otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie.”

But it’s a jumble of elements you’ve seen before, too safely crafted to either satisfy or fail, utterly predictable every step of the way. This movie about a snail racing racecars around a racetrack can’t even manage to be a little odd or unexpected. Director David Soren, who co-wrote the script with Darren Lemke and Robert D. Siegel, pulled stock character arcs, booming pop songs, and silly sight gags together and assembled them in an appealing package that danced in front of my eyes without every once engaging me on any level. It was simply there. I’d call Turbo the most forgettable animated film of the summer, but I’m sure I’ve already forgotten the most forgettable animated film of the summer.

The one truly notable aspect of Turbo is not necessarily the visually pleasant animation. We’re at the point where smoothly rendered computer-generated visual detail can be so blandly proficient that it’s only worth calling out for being truly terrible or particularly stunning. It’s fine here, that’s all, although I was charmed time and again by the neon blue streak of light Turbo trailed behind him at top speed. No, the only aspect worth noting is the film’s casual diversity. It’s appealing and admirable to have a cast of characters (the humans, at least) who are different in age, gender, body type and background without making a big deal about it. I mean, I’d prefer if they were in a movie that actually created characters out of them that were more than cogs in the all-too familiar plot mechanics, but it’s a start.

Die Hard or Something Like It: WHITE HOUSE DOWN

Jamie Foxx cuts an Obama-ish figure as President Sawyer in White House Down, the second of two Hollywood action films this year to put the Die Hard template in the White House. Unlike Olympus Has Fallen, the terrible spin on this scenario from earlier this year which found an unlikely group of rogue North Koreans simply shooting their way into the building, this picture finds a far more insidious coalition of bad guys with richer and marginally more believable resonance. The president’s under literal attack here by an organized team of villains made up of hawks, Islamophobes, white supremacists, right-wing conspiracy theorists, and threatened corporate interests. They start by quite literally exploding apart the deadlocked legislative branch as a distraction before quickly moving to take over the White House, holding the cabinet secretaries and an unfortunate tour hostage.

But they didn’t count on one of the tourists being an off-duty capitol policeman played by Channing Tatum. He was there with his political junkie 11-year-old daughter (Joey King), but now he’s loose with the president, trying their best to make it out alive and regain control of the country. The script by James Vanderbilt borrows liberally from the Die Hard template, from the crisp setup that quickly moves the everyman lawman and team of villains (Jason Clarke, Jimmi Simpson, and more) into place, to the family member amongst the hostages, to the escalating stakes, time spent clambering up and down elevator shafts, a henchman who likes Beethoven music, and an only sometimes helpful collection of agents, officials and policemen (James Woods, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Richard Jenkins, Lance Reddick, Michael Murphy) communicating via walkie talkies and cell phones. Unfortunately, the sense of destruction feels slightly out of proportion for the rather modest little action film that’s developing.

It’s not as bloody and ugly as Olympus, but seeing thousands of rounds of ammunition expended during a rather silly car chase on the lawn of the White House dulls the impact of the violence. It’s one thing to see the dome on the Capitol Building collapse, an event that feels too real in presentation, but then why back into punches and punchlines then cut away to linger on an unseemly shot of an airplane disintegrating? It’s so often so juvenile and small it feels insensitive to ratchet up the massive damage elsewhere. The stakes often feel very real and personal, but the excessive bombast of it all distracts. But excessive bombast is what director Roland Emmerich is all about. It works in his big splashier disaster movies like 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow and here he proves that he can still scale things back to a more contained set piece when he wants to do so.

But it's hard for him to stay small with a script like this. The film is patently preposterous right down to its literal flag-waving conclusion and Emmerich’s such a straight-faced spectacle showman that it almost works. He blew the whole White House up with one swift alien blast in Independence Day. Now he returns to the scene of the crime to spend over two hours torturing the poor place. Grounding the film is Foxx and Tatum, who keep the ridiculous on some recognizably human terms as they race around the house engaging in an almost-all-business relationship that has time for both bonding over the hardships of fatherhood and firing off the occasional snappy one-liner. They’re charming actors and the chemistry between them is natural, easy, and appealing, which is good, since they spend most of the movie alternately hiding from and shooting back at bad guys together. In a nice touch, Foxx puts on his reading glasses before shooting down his first bad guy. It’s like what might’ve happened if Reginald VelJohnson was stuck in Nakatomi Plaza with Bruce Willis instead of stranded outside.

I liked White House Down best when it gave in to its dumbest, broadest impulses, letting reasonably diverting action or genial banter carry it all along. At one point during the climactic action, a big red countdown clock reads 8 minutes until Very Bad Things happen, but characters scramble around for what felt like easily twice that length while the clock slowly ticks down its eternal seconds. That’s funny in an enjoyable stupid blockbuster way. But every time we get bogged down in the increasingly apocalyptic stakes outside the building, some energy gets sucked out of the plotting. Add to that the constant need to yo-yo Tatum’s daughter in and out of danger and the back half of the film grows increasingly grating and uncomfortable.

Around the 100-minute mark I would’ve been ready to enjoy a cathartic climax, but after another half hour ticks by, I was just ready to leave. I was rolling with the ridiculous, but every time I was asked to take the events seriously, I felt myself sinking in my seat. I did like how the inciting incident of the plot seems to be the president’s proposal of peace in the Middle East, the prospect ironically getting all the baddies riled up, but so much of the film is playing with politics in awkward ways that get blown all out of proportion by the damage on display. A shorter, less trigger-happy version of the film would’ve been better, but at least in its current form it’s still the year’s best Die Hard movie in a year that had an actual Die Hard movie. That’s less of a compliment than it sounds.

More Than a Name: JACK REACHER

There’s a scene in the middle of Jack Reacher in which the man himself (Tom Cruise), a former military investigator now poking around in the aftermath of a seemingly random shooting, finds himself confronted by two toughs ready to clobber him over the head. Reacher falls back in a confined space and his attackers, inexperienced and overeager, swing wildly. Reacher moves precisely and quickly, giving his attackers just enough room to inadvertently beat each other up, leaving him free to continue his investigation. This is a fun scene, well choreographed and a nice blend of danger mixed with a small amount of humor. But it is also a good enough metaphor for the film itself and the way it goes about working. It’s hardly original material, but it’s well written, quick-witted (at times) and precise, ready to lean back and let the plotting fall into place with good instincts. It’s a fine thriller, crisp, quickly paced, and with a smartly plotted mystery.

It starts with a terrifying act of violence. A sniper shoots into a crowd, seemingly at random, resulting in five deaths. The man the police take into custody does not speak when interrogated. He scrawls on a piece of paper a simple directive: Get Jack Reacher. They don’t have to look very far. He’s already on his way. What’s his connection to the accused? It’s all a tad more complicated than I need to get into here. Let’s just say that Reacher agrees to help the defense attorney (Rosamund Pike) investigate the case, while navigating the evidence provided by a perceptive detective (David Oyelowo) and the District Attorney (Richard Jenkins). How this seemingly open and shut case soon involves tails and goons (Jai Courtney and Vladimir Sizov), hired toughs (Josh Helman and Michael Raymond-James), an in-over-her-head girl (Alexia Fast), and a shadowy, mostly fingerless man played by the beloved German filmmaker Werner Herzog is complexity that eventually gives way to a grim, pulpy simplicity.

What holds the film steady on its course is the constant focus of Jack Reacher. As played by Cruise, the man’s a steady rock, a determined investigator who lives off the grid and shows up to help here out of a sense of duty. He’s no-nonsense, but with some terse quips here and there that are welcome wry one-liners. This character’s already appeared in a popular and ongoing series of novels by Lee Child from which I’ve meant to read one or two for a while now. Here Christopher McQuarrie, a fine screenwriter in his second directorial outing, gives the whole production the kind of easy familiarity and relentless steady momentum that drives us inevitably forward through the tangles of mystery, inevitable precisely because of the character at the center. Reacher feels like a character who enters fully formed. We know that he will get to the bottom of the mystery precisely because he’s so determined, part Shane, part Dirty Harry, a man who’s no (or rather, rarely a) loose cannon vigilante, but a man looking for justice with comprehensive training to back up his professed skills.

Cop and lawyer procedurals have told similar stories, investigating shocking crimes that aren’t as simple as they seem thousands of times over, an hour at a time, on TVs worldwide. What’s better here is the weight given to violence, a proper sorrow and horror. The opening shootings are scary enough (especially haunting in light of the many real life random massacres we’ve seen this year), but as we return to the event as the characters try to learn more, we’re given a montage that reveals who the victims were, examining their humanity with unexpected depth. Later on in the film, when a likable side character is suddenly murdered, it’s a sharp pain of a moment, unexpectedly fast and upsetting. How often do mysteries treat the deaths involved as mere plot point? Here, they’re felt more deeply than usual, which gives a heft to the unraveling mystery it might not otherwise have.

McQuarrie has made a fine example of slick popcorn filmmaking that’s serious about its entertainment. It doesn’t shortchange its subject by cheapening it. Instead, he allows the horror of the inciting incident to inform the intensity with which the audience is able to root for Reacher to untangle the motivations and conspiracies behind it. The movie embraces genre tropes a bit too much in the climax with what was an enjoyable investigation taking a turn into a standard action movie showdown, but McQuarrie never loses his refreshingly steady eye for framing the events on screen. This is a solid, well-built example of Hollywood craftsmanship that serves up some unsettling material and then brings in a movie star hero written with the right set of smarts to settle things back down again.

Criminal Minds: KILLING THEM SOFTLY

Killing Them Softly is a tense, talky little thriller, shot through with obvious arty nods towards oblique, gritty crime movies of the 1970s, the kind where glowering character actors talk all around their conflict between moments of bloody consequences. Writer-director Andrew Dominik, adapting the novel Cogan’s Trade by George V. Higgins, moves the setting from 1970s Boston to late-2008 New Orleans, the better to suit his thesis that connects American capitalism to the robbery and retribution that powers the film’s plot. The connection is made early and often, most obviously and effectively in the film’s crackerjack inciting incident in which two low-level criminals (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) stick up a card game organized by a mid-level criminal (Ray Liotta). While cash is forced into a pair of briefcases at gunpoint, the TV in the background breaks into regularly scheduled programming, filling the room with the sounds of George W. Bush explaining the need to bailout Wall Street.

It’s immediately obvious that Dominik is going to hammer home his thematic intent with all the subtlety of blunt force trauma, throwing a sharp elbow into the audience’s side shouting “Get it?” To say it has subtext would be too kind. Luckily, the film, a small, tough work of quiet tension, is just good enough to sustain itself in the face of its auteur trying a little too hard. Besides, I far prefer a film that’s trying a little too hard to a film that’s too lazy to leave much of an impact. Here, the ultimate entrepreneurial criminal is represented by Brad Pitt playing a dark, smoking, and professional hitman. He rides into the picture to the tune of Johnny Cash on the soundtrack, ready to clean up the mess caused in the underworld by this first-act robbery. Negotiating with a lawyer for shadowy interests (Richard Jenkins), Pitt agrees to bring in a big-shot out-of-town killer (James Gandolfini) to help take down three conspirators and one scapegoat. Nobody’s going to stick up a card game in this town and think they can get away with it. Not on his watch, not as long as he gets his money.

Pitt’s performance is controlled, unshowy work that forms a quietly dangerous center around which the other characters can turn. The film is structured around scenes of men glowering across tables and cars at each other, talking through long-winded monologues and dialogues about what they’re about to do or what they’ve just done. The writing in these moments is alternately humdrum and prickly, occasionally finding laughs so easily that if it weren’t such a carefully scripted picture you’d think it was by accident. In roundabout discussions and unexpected twists of language, the movie works. In between these scenes of tightly wound wordiness are directorial flourishes of fades, slow motion, jarring edits, and surprising jolts of sound design. Much like last year's Drive, this is a kind of distillation of crime movie tropes built back up with self-conscious moodiness and stylishly upsetting splashes of violence.

Though Dominik gets fine performances out of his cast and puts them through tough, crisp crime plotting of a fairly satisfactory kind, the film is in the end only an argument for itself. The closed loop of plotting leaves it all feeling empty, like drab pessimism for nothing more than the sake of drab pessimism. The coldly cynical underpinnings that reverberate throughout the film are often electrifying, juxtaposing speeches by then-candidate Barack Obama or news reports about the freefalling economic conditions with the story’s matter-of-fact preparations and negotiations leading up to theft and violence. But such stabs at weightier intent and broader implications are as exasperating as they are electrifying, both too obvious and too muddled. Cynicism comes cheap, something made especially clear when a general air of disaffected, inconclusive unhappiness is really all this particular film is up to in its grumbling thematic content.

It’s a good thing that Dominik just about makes up for the thematic mud underneath his glossy images and appealingly (type)cast group of sad, violent, greedy men. Even if by its conclusion, the film comes up emptier than you’d expect, it’s still a competent genre exercise, suspenseful and engaging all the way through. Its characters are unapologetically looking out for nothing more than reasons to advance in their criminal occupation of choice, to get the job done and get paid. As such, it’s a small film that only steps wrong when it tries to act bigger than it is.

Cabin Fever: THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

Note: I did my best to discuss this movie without major spoilers, but if you’re avoiding even hints of twists, you best go see the movie first. It’s pretty good.

The Cabin in the Woods starts like any horror movie of its ilk. A group of frisky young people head off to a remote location for a raucous vacation. This time around, as so many other times around, the group consists of people who can be broken down into all the usual types: a good girl (Kristen Connolly), a bad girl (Anna Hutchison), a jock (Chris Hemsworth), an egghead (Jesse Williams), and a stoner (Fran Kranz). On their way to the jock’s cousin’s summer cabin, they stop at a dilapidated gas station where the grizzled creep owner (Tim De Zarn) spits out chunks of tobacco and warns them away. Getting to the cabin is easy, he says. “Getting back will be your business,” he growls.

Of course they go anyway, because that’s the kind of movie this is. But before you can say, “Stop. I’ve heard this before,” screenwriters Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly) and Drew Goddard (of Cloverfield) have something cleverer up their sleeves. In a pre-title scene we’ve met two middle-age white guys (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford), each in shirt and tie, chatting all the way down a long, white and grey corridor, waving I.D. badges and getting in a couple of jibes at the expense of a coworker (Amy Acker). This seemingly unconnected scene is ultimately integral to what we’re about to see. This is no young-people-stalked-in the-woods movie like The Evil Dead or Friday the 13th or, or, or. There are definitely elements of that here, but Whedon and Goddard pull back and show us the strings. These guys have the cabin under close watch with a sharp eye for the expected.

You think you know where this is going. The characters are certainly familiar and won’t be explored for depth of characterization. You may even think I’ve spoiled things by revealing that the seemingly average bureaucrats have something to do with what’s about to go down in the cabin in the woods. But this movie’s better than that. It’s a work of supremely slippery genre craftsmanship with more twists than you’d think, that plays on what you think you know in order to double down on the unsettling dread that begins to sink in. When you go to a horror movie, you know things are going to go badly for the characters. When these young, vibrant people head down into the cabin’s mysterious basement and examine the creepy artifacts, yellowed photographs, and ominous incantations, you just know that soon it’ll be more than leaves rustling out there in the dark.

Because we know that there are others watching, we know that the characters are headed into a trap. This takes away some (but not all) of the scares from things going bump in the night, but it also proposes provocative questions of genre introspection. Why are horror movies capable of scares even when characters are driving headfirst (even knowingly) into predictable formula? And why is puncturing the illusion of these characters’ free will so destabilizing? You know going into a slasher movie that a masked killer’s going to hunt down some victims and the results will be bloody. Why, then, are these films still capable of great effectiveness and suspense? It’s all about the execution. When one of the bureaucrats says, “We’re not the only ones watching,” it’s clear that the movie is implicating us, questioning why we want to see what we’re about to see.

Goddard directs the script with confident genre expertise, staging jump scares with great playfulness. As the movie goes on, he and Whedon find ever more rugs to pull, ratcheting up the tension and dread. It’s all that I can do to restrain myself from writing in extensive, spoiler-filled detail about just how ingenious a genre deconstruction this film becomes. At one point, the chaos in the cabin – the running, the screaming, the hiding, the splitting up, the disappearing, the bloody implements of death – appears to be winding down to a grimly satisfying genre endpoint, the exact point that a lesser, even a slightly lesser, horror film would conclude with the feeling of a job well done. Indeed, I was prepared for the final freak out and the smash into the end credits. If they had arrived just then, I would have still found The Cabin in the Woods to be a reasonably clever genre exercise. But just as it’s coasting to a close, Whedon and Goddard tighten the screws and ratchet up the intensity one more time. The movie grows stranger, funnier, and bloodier, dissecting an impressive number of horror styles in a descent into the fiery pits of unsettling territory. The final twenty minutes or so are some kind of inspired genius.

However hugely entertaining, the movie is only about the essential nature of horror movies. The characters remain thin and, despite the cascade of topsy-turvy, surprising yet inevitable plot adjustments and a couple of killer cameos, it’s not exactly a movie of any deep humanity. (If it was, and just a little icier or more confrontational too, I’d call it popcorn Michael Haneke.) What Whedon and Goddard stage is an intense, oftentimes hilarious, slashing of expectations, a veritable thesis on the nature of point of view and audience identification in horror cinema. The final moments of the film have us asking anew whom to root for and questioning which outcome is actually the best outcome. It sets up the clichés so skillfully that, as the world of the film is so thoroughly ripped apart, subversion itself is ultimately the biggest source of both knowing winks and destabilizing fright.

It's Not a Romance / It's Totally a Romance: FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS

Friends with Benefits is a self-loathing romantic comedy, all too ready to hit all the required beats of the genre while almost all the while protesting every one of them. It stars a relaxed, lovable Mila Kunis and a tense, confident Justin Timberlake as young urban professionals and new friends who decide to skip dating and go straight for the bedroom. It’s not that they don’t like each other, far from it. They’re totally in love. They just pretend that what they’re having isn’t a relationship. It’s only casual because that’s what they tell themselves, much like the movie is only not a romantic comedy because it pretends not to notice its own boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl structure.

As the plot creaks through its predictable paces, it finds some occasional patches of effective humor and a few spots of legitimately button-pushing edginess. At times it is capable of living up to its potential frankness, though it often scurries away or buries its insight in juvenile giggling. But as the superficial daring of the film wears thin, I found myself asking why this film is so concerned with not coming off as a romantic comedy. After all, if it managed a few more laughs and a sweeter payoff, it could actually be a good rom-com, a rare feat these days. To paraphrase Godard, a great way to criticize a movie is to make another movie. How better to criticize the recent drought of rom-coms than to make a good one?

Earlier this year, the similarly themed comedy No Strings Attached approached the same topic from a safer, sappier angle and yet by embracing the genre it managed to find its small charms. The couple in that film (Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher) knew they were falling in love, that they were in a relationship, but even if they tried to hide it, the movie didn’t try too hard to deny it. It was a charmingly modest movie. Friends with Benefits finds a far more charming couple, more believably attracted to one another, and yet strands them in a less charming film, emotionally far behind what we in the audience already suspect and realize. These two good-looking people with the comfortable chemistry, twinkly eyes, and quick, easy smiles, love each other and care about each other and it’s completely obvious where the rigid formula of the film will take them. It feels like it takes forever for the characters to catch up to us.

Will Gluck directs the film which he wrote with Keith Merryman and David A. Newman. He brought us last year’s hilarious Easy A, but this film feels looser and slacker yet smaller. It’s filled with a terrific supporting cast, but they’re each given exactly one trait to play. If the one trait doesn’t work for you, you’re out of luck. It’s an ensemble in search of memorable moments that never materialize. Patricia Clarkson is Kunis’s wacky mom who, get this, is still seeing a lot of men. At her age? The movie finds this almost unbelievable. Jenna Elfman is Timberlake’s sister who is kind and supporting. Richard Jenkins (great, as always) is Timberlake’s father, still wise, despite suffering from Alzheimer’s. As for poor Woody Harrelson, he plays a gay sports editor and the film treats that as a big joke in and of itself and aggressively pursues any opportunity to make it one. If he has a line that doesn’t mention his sexual orientation I missed it.

Ultimately this is a film torn between its impulses towards sweetness and edginess and ends up satisfying neither. It’s a film that wants to get laughs from sex, but also earnest uplift from sap like flash mobs. It lacks a tone nimble enough to pivot between those emotions, which is just as well since it lacks a script worthy of it. The cast is game, Gluck’s direction is often energetic, but the self-deluded picture lacks the zip and skill of its ambition to tear down convention while blindly inhabiting it. From time to time it’s an adequate romantic comedy, but why’s it so unhappy about it?

The Girl Next Door: LET ME IN

The 2008 Swedish film Let the Right One In was one of my absolute favorite films of that year. It’s also one of, if not the, finest horror film of the last ten years. It’s a perfect shiver of mood and tension. I certainly wasn’t approaching Let Me In, the Americanized remake, with anything resembling anticipation. The only thing that got me in the theater was my sense of curiosity. Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t say it’s necessary. After all, the original still exists and is still superior. What surprised me, though, is how, after an early adjusting period in which I was consciously comparing it to its predecessor, the film works on its own terms. If you’re going to remake a masterpiece, you might as well try for a masterpiece yourself. In this case, the remake crew very nearly got there.

Retaining most of the icy dread and hushed tones, writer-director Matt Reeves (of the underrated Cloverfield) pulls off a nifty feat of cultural transposition. Instead of harsh Swedish winter, the story now takes place in a chilly 1980’s winter in a small high-altitude New Mexico town. In Reeves’s telling, the setting becomes a harsh and homey landscape dotted with Regan-era iconography. Kodi Smit-McPhee is Owen, an intensely bullied, quiet, sullen 12-year-old. He’s pale and thin, painfully vulnerable. He’s feeling particularly disjointed because of his parent’s divorce. His mother (Cara Buono), mostly unseen, has become a convert of the right-wing Moral Majority. The cramped, dark apartment she shares with her son is covered with Christian iconography and echoes with the sounds of televangelists.

Owen imagines violent acts, seemingly inspired by his daily abuse at the hands of his peers and filtered through 80’s-era slasher flicks. Early in the film he takes a large knife from the kitchen and uses it in his playing. Brandishing the impromptu weapon while standing before his bedroom mirror with a Halloween mask covering his face, he asks his hypothetical victim “Are you scared?” Soon enough, real violence comes to town. A local teen goes missing and is found dead. The local policeman (Elias Koteas) warns that there is a murderer on the loose.

Owen is spying on the neighbors across the courtyard – echoes of Rear Window – when he sees new tenants moving in. They make a stark pair, a haunted, bespectacled middle-aged man (Richard Jenkins) and a pallid 12-year-old girl (Chloe Grace Moretz). The man disappears some nights seemingly intent on performing unknown tasks under cover of darkness. The girl, though, is quiet and brooding. She has dark eyes and high cheekbones; an eerie ageless sheen sits on her colorless, vampiric skin. She walks barefoot through the snow. Owen finds her intriguing.

Reeves skillfully manipulates tone while drawing excellent, evocative performances out of these very talented young actors. The hesitant friendship that develops between the two of them is palpably sweet yet tinged with danger. It can be moving and disturbing in the same instant. The tricky tone is handled impressively with great maturity and care. This is a vampire movie that never once stoops to easy explanations or belabored back-story. This is a hushed, creepy film that moves hairs on the back of the neck with impeccable sound design and an evocative Michael Giacchino score. It has dark, warm interior spaces of classrooms and apartments juxtaposed with the dry crunch of snow and the damp chill of a public pool. The environment is expertly rendered, the stage beautifully set for the sequences of artfully displayed violence.

In an attempt to avoid merely copying the great moments of horror and gore from the original film, the remake, which contains some small plot variation in addition to its continental shift, sometimes goes for quick, choppy terror of the modern Hollywood variety, complete with dubious CGI. I was much impressed, however, with moments of startling originality that Reeves was able to find. A mid-film murder gone wrong culminates in a car crash that unfolds in one long horrifying take, the camera locked down in the backseat as the car gets smashed and flipped as it skids off the road. Instead of going big and flashy, Reeves keeps things visceral but suggestive, a technique that serves the film well here and in other well-staged scenes.

Let Me In is like a very good cover of a great song. It’s memorable and worthwhile on its own. It doesn’t replace or overshadow the original version. It plays the same melody, but finds different ways to get there with little additions, small subtractions, and effective variations and shifts in emphasis. Audiences who walk in unaware of the film’s inspiration will find a compelling, original narrative. Audiences who walk in loving the original will find a solid new version of a recent favorite.

UPDATE: In the weeks after I saw the film I grew to love it even more. I am now of the opinion that this is the rare remake that is every bit as good as the original.

Julia's World: EAT PRAY LOVE

Under the direction of Ryan Murphy, most recently notable for creating the TV show Glee, the popular Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat Pray Love has become a star turn for Julia Roberts who holds the screen with movie star style as she poses in exotic locations. This is a pretty travelogue with gorgeous scenery and well-dressed costars. What other leading lady in recent memory gets to be romanced by James Franco and Javier Bardem in the same picture? What other leading lady gets to indulge in lovingly prepared meals, walk through lush jungles and beautiful ruins, and look consistently endearing? This is a movie of wish fulfillment, allowing an audience to trek to Italy, India, and Indonesia with a beautiful travelling companion who lets us meet beautiful people.

It’s also a movie dripping in syrupy schmaltz, a gooey, sloppy mess that results in a movie that practically slides off the screen. This isn’t a chick flick; its a woman’s picture, but one portentous in the deep meaning it thinks it’s passing down to us. Roberts plays Elizabeth Gilbert, a writer who leaves her husband (Billy Crudup), has a fling with a struggling actor (Franco), and is all around unsettled. She tells her close friend (Viola Davis) that she feels disconnected from life, unsure of whom she really is. What she decides she needs is some time to get in touch with her appetites, her spirituality, and herself. Thus the eating, praying and loving that happens on her yearlong trek across three exotic locales.

Through her travels, Julia Roberts remains remarkably well put-together. She devours tempting plates of pasta that are sumptuously photographed. After many of those meals she mentions her need for wider pants, but when we get the shot of her struggling to button her jeans, she still looked skinny to me. She also stays remarkably clean, even when she tumbles off of a bike into a muddy ditch.

Figure and cleanliness aside, Roberts brings some small nuance to a role that, as scripted, has very little nuance inherent. She stands before breathtaking vistas, bikes through dripping, green rainforests, and meditates at an ashram in the heart of bustling India. She’s a great surrogate traveler for the audience, experiencing great beauty at every turn.

At each location, she meets people who help her along on her journey of self-discovery. The most intriguing is the sixtyish man from Texas whom she meets in India and is played by the always welcome, always excellent, Richard Jenkins. He has a moving background and a warm screen presence. Later, in Indonesia, Javier Bardem enters the picture and nearly steals the whole thing away with his effortless charm.

Yet, for all its amazing sights and charming cast, the film is frustrating in its lack of introspection. This is a story about a woman’s self-discovery, a woman coming to terms with whom she is, mentally and spiritually, finding a perfect balance and a sense of completeness. And yet, this is a film that gives us almost no sense of her interior thoughts. Sure, we get a few passages of on-the-nose narration, but we are otherwise left stranded with only occasional quivering lips, moody flashbacks, pensive eyes, and, maybe, a single tear rolling down Robert’s cheek. It’s a film that goes out of its way to convince an audience that this woman has learned Big Lessons on her journey, lessons that will change her life, change her outlook, for the better. And yet, as the credits rolled, I remained unconvinced.

Still, I found Eat Pray Love to be an agreeable experience. I liked the scenery and I liked the actors that I had to share it with. As the movie started, I found myself resisting it. I found it too maudlin, too episodic, and too full of polished imagery covering up its hollowness, it’s hodgepodge spirituality, it’s reductive view of foreign culture and it’s navel-gazing dullness. But the film outlasted my will to resist. While my early complaints still stand, by the film’s end I found myself lulled into a sense of small pleasure. It’s a shiny, big-budget, continent-spanning film with fine actors and a nice look, pleasant and undemanding. Robert Richardson’s sun-soaked cinematography is consistently lovely and the cast is enjoyable company. The film is far worse than it thinks it is, but much better than I was expecting, hardly necessary, but certainly watchable.

It Could Have Been Much Worse: DEAR JOHN

When you see the words “based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks” you know to expect a movie that replaces genuine emotion with meaningful glances, confuses trite twists with shocking developments, and sends the cinematography into a contest with the actors’ complexions to see which can be more sun-dappled. Dear John is all of the above, but thankfully also a little bit more. It’s the old story of lovers kept apart by war, but it doesn’t feel too stale under the direction of Lasse Hallström, who has made a career out of polishing movies until they just barely exceed expectations, the sturdy script by Jamie Linden, and the shrewdly chosen cast, who fill the thin roles beautifully.

Love at first sight, the two protagonists meet on a beach in South Carolina. He’s on leave; she’s on spring break. The romance develops more or less how you’d expect until he has to ship out with the army. It is spring 2001. They write each other dozens and dozens of letters. He says he’ll be home in a year. We know that’s doubtful, especially knowing what September has in store.

In broad strokes, the story sounds like typically dopey Sparks plotting (see, or actually, don’t see Nights in Rodanthe) but in the telling, the movie manages to elevate the material. Not much, but just enough. The casting does much of the heavy lifting. Channing Tatum plays the male lead (John, get it?). He’s an actor of extremely limited range, but he’s deployed here in a role that requires precisely that range. With his height, his broad shoulders, he fits the part of a soldier, but with his smaller eyes and mostly unexpressive mouth, he appears to be trapped within himself, like there’s more to him than he’d like to admit. This quality is used exactly wrong in something like G.I. Joe, but here he fits just right, especially opposite his romantic interest in the film, the wonderful Amanda Seyfried. With her large expressive eyes, she is a good balance to Tatum. It doesn’t hurt that she’s a great young actress with the rare gift of enriching material. How else could she be the only person other than Meryl Streep to escape the debacle of Mamma Mia! completely unscathed?

But the biggest reason the movie works more than it should is the great Richard Jenkins, a consistently good performer, playing the father of the Channing Tatum character. The character is the source of the greatest emotion in the film. He’s a quiet man, incredibly smart, slow to criticize, stuck in his ways. Jenkins has a way of communicating emotion that deflates melodrama, by just shifting his gaze or turning his head by the smallest of degrees. This has always been the quality of his that I have valued the most, the way his character can change with the smallest gesture, like in North Country or The Visitor, to name two of his best recent roles. He doesn’t have as great a role here, mostly because his character gets to be the center of an awkward subplot in which Seyfried suggests to Tatum that his dad might be slightly autistic. I see her point, but it made me wonder even more about the Jenkins character. How did he meet his wife? What happened to her? How has he raised his son? What was his job? I was distracted for a few minutes contemplating the better movie that could be made about him.

And yet, I was surprised by how often Dear John struck the right notes, or even slightly surprising notes that turned out to be mostly right anyways. I was surprised when, instead of hysterics, there are moments of quiet contemplation, or even slowly revealed revelations. There was even one scene that, despite being a little hokey in the writing, made my eyes a little misty. It’s a scene late in the film between Jenkins and Tatum and if you see the movie, you’ll probably know what I’m talking about.

Is the movie manipulative? Yes. Is it sometimes too corny or even, gasp, cornball? Yes, indeed. But did it still keep me interested and involved and even, at times, make me feel some emotion? I cannot tell a lie. Yes. Even though the movie lifts a put-your-thumb-over-the-moon motif from Apollo 13, it thankfully doesn’t show up too often. And even though I was, from time to time, not all that involved in what was going on, like when the couple make soft-focus, moonlit, tastefully framed, PG-13 love and I was more interested in the Swell Season song on the soundtrack, the movie is a just-good-enough mid-winter romance. It’s hokey, but it’s adequately told with modest rewards.