Lights On, Nobody Home: TRESPASS

Trespass is what is known as a bad movie, plain and simple. It’s phony to its core. The movie comes from director Joel Schumacher who has made some good movies and some bad ones over the course of his career. This is definitely a bad one. It’s a home invasion thriller that’s only the slightest mood shift away from being a flat-out comedy. It’s a film of stupid criminals and lousy hostages that keeps inventing new reasons to keep the characters in the same place well past any kind of logic, internal or otherwise.

The movie starts when the rich man (Nicolas Cage) comes home to his wife (Nicole Kidman) and daughter (Liana Liberato). We know he’s rich because we hear the sound of Cage rapidly negotiating the price of a diamond accompanying the opening aerial shot that tracks his convertible down a long winding road leading to their beachfront steel-and-glass mansion that’s tucked away in the forest. Once there, he continues to negotiate while he tries to help his wife make sure their willful teenage daughter doesn’t get to the local bad girl’s house for a party.

The girl huffs upstairs and the husband and wife prepare for their evening, which is soon interrupted by a home invasion. A group of thieves barges in and waves around their guns while barking for security codes. It turns out they know about the diamonds and would really like them. There’s the conflict. It’s a good thing that the daughter snuck out of the house and sped away in a friends car just a scene or two earlier.  

What follows is filled with yelling, whining, cajoling, pleading, and frustrated barking from all of the characters all of the time. It’s monotonous. As the head of the gang, Ben Mendelsohn stalks about while his gang members wander around looking mean, constantly waving around guns that make clickety-clack noises at the slightest touch. These crooks are so obvious that you can size them up in a second, like the henchman played by Cam Gigandet who will pretty clearly end up being the criminal with second thoughts since he gets so shifty eyed in his every reaction shot. Collectively the gang seems to be pretty dumb. They keep changing their demands and producing different threatening objects. It’s like they want to hang around this house for some time.

Have they even thought this plan through? Sure, they have electrical tape around their fingertips, but their masks are so porous I was identifying the actors underneath them almost immediately. And all Cage has to do is start poking holes in their scheme and the characters get to sit around and threaten each other all night. At one point the daughter sneaks back into the house and walks straight into the danger. Why? If she were smart enough to call for help the movie would be over.

Karl Gajdusek’s script does everything it can to keep the movie rolling forward beyond all plausibility. The homeowners are able to take their captors off task with such skill that I found myself hoping for some ultimate ludicrous twist that never materializes despite the ever-growing pile of ludicrous twists and diversions. This is the kind of movie in which the intelligence of any given character at any given time is dependent solely on what the plot requires at that point. These aren’t characters. These are barely caricatures. It’s all one big phony construct. This is barely a film. It’s a feature-length stalling tactic that keeps the characters, and the audience, locked up in this house well past any reason they should be.

Backwards and Forwards: BEGINNERS

It’s never too late to get a new start. At least, that’s what writer-director Mike Mills has to say in Beginners, a semi-autobiographical movie that follows a father and a son, each starting new romantic relationships. It’s a mostly solid effort, a film in which characters feeling boxed in by the lives they are living attempt to break out of them by trying to connect with others, to try and make their new starts last.

The father (Christopher Plummer), a handsome, recently widowered elderly man, sits down his son (Ewan McGregor), a single artist, to finally divulge a long-held secret: “I’m gay.” This surprises the son, but what surprises him more is the joyful intensity and all-consuming nature of this revelation. His father gets new clothes, new friends, and finds a boyfriend. He’s vibrantly alive in ways he had never been before, freed from the constraints of the closet. A few years later, he dies.

While grieving, his son glumly heads to a Halloween party where he meets a pretty young woman (Melanie Laurent) who came to celebrate the holiday despite suffering from laryngitis. They strike up a flirtation. He murmurs his charm from underneath a fog of depression. She writes down her responses in a small notepad, accenting her scribbles with gestures and wide-eyed expressions. From this Meet Cute, they begin a relationship. Mills cuts back and forth between the new beginnings of father and son, creating a film in which the memories of the father slip into the rhythms of the son’s narrative. The man just died, but he remains a presence. The grieving son is moving forward, but, through the film’s structure, he keeps moving backwards to reflect the past.

This is a low-key film of shaggy charms, wistful laughs and gentle sobs, filled with endearing performances amidst spare visuals. There’s a forced whimsy to it all, though. McGregor narrates the film with a super dry deadpan that errs on the side of preciousness, a fussed-over stream-of-consciousness that is interrupted from time to time by little drawings, photographic montages, or, worst of all, subtitles that give us unwanted insight into the thoughts of his pet dog. I could have done without the twee embellishments of such cutesy accoutrements.

Though I have plenty of little quibbles with smaller details, this is a muted film that works slowly and quietly and I can’t deny the power of the big picture. Yet I feel some indifference, some ambivalence, towards the film. I could see, respect, admire, and occasionally feel the impact of Mills’s choices, even if I was rarely drawn into the film. But the emotion of the film filters out through the layer of whimsy and feels painfully, acutely real. The contrast between father and son is the emotional heart of the film, a loving but testy relationship that uses their pasts to reveal emotions and expectations for the future.

Plummer is nicely subtle as a dignified older man surrounded by the books and artifacts of a long and learned life energized with the new freedom of living without secrets. He’s so good, in fact, that when we shift back to the present, I felt disappointed that we didn’t get to spend more time with him. This is, I suppose, part of the point. In the present, his son is trying to move forward without him, to start a new relationship while he still feels the pain of losing his father. He misses his father, and so do we. It’s a film about the damages of ending one part of life in order to gain the possibility of beginning again, that is itself somewhat damaged.

Truth Be Told: TABLOID

The most important thing to know about Tabloid, the fascinating new film from master documentarian Errol Morris, is that a great deal of the story comes straight out of the mouth of a crazy person. Maybe that’s unfair. Joyce McKinney is a convincing storyteller, spinning wild yarns of such impossibly convoluted and blatantly unbelievable intensity with such a clear eyed, somewhat coherent matter-of-factness that you can’t help but think that she really must believe the words that are coming out of her mouth. Morris sits her in front of a camera to spin these stories, these crazed stories composed of truths, half-truths, embellishments, and flat-out lies. Her wide eyes and bright blond hair frame a fairly honest looking face. And yet everything she says, no matter how tempting it may be from time to time to believe her, is unbelievable.

What, exactly, is the nature of the story that she tells? Well, this former Miss Wyoming was a tabloid figure of some repute in England back in the late 1970’s. As she tells it, the events that put her there is simply a love story. In California, she fell in love with a young Mormon named Kirk Anderson. She says it was love at first sight that developed into a love-against-all-odds relationship since his mother disapproved. Then, one day, he disappeared. The only logical explanation in Joyce’s mind is that the Mormons kidnapped him. (In actuality, he was serving out his time as a missionary, as all young Mormon men do).  After some low-level investigation, she discovered the love of her life living in England. She simply had to get him back.

This is the part that starts to get crazy. She hires a few big, strong guys to fly with her to England, drive out to the church and steal Kirk away from the Mormons. After snatching him in broad daylight from in front of a church, she kept him chained up in a cottage for days. This “love story” is a case of kidnapping, imprisonment and sexual assault. It was a missing persons case. When she finally let her prisoner go, she was arrested, but, with her co-conspirators, she jumped bail and fled the country. British tabloids, in the meantime, were exploding with reports of Joyce McKinney and “The Case of the Manacled Mormon.” Then, things get crazier.

While Morris includes interviews with experts who can provide sanity and clear-eyed analysis, including reporters, photographers, and writers for the tabloids who were researching Joyce and the wild scandal that seemed to follow her and continually unfolded wherever she went for years, the most compelling material is whatever Joyce is telling us. It’s clear that we’re not always getting the truth from her, but how much can we trust the others? At one point, a tabloid reporter mentions that the missionary was never “chained,” he was merely tied up. But, he confides, “chained sounds better.”

Will we ever know for a fact what went on in that cottage? No. Will we ever know the full truth about this scandal? No. But this isn’t a film that is interested in getting to the truth in that way. This is a kaleidoscopic Rashomon of a documentary that spins into a crazed conspiratorial frenzy right along with its central subject. Only Morris’s clear-eyed, cleanly framed approach, cheeky titles, and methodical pace keep things on an even keel. What I know for sure is that Joyce McKinney cannot be believed. Her version of the events must be taken with copious amounts of salt and the version the more impartial experts help illuminate strikes me as more convincing, more clearly close to the truth. But what is undeniable is the ferocity of McKinney’s likability.  There’s a reason Morris gives her so much time to talk; she’s just plain fun to listen to. She may be speaking out of some kind of jumble of truth, embellishment and delusion, but she sure is fascinating and entertaining.

Catching Up on 2011: L’édition française

Heartbeats

Young Québécois actor Xavier Dolan’s second film as director, Heartbeats, is an assured and confident film that knows exactly what it wants to be and achieves it. He’s only 22. This is a wonderful film that captures a certain kind of precocious youth, indebted to the past in ways that heighten instead of dampen volatile youthful emotion in the present. A perfectly romantic atmosphere cribbed in part from Wong Kar Wai, and a muted Gregg Araki mixed with a French New Wave flavor, is here deployed in an agonizingly tantalizing story of one-sided infatuation. It's about a love triangle of sorts in which a gay man (Dolan) and his best girl friend (Monia Chokri) are both crushing on the same cute guy (Niels Schneider), but said crush object doesn’t seem to know it, or worse, knows it and is toying with them. The film follows the three characters as they circle each other, charting their small shifts, their cyclical emotional and physical attempts to draw closer, and the moody currents that drift them apart. However thin the plot is, Dolan, a terrifically promising director and a great screen presence, fills up the empty spaces with delirious style and a thick mood aching with emotions and impulses. This is a film about the romantic charge of absence, especially when mixed with the slight possibility, however impossible despite physical proximity, of attainment. Dolan has made his film in a bold style that’s as fresh as it is referential. It’s style as substance.

Potiche

About as pink and bubbly as a film can get without a physical problem with the print, François Ozon’s Potiche is a 1970’s period-piece women’s empowerment farce (both aspects are given their progressive expressions) that struggles but never quite collapses under the weight of its soap-opera elements. It’s a light confection through which some hugely talented French stars (no less than Catherine Deneuve among them) stride. Deneuve plays a stylish trophy wife who we first meet out for her morning jog decked out in pink athletic wear, moving at a pace that still allows her to admire all of the animals in the forest. Her husband (Fabrice Luchini) is the stingy, adulterous owner of a nearby umbrella factory who, after his striking employees confront him, collapses with a heart condition. This leaves his wife to shake off her trophy status and take charge at the company. Her new position creates differing reactions from their adult kids (Jérémie Renier and Judith Godrèche) and the factory’s secretary (Karin Viard) and brings her into contact with an old flame (Gérard Depardieu), all of which kicks off a narrative of self-discovery and a journey to fulfillment. Her story is wrapped inside a bright, light, farcical comedy and the film goes down happily and humorously.

The Princess of Montpensier

I feel compelled to call Bertrand Tavernier’s latest film, The Princess of Montpensier, based on a 1662 novel from Madame de Lafayette, lengthy. Despite the fact that I thoroughly enjoyed every minute, this is a film that feels long simply because it’s so tightly packed and richly spun. If anything, it’s surprising that it fits as much as it does in only 140 minutes. At times, Tavernier makes use of elisions in cutting between scenes, withholding information, allowing the audience to fill in gaps left by events and decisions unseen. In this way, the plot expands past the boundaries of screen time and feels richer for it. The film is a large-scale epic with terrific, muted melodrama played out against the backdrop of 16th century war between the Catholics and the Huguenots and the smaller, but no less important, scale of arranged marriages, true love, and broken hearts amongst dukes and duchesses and the children thereof. This particular story pivots upon Count de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), who we meet in the opening scene in the heat of battle, a fight that causes him to lay down his arms and take up pacifism. This eventually leads him to the home of the Prince of Montpensier (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), who asks him to help tutor his new wife, Marie (Mélanie Thierry), so that she may be presentable when the time comes that she must appear before the royal court. Marie, the titular princess, becomes the other major figure in the film. We first meet her before the wedding, flirting with the dashing Duke de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel). She loves him, but her father (Philippe Magnan) is persuaded by the elder Montpensier (Michel Vuillermoz) that his marriage proposal is most beneficial. And so, Marie becomes Princess of Montpensier while her heart still belongs to another. As the film unfolds, the characters are held captive by and rebel against the social constraints of their stations, struggling to assert or ignore their desires while submitting to sociopolitical and religious inevitabilities. Excellent acting across the board animates this handsomely gorgeous and refreshingly steady and restrained film of convincing period detail, complicated political intrigue, and piercing emotion. I found it a full and compelling experience.

Less Than Purrfect: PUSS IN BOOTS

Puss in Boots, an anthropomorphized cat with snazzy footwear, first clawed his way to smirking CGI fame with the second Shrek, showing up as a terrific foil and an adorable sight gag with a soft, yet rolling, voice provided in a near purr by Antonio Banderas. The character is a swashbuckling feline, with a twist of Zorro mixed with the roaming Banderas gunman from Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Needless to say, he was strikingly perfect in the fractured fairy tale universe in which he appeared.

Now that the Shreks have stayed well past their welcome, it’s only natural that one of the most enjoyable supporting characters has struck off on his own (albeit with a small army of credited screenwriters and Shrek the Third director Chris Miller) to forge a potential new franchise for Dreamworks Animation with what is, I suppose, a prequel to those movies. It’s mostly a failure, an entirely inconsequential film that had a minimum of my interest while it ran, but lost it as soon as the credits rolled. It’s a nice try, anyways.

In Puss in Boots the titular rogue swordsman is out to find some magic beans when he runs into a cat burglar, Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), and a talking egg, Humpty Dumpty (Zach Galifianakis). They, too, want the beans, but Humpty and Puss have some backstory to get out of the way. In an extended flashback we learn not only why these two seem to hate each other, we also get a look at the origins of Puss in Boots, a look that answers all kinds of none-too-pressing questions. Why is he an outlaw? Why does he wear those boots? You’ll find out.

With all of this out of the way, the plot can get down to business. The two cats and the egg team up to take the magic beans and grow a beanstalk to the giant’s castle where they will find the golden-egg-laying goose that will make them rich, rich, rich, I tell you! The beans are currently in the possession of a surly, thuggish Jack and Jill (Billy Bob Thornton and Amy Sedaris), who just haven’t been the same since Jack fell down and broke his crown.

Lacking the emotional depth and visual energy of the Kung Fu Panda movies, Puss in Boots tries desperately to wring a few additional notes out of a one- or two-note character by sending him through a sagging plot loaded up with predictable kids movie antics and a few did-I-just-hear-that? innuendos to ostensibly delight the parents who will probably just be hoping their kids don’t ask them to explain later. It’s not entirely without its charms, but those charms are few and far between. Puss’s cat behavior is cute at times as he laps up some milk or is distracted by a beam of light and the voice performance from Banderas is simply delightful. I just wish this cat had something a little more memorable to do.

It’s all rather handsomely animated, even if the frames seem to be a bit sparse and uninteresting, especially compared to dense gag-riddled scenery of the Shreks. But what really seems to be missing most of all is a sense of urgency or necessity. It’s all perfectly harmless and easy enough to watch, but I find it hard to believe it’ll stick in the memory for very long. Even on the way back to my car, I found some of the details slipping away. It’s just barely passable and, especially in the case of whole families who’ll show up and be forced to pay 3D surcharges, that’s just not quite good enough.

Ain't No Time? Baby, Bye, Bye, Bye: IN TIME

With In Time, writer-director Andrew Niccol, who once wrote The Truman Show as well as created the near-future gene-swap thriller Gattaca and the holographic actress comedy Simone, creates a world in which time is literally money. Science has made it possible to live forever, but obviously this would create an unsustainable population growth if everyone were allowed access to the miracle technology. To get around this, there is some kind of vaguely worldwide crypto-fascistic capitalist system (I can only assume, since the movie doesn’t help out much when it comes to comprehension) by which many are allowed to die so others can live forever young.

In this world, people live with free time until their twenty-fifth birthday, after which they stop aging, but a glowing green countdown clock on their forearm jolts to life. They have one free year. Any time after that must be earned. In this futuristic nightmare, time has become currency, traded, stolen, bought, and earned. Niccol has precisely one good use for a world like this, to create a striking metaphor for income inequality. After this has been acknowledged often, redundantly, and gravely, he and his characters have no idea what to do with this revelation. The film digs so quickly and carelessly into the concept that loose bits of narrative avalanche back down into the plot holes, blocking believability from escaping.

The story centers on Will (Justin Timberlake, who really should think about singing again), a factory worker in the ghetto living day to day with just enough minutes to his name to get him to next payday. He rescues a rich man (Matt Bomer) from a bar fight with a thug (Alex Pettyfer) who wanted to steal his century of life. The rich guy is over a hundred years old and wants to end it all. While Will sleeps, the wealthy man gives him his century and dies, or “times out” in the parlance of this picture. This is suspicious to the government, who sends a timekeeper (the always awesome Cillian Murphy) to investigate. He decides it’s a murder after having only seen surveillance footage of Will fleeing the scene, circumstantial evidence at best.

Will doesn’t know this, though. He thinks he can move his mom (Olivia Wilde) into a nice new home. What he doesn’t know is that his mom is about to time out when she can’t afford to pay for bus fare and consequently dies on her lonely walk, unable to find someone to spare a minute. Enraged, Will sets off across the time zones (I couldn’t say what these are, but they appear to be neighborhoods separated by toll booths to keep people of differing life expectancies from mingling) to stick it to the richest in their society. There, he almost immediately runs into a wealthy, nefarious banker (Mad Men’s supremely conniving Vincent Kartheiser) and his beautiful daughter (Amanda Seyfried).

That’s where the law catches up to Will. He beats up some cops and takes the banker’s daughter with him as he races away. (You see, she’s kidnapped, or maybe she loves him, or maybe both.) So, the movie settles into its true nature as a chase movie. Timberlake and Seyfried flee to the ghetto where they agree to become some kind of hot futuristic leather-clad time thieves, pulling off daring Robin Hood heists (we only see two fairly uncomplicated ones) to give time to those who need it most while trying to stay one step ahead of the timekeepers, and her father. There’s lots of movement in this movie but no momentum. It’s a curiously inert film for one that has people on the run bearing literal countdown clocks that illuminate every scene. I was constantly trying to remember how much time our characters are carrying with them (it seems the lower they get on time, the faster they can run to try and get more), even as I was waiting around for anything to take my mind away from trying to figure out how this world works.

One minor character laments her husband dying with “9 years on his clock.” In this world, is there no way one can leave inheritance in case you die before your time? We see countless banks with vaults full of time. Why would you bank your time? If you run out before you can get back to the bank, there’d be no way to revive you since, as we clearly see, dead people can’t receive any new time payments. After a while, I stopped contemplating questions like these and instead focused on how nice it is that the concept offers relatively young actors a chance to play roles they otherwise couldn’t have for decades. Murphy (35) is playing a grizzled veteran cop with over fifty years on the job. Kartheiser (32) is playing an elderly robber baron. Wilde (27) is playing a mother celebrating her 50th birthday as the film opens. Now, the film doesn’t do much with the discrepancies between the ages of the actors and the characters beyond the initial cheap visual gag, but at least it’s proof the concept could have worked if it either 1.) made more sense and/or 2.) were more exciting.

In Time is a difficult film to write about because it’s a difficult film to care about. It’s a straight-up-the-middle, two star mediocrity and more or less a bore. It’s a movie in which no aspect in particular goes terribly wrong. It’s more a matter of no aspect in particular going especially right. Not even the great cinematographer Roger Deakins could help things along. It’s a high concept picture (a concept that, in theory, I absolutely loved) that never gets nearly as good, or as entertaining, as it should be.

Aliens in the Hood: ATTACK THE BLOCK

This year’s movie monsters have been sadly lacking. J. J. Abrams’s Super 8 is a good monster movie but, ironically enough, its most disappointing element is the monster. The humans are the entire source of interest. By the time the monster shows up in all his slimy, bug-eyed glory, it’s underwhelming. The titular beasts in Cowboys and Aliens were similarly afflicted with a ho-hum derivativeness that totally sunk what little there is to commend about that movie. These things are all arms and slime with inky black eyes and watery slithers, nothing more than the basic component elements of H.R. Giger’s Alien designs mixed and matched into something familiar-but-different.

So imagine my amazement that the slick and scrappy British creature feature Attack the Block shows off monsters that I’ve never seen before. In the dark, these are barely visible aliens, every inch covered with pitch-black fur. Only their eerie glowing maws reveal their presence in swift, chomping movements. I was delighted and surprised by these creepy creatures, which have a sense of weight and reality that is all too missing from those modern CG beasts. Even more impressive is the fact that the film that houses them is not only one of the most flat-out entertaining pictures of the year, but also the perfect kind of resourceful genre flick that has a point of view and something to say.

The events of the film take place in and around a towering building of low-income housing that dominates a city block in south London. The protagonists are a multi-ethnic group of young, aimless, posturing, unsupervised teens. They’re a tight-knit group of friends, joking, laughing, and bragging amongst themselves. A tall, older-looking-than-his-years boy clearly runs the group (John Boyega), but his buddies (which include Franz Drameh, Alex Esmail, Simon Howard, and Leeon Jones) aren’t underlings; they’re close friends. Their relationships are sharply drawn and convincing. They’re as warm and unconsciously self-conscious as any group of teen boys. We can see that they’re good kids – they genuinely care about their friends and their neighborhood – but the film doesn’t let them off easy. Their relationship to the audience is complicated. As the film opens, we are introduced to them menacing a white twenty-something woman (Jodie Whittaker), trying to steal her purse. While they bother the poor lady, a small falling object crushes a car parked nearby.

Investigating this crash landing, the kids are attacked by a gross, startling little alien. In a fit of fright, and posturing, they bludgeon the creature to death. Thus, the film starts off like a sick joke version of E.T. Instead of a white suburban kid befriending a nice little extra-terrestrial, here a group of inner-city kids kill a mean old alien and parade the body back to their block. They take it to their local weed dealer (Nick Frost) who decides to let them keep it in his weed room until the kids can contact the proper scientific authorities. After all, they just discovered a new life form, at least that’s what one of the buyers in the room (Luke Treadaway), a stoned nature doc fan, informs them.

This is all well and good, rapid-fire world building, but when things start to get hairy, the film explodes in a rush of excitement that builds increasingly tense and giddy as we race towards the climax. It turns out that the alien was just the first to land, so when the furry, pitch-black, essentially invisible, glowing-toothed aliens start stalking around the block, trying desperately to get into the towering building, looking like they’re sniffing around for revenge, the kids are the only ones prepared to recognize the threat. There’s a bit of Joe Dante (he of Gremlins) in the exuberance with which the film approaches the danger. The kids grab what they can find – anything blunt and wieldable – while they mount their bikes and get ready to protect their block from a localized alien invasion. The action that follows makes incredible use of their apartment building, with the characters and creatures scampering up, down, and all around the inner-city architecture in exciting, comprehensible ways with crisp editing from Jonathan Amos while cinematographer Thomas Townend gets a gritty beauty out of the thick nighttime atmosphere.

The film finds great vibrancy in the mostly inexperienced young actors, who bring a youthful vitality and braggadocio to their roles. They’re posturing at first, playing at the idea of toughness, but as events unfold they drop the charade and slowly turn into heroic toughs despite being scared out of their minds. One suggests they text for help. The reply: “This is too much madness to fit into one text!” The characters come from a rough part of town, but that doesn’t make them bad, unlikable, or disposable. The film asserts their humanity and strength under pressure, allows them to goof around and fight back with equal agency. They aren’t the white upper crust with the stiff upper lip of Merchant Ivory films and the Royal Family, but that doesn’t make them any less British. When they run into their victim from the film’s opening and discover that she lives in the same building they do, they’re apologetic. “We wouldn’t have robbed you if we’d known.”

This is a film energized by a deep sense of social justice and cross-cultural understanding without feeling burdened by weighty themes. It’s fleet, fast, and funny with an irrepressible wit and heart that shows through even the squishier moments of creature-related mayhem. Here, violence has consequences. Early on, the police turn up in response to the disturbance and make things worse by assuming that these kids are on a violent rampage and locking down the block. No one gets in; no one gets out. The kids have to deal with this dangerous situation without any outside help. It’s a move that amps up the plot’s tension considerably – nowhere to run, nowhere to find reinforcements – but also serves the larger satiric point beautifully. The larger society has turned a blind eye, misinterpreting the problems and enforcing solutions that only make matters worse. Those in power have effectively abandoned these kids.

Writer-director Joe Cornish, a veteran of British TV, makes his feature debut with Attack the Block, which is, in the end, not only one of the best movies of the year but one of the best debuts in several years. It’s a deceptively complex movie that mixes serious intent with a great pop tone, deeply aware of both youth culture and sociological concerns. Frightfully exciting set pieces make increasingly inventive use of a limited number of locations. The film builds characters that feel real. They’re funny and engaging and never sink to spouting monster movie clichés. They’re as distinct and memorable as the monsters they have to fight and the place in which they live. If you never thought a movie about “big alien gorilla-wolf [expletives]” could be not only one of the most entertaining movies of the year, but one of the most moving and thoughtful as well (and all in only 88 minutes!) I have just one word for you: Believe.