Michael Fassbender stars in this cold stare into the void of a hired assassin
The Killer Starring Michael Fassbender Directed by David Fincher Rated R
In limited theatrical release Oct. 27, on Netflix Nov. 10
He travels the world, loves British rock band The Smiths, meticulously tracks his heart rate and limbers up every day with yoga. And he makes his living killing people—with rifles, pistols, nail guns, bombs, poison or whatever other means necessary. Michael Fassbender plays the unnamed professional assassin-for-hire in this stylishly chilling neo-noir drama from director David Fincher, who has plumbed the dark, cold depths of bleak nihilism before in movies like Seven, Zodiac, Fight Club, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl. It’s another stone-cold stare into the void as we watch “the killer” go about his work with icy, expressionless, amoral precision, purging himself of empathy and laser-focused on his job—until an assignment in Paris hits a snag, his bullet misses its target, and the hunter suddenly becomes the hunted. It’s a gripping riff on a fatalistic job and a guy who does it, with an aloof “procedural” tone that takes an abrupt shift into revenge-survival mode as Fassbender’s character tries to find out—and rub out—the parties assigned to clean up the loose ends of his botched hit. The grim goings-on are deadly serious, but there are a few glimpses of dark humor as the killer uses aliases (we never know his real name) from classic TV shows, employs a cheese grater in a brutally bruising fight scene, and has a fateful encounter with a rival (Tilda Swinton) who tells a fearlessly funny existential joke about a bear in the woods. We never get to know much about the killer, and that’s the way he wants it, going about his work in the shadows, an anonymous figure leaving a path of destruction on a career track where people want other people dead. A finely tooled exercise in dirty work, this is a lean, mean descent into a deadly “professional” underworld with dozens of ways to die—especially if you cross paths with The Killer.
The acclaimed director tackles a dark chapter of American history, and makes another movie masterpiece
Killers of the Flower Moon Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro & Lily Gladstone Directed by Martin Scorsese Rated R
In theaters Friday, Oct. 20
“If you’re gonna make trouble, make it big.”
That’s what big-deal bigshot William Hale (Robert De Niro) tells his neophyte nephew (Leonardo DiCaprio) early in director Martin Scorsese’s sprawling, slow-burn neo-Western epic about a grim and horrific chapter of American history in the expanding frontier of the 1920s.
And indeed, there’s some very big trouble in this very big big-message movie, which clocks in at nearly three and a half hours.
DiCaprio’s character, Ernest Burkhart, is a young WWI veteran who returns from the battlefield to stake out a new life “out West” on the Great Plains of Oklahoma, where oil has been discovered on land settled and owned by the Native Americans of the Osage Nation. Ernest freely admits—a couple of times—that he “loves money,” and there’s certainly plenty of it here, bubbling and spewing in geysers from the ground…and making the Osage some of the most fabulously wealthy people on the planet.
And it’s also made a boomtown for carpetbaggers, non-indigenous “white” opportunists like Ernest’s uncle, thirsty for some of that black gold—or all of it. So, what will money-loving Ernest do to get filthy rich, far beyond what he can rake in playing poker or even pulling highway-robbery holdups?
Scorsese is probably best known for his crime sagas—Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Irishman, The Departed. This isn’t a “gangster” movie, as such, but it certainly has the feel of the director’s familiar wheelhouse, with a core group (yes, a gang) of bad men doing bad things. In the Osage Nation, they’re robbing the natives of their wealth by almost every means possible, including murder.
Ernest falls in love and marries an Osage woman, Molly (Lily Gladstone), and then, one by one, all Molly’s sisters and other family members start dying. Who’ll be next? Maybe even Molly? Who blew up that house? Or left that dead body out in the woods? And what’s Ernest got to do with it? As the death toll rises into double digits, J. Edgar Hoover sends a federal agent (Jesse Plemons) from the Bureau of Investigation—which would later become the FBI—to nose around.
Based on the bestselling 2017 novel by David Grann, it’s a complex, complicated tale of systemic racism, white nationalism, greedy imperialism, income disparity, ethnic genocide and a conspiracy of silence and coverup, all folded into a love story that takes a wrenching wrong turn. DiCaprio has rarely been better, playing a scowling, morally compromised yahoo in an oversized Stetson, and Gladstone (who grew up in the Blackfeet Nation) has an almost Mona Lisa-like serenity, anchoring the story with a radiance and grace that will doubtlessly be recognized by the Oscars and other year-end awards. Their chemistry is lusty and palpable.
It’s all massive, majestically moving and monumental, but also intimate, richly detailed and finely tooled, full of authentic “period” touches—and enough violence, including an ad hoc autopsy with a handsaw, to meet minimum requirements for a Martin Scorsese movie.
DeNiro—who, like DiCaprio, is one of Scorsese’s favorite go-to actors—is great, as usual, craftily playing “King” Bill Hale, a dapper Osage benefactor and community builder whose smile masks a much more sinister side. There are dozens of other characters too, many played by authentically indigenous Osage actors, and small-part cameos by musicians Jack White, Sturgill Simpson, Pete Yorn and Jason Isbell, plus Brendon Frasier and John Lithgow.
But appropriately enough, it’s Scorsese, the virtuoso filmmaker who’s crafted yet another cinematic masterpiece of movie storytelling, who gets the last word, quite literally, in a final wrap-up epilogue that show how true crime became entertainment for the masses—like this all-star opus about “big trouble” that the modern-day Osage still refer to as their nation’s Reign of Terror.
New ‘Exorcist’ is a schlocky retread of shocks we’ve seen before, with diminishing returns of disturbia
The Exorcist: Believer Starring Leslie Odom Jr., Jennifer Nettles & Ann Dowd Directed by David Gordon Green Rated R
In theaters Friday, Oct. 6
Fifty years ago, people all over the place were freaking out about director William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. I saw it in a downtown Nashville theater with one of my high school friends and her mom, who was progressive enough to take a couple of 16-year-old kids to a movie swirling with buzz about how deeply disturbing it was, and that anyone who saw it might be opening themselves up to dark, satanic forces.
Well, my friend, her mom and I and survived it, just fine. And The Exorcist went on to claim a rightful place as a horror classic, the gold standard of movies about the ancient belief in demonic possession. It became a brand name, a franchise of five films spread over as many decades.
Now there’s a sixth, and even though it’s an Exorcist movie, it’s no Exorcist. The new fright flick is a schlocky, hyperventilating return to the basics of the first movie, transplanting the original setting of D.C.’s leafy Georgetown neighborhood to the modern-day South (everything, it seems, is filmed in Georgia these days) with all-new characters joined by a couple of old ones, including Ellen Burstyn reprising her role from 1973. There’s someone else, too, but I won’t spoil it.
As Charlie Daniels once sang, the Devil went down to Georgia, and here he does, indeed. Hey, that must mean all the demonic scourge has been purged from Washington, right?
When a couple of young school chums (Lidya Jewett and Olivia Marcum) go missing for several days in their tight-knit, church-going community, their parents (Leslie Odom Jr., Jennifer Nettles) are understandably distraught, then overjoyed when the two little girls are found, disoriented and a bit worse for wear after their three-day trek in the woods. After a battery of medical procedures and psychological testing, their moms and dads—and a devout next-door-neighbor (Ann Dowd)—realize what the audience already knows: Some kind of demon has hitched a ride home inside the two little sweetums.
Norbert Leo Butz and Jennifer Nettles play parents of a real problem child (Olivia O’Neill)
Both girls get progressively weirder in this devilish two-fer before going head-spinning, feral-batshit crazy. The Exorcist: Believer retreads most of the shock-value stuff of the original film—writhing young bodies, blood-stained nightgowns, spooky levitation, a vicious act with a crucifix and droning incantations of religious mumbo jumbo. One of the girls has slash marks on her back spelling out a message that viewers of the 1973 movie will certainly recognize. “The body and the blood!” screams the other, stomping down the aisle of a church service in a ranting reference to the Christian ritual of communion. A character compares what the girls have been through with the sacred mythos of Christ descending into hell for three days between his crucifixion and resurrection.
Eventually, a Catholic priest is called in, but this exorcism becomes a grassroots all-in affair, with two little girls strapped into chairs, hissing and writing and spewing black bile as parents, friends and neighbors intone Bible verses and splash on “holy” water.
Only here, 50 years later, it’s not very frightening, and it’s certainly not terribly shocking anymore. This retread into familiar territory doesn’t do much of anything new, especially when it comes to deeply disturbing viewers, and it crowns it all with a tidy little bow of suggestion that the powers of demons and darkness can only be countered by being a “believer.”
Director David Gordon Green also steered three Halloween sequels, and he collaborated with Danny McBride on the gonzo pothead movie comedy Pineapple Express and TV’s East Bound and Down, Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones. McBride is also one of this film’s cowriters and producers, and this project was hatched during breaks in production of Gemstones, the profanely hilarious HBO comedy series in which he plays a comedically corrupt televangelist.
McBride doesn’t appear in this Exorcist, though, and that’s too bad. Having Jesse Gemstone do battle with a double-dipping demon—now that, I believe, would make for one fine holy hell of a movie.
John David Washington stars in a sprawling sci-fi drama with a mega-message about AI
The Creator Starring John David Washington, Allison Janey & Madeleine Yuna Voyles Directed by Gareth Edwards PG-13
In theaters Friday, Sept. 29
Concerned about robots crashing your car, taking your job, or maybe even ruling the world? In this epic-scale sci-fi war parable, we’re a few bleak decades beyond concern—it’s already happened, and the humans are fighting back against the rising tide of AI. Robots deliver babies, quell riots and work as cops and security guards. But maybe they also set off atomic bombs, and rumor has it they’re making plans to wipe us out completely…
So now, in 2065, the dogs of war are howling and robots are the enemy. When a brassy U.S. Army commander (Allison Janney) gets wind of a super-secret mega-weapon being developed by artificial intelligence, she sends a war-weary special-ops soldier (John David Washington) on a covert mission to find and destroy it, along with its creator.
This wildly ambitious, extravagantly staged dystopian drama depicts a grungy futurarama that doesn’t feel too far removed from the present, just considerably more battle-scarred and damaged by America’s war against the machines—fully mechanized humanoids as well as “simulants,” hybrids that look, walk and talk like humans, but with big, hollow holes through their heads.
And the search for the doomsday device yields some surprises—in the guise of a little simulant girl (Madeleine Yuna Voyles, making her acting debut).Does she hold the key to the world’s destruction, or its path to reconciliation?
Director Gareth Edwards, who also cowrote the original screenplay, also directed the romping, stomping Godzilla reboot (2014), created space-alien creepy-crawlies in Monsters (2010) and put his creative stamp on Rogue One: A Star War Story (2016). He likes big, expansive movie playing fields, and The Creator certainly gives him one. Visually and thematically, it’s a golly-whopper, filmed in awe-inspiring locations around the globe and tackling big mega-themes of war and peace, American imperialism, colonialism, slavery, freedom, terrorism, the weaponization of misinformation and the double-edge sword of technology.
And, oh, the sights you’ll see—robot soldiers, military mega-machines, and squatty, sprinting suicide-bomber bots, like exploding trash cans with arms and legs.
It’s also, at its core, a love story.
You’ll have to wait until the end to see where and how everything ends up, but in the meantime, just sit back and enjoy the show. There are echoes of other visionary movies, sure, from Tenent, District 9 and Blade Runner, to even Wall-E. But The Creator makes its own bold claim to high ground as a meaty, immersive sci-fi spectacle with bountiful bang…and a message about how the key to survival might be simply learning to get along…even when some of us act like we have holes in our heads.
Edgy erotic thriller puts a relationship in jeopardy in the cutthroat world of Wall Street
Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor star in director Chloe Domont’s dynamite film debut
Fair Play Starring Phoebe Dynevor, Alden Ehrenreich & Eddie Marsan Directed by Chloe Domont R
Opening for one week in limited theaters Friday, Sept. 29 (and on Netflix Friday, Oct. 6)
A tight, terrifically edgy erotic thriller, Fair Play is about a pair of young lovers whose lives are turned inside out when one of them gets a big promotion, just after they’ve become engaged to be married. Luke (Alden Ehrenreich—he was young Han Solo in Solo and singing cowboy Hobie Doyle in Hail, Caesar!) and Erin (Phoebe Dyneovor, who played Daphne on TV’s Bridgerton) are both drone-bee, grunt-work analysts at a cutthroat, high-pressure Wall Street hedge fund.
When she’s unexpectedly bumped into a coveted spot of portfolio manager, glass-walled office and all, Luke’s resentment festers and grows—especially since he was expecting to get the job for himself. He feels entitled to it, mainly because he’s always wanted it. He accuses Erin of dressing like a “cupcake” and sleeping her way to the top. Love becomes loathing, and their relationship gets pushed to frightening extremes.
It only adds to the pressure of them already having to keep their romance a secret, as it violates their company’s ban on workplace dalliances. And as Erin ascends into the company’s elite “boy’s club” of billion-dollar deals, locker-room jokes and strip clubs, she holds her own on the playing field of misogynistic sexual dynamics and office power plays while Luke sits and simmers on the sidelines.
Director Chloe Dumont, who honed her craft on TV series like Billions, Ballers and Suits, makes a terrifically impressive feature-film debut behind the camera, torquing up the wickedly smart tension as Luke and Erin’s unbridled romantic passion (wild, messy bar-bathroom sex!) turns toxic. With both competing to curry favor of the firm’s ruthless boss (veteran British actor Eddie Marsan), their shared apartment becomes a psycho-sexual battlefield. And their second bathroom-sex tryst, late in the film, takes a dynamically different turn from the first.
Eddie Marsan
The movie effectively makes us feel that Luke and Erin do, on some primal level, really love each other, and demonstrates one way love can devolve into lust, emotional assault, raging arguments, sexual battery and even worse. Ehrenreich is always adroit and watchable, but it’s Dumont who grounds the film in a performance so hot it leaves blisters, smoldering like the burning ends of the cigarettes Erin puffs when she’s nervous, sharper than the pointed heels of the stiletto pumps she wears with her power suits. Eventually, you know something’s gotta give—and something’s bound to break. All’s fair, as the saying goes, in love and war, and Fair Play paints a searing picture of lovers on an uncharted collision course in a relationship going madly off the rails.
The abrupt, ambiguous, cut-to-black ending might not satisfy everyone, but this is a movie that certainly gets in your head with thorny issues of sex, gender roles, burning jealousy, greed and the caustically competitive world of work. It’s steamy and sexy as hell, as jagged as shards of broken glass…and as pointed as the tip of a stiletto heel.
The latest Agatha Christie murder mystery is more tricks than treat
Kenneth Branagh returns as detective Hercule Peroit.
A Haunting in Venice Starring Kenneth Branagh, Michelle Yeoh & Kelly Riley Directed by Kenneth Branagh PG-13
In theaters Friday, Sept. 15, 2023
Here’s an early Halloween trick-or-treat for fans of the late, great queen of murder mysteries, Agatha Christie.
A Haunting in Venice brings famed detective Hercule Peroit out of retirement in Italy, pried from piddling in his rooftop garden and nibbling on breakfast cannoli. He’s been coerced—by his visiting American author acquaintance (Tina Fey)—to a local Halloween bash followed by a séance, where things take a decidedly deathly turn. Based on Christie’s 1969 novel Hallowe’en Party, it puts an otherworldly twist on the typical murder-mystery whodunnit and transplants the tale from the novel’s setting of England to the Mediterranean’s iconic “City of Water.”
Tina Fey plays an American mystery writer who bases her books on Peroit’s cases.
Peroit (Kenneth Branagh) is skeptical about anything supernatural—like the supposed spiritualism of the medium (Michelle Yeoh) who arrives for the séance at the creepy old Venetian palazzo, the site of a former orphanage. She’s there to contact the spirit of a young girl who died on the premises, plunging out of a window and into the canal below. Was it suicide, was she insane, or was she murdered?
Peroit says he doesn’t believe in “God or ghosts,” but an unnerving night in this mysterious mansion may change his mind, especially when more bodies begin to drop—literally.
Venice marks Branagh’s third turn as Christie’s famous Belgian sleuth, following Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022). He’s joined by an international ensemble cast that includes London native Kelly Riley (she’s Beth Sutton on Yellowstone), Ireland’s Jude Hill (the young actor who starred in Branagh’s Oscar-nominated coming-of-age tale Belfast) and French actress Camille Cottin (who played Hélèn on Killing Eve).
Kelly Reilly also stars on TV’s ‘Yellowstone.’
As an esteemed Shakespearean-molded actor himself, and an accomplished director, Branagh certainly knows his way around both sides of the camera. He’s appeared in more than 40 films and directed nearly two dozen, including his two previous Agatha Christie outings, Disney’s live-action Cinderella, a Thor and even a Frankenstein.
The real mystery of A Haunting in Venice is why such an experienced, Oscar-winning, actor-director feels the need to trot out just about every trick in the filmmaking 101 playbook—odd camera angles, fisheye-lens views, 360-degree circular shots; jerky, jarring edits; abrupt jump-scare “gotcha” jolts every few minutes. There are a lot of ways to tell a scary story, and Branagh was apparently determined to use them all. The movie seems more interested in spooking the audience than in making its characters act and behave like they’re spending a long night with the realization they might be the next victim.
Set in 1947 and partially filmed in Venice, the movie is, however, rich in mood and atmosphere and does stir up some serious issues about the lingering traumas of war. Peroit and a young doctor (Jamie Dornan, the Irish actor who also starred in Belfast) grapple with unseen scars from the WWII battlefield. A young French sister and brother (Emma Laird, making her film debut after a role in the Paramount+ series Mayor of Eastown, and Ali Kahn), uprooted by the war, dream of a better life in faraway peacetime America. They’re all haunted by “ghosts” of a different kind, scarred by the things they’ve seen and done.
Everyone’s a suspect, of course. So…whodunnit? You’ll have to wait for the end when “the world’s greatest detective” reveals how he solved the case, and then it’s arrivederci. But by that time, you’ll likely have figured out on your own that this overstuffed, gimmicky mystery movie is more trick than treat.
Dennis Quaid goes gonzo for God in heavy-handed baseball biopic
The Hill Starring Dennis Quaid, Colin Ford, Jonelle Carter, Bonnie Bedelia & Randy Houser Directed by Jeff Celentano PG
In theaters Friday, Aug. 25
Baseball and the Bible round the bases in this sermonizing biopic based on the real-life story of a young Texan with a degenerative spine disorder who dreams of becoming a Major League baseball player.
If you happen to already know about Rickey Hill, this story won’t yield any big grand-slam surprises. But for most mainstream viewers, not steeped in the obscure stats and historic miscellany of America’s pastime, you’ll be learning about him for the first time—how he grew up with stiff braces on both legs, how his rural-preacher daddy forbade him to play ball, how little Rickey did anyway. And how the underdog Rickey, ultimately, lived his dream.
Rickey is played as a child by newcomer Jesse Berry, making his acting debut, and he’s good—one of the best things about the movie, in fact. He’s certainly much more of a “screen presence” than Rickey as a high schooler, played by Colin Ford, a Nashville native who appeared in TV’s Under the Dome and several other series (including as a victim of Jeffrey Dahmer in last year’s Dahmer: Monster). He’s kind of a victim in The Hill, too, confined in a movie that seems unable to give him more than one dimension to maneuver.
Dennis Quaid plays Rickey’s father, dishing out fire and brimstone from the pulpit while his young son blasts rocks with sticks in the backyard, sending them sailing into the sky and over the trees—and sometimes through windshields. More than once we hear other people marvel that his talent is “phenomenal,” his batting skills a “miracle” given his condition.
Director Jeff Celentano is a former actor (whose movies you’ve likely never heard of) turned B-movie filmmaker (whose films, well, ditto). He’s playing in the big leagues now, sort of, with a handful of brand-name actors (Quaid, Bonnie Bedelia, Scott Glenn, Joelle Carter from TV’s Justified and Chicago Hope) and a movie releasing nationwide. Rickey Hill’s story is, for sure, an inspirational one—how a kid never let go of his dream, despite the odds that he’d never make it. It’s a feel-good movie for people who want a movie that wants to make them feel good, scratch their “films about faith” itch and likes their sports with a great deal of Bible thumping. It means well, but its real-life drama of the diamond, under the halos of the ballpark lights, gets lost in tedious, telegraphed tent-revival messaging.
And The Hill is Hallmark Channel quality up on the big screen, with ooey-gooey sentimentality, cringey performances, and a heavy, holy-hokum dose of Sunday School threaded by stories of David and Goliath, the strength of Solomon, sermons about water and rocks, God’s “calling” and being “tested,” admonitions about respecting “the Lord’s house,” and so many quoted Bible verses, I lost count. The dialog is laughably clunky and scripted with such a heavy hand, prone to speech-ifying and often putting words into character’s mouths that, I’m certain, they wouldn’t say. (“Hardscrapple,” for instance, wasn’t a word you would hear a lot in the rural South of the early 1960s. I was there, and I know.) And it just seems odd to hear a little girl—Ricky’s childhood sweetie—chide him about his batting and limited “body rotation.”)
In some instances, you can tell that characters mouths move to salty words that we spoken in a scene but later overdubbed into substitutions—“darn” for “dam,” “stuff” for, well, another word that stars with an “s.” This is a movie that doesn’t have the conviction it’s so preachy about—to let people talk the way they would naturally talk.
Quaid has a deep acting resume that has swung wide, as they say, over the decades, with some bona fide classics (Breaking Away, The Rookie, The Right Stuff) and some real dogs (Jaws 3, A Dog’s Purpose, I Can Only Imagine). This one leans into foul territory, as he gets all grim and clammy—and hammy—digging deep into fever-pitch fervor, insisting that his son follow his zealous path into pastorhood. It’s over the top, even for an actor who played Jerry Lee Lewis, Ronald Reagan, and Lindsay Lohan’s dad in The Parent Trip.
Bonnie Bedelia, who plays his mouthy mother-in-law, is bedecked in a wad of ghostly white granny hair and makeup to make her appear even older than her 75 years. The former soap star who made a splash alongside Bruce Willis in Die Hard looks like she entered every scene from the set of a small-town community playhouse. Oh, and she gets a deathbed scene so full of corn, it’s a real bumper crop. There should be a trail of it following her into the cemetery.
There are several moments that mimic other, better movies—a “railroad tracks” scene set to a retro tune that recalls Stand By Me, slo-mo slugfest batting a la The Natural. Church-going folks may flock to The Hill, but more discriminating movie fans can find a (sand)lot of better baseball movies to love.
A chapter from ‘Dracula’ takes wing with a lean, mean monster out for blood on the high seas
The Last Voyage of the Demeter Starring Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham & David Dastmalchain Directed by André Øvredal Rated R
In theaters Friday, Aug. 18
Everyone’s favorite vampire is back on the big screen, and this time the count is down for some real dirty work.
Dracula, the title character of British author Bram Stoker’s classic Gothic tale about the aristocratic Romanian blood sucker, has fed the voracious appetites of pop culture for more than a century, appearing in some 200 films. One of the first, director Max Schreck’s iconic German silent film Nosferatu, spooked audiences in 1922; one of the most recent, the campy Renfeld earlier this year, featured Nicholas Cage sporting the familiar fangs.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter is based on a single chapter from Stoker’s Dracula, about how Drac made the fateful hop from the European mainland to London in the late 1800s by hitching a ride on the schooner Demeter. Things didn’t end well for the Demeter, as we learn on a dark and stormy night (of course!) at the very beginning of the movie.
The recovery of the captain’s day-to-day log unspools the story; think of it as the original Vampire Diaries, detailing how Dracula got onto the ship (sneaky!), lurked in the shadows and then wrecked all kinds of hellish havoc every night after the sun went down. If you think of Dracula as a dapper, seductive, cape-draped gentleman aristrocrat—as embodied cinematically by Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee—well, get ready for a reset. This Drac is a real monster, a lean, mean, gargoyle-like winged creature with a mouthful of spiked teeth and a thirst that can only be quenched with blood. No neck is safe when he’s around. He’s not an animal, exactly, but not human, either. He’s referred to as one point as a “thing that wears the skin of a man.” If you need some new fodder for your nightmares, here it is.
The captain and the crew, we find out, were slow to catch on when they on-boarded a shipment of big wooden (coffin-like) crates in Bulgaria. When things start to get messy on the Demeter, in the middle of the Mediterranean, terrible things begin to happen, they cast about for explanations. Maybe it’s God’s wrath for their sins; perhaps it’s the bad luck, or curse, of having a woman—a female “stowaway”—on board. It’s 45 minutes into the movie before anyone even brings up Dracula’s name; this is one of those movies where the audience knows long before the characters figure it out. Maybe the captain and crew should have paid more attention to all those ominous crates embossed with the crest of a snarling dragon—and, I swear, with what looks like a big, capital “D” smeared on the sides.
Norwegian director André Øvredalleans into the mood of the story—dark, dangerous and deadly—that makes the most of its soggy setting. The Demeter is damp, cramped and claustrophobic, with old wood, scampering rats and working conditions that would never pass an OSHA inspection. But to the sailors, it’s home, and now they have an uninvited guest threatening to turn their ship into a sarcophagus. It’s not the kind of place you’d want to be with a vampire on the loose, especially when Drac gets down to business. Even kids, dogs and other animals aren’t safe. This Dracula is a carnivore who doesn’t care where the next meaty meal comes from.
Captain (Liam Cunningham) and crew (Chris Walley and Corey Hawkins) size up the terrifying situation in ‘The Last Voyage of the Demeter.’
Corey Hawkins (from TV’s The Walking Dead and 24: Legacy) leads the cast as the ship’s Cambridge-educated man of reason. Irish actor Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones) plays the seasoned, ready-to-retire captain; David Dastmalchian is his dependable first mate. Aisling Franciosi (also Game of Thrones) plays a Romanian girl already very familiar with the “thing” now threatening everyone onboard. Dracula is portrayed by Javier Botet, a Spanish actor who’s apparently found his niche playing creatures in horror films and creature features, including Slender Man, Crimson Peak, and Conjuring and Insidious flicks.
If you’re not a Dracula buff, in general, you might not want to board this salty slog of a rampaging monster romp. But fans of the character, grown from seeds planted 120 years ago, might find it an interesting addition to the ever-expanding movie canon of the undead’s OG.
It’s a scarifying creature feature that gets grimmer, gorier, bloodier and more violent as it sails along, with the body count rising and the crew winnowed down, one by one, to a handful of desperate survivors who must make a fateful decision. (And you might have thought your Carnival Cruise went badly.) It’s basically a little B-movie about the big D, perhaps the most dependably deplorable monster in monster lore. Dracula keeps coming back, and you can never count out the count.
And as this ill-fated sea cruise reminds us, there’s still plenty of life left in this ol’ bat.
Disney’s haunted-house redo is haunted by movie ghosts of another park attraction
Rosario Dawson, Tiffany Haddish, LaKeith Stanfield & Owen Wilson size up the spooks.
Haunted Mansion Starring LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson & Tiffany Haddish Directed by Justin Simien PG-13
In theaters Friday, July 28
You’ve heard that old saying, “If at first you don’t succeed, try again.”
Disney’s initial attempt at turning its iconic haunted-house attraction into a movie, back in 2003, was a flop, especially with critics. Now the House of Mouse is trying, trying again, with a fresh take and a new cast.
But not new enough or fresh enough.
The new Haunted Mansion may delight some Disney fans, with its “ghostly” FX that dutifully replicates many of the giggly goosebumps of the actual Disney attraction. There are rooms that “stretch,” goofy-ghoul portraits, a ballroom of waltzing spirits, a cemetery a-swirl with specters, an ominous suit of armor, and the Hatbox Ghost, a fan-favorite cadaver from the ride. (Look him up Disney.fandom.com. He’s got quite a story.)
But this movie lives in kind of cinematic netherworld, too goofy to be truly scary and too ridiculously, rampantly cheesy to be truly funny, or fun. It’s good for a few chuckles (thanks mostly to the script, by Parks and Rec ace writer Katie Leopold, which gives Tiffany Haddish some nice nuggets). But most of the humor is forced, flat, rote and predictable, mired in a gooey, sentimental subplot that feels completely at odds with the sense of untethered, otherworldly escapism on which it’s so clearly, obviously based.
The cast is game and leans heavily into the hammy premise of how they all came to be together in a creaky old house awash in pesky paranormal activity on the outskirts of New Orleans. LaKeith Stanfield is a man of science grieving his late wife; Owen Wilson plays a priest; Tiffany Haddish is a local psychic with great Yelp reviews; Danny DeVito chews the scenery as an eccentric historian steeped in supernatural lore. Rosario Dawson is a young-professional mom with a preteen son (newcomer Chase W. Dillon, who seems to be channeling the late child actor Gary Coleman from Diff’rent Strokes).
The characters find out that, if they try to leave the mansion, the pesky ghosts will follow them home, or wherever they go. Disney buffs will recall that’s just what visitors to the attraction are warned will happen as they exit the ride.
The house is haunted by a pantheon of out-of-control spirits, including a ghost medium (Jamie Lee Curtis), and Jared Leto brings the Hatbox Ghost back from the crypt.
Jamie Lee Curtis as Madame Leota
Acclaimed movie maestro Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water, Pan’s Labyrinth, Nightmare Alley) initially wanted to make this movie, or at least write its screenplay. But shakeups at Disney shook him out of the project and ushered in Justin Simien, whose previous experience includes the TV series Dear White People and the satirical horror comedy Bad Hair. With del Toro at the helm, Haunted Mansion would have certainly been a different movie—and likely a much better one.
The overstuffed, hyper comedic mayhem gets even more overcrowded with familiar-face cameos from Dan Levy and Winona Rider (as tour guides), and Marilu Henner as a tourist. Time your movie bathroom break wrong and you’ll miss ‘em. Rider’s teeny role is likely a nod to another haunted-house movie, Beetlejuice, in which she starred in 2008, when she was 17.
But this Haunted Mansion is no Beetlejuice. Heck, it’s not even its predecessor, the previous Haunted Mansion (actually, The Haunted Mansion), which at least had the manic movie-star mojo of Eddie Murphy. And it’s no Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney’s 2003 live-action version of another of its popular park attractions, which went on to be a global box-office blockbuster of a franchise. This is another misfire, another Disney dud that feels like an under-performer, despite the work and intentions that went into it.
A houseful of ghosts, once again, turns out to be no match for boatloads of buccaneers.
The brainy blockbuster ‘Oppenheimer’ is a big, beautiful must-see about the man who made the device that ended World War II—and created the grim specter of global destruction
Oppenheimer Starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon & Robert Downey Jr. Directed by Christopher Nolan Rated R
In theaters Friday, July 21
It opens with a screen that tells us about Prometheus, the Greek god who “stole fire from the gods and gave it to men.” His fellow Olympians weren’t too happy with him, and they sentenced Prometheus to spend eternity in torment, shackled to a volcano.
Oppenheimer is based on the book American Prometheus, about Robert J. Oppenheimer, the New York-born theoretical physicist who led America’s Manhattan Project, the top-secret “think tank” that created the atomic bombs dropped in on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan in August 1945. The bombs effectively ended World War II, but also created the grim specter of nuclear war as a reality, one that could—theoretically—lead to the destruction and doom of the entire planet.
Director Christopher Nolan’s grandiose, magnum opus of a historical biopic depicts Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) as a tortured, sometimes arrogant genius, wrestling with the wide-reaching global implications of what he’s doing, and later, with what he’s done. Like Prometheus, he harnessed the fire of the cosmos—splitting subatomic particles and unleashing the deadly “fire” power of a thermonuclear device—and was then pilloried for it, with accusations that he was a traitor, a spy, a Commie.
It’s a dense drama, powerful and potent, about a loaded moment in time at the intersection of politics, science, discovery, history, human emotion, psychodrama, creation and destruction, chain reactions and ethics, all swirling like protons and neutrons around something no one had ever done, or witnessed, before. It’s a cinch for year-end awards nominations, likely even some Oscars. Yes, it’s that good.
Cillian Murphy and Matt Damon
The all-star cast is outstanding, with everyone playing someone from real life, from Matt Damon as the hawkish Leslie Groves, the U.S. Air Force general who built the Pentagon and was chosen to oversee Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, to Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife—whose former ties to the Communist Party become a major, troublesome part of her husband’s trajectory from the classroom to the world stage. Robert Downey Jr. is a major part of the story as Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission. There’s Florence Pugh, Oppy’s Communist lover, and Casey Affleck as the military intelligence officer who commands the Allied forces during the war. Matthew Modine plays a scientist doing high-ranking R&D for America’s war machine. Kenneth Branagh is the Danish physicist Niels Bhor, and Tom Conti plays Albert Einstein.
But everything hinges on Oppenheimer, the central character in almost every scene. Murphy, an Irish actor who’s also appeared in Batman Begins and Inception, plus the British hit TV series Peaky Blinders, gives a stunning, career-high performance, conveying the inner turmoil, passionate convictions and strong opinions of the man tasked with making a device that would weaponize the science on which he had dedicated his life. Oppenheimer’s bombs ended the fighting and brought peace to a war that had been raging across the globe for six years. But what would be the cost to him, and to the world?
Director Nolan (who also wrote the screenplay and produced) is perhaps Hollywood’s leading movie maestro, known for his densely layered, often complex dramas and intense character studies across multiple genres, including a trio of acclaimed Batman blockbusters starring Christian Bale, the mind-bending Inception, Tenet and Memento, the gripping, innovative war drama Dunkirk, and the far-out space-travel drama Interstellar. He knows better than almost anyone how to make blockbusters with brains, and Oppenheimer is queued up to be one of the most intensely brainy, monumentally majestic, stylistically soaring blockbusters of the year.
And the “test” of Oppenheimer’s nuclear device, at Los Alamos in the American desert, is as gripping, jaw-droppingly dramatic and visually stunning as almost anything you’ve ever experienced at any movie, ever.
With booming, atmospheric sound design, lavish visuals, probing questions about the role of science in the world, and a dive into the mysteries of the universe and our place in it, Oppenheimer enters the race as one of the year’s most impressive, important films. I won’t even take away any points for its nearly three-hour running time. It takes a big movie to tell about history’s biggest bang. And Oppenheimer is big, beautiful and absolutely a must-see.
The Media Tourist 