The Media Tourist

This screeching Christmas turkey is a bombastic holiday-flick misfire

Red One
Starring Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans & J.K. Simmons
Directed by Jake Kasden
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, Nov. 15

Ah, the heartwarming glow of classic Christmas movies! Jimmy Stewart hugging his family and thankful for his friends as Clarence the angel gets his wings… Buddy the Elf convincing New Yorkers to believe as Santa’s sleigh zooms over Central Park… The awesomeness of Miracle on 34^th Street.

And then there’s this, the muck-fest that is Red One, a bombastic holiday-flick misfire that looks like the big-screen equivalent of an especially hideous ugly Christmas sweater, garishly pieced together with a barrage of CGI, forced “buddy comedy” banter and a bizarro collection of frightening sights. It’s a big ho-ho-ho no thanks, a grossly overstuffed Christmas stocking of charmless Yule-adjacent mayhem with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson fighting a giant hag, slamming around hulking snowmen brutes, and getting into a slapping contest with a sneering, goat-faced Nordic Krampus. Oh yeah, and there’s also Santa, ripped from pumping iron, counting carbs, hydrating and running the North Pole like a five-star-general and superstar CEO in charge of a global toy-centric military-industrial complex.  

When Santa, code-named Red One, gets kidnapped, his chief of security, Callum Drift (Johnson) swings into action to find him before a beautiful witch (Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka) can sap his St. Nick life force, using it to imprison and punish everyone who’s ever been on the fabled “naughty list.” Somehow J.K. Simmons got hauled in to play Santa; I kept wishing he’d bark “Not my tempo!” to some hapless kid tapping on his Christmas drum kit. Chris Evans (Captain America in the Marvel-verse) is a mercenary hacker whose shady connections are to blame for the abduction—and who, of course, becomes essential to the Santa search, after, that is, he’s done swiping lollipops from kids, leering at bikini babes on a beach and lusting for a Wonder Woman toy that can be zapped life-size by Drift’s do-dad wrist thingy.

How awful is it all? There are toothless ogres, snarling hellhounds, unsightly elves, heaving steampunk machines, a haunted piano and a dismal Gothic castle where rowdy revelers look like grotesque, rubber-masked drunken rejects from the Star Wars cantina. A snowman’s face gets melted when it’s smushed onto a sizzling grill, like something you might expect to see in a movie like Goodfellas. There’s a smattering of swearing, including an f-bomb that gets diffused at the last millisecond. The whole movie takes place in a kind of alt universe where storybook creatures really exist, which is why the Headless Horseman is rounded up as one of the “usual suspects” after Santa goes missing. If you want to give your little one a nightmare for Christmas, here you go.

Bonnie Hunt seems like she’s in another movie entirely as Mrs. Claus. Lucy Liu practically phones it in in for her scenes as the head of mythological creatures. (So, hey, where’s Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman when you really need ‘em?) Actor/comedian Nick Kroll is a crime-syndicate middleman who gets possessed, Exorcist-style.  Ah, that cozy Christmas charm.

Red One is an Amazon production, originally intended as first of a franchise (oh, dear). Amazon, you know, where you order stuff—like Hot Wheels toy cars, a Monopoly board game and Mattel’s Rock Em Sock Em Robots, which all feature prominently in the plot. Director Jake Kasden’s previous movies include Sex Tape, Bad Teacher and a pair of Jumanji remakes. Screenwriter and producer Chris Morgan was behind the Fast & Furious franchise, Bird Box and Shazam! Fury of the Gods. It’s like they siphoned off glops of those flicks to pour into this one, slopped in a dash of expired eggnog, ran up the production price tag to a gollywhopping $250 million, and then bid all a good night.

The sentimentality is forced, the action muddled and the whole affair grim, void of mirth, bereft of comfort and joy, and with only the slightest smudgy smidge of anything you might even loosely call the spirit of Christmas.  “Haven’t you had enough?” asks one character in the middle of yet another CGI smackdown. After two hours of watching this screeching Christmas turkey flop and flounder around on an IMAX screen, I certainly had.

—Neil Pond

Hooligan kids show a small town the real meaning of Christmas in this holiday yarn with a Sunday School spin

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
Starring Judy Greer and Pete Holmes
Directed by Dallas Jenkins
Rated PG

In theaters Friday, Nov. 9

Based on a Christmas yarn first published in McCall’s magazine in the ‘70s—and later made into a novel—this holiday tale is about a group of unruly, wrong-side-of-the-tracks kids who infiltrate their small town’s nativity play, ultimately showing everyone the real reason for the season.

The ever-versatile Judy Greer is the mom who steps into the fray to direct the wobbly production; standup comedian and actor Pete Holmes plays her helpful husband. The disruptive kids are six scrappy little-rascal siblings regarded as the local bullies, troublemakers and fire-starters. They may not know all the details of Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus, but they dive into the play anyway, motivated by finding out the church provides snacks.

The result: A unique spin on a familiar old story.

Director Dallas Jenkins—whose crowd-funded life-of-Jesus series, The Chosen, is in its fourth season—puts a Sunday School spin on the shenanigans, blending kid-zone humor with a more serious theme about how Christmas is for everyone, including bullies and troublemakers, and how Jesus was all about the poor, the outcast and the marginalized. The movie tells us the town’s longstanding Christmas pageant, now celebrating its 75^th year, had become overly familiar and cookie-cutter predictable, in need of a shakeup and a makeover—suggesting that even faithful churchgoers can sometimes get stuck in a rut and would benefit from a good goosing.

In a couple of scenes we see where the wayward siblings live, in a scrappy house that’s basically a shack, pretty much raising themselves. It’s a not-so-subtle reminder of the humble circumstances described the familiar story of the birth of the Christ child—away in a manger, no crib for a bed, indeed.

The film’s marketing campaign is clearly targeting traditional Christian believers…and any adolescents who might think hearing someone say “butt” or “pussy willow” is tee-hee hilarious. It’s an earnest, sermonizing B-movie that so wants to be another Christmas “classic,” specifically A Christmas Story—from which it borrows some of its retro mojo, including its narration by the now-grown-up version of one of the kids (in this case, former Gilmore Girl Lauren Graham). And maybe it’s just coincidence, but one of the li’l disruptors (Matthew Lamb) looks a lot like bespectacled, fair-haired Ralphie from A Christmas Story.

So, it’s a Christmas story that wants to be A Christmas Story. But it’s more straightforward about the meaning of Christmas—to Christians, anyway—and not Bumpis hounds, leg lamps, turkey leftovers or the risks of shooting an eye out with a BB gun. And it does prod viewers to re-think the origin story central to the Christian faith by seeing it unfold from a new perspective—with a shrieking angel, wise men lugging a cooked ham and a cigar-smoking teenage Mary back-slapping her babydoll, in case infant Jesu is a bit gassy.  

Joy (burp!) to the world, y’all!

—Neil Pond

Hugh Grant is terrifying in his horror-movie debut as a religion-obsessed nutjob

Heretic
Starring Hugh Grant, Chloe East & Sophie Thatcher
Directed by Scott Black & Bryan Woods
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Nov. 8

A pair of earnest young Mormon missionaries gets converted to terror when they come across a strange man who tries to malevolently dismantle their faith. Hugh Grant is a horror-show hoot as the suave psychopath who traps them in a fateful game of choices, setting up a series of diabolical challenges and methodically deconstructing almost everything they once believed as truth.

A24, the studio that brought us such superb freakouts as Men, Lamb, Hereditary, Midsommar and The Witch, delivers another mind-warping detour into something unfathomably unsettling as Grant’s character—known as Mr. Reed—reveals himself as a culturally literate, religion-obsessed psychopath, trying to lead the women to “the one true religion.” And those two missionaries clearly aren’t the first to get caught in his lair…

The unsuspecting proselytizers—both of whom turn out to be more resourceful that they initially seem— are aptly played by Chole East (she was the teen crush in The Fablemans) and Sophie Thatcher (from TV’s Yellowjackets). Grant, of course, is British romcom royalty (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Sense and Sensibility, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Notting Hill), and now a new ringmaster of creepiness.  This is his first bona fide horror flick (no, I’m not counting The Lair of the White Worm, back in 1988), and he kills it as Reed’s suave, smooth, mild-mannered monstrousness unfolds with stabs of highly erudite Brit-wit humor.

Heretic is an intellectually prickly maze of a movie; its tagline is “Question Everything”— like the wooden tabletop puzzle box that hints that what we’re witnessing might be, indeed, manipulation and trickery on an even cosmic scale. The word itself stems from heresy, which means opinions contrary to orthodox religious thought. Organized religion has always looked unfavorably on heresy and heretics, which undermine the “truths” and tenets on which cathedrals, temples and mosques—and empires—are built.

The film not only dissects and dissembles religion, but takes on human existence itself, mixing in ponderables about time, prayer, prophecy, polygamy, psychology, afterlife, miracles, choices, control, board games, hope and how ideas, ideologies and even music are all just “iterations” of things that came before. (Radiohead, Lana Del Rey and Air Supply, here’s looking at you.) How do condoms, porn, Mormon “magic underwear,” butterflies and blueberry pie all figure into the plot?

You’ll find out in this impressively heady “haunted house” movie, which nods to some classic tropes while shaping everything into its own psychologically twisty Mobius Strip, where knowledge only leads to more questions. “The more you know, the less you know” Reed tells the missionaries—and believe me, that’s no comfort for them to hear.

I don’t want to spoil the surprises of Heretic, so maybe the less you know is the way to go. It’s a hellishly wild plunge into raging, slow-burn craziness—and a parable for our current age of misinformation, mistruths and outright lies in high places. There’s some spurting blood and a bit of viscera, yes, but it’s certainly no Saw; it’s smarter and more deviously disturbing than that. A white-knuckle ride that ratchets up the tension with every scene, minute by minute, it’s like a theology master class taught by a madman. It will get under your skin and into your head and stay there after it’s over.

And now, if you ever knock on a door and Hugh Grant answers, with the scent of blueberry pie wafting through the house, you might want to think twice about coming inside.

—Neil Pond

A brutal Mexican cartel boss wants to leave his old life behind—and become a trans woman—in this vibrantly saucy movie musical.

Émilia Perez
Starring  Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón & Selena Gomez
Directed by Jacques Audiard
R

In limited theaters Friday, Nov. 1 (streaming on Netflix Nov. 13)

A fearsome Mexican cartel leader secretly longs to become a woman. A lawyer is stuck in a dead-end job prosecuting mobsters in a system totally rigged to get them off the hook. How can they help each other out?

In this vibrantly bold tale of self-identity, change, atonement and family, Zoe Saldaña (taking a break from the sky-high sci-fi worlds of Avatar and Guardians of the Galaxy) is a hardworking junior attorney who gets an offer she can’t refuse, promised unfathomable riches to help the notorious kingpin find his “real life” and leave the old one behind. Soon the legal eagle is flying all over the world to find a surgeon who’ll do the job, keep his mouth shut, and keep everything hidden from Manitas Del Monte’s wife and kids—and his old enemies.

In a bravura performance that’s already getting Oscar Best Actress buzz, real-life openly trans Spanish actress Karla Sofia Gascón plays the cartel boss as well as the transgendered woman, Émilia Perez, he exuberantly becomes. The lawyer spreads the coverup, that that the crime lord is dead. Of course, that’s not much of a stretch, in his line of work, and his wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez, below, sizzling with secrets and hidden desires of her own, gets shuttled off for her “safety” to snowy Switzerland.

But the violence of Emilia’s former life comes home to roost when Emilia reenters the world of his wife and kids, who have no idea who she really is (and used to be), and Emilia begins to shelter Jessi and raise their children in the ruse of being their aunt.

Mexican cartels, a she who was a he, a horny kinda-ex-wife and a lawyer caught in the middle…and it’s a musical! In Spanish! Characters burst into song on the streets, in their homes, everywhere. Movie musicals, of course, are nothing new. But I’d wager a Swiss bank account full of ill-gained pesos (if I had one) that next month’s big-screen Wicked adaptation won’t have a number set in a gleaming sex-change clinic, with surgeons and patients merrily crooning about chondrolaryngoplasty—Adam’s apple reduction—and the process of turning a penis into a vagina. And you won’t hear Selena Gomez, on Only Murders in the Building, purring into a phone about an intimate part of her body that, ahem, still “aches” for a former lover. (Hint: It’s not her heart.)

It’s a boldly original, invigoratingly saucy spin on a dramatically charged story with a trio of superlative leads, intermingling elements that don’t often come together on a screen—kinda like Sicario meets Mrs. Doubtfire by way of La La Land. And as Emilia becomes an advocate for victims of cartel violence—that his male counterpart certainly helped perpetuate—the movie’s tone shifts into one of heroics and reparation, signaling another kind of “transition” entirely.

When the streets of Mexico fill with people proclaiming Emilia as a sort of national icon, you can understand why—even if you don’t break into song about Adam’s apples, penises and vaginas.  

—Neil Pond

Fright-film followup expands its finely crafted creepiness into the world of a traumatized pop superstar

Smile 2
Starring Naomi Scott, Rosemarie Dewitt, Lukas Gage & Dylan Gelula
Directed by Parker Finn
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Oct. 18

A pop superstar begins having terrifying visions as she mounts an ambitious concert tour. Is she losing her mind, having alarming flashbacks from a troubled time in her life? Or is she infected by a vile demonic entity that feeds on human trauma?

If you saw the first Smile in 2022, you already know the answer. This masterfully nasty little house of horrors takes the premise of the first flick and lets it play out through a nightmarish new scenario with a troubling subtext about the high pressures—and high personal price—of fame.

As the singing superstar Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) tries to hold onto her sanity, she’s haunted by jarring memories of a horrific car crash—and freaked out by seeing people staring at her with crazed, malicious grins. Terrible things start happening around her, like the cokehead drug dealer (Euphoria’s Lukas Gage) who smashes his smiling face to a bloody pulp with a barbell weight.

It turns out the evil entity “replicates” people you know, and people you don’t, making you question reality before giving you a lethal “smile” of your own.

You never know what’s going to happen next, what’s lurking in the darkness, or when that evil grin is going to reappear. But when it does, it’s bad news. The movie mixes bloody shocks and “body horror” with the idea that witnessing, or experiencing, awful things can leave lasting impressions in your grey matter. It’s no wonder one of Skye’s hit songs is “I Want a New Brain.”

Returning director Parker Finn does another fine job of diving into the crazy swirl of this shock-filled disturbia spiked with jolting violence, jarring jump scares and the constant low hum of unbridled dread. More than once, we hear a character say, “This is f*cked up!” Indeed it is, in the way that well-crafted scary movies can really get under your skin.

Veteran actress Rosemary DeWitt plays Skye’s drill-sergeant stage mom, setting the stage for Scream 2’s return to the monstrous “mommy issues” of its predecessor. Drew Barrymore’s cameo, as the host of her real-life TV show on which Skye appears as a guest, might make you remember her breakthrough role in Scream in 1996, which is credited with revitalizing the horror-movie genre. Dylan Gelula had a freaky nocturnal encounter with Nicholas Cage in the mind-bending Dream Scenario.

But it’s Naomi Scott who channels all the horror in the mad, mad world in which her character finds herself trapped, dealing with her own toxic traumas. You may have seen the British actress singing and co-starring as Princess Jasmine alongside Will Smith in the Disney live-action remake of Aladdin back in 2019. She totally crushes her role here as a another kind of princess, a pop idol, playing stadium shows and trying to hold it together while her world tips upside down, inside out and out of control. (The movie does a great job of adding an even higher level of queasy creepiness to the often-uncomfortable encounters celebrities have with deep-dish fans.)

The movie kinda jumps the shark at the end, when it goes all-out for gross-out. But it introduces us to a new scream queen, once a Disney princess, and it reminds me of a song—the Temptations’ hit of 1971, “Smiling Faces,” in which the Motown group cautions listeners that smiling faces can mask lies. But the group probably didn’t know that, a half century later, unnerving grins can also mess you up for life…or what’s about to be left of it.

—Neil Pond

Powerful documentary about the man who embodied the iconic comic book hero in the ’70s, the tragedy that left him paralyzed, and how it made him a superhero anew

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
Starring Christopher Reeve
Directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui
Unrated

In theaters soon

Handsome New York actor Christopher Reeve was a virtual unknown when Superman made him a movie megastar in 1978, re-introducing the iconic superhero with a grand cinematic splash to a new generation. Now this emotionally impactful documentary spotlights Reeve’s rocket ride into almost overnight fame at the age of 23, the enduring legacy of his role as the “Man of Steel” in three sequels, and when a tragic accident, less than two decades later, left him paralyzed from the neck down and altered the course of his life forever.

Breaking two vertebrae after being thrown from a horse in an equestrian event, Reeve would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, eventually relearning how to breathe and talk. But his story didn’t start and end with Superman, as he went on to become an undeterred advocate for disability rights, starting a foundation to raise awareness and pursue research on spinal cord injuries and paralysis.

The film’s narrative unfolds primarily through interviews with Reeve’s four now-adult children, archival footage and home movies, and conversations with his celebrity pals and the British model, Gae Exton, with whom he had a ten-year relationship before meeting and marrying his wife of 12 years, Dana. One of the most intriguing parts is the warts-and-all exploration of Reeve’s childhood in a fractured household, with an overbearing, aloof and absentee father and an absence of good examples.  

Perhaps you already know he was lifelong friends (and former roommates) with actor Robin Williams, who saw his own star rise in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The movie examines their durable relationship, and how Williams—known as a leading Hollywood funnyman—worked hard to uplift Reeve’s spirits after his debilitating injury. When his buddy was in the hospital after the accident in 1995, Williams came to visit, masking himself in surgical scrubs and schtick-ing it up as an overzealous Russian proctologist. Reeves couldn’t talk or even smile, but Williams swears he saw his blue eyes twinkle.

Reeve ultimately lost his battle with his battered body in 2004; in a cruel coda, wife Dana (a lifelong nonsmoker) succumbed to stage four lung cancer two years later. But the work of their Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation continues, driven by the passion of their children. Super/Man is a wide-arcing, soaring tribute to hope, drive, determination and dedication, and you’re a stronger, stiffer person than me if you can watch it through without feeling your eyes get a bit moist. And you’ll certainly come away with a new appreciation for an actor whose biggest feat, it turns out, wasn’t flying high up on the screen, but traveling here in the trenches of the real world, spreading a message of hope and dignity in his final role from a wheelchair, as another kind of superhero entirely.

—Neil Pond

Frances Ford Coppola’s spectacular movie mess is an overstuffed stew of past, present and future.

Megalopolis
Starring Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LeBeouf & Jon Voight
Directed by Frances Ford Coppola
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Sept. 27

This big, bloated mess-terpiece of a movie is a longtime passion project for director Frances Ford Coppola, a dreamscape of ideas he’s been stewing on for decades. Set in a near-future New York City now renamed New Rome—that looks like Manhattan dressed up for a big toga party—it’s about a crumbling American society and a visionary architect (Adam Driver) seeking to remake it into utopia. There are warring politicians, abusive cops, scheming dames, chariot races at Madison Square Garden and a mystery substance called Megalon that can repair flesh, help crippled dogs walk and make see-thru invisi-dresses. But can it create a whole new world?

Oh, and time can also be stopped, if you’ve got the mojo to do it.

It’s a lot to unpack, and it’s often wildly incomprehensible, an impenetrable cinematic chowder chock-full of ideas drawn from world history, old Hollywood, futuristic sci-fi, classic literature and modern turmoil. There’s the full “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Jon Voight dressed like Robin Hood and bragging about his erection, and Shia LeBeouf rocking a mega-mullet. Hey, is that Dustin Hoffman, Talia Shire (Coppola’s sister), Jason Schwartzman (Coppola’s nephew and Shire’s son), and singer-actress Grace Vanderwaal crooning in a swing at a vestal virgin auction? Yep, yep, yep and yep! Game of Thrones’ Nathalie Emmanuel wears a Red Riding Hood cloak and plays Driver’s love interest, Laurence Fishburne narrates in stately tones, and Aubrey Plaza is a horny gold-digger TV reporter named—I’m not kidding—Wow Platinum. Giancarlo Esposito—who has nearly 200 acting credits but is probably best known for Breaking Bad—is a mayor with a major secret. To boldface the movie’s preachy parallels to Rome collapsing from a mighty civilization into a fractured empire ruled by tyrants, characters are given names including Cesar, Cicero and Crassus. Just so we get it.

Massive colossus statues collapse under the sheer fatigue of world-weariness, sighing helpless and broken in the streets. A Russian satellite plummets downward on a collision course with Earth. Cars trail each other down dark, rain-soaked alleys. There’s a female body in the morgue marked Jane Doe, but who is she really? There are orgiastic parties, angry mobs and gladiators walloping each other in a three-ring circus maxiumus. An overheated sex scene is a prelude to an Ides of March-like confrontation in a steam room. In my notes from the screening, I wrote down “Caligula meets Chinatown.”

It’s impossible to miss the movie’s central themes—that America is headed down a path of self-inflicted destruction, and the world has always teetered back and forth between innovation and the status quo. With a fervent swirl of messaging about creating a better future, it’s a big, eye-popping, overstuffed spectacle, the director’s own sprawling, architectural concoction bridging past and present.

Coppola is one of the leading filmmakers of the 20^th century, an iconic director and producer who’s given us landmark movies like The Godfather and its sequel, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation. But he’s also put out some real stinkers, like Jack, Rumble Fish and Twixt. He swings big and sometimes knocks it out of the park. And sometimes he misses. Megalopolis will likely go down as another ambitious, super-showy, Megaloaded, all-over-the-place movie misfire.

But hey, Shia LaBeouf gets shot in the ass with two arrows—at least those hit their mark.

—Neil Pond

James McAvoy goes into full creep mode as a monster hiding behind a friendly face

Speak No Evil
Starring James McAvoy, McKenzie Davis, Aisling Franciosi & Scoot McNairy
Directed by James Thomas Watkins
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Sept. 13

James McAvoy is a very versatile actor who’s been in dozens of TV shows, plays and movies since the 1990s. But he seems to have a special knack for masked malevolence, like the creepiness and coiled, rip-roaring craziness of his characters in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split (2016) and its follow-up, Glass (2019). In this psychological horror thriller, he’s Paddy, a crudely boisterous Brit who lives off the grid in the scenic rural countryside, loves hunting and bemoans the conveniences and lifestyle choices of the modern world.

When Paddy and his wife, Ciari (Aisling Franciosi from Game of Thrones), meet a more refined, citified London couple, Louise (MacKenzie Davis, who starred in AMC’s Halt & Catch Fire) and her milquetoast husband Ben (Scoot McNairy), on a vacation in Italy, they all become tentative friends.  But something seems a bit off right from the start, and it starts feeling even more off after Paddy invites Ben, Louise and their preteen daughter (Alix West Lefler, who plays Genevieve on TV’s Fire Country) to visit them at his rural home.

Alix West Lefler, MacKenzie Davis & Scoot McNairy play a London family whose countryside holiday turns into a nightmare.

Paddy and Ciari also have a young child, a boy named Ant (newcomer Dan Hough) who is unable to communicate beyond moans and mumbles. Ant’s “condition”—and don’t worry, you’ll find out more about it—gives the movie its title. But it also refers to how Ben and Laura try to act polite and mannered and not complain, speaking no evil as their pastoral retreat starts to go off the rails, before Paddy’s mounting transgressions and bothersome behaviors build to shocking revelations and a bloody fight for their lives against a sadistic psychopath.

Director James Watkins certainly knows how to tighten down the screws in a horror movie, as he did in Eden Lake (2008) and The Woman in Black (2012). In this remake of a 2022 Danish film of the same title, he remains faithful to the devilish dread of the original but gives it some new violently nasty tweaks at the end, and that’s all I’ll tell you about that.

The movie is spiritual kin to Straw Dogs, Get Out, Funny Games and other flicks that use normalcy as the jumping-off spot before deep-diving into something much darker, disturbing and deviant. One of the things I liked about Speak No Evil is how it’s not a “slasher” flick; it’s more subtle than that. The terrors at its core worm their way into our awareness without a need to see them. That might disappoint some gorehounds, attracted to the film’s BlumHouse production banner, but just knowing—and leaving some details to the murky recesses of the imagination—is supremely unsettling and jarringly nerve-wracking.

Beneath its surface, it touches on toxic masculinity, marital discord, motherhood, feminine empowerment, lost childhood and parenting, with a modern-world nod to classic Old World fairy tales about the dangers lurking in deep forests full of trolls, witches and demons. And it’s certainly a cautionary tale about stranger danger—and the twisted intentions that might be hiding behind a friendly face.

And for sure, you’ll never again hear The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame” the same again after you hear it hijacked by Paddy, a monster whose initially friendly smile becomes a scowling grimace of unspeakable acts in a real house of horrors. Speak No Evil and James McAvoy work hard to get under your skin, and they certainly come through loud and clear.

—Neil Pond

Michael Keaton returns as the ghost with the most in Tim Burton’s majestically gonzo encore of the hereafter

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Starring Michael Keaton, Winona Rider, Catherine O’Hara & Jenna Ortega
Rated PG-13
Directed by Tim Burton

In theaters Sept. 6, 2024

After just a tad over 35 years, the ‘Juice is again on the loose.

Michael Keaton is back and doubling down on his memorable role as moviedom’s quippiest gross-out ghoul, while Winona Rider and Catherine O’Hara return as older versions of their characters from the first film and new additions (Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci) freshen things up with a new wrinkle or two.

And director Tim Burton also resurfaces for this majestically gonzo encore of the hereafter, a cinematic carnival ride festooned with quirky stop-action oddities, subversively dark humor and wildly unpredictable bursts of imagination. It’s like Pee-Wee Herman on a playdate with Edward Scissorhands in Dante’s Inferno. But the star of the show is clearly Keaton, as unhinged and untethered as he should be, the ghost with the most, a cadaver of cad, the lewd ladykiller slob from beyond still lookin’ for love.

And like Beetlejuice, Keaton is game for anything, throwing himself into the crazy comedic churn of a storyline that includes ghostly office drone workers with teeny shrunken heads, an RIP’d actor (Willem Dafoe) policing crime in the underworld, a soul-sucking spurned lover (Monica Bellucci), a jaded undead janitor (Danny DeVito) and a teen girl (Jenna Ortega) whose crush on the boy next door (Arthur Conte) gets her pulled into the afterlife. There’s a hustle-bustle subway to the great hereafter—the Soul Train—pulsing with disco, and a pull-out-the-stops grand finale to “McArthur Park” that out-wows even the original film’s “Banana Boat (Day-O)” scene for wonderful weirdness.

There’s a lot of connective tissue to the first film, both stylistically and thematically, with sight gags and throwback references to the original. Ortega, the star of two Scream flicks as well as the TV series Wednesday (the spinoff of The Addams Family), brings a full-circle generational spin to her role as the daughter of Rider’s Lydia Deetz, now working as a TV spiritualist. Absent: Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin, who played a ghostly couple central to the story back in 1988, as is Jeffrey Jones, whose conviction as a sex offender now keeps him mostly out of Hollywood’s spotlight—but whose former character nonetheless “appears” here in a couple of inventive workarounds.

But there’s so much going on, the no-shows are barely missed. And Monica Bellucci (above) gets the film’s hands-down best new-character entrance, as her seductive wraith Delores literally pulls (and staples) herself together after spending centuries with severed body parts scattered hither and yon. It’s perhaps Burton’s wry cinematic nod to the career of the multi-lingual Italian model-turned-actress, a journey made up of bit parts and odds and ends including portraying the bride of Dracula, Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, a rape victim in the controversial Irreversible, and the oldest “Bond girl” in the history of the franchise (Spectre). In the new Beetlejuice, she’s certainly the gal to die for—and as Beetlejuice remarks, she’s certainly looking very put-together.

And Tim Burton’s grand-guignol resurrection of the bawdy Beetlejuice puts together a new dose of movie moxie for a familiar franchise that’s already expanded into TV animation, videogames and a Broadway musical. It proudly unfurls its freak flag and lets it fly anew, a spooky-fun and retro-riffic way to spend 90-odd minutes with a spunky spirit who’s apparently still got a load of afterlife left.

—Neil Pond

Sebastian Stan has a face-off with himself in this wild-twist parable about people who “don’t belong”

A Different Man
Starring Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve & Adam Pearson
Directed by Aaron Schimberg
Rated R

In theaters Wed., Oct. 4

 A struggling actor with a disfigured face gets a miraculous second chance at life in this wild, inside-out parable about identity, self-awareness, longing to belong and our perceptions of beauty and ugliness. Sebastian Stan (so good in Pam & Tommy and I, Tonya) is center stage as Edward, a glum recluse whose advanced neurofibromatosis makes him look like The Elephant Man. He’s a shlumpy sad sack as he moves around New York City, shunning people, trying to be inconspicuous, wishing he could be invisible. But he perks up a bit to a new neighbor, Ingrid, an aspiring playwright (Norway’s Renate Reinsve) who seems to “see” him as a person, not as a freak.

An experimental medical procedure offers a possible cure for Edward’s condition, and his face soon starts to peel off in goopy clumps. And as it does, voila—underneath is something crazy: a “normal” face, and an exceptionally handsome one at that. Edward becomes a different man entirely, taking a new name, Guy, burying his painful past and reveling in his dashing new looks as he becomes a hotshot New York real estate broker. His coworkers celebrate his success, admitting that he’s a fine piece of “man candy.” At a bar, a young woman takes him into the bathroom and pulls down his pants for a quickie. Edward can’t believe how things have turned around.

But he keeps the latex mold—a mask—made by his doctor of his “former” face to gauge how his treatment was going. It’s a reminder of the person he used to be.

What happens next, well, it’s no Beauty and the Beast, although that folktale is certainly referenced, along with Cyrano de Bergerac, Woody Allen movies and an acclaimed book by Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, about a little Black girl who wishes for blue eyes to better fit in with the Caucasians around her. Edward, who also once anguished because he didn’t fit in, finds that the grass isn’t always greener (or bluer) on the other side, especially when he meets another man, Oswald (Adam Pearson), with the same facial disfigurement he once had.  (And that’s no makeup job on Pearson, a British actor who really does have neurofibromatosis and campaigns to prevent bullying of people with deformities.)

Unlike Edward the Elephant Man, Oswald is outgoing, glib, brimming with personality and self-confidence. He plays the saxophone and has a young daughter. Oswald has embraced his face and his life, and women swoon before him when he soulfully croons the Rose Royce hit “I Wanna Get Next to You” at a karaoke bar. And Edward/Guy can only watch in awe, and seethe with envy.

The film loops itself into a Möbius Strip of art imitating life and life imitating art when “Guy” and Oswald both compete to star in an off-Broadway play about Edward and his disfigurement. And guess what? It’s written and directed by Ingrid—who has no idea that “Guy” used to be Edward. In rehearsals, Guy wears his Edward mask, and Ingrid even wants him to put it on when they’re rooting and rutting around in the sack. Edward doesn’t know if she’s turned on by it, or just finds it freakishly funny.

As Edward’s frustration, jealosy and resentment build with Oswald, everything boils over into yet another reversal of fortune—and actor Michael Shannon pops up for a Christmas meal.

In an early scene, a rat plops out of a dark, dank hole in Edward’s ceiling, falling with a sloppy splash into a bucket of yukky water. Much later, in a new upscale apartment, “Guy” is repulsed to find a cockroach has dropped into his coffee. Rats and cockroaches, things that were once hidden, things that repulse us, have now come into plain view, like Edward after his “mask” comes off.

A Different Man gives you a lot to ponder, suggesting that we can change our masks—our faces—but we can’t change what’s underneath. It might be beautiful, but could also turn out to be beastly.

—Neil Pond