Good Efficient Butchery

MISS SLOANE
(France/US/UK - 2016)

Directed by John Madden. Written by Jonathan Perera. Cast: Jessica Chastain, Mark Strong, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alison Pill, Michael Stuhlbarg, John Lithgow, Sam Waterston, Jake Lacy, Christine Baranski, David Wilson Barnes, Chuck Shamata, Dylan Baker, Ennis Esmer, Raoul Bhaneja, Douglas Smith, Meghann Fahy, Lucy Owen, Michael Cram, Joe Pingue. (R, 132 mins)

A sort-of MICHAEL CLAYTON take on the gun control lobby, MISS SLOANE is fairly transparent end-of-the-year awards bait that works more often than it doesn't and serves as a reminder that movies for grown-ups used to not be such a rare commodity. The crammed story perhaps bites off more than it can chew yet still seems a little long running past the two-hour mark, and frequently seems like it could've been better served as an HBO or FX series. It also can't help but feel like Aaron Sorkin fan fiction, with debuting screenwriter Jonathan Perera slavishly devoted to the Sorkin style, from every line of dialogue sounding like an over-rehearsed proclamation to the presence of NEWSROOM co-stars Sam Waterston and Alison Pill to dubiously silly character names, though in fairness to Perera, neither "Rodolfo Schmidt" nor "Esme Manucharian" seem quite as improbable as Olivia Munn as THE NEWSROOM's chief financial reporter "Sloan Sabbith," though a point is made of Schmidt's middle name being "Vittorio." Though dealing with a topical subject matter, director John Madden (SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL) gives MISS SLOANE a '70s aesthetic in its matter-of-fact, Alan J. Pakula-esque presentation, right down to a clandestine meeting in a dimly-lit Washington, D.C. parking garage that's straight out of ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN.

Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain in icy and driven ZERO DARK THIRTY mode) is a top shark for a powerful D.C. lobbying firm run by George Dupont (Waterston). Dupont wants her to work with Bob Sandford (Chuck Shamata), a representative from an NRA-type organization looking to bring women aboard the pro-gun movement. Elizabeth derisively dismisses the idea, with everyone wrongfully assuming she lost a loved one in a mass shooting. Her rationale is simple: she has the skills and the power plays to sell anything on Capitol Hill, but pushing to make gun access easier is where she draws the line and grows a conscience. She quits Dupont's firm in protest and joins a smaller outfit owned by Rodolfo Schmidt (Mark Strong) that's backing a mandatory background check bill that Dupont and his new top gun Pat Connors (Michael Stuhlbarg) are working to help Sandford shut down. Elizabeth pulls out every trick in the book, putting the cause before all else, including outing colleague Esme Manucharian (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) as a survivor of a high school massacre 20 years ago, something Esme has kept buried from everyone except Schmidt. As Elizabeth's former colleagues--Dupont, Connors, and Jane Molloy (Pill)--plot her downfall with a forgotten incident in her past involving paying for a congressman's overseas trip as part of a lobby for palm oil tariffs (way too much time spent on that scintillating subject), Miss Sloane sets her own plan in motion that exemplifies her core philosophy: play your trump card right after they play theirs and make sure you surprise them.

Chastain commits to the character even as Perera's script has her go through all the predictable arcs. We learn little about Miss Sloane as a person other than she's a loner who doesn't relate to people, thinks only of her work, abuses prescription pills, and frequently enlists the services of male escorts when she needs a release or to "fantasize about the life I didn't want." When her usual appointment skips town, she meets his replacement Forde (Jake Lacy), and it's all business until he starts to sense real feelings in her, and she of course shuts down and sends him away, her illusion of emotionless isolation shattered. You see moments like this coming, and others like the desk-clearing fit of rage when her back's against the wall, the opposition is beating her, and she's questioning her entire career. Told mostly in a series of flashbacks as Elizabeth is testifying before a Congressional hearing overseen by a vindictive senator (John Lithgow) and not following her attorney's (David Wilson Barnes) advice and invoking the Fifth, MISS SLOANE sometimes suffers from its characters giving speeches in lieu of having actual, real-life conversations, but it does a mostly commendable job of replicating an "issues" movie from back in the day, fused with the least grating tendencies of its obvious inspiration in Aaron Sorkin. Madden and Perera succeed in making it less about taking sides on the gun issue and more about the characters while keeping the preachy, hectoring sanctimony (like, everything that ever came out of the mouth of Jeff Daniels' Will McAvoy on THE NEWSROOM) that's often Sorkin's Achilles heel, to a minimum.

END OF A GUN
(US - 2016)

Only Steven Seagal could star in seven movies in one year and still be the laziest actor alive while still finding time to secure Russian citizenship from his BFF Vladimir Putin. Two Seagals have been released on DVD/Blu-ray in the last week, along with a third (CONTRACT TO KILL) hitting VOD. END OF A GUN is a rarity for present-day Seagal in that, while he's doubled in some fight scenes by his more svelte stuntman being shot from the neck down as bad guys just walk into him and get knocked on their ass, his character is actually in the whole movie and doesn't take the customary mid-film sabbatical where the star vanishes for 25 minutes of screen time. While Seagal is capable of colorful supporting turns (he did a nice job in as a cranky loan shark in the indie GUTSHOT STRAIGHT), he pretty much stopped giving a shit years ago. END OF A GUN is another one of his Romania walk-throughs, mumbling his dialogue in a barely audible whisper and keepin' it real by wheezing terms like "ho"'s and "y'all muh-fuckaz." Seagal is Michael Decker, a undercover DEA agent in Paris (of course, the city is played by Bucharest with repeated time-lapse stock footage shots of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe) who saves stripper Lisa (Jade Ewen) from a beating by a shitbag club manager, who pulls a gun on Decker and promptly gets shot in the head for his trouble. A grateful Lisa lets Decker in on her plan to steal $2 million from the trunk of a car being stored in a parking garage. The car belongs to the dead club manager's criminal boss Gage (Florin Piersic Jr.), who works for Vargas, a Texas-based meth lord who Decker's been trying to bust for years (so why is he in Paris?). Decker finds himself falling for Lisa and is forced to take action when she's kidnapped by Gage and his goons, as Gage understandably wants his money back. I probably don't even need to point out that all of this will lead to a climactic shootout at an abandoned warehouse.

Director/co-writer Keoni Waxman has helmed some of the (relatively speaking) better latter-day Seagal vehicles, like 2010's surprisingly solid A DANGEROUS MAN. But Waxman seems to have given up trying to get anything out of his star. Seagal is totally sleepwalking through this, which is a shame, because Waxman approaches this not like a Seagal shoot 'em up with some bits of what passes for the star doing Aikido (though it ends up there), but rather, a heist thriller with distinctly Steven Soderbergh/OCEAN'S ELEVEN touches. There's a bouncy jazz score, multiple characters followed via split-screen, and even a couple of half-hearted attempts at the kind of non-linear editing that Soderbergh famously used in OUT OF SIGHT and THE LIMEY. Waxman doesn't necessarily pull it off, mainly because he's not very gifted, the story's not that interesting, and his lead actor's range is somewhere between Mushmouth and Mannequin Challenge. But Waxman is at least trying to make something out of nothing, though perhaps he could explain why Vargas is always shot from behind and with a dubbed voice, deliberately hiding his face as if putting the pieces in play for a big reveal that never comes. Piersic plays a stock Eurotrash villain but he puts forth some effort, and the stunning Ewen is a gorgeous femme fatale, so everyone seems at least somewhat invested in this except the star who simply can't be bothered to wake up. Man, remember ABOVE THE LAW and OUT FOR JUSTICE? Where did that guy go? (R, 87 mins)

THE PERFECT WEAPON
(US/UK - 2016)

Not to be confused with the 1989 martial arts actioner that served as the intro to Jeff Speakman's short-lived big-screen career, THE PERFECT WEAPON is set in the gloomy dystopia of America 2029. It's filled with rainy neon and sub-BLADE RUNNER cityscapes with the mandatory giant TV screens on the sides of skyscrapers. Here, Seagal is "The Director," the totalitarian overlord who rules this future world via surveillance and "conditioning" to control innate human weakness and emotion. Condor (Johnny Messner) is one of The Director's chief enforcers, a killing machine charged with taking out The Director's enemies, including a corrupt politico (Lance E. Nichols) plotting an insurrection. When Condor makes a heat-of-the-moment decision and chooses to not terminate a female witness to one of his hits, his handler Controller (Richard Tyson) is ordered by The Director to terminate him, as his innate humanity has made "reconditioning" impossible and he's simply outlived his usefulness. Going on the run after finding his presumed-dead-but-still-alive wife Nina (Sasha Jackson), Condor is branded a traitor to The Director and must deal with Controller as well as The Interrogator (an embalmed-looking Vernon Wells, best known as THE ROAD WARRIOR's Wez), the kind of sadist who puts out a cigar on Condor's chest ("That...was just foreplay!") and threatens to pay a visit to Nina while licking a razor blade and purring "I can be very persuasive."

Starting with Messner's wardrobe and shaven-headed appearance, it's obvious from the start that director/co-writer Titus Paar (a Swedish music video director who gives himself two supporting roles and is credited with "harsh vocals" on the metalcore closing credits tune) has fashioned THE PERFECT WEAPON as a blatant and very tardy HITMAN ripoff fused with every bleak future dystopia cliche you can imagine. Seagal, also an executive producer, puts in a few sporadic appearances, barely awake, visibly bored, mumbling nonsense and interacting with his co-stars as little as possible. The storyline is muddled and there's about five endings, and that's before a ridiculous last-shot twist that rather presumptuously leaves the door open for a sequel. Filled with endlessly recycled genre tropes, crummy CGI, and laughable dialogue (Controller, to The Interrogator, as he hold a razor blade to Condor's junk: "I won't have you slicing off his manhood for your own amusement!"), THE PERFECT WEAPON is cheap, lazy, and doesn't even try. In other words, it's everything you expect from 2016 Steven Seagal. (Unrated, 87 mins)

SOLACE
(US/Switzerland - 2016)

Directed by Afonso Poyart. Written by Sean Bailey and Ted Griffin. Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Colin Farrell, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Abbie Cornish, Marley Shelton, Xander Berkeley, Sharon Lawrence, Janine Turner, Matt Gerald, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Josh Close, Kenny Johnson, Luisa Moraes, Autumn Dial. (R, 101 mins)

Completed over three years ago and arriving at the end of 2016 as a Lionsgate VOD dumpjob sporting a 2014 copyright in the credits, SOLACE is the kind of high-concept serial killer thriller that was commonplace in multiplexes in the 1990s, at least until the barrage of CSI-inspired network TV procedurals stole their thunder. Even as recently as a few years ago, it would've seemed impossible to believe this kind of movie could be completely abandoned by its distributor (part of the reason for its delay was the bankruptcy of Relativity Media, who sold it to Lionsgate), especially with a cast headlined by several name actors. Even more surprising is that SOLACE's script, credited to producer Sean Bailey (TRON: LEGACY) and veteran screenwriter Ted Griffin (RAVENOUS, OCEAN'S ELEVEN, MATCHSTICK MEN), had been in development for so long that it was initially reworked by New Line Cinema to be a sequel to SE7EN for Morgan Freeman, titled--wait for it--EI8HT. The idea was flatly rejected by David Fincher, which put the whole project in turnaround. It was eventually dusted off and given further uncredited rewrites by James Vanderbilt (ZODIAC) and Peter Morgan (FROST/NIXON) before ending up in its current state as one of the silliest thrillers to come down the pike in some time.

After a string of murders where the victims are killed instantly by a long needle piercing their medulla oblongota, baffled FBI agent Joe Merriweather (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) resorts to a Hail Mary against the wishes of his skeptical partner Elizabeth Cowles (Abbie Cornish). He reaches out to retired colleague Dr. John Clancy (Anthony Hopkins), a former FBI consultant who's also a psychic who helped Merriweather crack a number of cases. Clancy has been living like a hermit since his daughter died of leukemia and his wife (Janine Turner) left him, but of course, he's drawn to the case because...it's what he does. All Clancy has to do is come into physical contact with a victim to deduce the circumstances surrounding their death, and he can even see an entire person's life--past and future--just by touching them. Why this guy isn't solving every crime everywhere is the real mystery. The agents always seem to be one step behind in their investigation and eventually, Clancy comes to realize that the killer, one Charles Ambrose (Colin Farrell), is a super-psychic whose powers surpass even his own. Clancy must devise a way to outwit Ambrose, whose targets are those who are terminally ill and don't yet realize it (a child with an undiagnosed brain tumor, a woman unaware that her adulterous, bisexual husband has given her HIV that will become AIDS), thereby justifying--in his eyes--his murders as acts of mercy to save the victims from future suffering.

SOLACE, which opens with an onscreen definition of the word "solace" because of course it does, plays like the pilot of what should be a CBS procedural about a psychic cop. It starts out intriguing enough, especially with the way that Hopkins relies on familiar elements of his Hannibal Lecter persona (variations on that inimitable "Claaaarice..." purr), only this time as a good guy. He does get to spit out one great "...getting all the way...to the F...B...I!" takedown of an incredulous Cowles, running through every sordid secret of her past and thus, finally convincing her that he's the real deal. But once director Afonso Poyart goes all in on the psychic battle of wits between Clancy and Ambrose, SOLACE just becomes one eye-rolling contrivance after another. The highlight of the film is the psychic car chase, with Cowles behind the wheel and Clancy riding shotgun, barking "Turn left now!" and "Turn right now!" and finally "Stop right here!" where they proceed to just wait until the guy their chasing passes them, to which Clancy barks "There! Go!" In at least his fourth dumb thriller to hit VOD this year (you almost certainly missed MISCONDUCT, BLACKWAY, and COLLIDE), Hopkins isn't even pretending to give a shit anymore, but even though the movies have become junk, he's one of the very few actors in his age group--he'll be 80 in 2017--who's still getting lead roles. Farrell doesn't turn up until a little past the one-hour mark, with his role requiring him to do little more than speak in ominous riddles with a wide-eyed glare (yes, he gets the obligatory "We're not so different, you and I" monologue) and strike occasional Jesus Christ poses in Clancy's psychic visions. SOLACE is an absolutely inessential movie but it's always watchable, even if it's only for a few unintended laughs. I mean, come on. That psychic car chase is like a live-action FAMILY GUY cutaway.

I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER
(Ireland/UK - 2016)

Based on the 2009 novel by Dan Wells, which led to five books thus far centered on protagonist John Wayne Cleaver, I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER is one of the best genre offerings of 2016, an eclectic mix of teen angst, detective story, and supernatural horror. John (Max Records, who's grown a bit since his first big role in 2009's WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE) lives in Clayton County in the rural outskirts of Minneapolis. It's a small industrial town where everyone knows everyone, and John is the weird, bullied outcast at school because his single mother April (Laura Fraser) owns and operates the funeral home which, whether it was nature or nurture, has had a profound impact on him. His therapist Dr. Neblin (Karl Geary) has diagnosed him as a sociopath, the school is concerned because he wrote a term paper about BTK serial killer Dennis Rader. John believes that he has the innate psychological capacity for serial killing, but he does things to keep his impulses in check. These include repeating a reassuring mantra, hanging out with his only friend Max (Raymond Brandstrom), because goofing off and playing video games makes him feel normal, and regularly chatting with and helping out friendly, elderly neighbor Bill Crowley (Christopher Lloyd). John's fascination with death leads to his investigating a series of brutal murders that have rocked the small community. The victims are found dead, often with vital organs missing. Eating lunch in the town's greasy spoon, John spots Crowley talking to a drifter and offering him a ride. Following them on his bike at a distance, John witnesses Crowley slaughter and disembowel the drifter, then removing several of his organs and appearing to eat them. There's an oil like residue left at all of the murder scenes, and as John follows Crowley as he claims other victims over the next several weeks, thus begins a game of cat-and-mouse, as John, fighting his own sociopathic impulses and desperately trying to be a good person, leaves a note on Crowley's windshield reading "I know what you are," but he really has no idea exactly what his seemingly normal neighbor really is.

An Irish-British co-production, directed and co-written by Irish Billy O'Brien and shot in Minnesota, I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER first and foremost establishes its starkly effective atmosphere with its gray color palette, overcast skies, and plumes of smoke and steam billowing from factories. Much like Italian filmmakers really nailing the seediness of NYC in their guerrilla-shot excursions of the early 1980s, O'Brien captures the midwestern dreariness in a way that only outsiders with different eyes sometimes can. With the lonely and isolated small-town atmosphere (John riding his bike around town accompanied by the song "On Your Side" by The Family Dog is maybe the best opening credits sequence of the year) and the teen angst despair, I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER manages to evoke memories of everything from PHANTASM to DONNIE DARKO. But it's not all downbeat navel-gazing, as there's some darkly funny touches throughout, like John following Crowley and his wife (Dee Noah) to a Chinese buffet and running into his mom and Dr. Neblin on a date. Records is terrific as John and Lloyd takes the best role he's had in years and just runs with it. A thoughtful, insightful, smart, and often terrifying genre-bending mash-up, I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER juggles a lot but keeps focus and emerges as an original piece of work that deserves all the cult movie glory it's going to get. (Unrated, 103 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

SHELLEY
(Denmark/France/Sweden - 2016)

There's a vividly Scandinavian chill in this horror film that looks like what might've hypothetically happened had Ingmar Bergman made ROSEMARY'S BABY. Married, well-to-do couple Louise (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and Kasper (Peter Christoffersen) live in a very remote and isolated cabin, largely off the grid and living off the land. They raise their own chickens, get water from a well, and eschew the modern benefits of things like TVs, computers, and even electricity. This is a jarring adjustment to Elena (Cosmina Stratan), a Romanian immigrant and single mother who left her child with her parents while she headed to other parts of Europe to find work. They've hired Elena to do housework and farming chores, as Kasper is often away and Louise is recovering from surgery after her most recent miscarriage. Louise and Kasper are both pushing 40 and have endured multiple miscarriages, the most recent resulting in a hysterectomy. With a lot of down time and little in the way of leisure activities other than reading, Elena finds herself bonding with Louise, who then reveals the real intention they hired her: to be a surrogate mother and have the child she isn't capable of carrying. The financially secure couple offers Elena significant compensation and enough money to move her young son and her struggling parents to Denmark. Elena agrees, and for a while, everything is fine. But before long, Elena's morning sickness becomes something else. She grows increasingly ill, suffers from horrifying nightmares, starts behaving erratically, and is convinced something is wrong with the unborn child.

A plot synopsis makes SHELLEY sound a lot more formulaic and commercial than it really is. Director/co-writer Ali Abbasi ends up leaving the viewer with more questions than answers, with the unfolding story ambiguous almost to a fault. Strange occurrences are never explained and elements are introduced and never expanded upon. It's by design and it works in creating a sense of unease and menace in the way Elena is never really sure what's happening to her and what is real. Abbasi also has you questioning the characters in the way they'll lose and regain your sympathy: are Louise and Kasper fully aware of what's happening to Elena? Is it part of a plan? They even say they know they should call her family but put her health further in jeopardy by not doing so because they're afraid Elena's family will keep the baby. And just as we begin to worry for Elena, we see she's sneaking cigarettes during her daily walks through the surrounding forest (during one such walk, she's confronted by a wild dog who just stares at her, almost silently judging--we never see this dog again). It's never really clear what's going on in SHELLEY, but Abbasi excels at maintaining an ominous tone throughout, whether it's the stark atmosphere of the interiors that allow for a BARRY LYNDON sense of a natural lighting look thanks to the candles and the lanterns, the way he uses the light and the shadows (the scene where Louise finds a feral Elena cowering in the basement is terrifying) or the unsettling rumblings on the soundtrack. Similar in some ways to the profoundly disturbing PROXY but not quite as good, SHELLEY is a slow-burner that may frustrate those looking for a commercial horror movie, but for those whose fright-film tastes lean toward the arthouse side of things, it's worth a look. (Unrated, 92 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

BROTHER NATURE
(US - 2016)

Another buried SNL/Lorne Michaels production to go along with last year's Colin Jost pet project STATEN ISLAND SUMMER, BROTHER NATURE has former SNL cast member Taran Killam (a veteran who abruptly departed the show prior to the current season) as Roger Fellner, the uptight, control-freak Chief of Staff to beloved Seattle congressman Frank McLaren (Giancarlo Esposito). When McLaren announces his intention to retire from politics, he tells Roger that he wants him to run for his seat. But first, Roger is off on vacation at a remote lake with his girlfriend Gwen (Gillian Jacobs) and her wacky, vulgar family. Roger intends to propose on the trip, but can't find any alone time thanks to Todd Dotchman (Bobby Moynihan), the loud, obnoxious boyfriend of Gwen's sister Margie (Sarah Burns). Growing up as the baby of the family with six older lesbian sisters, Todd is desperate for male bonding and comes on a little too strong, but with one mishap after another, Roger manages to alienate the entire family. He causes skunks to spray a cabin, rendering it uninhabitable; he high-fives Gwen's nephew who has a splinter in his palm; he walks in on Gwen's parents (Bill Pullman, Rita Wilson) having sex; he eats some pot-laced potato chips that Todd bought for the sisters' sciatica-suffering grandmother; he gets covered in ants and bitten all over after Todd uses Coke to clean up spilled ice cream near where Roger is sleeping; and he gets preoccupied with work when word leaks of McLaren's retirement and is forced to announce his candidacy live from the lake while covered in ant bites, which of course Todd intrudes upon and becomes a media sensation even though a humiliated Roger feels his career is ruined.

There's definitely a GREAT OUTDOORS and WHAT ABOUT BOB? influence on BROTHER NATURE, especially in the way Killam's increasingly shrieking performance draws from Richard Dreyfuss' masterful raging in WHAT ABOUT BOB? BROTHER NATURE means well, but it's simply not very funny, with the script by Killam and current SNL writer/cast member Mikey Day (the guy behind "David S. Pumpkins") just too formulaic and filled with too many gags that land with a thud. Few of Roger's mishaps are amusing, and a little of Todd--with Moynihan in total Belushi/Blutarsky--goes a long way. Of course Todd is the main reason Roger's life falls apart, but everyone loves Todd and blames Roger, even though Todd a) accidentally throws the engagement ring into the lake, and b) usurps all the attention by proposing to Margie before Roger has a chance to propose to Gwen. We saw all of this in WHAT ABOUT BOB? so Killam and Day add other jokes that go nowhere, like Gwen's mom using the term "nut" but not knowing it means "to ejaculate," and Pullman's character telling a heartwarming story about being hospitalized for shoulder surgery and getting a handjob from his wife. A running gag about the Spin Doctors' hit "Two Princes" plays as lazy '90s nostalgia that leaves no doubt that you're getting a cameo by the band. There are a couple of funny bits--Todd grew up in Reno and can only sleep with a white noise machine programmed with casino sounds, and the ultimate fate of the beloved Gill the Fish is an absurdly over-the-top grossout gag that works (regular SNL viewers will be reminded of last season's "Farewell Mr. Bunting" filmed piece)--but two solid jokes can't carry an otherwise painfully unfunny 97 minutes. Even with ringers like Rachael Harris and WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER mastermind David Wain, along with SNL cast members Day, Kenan Thompson, and Aidy Bryant in supporting roles, BROTHER NATURE just whiffs too much to be even remotely successful. The film was directed by Matt Villines and Oz Rodriguez, the "Matt and Oz" team behind the SNL commercials and filmed bits. Sadly, Villines died in July 2016 at just 39 after a two-year battle with kidney cancer, two months before Paramount dumped this on 17 screens and VOD with no publicity at all. (R, 97 mins)

ROGUE ONE
(US - 2016)

Directed by Gareth Edwards. Written by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy. Cast: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Forest Whitaker, Donnie Yen, Jiang Wen, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Riz Ahmed, Jimmy Smits, Genevieve O'Reilly, Alistair Petrie, Fares Fares, Valene King, Anthony Daniels, Spencer Wilding, Daniel Naprous, Guy Henry, Paul Kasey, Warwick Davis, Ingvild Deila, Ian McIlhinney, Michael Smiley, Angus MacInnes, Drewe Henley, voices of James Earl Jones, Stephen Stanton. (PG-13, 134 mins)

The first standalone STAR WARS film chronicles the events leading up to Princess Leia getting the plans for the Death Star at the beginning of A NEW HOPE back in 1977. ROGUE ONE had a notoriously troubled production, with a major script overhaul by BOURNE series screenwriter Tony Gilroy, who was also rumored to have supervised extensive reshoots, with a particular focus on the last 30 minutes, after no one was satisfied with director Gareth Edwards' rough cut. Indeed, many shots and some dialogue ("I rebel") from the first teaser trailer are nowhere to be seen and heard in the finished film, and with three credited editors along with an "additional editing" credit for veteran Stuart Baird, who's long had a reputation as Hollywood's go-to guy to work his magic in salvaging a wreckage, it's obvious to anyone schooled in today's cinema that the making of ROGUE ONE was far from smooth sailing (post-production ended on November 28, 2016, 18 days before the film's release date). Edwards, whose MONSTERS was a monster movie with very little in the way of monsters, and whose GODZILLA relegated Godzilla to little more than a cameo, is a director who takes unpredictability to a detrimental extreme. He seems to go out of his way to avoid giving the audience what they came to see, and for some reason, this has earned him accolades. Right from the start, it's apparent that Edwards is attempting to make ROGUE ONE his own by not including the iconic opening crawl that's been a staple of the STAR WARS canon for nearly 40 years.

The film gets off to the clunkiest start this side of RULES DON'T APPLY, jumping from location to location until the pieces are in place and the plot finally set in motion. Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) is a scientist involved in the creation of the Death Star, the Imperial Forces'"planet destroyer" and a project with which he morally disagrees but worked on it since it was going to be built with or without him. Erso's wife is killed and he's taken prisoner by Imperial weapons director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), while his young daughter Jyn is taken in by Rebel leader Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker). 15 years later, the grown Jyn (Felicity Jones) is a prisoner given a shot at freedom if she agrees to accompany Rebel spy Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) on a mission to find her father. Believing Erso is working with Krennic and Grand Moff Tarkin (Guy Henry, whose face has been replaced by a CGI recreation of the late Peter Cushing, who played Tarkin in STAR WARS and died in 1994), Andor's actual orders, unbeknownst to Jyn, are to kill Erso. Assembling a ragtag motley crew of outcasts and miscreants--reconditioned droid K-2SO (motion-captured by Alan Tudyk), Zatoichi-like blind warrior Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen), mercenary Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen), and defector Imperial pilot Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed)--they embark on their search for Galen Erso, with Andor having a change of heart once it's known that yes, Erso took a major role in designing the Death Star, but he included a flaw in its exhaust system to give it a major weakness and render it ultimately ineffective.

ROGUE ONE has a lot of shout-outs and callbacks to the rest of the franchise, whether it's appearances by Bail Organa (Jimmy Smits) or Dr. Evazan (played here by Michael Smiley), who was famously bounced from the Mos Eisley Cantina in the 1977 film, or the decision to use outtake footage of actors Angus MacInnes and Drewe Henley (who died in early 2016), who played the Gold and Red leaders, respectively, in A NEW HOPE. Darth Vader (played by both Spencer Wilding and Daniel Naprous, and again voiced by James Earl Jones) appears, and there's a very brief walk-on for C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) and R2-D2. The epic battle between the Imperial Forces and the Rebel Alliance fleet recalls some of the best moments from the original film and Edwards and cinematographer Greig Fraser (ZERO DARK THIRTY) put forth a concerted effort to match the look and style of the nearly 40-year-old franchise kickoff. But Vader's intro is weak, and 85-year-old Jones' legendary voice just doesn't have the rumbling power that it possessed in his younger years. Vader's big scene at the end is most likely a reshoot (perhaps that explains why two actors are credited with the role when the character only has two scenes), and I'd be willing to bet that the most crowd-pleasing elements of what's on display here were the work of Gilroy rather than Edwards--things that were added after it was determined that what Edwards was doing simply wasn't working (it's also worth noting that one of the credited editors is Tony Gilroy's brother John).

One thing that doesn't work in ROGUE ONE is the CGI recreation of Peter Cushing, done with the blessing of a trust overseen by his secretary and personal assistant. The face is convincingly done on a technical level, but the ruse is up the moment Tarkin starts talking and moving and it just doesn't look quite right. It's not a matter of it being done out of necessity, like when Oliver Reed died during the filming of GLADIATOR and Ridley Scott used outtakes to have his face CGI'd onto a double's body to finish a handful of remaining shots. 2004's SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW infamously used digitally manipulated footage of a young Laurence Oliver, who died in 1989, to function as the film's villain and it wasn't met with a favorable response then, so it's a mystery as to why a full-on CGI version of a long-deceased actor is being done here, unless the goal was just seeing if it could be done. Like almost all CGI, it comes close at times but generally misses the mark, primarily because we see too much of it. Tarkin doesn't have a lot of screen time, but the digital Cushing is seen enough that it's a distraction. We also get a CGI version of young Carrie Fisher for one scene as Princess Leia (played on set by Ingvild Deila), but at least it's brief enough to serve its purpose without becoming completely off-putting. At 134 minutes, ROGUE ONE is occasionally sluggish and could use some tightening, but it comes alive in the second half with the action and battle scenes. However, other than Jyn Erso, the characters aren't very fleshed out and we never feel the closeness to them that we did with Leia, Luke Skywalker, or Han Solo back in the day (I didn't even know Wen's character was named "Baze Malbus" until the closing credits). It does earn some points for ending on the most grim and downbeat note for the STAR WARS universe since THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, but that sense of fatalism--this can't end any other way--was a given considering the circumstances under which Leia gets the Death Star plans. In the end, ROGUE ONE has its moments, but won't go down as anyone's favorite STAR WARS film, and while I like the idea of standalone STAR WARS films, this never manages to feel like much more than big-budget fan fiction.

MANCHESTER BY THE SEA
(US - 2016)

Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan. Cast; Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler, Lucas Hedges, Matthew Broderick, Gretchen Mol, C.J. Wilson, Tate Donovan, Josh Hamilton, Kara Hayward, Anna Baryshnikov, Heather Burns, Tom Kemp, Kenneth Lonergan. (R, 137 mins)

Acclaimed writer-director Kenneth Lonergan's pay-the-bills gigs have included scripting films like ANALYZE THIS and GANGS OF NEW YORK, but he's best known for his 2000 indie YOU CAN COUNT ON ME, which got Laura Linney an Oscar nomination and was the first big break for Mark Ruffalo. But then it all fell apart as Lonergan's follow-up, MARGARET, was shot in 2005 and languished on the shelf for six years, mired in editing issues and lawsuits. It finally got released on just 14 screens in 2011, and that was only after Lonergan mentor Martin Scorsese intervened and supervised an exactly 150-minute recut that met the distributor's demand of a 150-minute film that Lonergan refused to deliver. Lonergan was allowed to prepare his own 186-minute director's cut for the Blu-ray and while the film met with significant acclaim, he was subsequentl viewed as everything from difficult at best to unstable at worst, and for a while, it appeared as though his career might be finished. Five years after the MARGARET debacle came to an end, and with the help of producer pal Matt Damon, Lonergan is back with MANCHESTER BY THE SEA, a distinctly Lonergan character piece that takes the complex family dynamics of YOU CAN COUNT ON ME and the gut-wrenching emotional trauma of MARGARET to make what's probably his defining auteur statement yet.

Turning in the sort of internalized, anguished performance whose power might not hit you right away, Casey Affleck stars as Lee Chandler, an apartment janitor and handyman in Quincy, just outside of Boston. He keeps to himself, drinks too much, isn't pleasant with tenants, and looks for fights at the neighborhood bar. He's going about his routine when he gets a call that his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler), who lives 90 minutes away in Manchester, has been hospitalized. Joe dies before Lee can get to the hospital, his heart finally just giving out after being diagnosed with congestive heart failure at an unusually young age a few years earlier. There's the usual affairs to get in order--Joe's business, his boat, and the burial, which can't take place until spring because it's the dead of winter and the ground is too frozen, forcing Joe's body to be kept in a hospital freezer until the ground begins to thaw--but Lee's primary concern is Joe's 16-year-old son Patrick (Lucas Hedges). Joe explicitly stated in his will that Lee is to become Patrick's guardian, a decision never discussed with Lee, who was under the impression that their uncle would raise Patrick if anything happened to Joe, but Joe changed the will when that uncle moved to Minnesota. With Patrick's mother, Joe's alcoholic ex-wife Elise (Gretchen Mol), out of the picture, Lee tries to get Joe's best friend George (C.J. Wilson) to take Patrick, but decides that he'll just have to move back to Quincy with him. This upsets Patrick, who has friends, two girlfriends, school, and sports in Manchester, along with his being the lead guitarist in a not-very-good band. The situation is forcing the closed-off Lee to take charge and confront actual feelings again, several years after his life fell apart in a tragic incident that was too much for his ex-wife Randi (Michelle Williams) to handle.

Lonergan reveals Lee's past in bits and pieces, flashing back to various incidents from Patrick's childhood, the early stages of Joe's diagnosis, and scenes depicting Lee's happily married life with Randi. What happened to Lee and Randi is operatically tragic, a bit of drunken absent-mindedness that changed the Chandler family's lives forever, and one that still causes the Manchester townies to speak of Lee in hushed tones when he returns for Joe's funeral, some old friends offering condolences, others wanting nothing to do with him. This incident is revealed in a long flashback that's almost too difficult to watch, but Lonergan belabors the point a little by blaring Albinioni's Adagio in G Minor so loud and so long that it actually starts to undermine the effectiveness. It's really the only misstep in an otherwise exemplary and profoundly, achingly moving film, anchored by powerful performances from Affleck and Hedges, as well as Williams, who only has a few scenes but makes every one count. Lonergan dives right into the action, but then lets things play out in natural, unaffected ways, allowing us to get to know everything we need to know about these characters, even the minor ones like Elise's second husband, played in a one-scene cameo by Lonergan regular Matthew Broderick. Affleck and Hedges beautifully portray the back-and-forth love and resentment between a broken man who just wants to be left alone and the nephew who used to look up to him and wants to be independent but needs his uncle more than he realizes. It's a raw and unflinching film but it's sprinkled with some surprisingly funny moments, whether it's Lee trying to grasp how Patrick can juggle two girlfriends or how the uncle and nephew find dark humor in a period of intense mourning (Patrick, inside Lee's freezing cold car: "Maybe we can just put my dad back here." Lee: "Shut the fuck up"). MARGARET was an ambitious but sometimes unwieldy mess that got away from him, but Lonergan has crafted his finest work yet with MANCHESTER BY THE SEA, one of 2016's best films.

PASSENGERS
(US/China - 2016)

Directed by Morten Tyldum. Written by Jon Spaihts. Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, Andy Garcia. (PG-13, 116 mins)

The sci-fi epic PASSENGERS is a triumph of production design weighed down by a script that feels like its second half was hastily rewritten after focus groups said more shit needed to blow up. Its intriguing opening act does a commendable job of replicating that unique Kubrickian chilliness and isolation, with a 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY vessel seemingly revamped by an interior decorator whose favorite movie was THE SHINING. Even the pattern on a wall matches the carpeting where Danny is playing with his cars outside Room 237. Set in a future where people are looking to move beyond an overcrowded Earth, PASSENGERS opens aboard the Starship Avalon, with 5000 passengers and a crew of 238 in hibernation on a 120-year voyage to a planet colony called Homestead II. 30 years into the voyage, a minor collision with an asteroid causes a brief disruption in the computer system that results in engineer Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) being awakened from his hibernation pod. It takes him a while to realize he's up 90 years too early, but going back into hibernation is impossible, a message sent to Homestead headquarters back on Earth will take 19 years to arrive, and his only company for what's looking like the rest of his life is affable robot bartender Arthur (Michael Sheen), who in no way reminds one of Lloyd in the Gold Ballroom of the Overlook Hotel.

An increasingly disheveled and depressed Jim spends the next 15 months alone, growing increasingly despondent by the day. He's contemplating suicide by shooting himself through an airlock and out into space, but notices hibernating Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence) in her pod. Checking the passenger manifest and watching her video file, a desperate Jim falls in love with her and with the idea of having a companion. He agonizes over the decision for months, spending his days sitting by her pod and talking to her and when he's reached his breaking point, he reworks the pod mechanism so she's awakened. Letting Aurora think her pod malfunctioned just like his, Jim gives her time to accept the circumstances but after a while, they inevitably go from friends to lovers, with Jim still leaving her in the dark about what he did. Of course, she'll eventually find out, but that becomes a secondary issue after slowly-developing malfunctions and glitches, all snowballing since the initial asteroid collision that caused Jim's pod to open, start to jeopardize not just their solitary--and now hostile--living situation but also the lives of the crew and passengers, who still have 88 years before they reach their destination.

The next paragraph contains SPOILERS.

The early scenes of PASSENGERS are the strongest, with Jim realizing the seriousness of his situation while wandering around the most visually stunning spaceship we've seen in quite some time, accompanied by a frequently John Carpenter-meets-Vangelis-sounding score by Thomas Newman that works like a charm. It stumbles a bit during Jim's disheveled phase, where Pratt is required to wear an awful wig and what might be cinema's least-convincing fake beard, which looks like someone glued a stunt bush from a community theater production of BOOGIE NIGHTS to his face. Once Aurora is awake, there's considerable tension as Jim is wracked with guilt over his decision to mislead her, but screenwriter Jon Spaihts (PROMETHEUS) and Norwegian filmmaker Morten Tyldum (HEADHUNTERS, THE IMITATION GAME) quickly lose interest in exploring this ethical dilemma. After a period of not speaking, they more or less agree to set aside their differences when they're joined by Gus Mancuso (Laurence Fishburne), a Chief Deck Officer whose hibernation pod has also malfunctioned. It's here that PASSENGERS shows that it doesn't have the courage of its convictions, abandoning a serious moral quandary in order to restage key elements of GRAVITY and THE MARTIAN out of an apparent need to make Pratt the hero. Some reviews have responded harshly to Jim's actions, likening him to a creep, a stalker, and a psycho, and taking offense over the perceived notion that Aurora is more or less Stockholm Syndromed into falling for him. These sound like the imaginary concerns of people looking for something to outrage them. Jim does what he does out of loneliness, desperation, and slowly encroaching insanity. He doesn't approach it lightly, but he can't fathom the idea of spending the rest of his life. It's wrong and more or less indefensible and he shortens Aurora's life, but it's an extreme situation. And, it's worth mentioning, even if it's ultimately a plot convenience that lets Jim off the hook, they all would've died anyway since Jim ultimately can't save the ship and the other 5000+ people without Aurora's help. It's doubtful the same criticisms would be leveled at PASSENGERS had it been Aurora who woke early and decided to open Jim's pod 89 years early, or if Jim was played by say, Michael Shannon or Steve Buscemi or Clark Duke and it would be easier to grasp Jim's actions because he's being played by an oddball character actor or a dweeby-looking comedian and not Chris Pratt. Focusing on Jim's decision certainly would've made a more interesting film on a psychological thriller level--and it could've given Pratt a chance to show some range--but this is a $100 million holiday movie with two of the most attractive and popular celebrities on the planet.

I'm not asking for Tarkovsky's SOLARIS here, but PASSENGERS could've tried a little harder. The second half wants to be a big, epic, special effects crowd-pleaser and the abrupt tone shift leaves Lawrence and Pratt stranded, which is shame because in the more character-driven sections, their performances are quite good. As far as the rest of the cast goes, Sheen is amusing, Fishburne is fine with his limited screen time, and Andy Garcia has been almost completely cut from the film since his entire role as the ship's captain consists of him walking through a sliding door and looking up, giving him about five seconds of screen time with no dialogue for what must be the most frivolous big-name, prominently-billed cameo since Albert Finney's eight-second appearance in a YouTube video in 2012's THE BOURNE LEGACY. He had to have a larger role initially. You don't hire Oscar-nominated Andy Garcia, a respected actor for the last 30 years, to walk through a door and look confused, unless he's also wondering what he's doing in this movie. In the end, PASSENGERS is always fascinating to look at, but it abandons its thought-provoking aspects and is riddled with rampant lapses in logic. For instance, why is Arthur online and tending bar for no one? Why is the liquor opened when no one would be drinking it for 120 years? And if the crew is scheduled to be awakened a month before the passengers, who's been maintaining the pool for the first 30 years of the voyage? Wouldn't switching on Arthur and opening the booze and filling the pool and chlorinating it be something the crew did in the month before the passengers were revived? How fresh is the sushi that Aurora is eating? Is that the smartest thing to have on the menu?

THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES
(Denmark/Germany - 2013; US release 2016)

Based on a series of six (to date) Department Q novels by Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, 2013's THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES was the first of thus far three movie adaptations. Huge post-GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO hits in Scandinavia, the first three DEPARTMENT Q movies were released simultaneously in the US by IFC Films/Sundance Selects in the summer of 2016. Being in Danish with English subtitles, the films are relegated to the arthouse circuit, but they're very commercial police procedurals that will appeal to any fan of the original DRAGON TATTOO trilogy and American TV shows like LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT and more recent offerings like THE KILLING and TRUE DETECTIVE. Lone wolf homicide cop (is there any other kind?) Carl Morck (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is a plays-by-his-own-rules type who impulsively leads a raid on a perp's residence without waiting for backup. His impatience results in a shootout that gets one cop killed and his only friend Hardy (Troels Lyby) paralyzed, and Morck himself gets grazed by a bullet that leaves him with a scar on his forehead and noticeable tremors in his left hand. Morck's irate boss Marcus (Soren Pilmark) refuses to put him back on homicide and busts him down to Department Q, a newly-created cold-case unit buried in the basement. Morck's job is to sign off on two cases a week and Marcus sees it as a way to eliminate some bureaucratic red tape and keep Morck out of sight and out of mind, since no one likes him anyway. He's paired in Department Q with Assad (Fares Fares of ZERO DARK THIRTY), a good cop who's never been given a chance because anti-Muslim prejudice has made him as much of an outcast pariah to his colleagues as Morck. Assad sees this as an opportunity but Morck is furious and feels it's beneath him, until he becomes intrigued by the case of Merete Lynggaard (Sonia Richter), an aspiring politician who disappeared from a ferry five years earlier and was presumed to be a suicide by drowning. She was on the ferry with her Uffe (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard), her disabled, brain-damaged younger brother, and her body was never found.

Morck doesn't buy that Merete would kill herself and leave her brother alone on the ferry, and of course, he's right. She was abducted from the ferry and has been held captive for five years in a small, pressurized room. Morck and Assad butt heads and go through all the formulaic business that mismatched cop partners do (Assad doesn't understand why Morck is so miserable, while Morck can't stand Assad's coffee), but they very gradually form a grudging respect for one another as they dig deeper and deeper into Merete's past, uncovering info that the detectives who caught the case never bothered to pursue and incurring the wrath of Marcus, who just wants the cold cases closed but not necessarily investigated (of course, he reads them the riot act and makes them both hand over their badges and, like every movie cop who's ever been ordered to hand over his badge, they just carry on with the investigation on their own time). There isn't much in the way of surprises as far as characters and plot construction are concerned, but when these sorts of things are done right, they're pretty hard to resist, and THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES is fast-moving and thoroughly engrossing from the start, thanks to an economically-constructed and no-bullshit screenplay adaptation by Nikolaj Arcel. Arcel also scripted the original 2009 version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, wrote and directed the 2012 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar-nominee A ROYAL AFFAIR, and will make his Hollywood debut in 2017 by writing and directing THE DARK TOWER, based on the first book in Stephen King's epic series. Produced by Lars von Trier's Zentropa Entertainments, THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES was directed by Mikkel Norgaard, best known to cult comedy fans for helming KLOWN and its sequel KLOWN FOREVER. Norgaard and Arcel would return for the 2014 sequel THE ABSENT ONE. (Unrated, 97 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

THE ABSENT ONE
(Denmark/Germany/Sweden - 2014; US release 2016)

With its central mystery dealing with a traumatic incident in the life of a teenage girl two decades back and a climax involving the heroes being held prisoner in a rich psycho's secret lair, THE ABSENT ONE can't help but draw comparisons to either version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. Here, Morck (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and Assad (Fares Fares) are spinning their wheels in Department Q, earning scorn and disdain from fellow cops who dismiss them as "The Arab and the Drunk." At a party for their boss Marcus (Soren Pilmark), Morck is confronted by Henning Jorgensen (Hans Henrik Voetmann), a former cop whose career imploded when his twin son and daughter were murdered at an exclusive boarding school. One of their classmates, Bjarne Thorgersen (Kristian Hogh Jeppesen) was convicted, but only served three years thanks to a high-powered defense lawyer clearly out of Thorgersen's parents' price range. The surprisingly light sentence is enough to get Morck to take another look at the case, especially when he's overcome by guilt when Jorgensen commits suicide two hours after Morck has him thrown out of the party. Morck is convinced Thorgersen was the fall guy and he and Assad start looking at other students who were there at the time. Chief among the alumni is Ditlev Pram (Pilou Asbaek, best known to American audiences as Euron Greyjoy on GAME OF THRONES), the wealthy owner of a hotel chain and an all-around shitbag who still pals around with equally wealthy and even sleazier boarding school buddy Ulrik Dybbol (David Dencik, who was in the American remake of DRAGON TATTOO). Pram and Dybbol have a dark, murderous past they want kept under wraps, with Pram even going so far as to hire security expert and freelance hit man Alberg (Peter Christofferson) to kill Kimmie (Danica Curcic), who briefly dated Pram in school and whose life completely derailed into homelessness and prostitution after the murder of Jorgensen's twins. She knows something and Pram wants her dead, which sends Morck and Assad on a frantic search to find her.

THE ABSENT ONE isn't quite as good as THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES. The pace is slower, the presentation a little muddled, a subplot involving Pram's jealousy over his wife's extramarital affairs just bloats the running time, and the story just seems to be a too-formulaic variant on Stieg Larsson. Kaas and Fares are still a winning team who play well off one another (Morck still can't stand Assad's coffee), with Fares' Assad getting a bit more assertive when the situation calls for it. Morck and Assad are joined in the office by Rose (Johanne Louise Schmidt), their new secretary who proves to be a very observant and resourceful addition to the team and one who's hopefully used a little more in the next installment, A CONSPIRACY OF FAITH. (Unrated, 120 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

A CONSPIRACY OF FAITH
(Denmark/Germany/Norway - 2016)

Screenwriter Nikolaj Arcel was set to direct this third film in the DEPARTMENT Q series, but Hollywood beckoned with the offer to helm THE DARK TOWER, so the job was given to veteran Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland, best known for the 1995 cult film ZERO KELVIN. While Mikkel Norgaard focused on the procedural elements of the investigation, Moland brings a more action-oriented sensibility to DEPARTMENT Q, with no less than two masterful chase/suspense set pieces--a ransom drop from a speeding train and a hospital pursuit of a killer disguised as a doctor--that rank among the most nail-biting sequences of 2016. If familiarity was already creeping in with THE ABSENT ONE, Moland definitely shakes things up with the faster pace and different, more outdoor setting of A CONSPIRACY OF FAITH, without skimping on the grim, grunt detective work that makes Carl Morck (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and Assad (Fares Fares) such a solid team. As this film opens, Assad is temporarily overseeing things in Department Q with dutiful secretary Rose (Johanne Louise Schmidt), while a down and depressed Morck is on a medical leave following the events at the end of THE ABSENT ONE. When a literal message in a bottle is found washed up on a shoreline, the police bring it in to Assad, almost as a sarcastic joke considering how little respect Department Q gets from the rest of the force. Assad and Rose examine the cryptic eight-year-old message, written in blood, and mentioning "Jehovah." Judging from the misspellings and the grammar, Assad theorizes that it was written by a child and wants to investigate all cases of missing children from the last ten years, but a returning and intrigued Morck tells him there have only been two cases, both closed.

Meanwhile, in another town, a report is made of two siblings being abducted by a stranger in a car. Their parents, Elias (Jakob Ulrik Lohmann) and Rakel (Amanda Collin) belong to a tight-knit religious sect known as "The Lord's Disciples" and insist their kids are visiting Elias' sister. When that doesn't check out, Elias, who refuses to speak with Muslim Assad, confesses that the kids are being held for ransom by Johannes (Pal Sverre Hagen), a charismatic, phony minister who visited the area and took the children. Johannes also matches the description given to police by Trygve (Louis Sylvester Larsen), a 15-year-old who was kidnapped with his brother--who wrote the message in a bottle--eight years ago. Trygve managed to get away but his brother was killed by Johannes. Morck and Assad are convinced history is repeating itself, and that Johannes is a serial kidnapper and murderer. He's also a practicing Satanist who preys on fanatically religious families, usually correctly assuming they'll follow his directions because they have more faith in God and His plans than they do in the police. And in Johannes' twisted mind, by ruthlessly murdering children even after their parents have cooperated, he is robbing the religious of the faith they hold so dear. A CONSPIRACY OF FAITH is a bit thematically deeper than its predecessors, with atheist Morck and religious Assad engaging in a couple of thoughtful theological debates, but there's also some amusing and/or off-the-wall touches, like a short-fused Morck shutting down an enthusiastic forensics nerd who's more interested in explaining his technique than the results, and a church choir performing an oddly unsettling, Danish-language rendition of Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" at a baptism. With a memorably despicable villain in Hagen's Johannes, the chemistry between Kaas and Fares stronger than ever, some exciting action sequences, and a change in approach and style courtesy of Moland, A CONSPIRACY OF FAITH is the best entry yet in the DEPARTMENT Q franchise. (Unrated, 112 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

GOAT
(US/UK - 2016)

GOAT is a harrowing chronicle of fraternity hazing, based on the 2004 memoir by Brad Land. Director Andrew Neel (the LARP documentary DARKON) and co-writer David Gordon Green (PINEAPPLE EXPRESS) take some significant liberties with the book, playing a little fast and loose with the facts as to what happened to Land and what he did regarding the fraternity. Taken on its own terms, GOAT is frequently very powerful, with a pair of strong performances as its core by Ben Schnetzer (the acclaimed but short-lived series HAPPY TOWN) as Brad and Nick Jonas as his older brother Brett (though he looks younger, Schnetzer is actually two years older than Jonas). In the summer after graduating high school, Brad visits Brett at his Phi Sigma Mu frat house at Brookman University (the frat and Brookman are fictional; the actual university was Clemson) and is talked into giving a ride to two sketchy-looking townies who steal his car and nearly beat him to death. Still traumatized by the incident and unwilling to cooperate with police, Brad has all of his masculine insecurities brought to the forefront, questioning why he gave them a ride and why he never tried to fight back ("Am I a pussy?" he drunkenly wonders). Though Brett doesn't think it's the answer, Brad decides to pledge Phi Sigma Mu and is joined by his sensitive new roommate Fitch (Danny Flaherty), both freshmen needing to feel like they belong somewhere and needing to feel bolstered and reinforced by the power and prestige that comes with being in a popular frat ("I'm having sex for the first time in my life!" Fitch keeps saying). Neel doesn't shy away from the brutal hazing of Hell Week, an endless series of increasingly degrading and dehumanizing rituals that make it seem like a collegiate version of SALO could break out at any moment. The pledges are terrorized, forced to drink gallons of alcohol until they puke and black out, tied up and locked in animal cages, urinated on, threatened with forced bestiality with a goat if they don't finish a keg in a certain amount of time, and one comparatively harmless prank involves a blindfolded Brad believing he's being forced to eat a turd out of a toilet bowl, but it's only a banana. The hazing by frat leaders Chance (Gus Halper) and the sadistic Dixon (Jake Picking) goes over the line to the point where even Brett is growing disillusioned with the whole thing, asking Chance at one point "Is this getting a little weird this year?"

Weird eventually escalates to tragic, but all the while, Brad is willing to look the other way because the more he endures, the less of a "pussy" he feels. It's his way of getting back at the guys who assaulted him, even as he ignores calls from the cops to come in and ID two guys who match the description and have been picked up for another crime. The changes made by Green and Neel are strange--in the book, Brad put his foot down and quit the fraternity while Brett was presented as, for lack of a better term, an antagonist who resented his brother. In the film, Brad is so concerned with asserting his manhood that he refuses to give up on the frat even as Brett pleads with him to do so, and it's Brett who grows tired of Chance's and Dixon's antics. It's an odd decision that may create some dramatic tension between the brothers but sort of undermines Brad's role in what was supposed to be his own story and his own expose. The story works in the context of the film, but it's a bizarre artistic choice by the filmmakers, unless someone thought making Nick Jonas the hero might secure a better distribution deal. It hardly mattered--the Cincinnati-shot GOAT only played in a few theaters and on VOD, but it's a sleeper that's certain to find an audience on streaming services, as difficult as it is to endure at times. Schnetzer and Jonas are both excellent (Jonas is a real surprise here, though he might've fared even better as an actor if the filmmakers stuck to the book), but producer James Franco gives himself a cameo as an aging frat god from years earlier who still periodically stops by the house to chug some beers and reminisce with the younger guys about his glory days. Franco basically turns up for a few minutes to play a dudebro combination of "James Franco" and "Matthew McConaughey's Wooderson" for a few minutes, and it's distracting to say the least, but hey, he's the producer, so what are you gonna do? (R, 102 mins)

PET
(US/Spain - 2016)

There's some intriguing ideas in this sort-of extreme horror variation on the John Fowles novel The Collector, famously made into a 1965 film with Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar. What begins as a standard-issue psycho-stalker movie gets a major boost from a mid-film reveal that just ends up fizzling by the end, when screenwriter Jeremy Slater (a writer and producer on the Fox TV series THE EXORCIST) and director Carles Torrens (the found-footage possession movie APARTMENT 143) go for one too many twists and contrivances as things wrap up with a groan instead of a jolt. Seth (Dominic Monaghan, whose American accent needs some work) is a lonely and awkward man who works as an attendant at a Los Angeles animal shelter. On the bus ride home from work one evening, he spots Holly (Ksenia Solo), an aspiring writer and high school classmate who doesn't remember him. He makes bumbling small-talk and is oblivious to the fact that she's clearly not interested, but he stalks her on social media, shows up at the greasy spoon where she waits tables asks her to a Ben Folds show, and follows her to a bar where he's promptly beaten up by her ex-boyfriend Eric (Nathan Parsons). Repeatedly reprimanded at work for getting too attached to the animals and failing at any attempt at male bonding with imposing security guard Nate (Da'Vone McDonald), a desperate Seth finds a closed-off room in the shelter basement, complete with a large cage, which he deems the perfect place to keep Holly until she realizes how perfect they are for one another.

PET is pretty standard up to that point, but Slater and Torrens pull one of 2016's better bait-and-switches that up-ends both Seth's motive for doing what he does and the audience's perception of Holly. We're not talking a USUAL SUSPECTS-level game-changer here, but as far as twists go in 2016 movies, this one is pretty audacious. But the filmmakers stumble on the follow-through, with PET completely collapsing in the final act, trying to go for ambiguity as an excuse to cover up the trail of implausibilities that's left them completely backed into a corner. Seth's devotion and Holly's behavior ultimately make little logical sense, and PET turns into one of those movies where everyone from Seth's bosses to the cops are required to be incredibly careless and unbelievably stupid in order to keep the plot moving. Still, there's enough good intentions in the building blocks of PET's construction and in an outstanding performance by Solo that it's worth a look, even if it ultimately misses the mark and 40-year-old Monaghan looks entirely too old to have gone to high school with Solo. (R, 94 mins)

DAD'S ARMY
(UK - 2016)

Running from 1968 to 1977, the BBC series DAD'S ARMY remains one of the most beloved sitcoms in the history of British television. Giving career roles to great British character actor ringers like Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier, DAD'S ARMY dealt with the wacky antics of a platoon of misfit Home Guard volunteers in a small English town in WWII. With its slapstick comedy and quotable catchphrases, it was so popular that it spawned a 1971 feature film spinoff in the middle of its run. Nostalgia would seem to be the only reason to produce a remake nearly 40 years after the show went off the air, and with absolutely no reason to exist, the 2016 version of DAD'S ARMY is painfully unfunny and would be completely unwatchable if not for a distinguished cast that's hopefully having a lot more fun than the audience. In 1944, in the days before D-Day, Walmington-at-Sea's Home Guard leader Capt. Mainwaring (Toby Jones in Lowe's role) and his right-hand Sgt. Wilson (Bill Nighy in Le Mesurier's role) are informed by their commander Theakes (Mark Gatiss) that they're to patrol an Allied base at Dover that's being targeted for invasion by high-ranking Nazi Admiral Canaris (Oliver Tobias), who's sent a spy to infiltrate the area. Meanwhile, sultry reporter Rose Winters (Catherine Zeta-Jones) arrives to do a story on the Home Guard, which results in Mainwaring and Wilson trying to one-up the other in their hapless attempts to woo her, which naturally infuriates their henpecking wives. Also among Mainwaring's Home Guard troops are doddering Jones (Tom Courtenay), senile Godfrey (Michael Gambon), crotchety Frazer (Bill Paterson), and youngsters like the womanizing Walker (Daniel Mays) and goofball Pike (Blake Harrison).

With that cast and a script by frequent Rowan Atkinson collaborator Hamish McColl (MR. BEAN'S HOLIDAY, JOHNNY ENGLISH REBORN) working under the direction of Oliver Parker (the 1995 OTHELLO with Laurence Fishburne, AN IDEAL HUSBAND), it's hard to believe DAD'S ARMY is as terrible as it is. Joke after joke lands with a thud, the pace is laborious, and the greenscreen work and CGI look unfinished. Who is the audience for this movie? Older people who fondly remember the TV show probably won't go for the more contemporary vulgar elements, whether it's a confused Godfrey relieving himself on what he thinks is a tree but is really Jones in disguise (I'm pretty sure that when Tom Courtenay received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO 50 years ago, he never envisioned Michael Gambon pissing on him in their emeritus years), or Paterson's Frazer dropping trou and mooning a U-boat crew. The increased toilet humor seems to be there to draw a younger crowd who I'm certain has no interest in seeing an otherwise dated and creaky WWII comedy headlined by Bill Nighy, Toby Jones, and Tom Courtenay. DAD'S ARMY resurrects the catchphrases ("You stupid boy!") and gives cameos to the series' two surviving cast members (Ian Lavendar, the original Pike, appears as a general, and Frank Williams reprises his role as the town's vicar), but it was panned by British critics and flatly rejected by UK audiences, bombing when it was released there in early 2016. With the TV show known only by the most ardent Anglophile TV fans in the US, Universal had no viable strategy on how to sell this to American audiences, even with familiar faces like Nighy and Zeta-Jones, so they ended up releasing it straight-to-DVD/Blu-ray with no publicity at all. A rare movie that's made for absolutely no one and whose very existence is an inexplicable mystery, DAD'S ARMY's only point of interest is that it was produced by Alan Parker (MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, FAME, PINK FLOYD: THE WALL, MISSISSIPPI BURNING), who's been MIA since directing 2003's THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE. He's no relation to Oliver Parker, which would at least explain his involvement. Alan Parker disappears for 13 years and this is what inspired him to emerge from self-imposed exile? You know a comedy is bad when even the end credits blooper reel isn't funny. (Unrated, 100 mins)

SPECTRAL
(US - 2016)

Directed by Nic Mathieu. Written by George Nolfi. Cast: James Badge Dale, Emily Mortimer, Bruce Greenwood, Max Martini, Cory Hardrict, Clayne Crawford, Gonzalo Menendez, Ursula Parker, Stephen Root, Aaron Serban, Dylan Smith, Louis Ozawa Changchien, Ryan Robbins, Jimmy Akingbola. (Unrated, 108 mins)

After over a year on the shelf, SPECTRAL, a $70 million Legendary Pictures-produced sci-fi horror actioner, was set to open in theaters nationwide in August 2016. That never happened, as it was abruptly yanked from the release schedule a few weeks earlier after Legendary's WARCRAFT bombed and distributor Universal grew skittish about having another expensive summer flop on its hands, even though WARCRAFT was a hit everywhere in the world but America. They shopped SPECTRAL around to other studios and found a taker in Netflix, who are now streaming it as a "Netflix Original." It's not a great movie by any means, and it likely would've ended up tanking in theaters just as Universal feared, especially being a summer movie lacking any big name draws in front of or behind the camera. In that respect, Netflix seems like perfect platform for SPECTRAL, where it's free from box office expectations and can earn the minor cult following it's inevitably going to get. Military-contracted science researcher Dr. Mark Clyne (James Badge Dale, a solid supporting actor, but c'mon, who puts a $70 million summer sci-fi action movie on the shoulders of James Badge Dale?) is summoned to Moldova to help a tactical unit that's been using high-tech "spectral" combat helmet cam goggles that he designed. He's informed by Gen. Orland (Bruce Greenwood) and CIA operative Fran Madison (Emily Mortimer) that the cameras have been picking up images of apparitions--termed "hyperspectral anomalies"--who have attacked and killed several members of the Delta Force team, led by Sgt. Sessions (Max Martini, Dale's 13 HOURS co-star). Orland and Madison believe it's a cloaking device being used by enemy insurgents, which Clyne dismisses since the US hasn't even come close to achieving that capability. Orland orders Clyne and Madison to accompany Sessions and what's left of the Delta team to find another unit that went missing the day before, obviously taken out by the "anomalies," ghostly specters that can only be seen through the combat goggles or the light from a hyperspectral camera that Clyne creates on the fly when most of the goggles are destroyed in a paranormal skirmish.

Written by George Nolfi (a good buddy of Matt Damon's who co-scripted OCEAN'S TWELVE and THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, and wrote and directed THE ASSASSINATION BUREAU) and directed by feature-debuting TV commercial vet Nic Mathieu, SPECTRAL dives pretty deep into hard sci-fi with Clyne's theories on the origin of the anomalies. They're impervious to weapons and can travel through any surface except iron and ceramic, which leads Clyne to believe they're man-made via bosons hovering near absolute zero with a cooled gas of extremely low density and known as the Bose-Einstein Condensate, which is not something Joe Multiplex normally expects to be name-dropped in a big-budget summer action movie. SPECTRAL has some great ideas, but while Nolfi's script talks a big game, it doesn't really have the brains to back it up. The scene where Clyne explains everything to Madison and the soldiers turns into a momentum-killing monologue because Dale has a difficult time selling it when he just keeps anxiously repeating "ceramic" and "condensate." He doesn't sound like he knows what he's talking about, probably because Nolfi doesn't either and should probably be sharing the screenplay credit with Wikipedia. Nevertheless, SPECTRAL is very well-made, and with location shooting in Hungary, Slovakia, and Israel, it definitely looks like a "bigger" movie than one usually associates with "Netflix Original." It also boasts some impressive visual effects and refreshingly coherent combat sequences, and with its stark, ominous Eastern European setting (most of this was shot in Bucharest) and some lighting and cinematography techniques, it would appear that SPECTRAL owes a stylistic debt to Michael Mann's 1983 cult classic THE KEEP. The biggest structural influence is obviously James Cameron's 1986 masterpiece ALIENS, right down to the discovery of a little Moldovan orphan girl (Ursula Parker, one of the daughters on LOUIE) who isn't named "Newt," but might as well be (all that's missing is a scheming Paul Reiser to sabotage the mission). Feeling like BLACK HAWK DOWN retooled as a John Ringo or David Weber military sci-fi novel published by Baen Books, SPECTRAL isn't nearly as smart as it thinks it is, but its ambition is appreciated. It delivers if you're looking for action, special effects, and atmosphere, so this really is custom-made for Netflix streaming.

THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED
(Spain - 1969; US release 1971)

Written and directed by Narciso Ibanez Serrador. Cast: Lilli Palmer, Cristina Galbo, John Moulder Brown, Mary Maude, Candida Losada, Tomas Blanco, Maribel Martin, Pauline Challenor, Teresa Hurtdao, Conchita Paredes, Victor Israel. (PG, 94 mins)

It's not nearly the exploitative grinder that American International's poster art promised when it opened in the US in 1971, but 1969's THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED is a slow-burning and quietly effective Spanish chiller that's certain to find a new audience now that it's been rescued from obscurity by Shout! Factory's new Blu-ray release. Never released on VHS and all but impossible to see in a decent-looking presentation for many years, THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED looks terrific on Blu-ray with its "old dark house" sets and late 19th century period detail. The entire film takes place at a French boarding school for wayward girls run by Mme. Fourneau (Lilli Palmer), a strict spinster-type who lords over her charges and doesn't hesitate to dole out stern punishment, such as headstrong, rebellious Catherine (Pauline Challenor) being thrown into the "seclusion room," where Fourneau has her whipped by sadistic teacher's pet Irene (Mary Maude). The girls welcome the arrival of new resident Teresa (Cristina Galbo), dropped off by a friend of her family, which consists of her absent mother who may or may not be a prostitute. There's a gloomy cloud hanging over the proceedings, whether it's the unbending rule of Fourneau, who harbors a barely concealed desire for the girls--watch the way she leers at them while they shower or gently kisses the bleeding flagellation wounds in the middle of Catherine's back--or her sheltered and sexually curious son Luis (DEEP END's John Moulder Brown), who's prone to spying on the girls and seems to be developing a fixation on Teresa.

Writer/director Narciso Ibanez Serrador (the disturbing 1976 masterpiece WHO CAN KILL A CHILD?) spends nearly half the film methodically establishing an unsettling and perverse atmosphere (with some help from a moody score by Waldo de los Rios) before he even introduces a killer into the proceedings with the unexpected murder of Isabelle (THE BLOOD SPLATTERED BRIDE's Maribel Martin), a shy girl who angered Mme. Fourneau by having romantic feelings for Luis. It's only later that we discover several girls have vanished over the last few months, their disappearances unaccounted for and swept under the rug by Mme. Fourneau. The ultimate reveal of the killer isn't a big shock, but THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED surprises in other ways. The best example is the unexpected character arc of Irene, who spends much of the film behaving even more despicably than Mme. Fourneau, exacting mean girl revenge on Teresa after her overt lesbian advances are rejected (the agonizingly long scene where she terrorizes Teresa is almost too uncomfortable to watch), but having a change of heart when she realizes Fourneau has been negligent about the missing girls and has been using her as a puppet to bully the other girls and keep them under her thumb. Irene's transformation from bitchy villain to hero-by-default is tough to pull off in a believable fashion but Maude does, and her performance really is the film's secret weapon. Serrador also displays some sly bits of dark humor, as evidenced in one scene where quick-cut shots of girls frantically knitting is used to symbolize intense sexual frustration as they listen to one of the others having sex outside with a local stud who secretly visits the school once a week.

With its horny schoolgirls, lesbian undertones, a weirdo mama's boy, rampant sexual repression and a knife-wielding maniac, there's an undeniable sense of tawdry sleaze permeating THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED, but it's usually presented in as subtle and tactful a manner as possible. For lack of a better term, it could be called a "gothic giallo," with the look and feel of a Hammer horror period piece with a plot that prefigures the Italian thrillers that would be popularized by the likes of Dario Argento and Sergio Martino in the next year or two. It's one of the earliest "schoolgirls in peril" subgenre offerings, coming not long after Alfred Vohrer's krimi THE COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS and Antonio Margheriti's THE YOUNG, THE EVIL AND THE SAVAGE, and a few years before Massimo Dallamano's essential giallo/krimi hybrid WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? (which featured Galbo), initially released in the US as THE SCHOOL THAT COULDN'T SCREAM, and its semi-sequels WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS? and ENIGMA ROSSO, There's only a couple of onscreen murders, but they're handled in an unusual fashion, with one playing with de los Rios' score and having it slowly grind to a halt as the victim dies. Factoring out the supernatural element with which Argento ran wild, SUSPIRIA also owes a bit of a debt to THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED, especially with its girls trudging through a miserable ballet class and Palmer's Mme. Fourneau being cut from the same cloth as Joan Bennett's Mme. Blanc and Alida Valli's Miss Tanner in the Argento classic. Argento also incorporated the schoolgirl theme into his 1985 film PHENOMENA, aka CREEPERS, with Daria Nicolodi's psycho headmistress Miss Bruckner another variant on Mme. Fourneau. THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED goes pretty bonkers in its unforgettable closing minutes, and without going too deeply into spoiler territory, it'll become clear to fans of the legendary 1983 Spanish splatter classic PIECES where that film got one of its craziest ideas.

Based on the plot, it was probably easy to sell THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED as a trashy drive-in horror flick to American audiences, but like many Spanish films of that era and into the mid '70s, it takes some not-very-veiled swipes at the regime of Francisco Franco. There's no aggressive political statements being made, but certainly Mme. Fourneau's forcing the girls to shower in their nightgowns, refusing to allow them to be nude even while bathing--this is another thing against which Catherine rebels and Fourneau can't stop herself from staring with obvious desire at the young woman's breasts (Palmer plays this moment perfectly)--is a jab at the pervasive censorship of the arts under Franco. Such critiques were common in Spanish cinema of this period, most notably in the works of Luis Bunuel (1961's VIRIDIANA) and Carlos Saura (1975's CRIA CUERVOS), but also Victor Erice's 1973 classic THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE. THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED is ultimately a film firmly ensconced in the thriller/horror genre and doesn't take quite the line-in-the-sand stances that Bunuel, Saura, and Erice did, or that Serrador would do seven years later with the still-shocking WHO CAN KILL A CHILD?, but it's got a little more going on than the typical AIP B-movie exploitation import you'd see in 1971. Born in Uruguay in 1935 and in apparent retirement now, Serrador's family moved to Spain when he was 12, and his career dates back to the late 1950s, much of it spent doing gun-for-hire work for Spanish television, often under the pseudonym "Luis Penafiel." He's best known in Spain for creating several TV game shows, including the hugely popular UN, DOS, TRES...RESPONDA OTRA VEZ, which ran in prime time from 1966 to 2004. He compiled a handful of screenwriting credits over the years and didn't aspire to be a "horror guy" but oddly, his mere two outings as a feature film director have cemented his status as a major figure in Spanish cult horror cinema to those outside of Spain, while to Spanish audiences, his association with game shows and variety programs have basically made him that country's Merv Griffin. Shout's Blu-ray includes both the 94-minute American cut of THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED and an extended 102-minute version with standard-definition inserts of footage cut by AIP that included some additional gore and nudity but primarily consisted of dialogue that slowed the pace a bit. There's also interviews with Moulder Brown and Maude that make this as comprehensive a package as you can get for a horror gem that's been long forgotten except by a small cult of devoted fans.

A MONSTER CALLS
(US/Spain - 2016)

Directed by J.A. Bayona. Written by Patrick Ness. Cast: Lewis MacDougall, Sigourney Weaver, Felicity Jones, Liam Neeson, Toby Kebbell, Geraldine Chaplin, James Melville, Ben Moor, Dominic Boyle, Oliver Steer. (PG-13, 108 mins)

Acclaimed Spanish filmmaker and Guillermo del Toro protege J.A. Bayona (THE ORPHANAGE, THE IMPOSSIBLE) crafts his first genuine masterpiece with A MONSTER CALLS, adapted by Patrick Ness from his 2011 novel. The book came from an original idea by Siobhan Dowd, who planned to write it herself but only got as far as outlining the project before succumbing to terminal breast cancer in 2007, a battle that inspired the story. Dowd's editor passed her notes on to Ness, who agreed to write the novel. As a director, Bayona seems more akin to classic-era Spielberg than del Toro (Bayona is currently at work on the next JURASSIC WORLD movie, due in summer 2018), demonstrating a gift for getting natural performances out of young and inexperienced actors. He coaxes a star-making from young Lewis MacDougall (PAN) as Conor O'Malley, a lonely 12-year-old boy in a small British town trying to cope with the slow decline of his terminally ill mother (Felicity Jones). Treatment after treatment doesn't work, and Conor has no one to turn to--his grandmother (Sigourney Weaver) is cold and stand-offish, and his father (Toby Kebbell) split several years ago and has since started a new family in Los Angeles ("You could come for Christmas and meet your sister," he tells Conor, who snaps "Half-sister"). He's bullied on a daily basis at school by Harry (James Melville) and spends his time sketching and drawing, a passion he inherited from his mother, who wanted to go to art school but put it on the backburner when she became pregnant with him. Conor is plagued by recurring nightmares in which he's clinging to his mother as she dangles over a bottomless hole that's opened up, always followed at 12:07 am by an ancient yew tree in the cemetery behind their home coming to life.

Voiced and motion-captured by Liam Neeson, the giant, fire-breathing tree monster is in Conor's imagination but mentors him in dealing with his problems--with the bullies at school, with his grandmother, the resentment he feels toward his father, and his refusal to accept that his mother is near death. The monster tells Conor three stories that have little to do with one another and whose points are initially lost on him. In them, nothing is black and white. People who are presumed evil are actually not and vice versa and there are no clear answers for anything. Conor is, as the tree monster says, "A boy, too old to be a child and too young to be a man." He's faced with thoughts that he can't process. He wants his mother to recover but is angry with her when the last-ditch attempt at treatment doesn't work. He's happy to see his visiting father, but it doesn't take long before he realizes that he's not the priority when Dad declines his request to move with him to L.A. ("There's just no room," Dad says). Things take a devastating turn when Mom is readmitted to the hospital and Conor is forced to stay with Grandma and crosses a line that may irreparably damage any chance at establishing a positive relationship with her. The moral of the tree monster's stories all parallel plot developments in the film, and in doing so, the tree monster is preparing Conor for the inevitable truth he has to face: that his mother is going to die and there's nothing he can do to stop it.

For anyone who's lost a parent or a close family member to a long illness, A MONSTER CALLS may dig up emotions both devastating and cathartic. You'll recognize every thought that runs through Conor's head: his wish that treatment is a success and everything will get back to normal, his anger when that doesn't happen, his wish that the suffering would just end, a sentiment that he misconstrues as wishing she'd die, which causes him extreme guilt ("You don't want her to die," the tree monster reassures, adding "But you want the pain to end. For her and for you"). It's hard to discuss a lot of what happens in A MONSTER CALLS without giving away too much, but it's a powerful and deeply moving film that addresses a difficult subject in a mature and thoughtful way. I wouldn't be at all surprised if psychologists and families find it to be a therapeutic tool in the future for helping children cope with the pending loss of a terminally ill parent. It's a film about loss and grief that handles real life issues in a blunt but sensitive fashion. It isn't afraid to show its characters in a negative light because that's how life happens. There are moments where you'll intensely dislike Conor, no matter how much you empathize with his situation, making A MONSTER CALLS a special effects-heavy fantasy with much going on under the surface--"monster" has numerous meanings here--pulling no punches and unafraid to take risks. It's depressing, heartbreaking, comforting, and hopeful in equal measure, and is thus far my pick for 2016's best film.

ARSENAL
(US/UK - 2017)

Directed by Steven C. Miller. Written by Jason Mosberg. Cast: Adrian Grenier, John Cusack, Nicolas Cage, Johnathan Schaech, Lydia Hull, Mark McCullough, Tyler Jon Olson, Abbie Gayle, Christopher Coppola, Christopher Rob Bowen, Megan Leonard, C.J. LeBlanc. (R, 92 mins)

It's only the first weekend of 2017 and we've got the year's first of undoubtedly several straight-to-VOD thrillers with either Nicolas Cage or John Cusack--in this case, both. The CON AIR stars were last seen together in 2013's surprisingly good THE FROZEN GROUND but with ARSENAL, they're already blowing their New Year's resolutions to start appearing in better movies. Scripted by a debuting Jason Mosberg and directed by VOD mercenary Steven C. Miller (whose not-terrible 2016 Michael Mann knockoff MARAUDERS was the best-by-default entry in Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis phones in his performance from his luxury hotel suite" series), ARSENAL's biggest problem is that it can't figure out what it wants to be. Set and shot in Biloxi, MS, with a special appearance by the Biloxi Shuckers minor league baseball team, ARSENAL opens in a such a somber and downbeat fashion with a focus on two teenage brothers in the early 1990s that it could almost pass for an early David Gordon Green indie drama. Older Mikey pushes little brother JP around but there's genuine love between them as they come from a broken home and have one another's back. 23 years later, they still live in the same town but a lot's changed: JP (ENTOURAGE's Adrian Grenier, who was in MARAUDERS and is looking like a new regular in these things) is married with a newborn daughter and owns a successful construction company, while Mikey (Johnathan Schaech, already a regular in these things) is a perpetual fuck-up who was booted out of the military, can't hold down a job, and has an ex-wife and a daughter who hate him. He's also a low-level criminal with tenuous ties to Eddie King (Cage), a coke-snorting crime lord who holds court in a skeezy titty bar on the outskirts of town. Mikey is such a loser that JP loaned him $10,000 to pay his back rent and get braces for his daughter, but instead Mikey spent it on a cocaine shipment that he planned to flip for double the price. Of course, other lowlifes knew he had the stash and jacked it from him, leaving him with nothing. Mikey needs money, and so does Eddie. He's in debt to some NYC mobsters who have sent his younger brother Buddy (Cage's brother Christopher Coppola) to collect. Eddie comes up with a half-assed plan to stage Mikey's kidnapping and shake JP down for a $350,000 ransom. Things obviously don't work out for anyone, starting with the viewer (I'd say "audience," but I don't wish to exaggerate).

ARSENAL's more serious side would work better if Grenier and Schaech were more engaging actors. But that seriousness is undermined by frequent instances of ludicrously over-the-top violence, including a cartoonishly splattery climax more fitting for the insane Paul Walker thriller RUNNING SCARED or the gloriously bonkers PUNISHER: WAR ZONE, with slo-mo bullets blowing up everything from skulls to ballsacks with wild abandon. Grenier and Schaech seem to be in a serious drama about the family ties that bind, while Cage is off in his own movie where he's inexplicably reprising his role in the barely-released 1993 campy pseudo-noir bomb DEADFALL, which he agreed to do as a favor to Christopher Coppola, who wrote and directed. Cage's performance--possibly his most gonzo in a career full of them and augmented by what appears to be a Tony Clifton-meets-Sonny Bono wig and mustache combo with a putty nose--is the only reason anyone remembers DEADFALL, a film that's barely watchable despite a cast that includes Michael Biehn, Charlie Sheen, James Coburn, Talia Shire, Micky Dolenz, Clarence Williams III, Angus Scrimm, and Peter Fonda. While Cage's Eddie was killed off midway through DEADFALL, he's clearly playing the same character here, right down to the wig, the stache, and the fake schnoz, which may go down as 2017's most obscure and self-indulgent inside joke.

In ARSENAL, Cage is here to do exactly what you expect him to do: shout, yell, scream, spaz out, and totally Cage it up as his putty nose perpetually seems on the verge of falling off. He's introduced shoving a steel pipe into a guy's mouth and driving it out the back of his skull with a baseball bat and he spends much of the second half of the film covered in blood after shooting and clawing his way out of a mob ambush. If ARSENAL went for this level of sustained lunacy for its entire run time, it might grow exhausting but it would at least be interesting for Nic Cage fans. No one cares about JP taking a stand against Eddie (telling his wife "Katrina didn't run us out and neither will Eddie King!") or shitbag Mikey's redemption. ARSENAL tries to have it both ways and succeeds at neither. It also fails to find a purpose for Cusack, sporting a doo-rag, a ball cap, shades, and his ubiquitous vape pen in a thoroughly superfluous supporting role as Sal, a shady undercover cop who's buddies with JP and Mikey and dispenses sage advice to JP about how to handle Eddie. Sal does nothing to advance the plot, and Cusack could've been completely eliminated with no effect at all on the movie. As usual for this sort of gig in the Cusackalypse Now canon, he looks haggard and sleep-deprived, like he just crawled out of a dumpster, exerting no effort to camouflage his utter lack of interest in the entire project. Cage is fully aware that this is shit as well, but he at least embraces the notion of self-parody and gives you what you came to see.

THE MONSTER
(US/Canada - 2016)

Similar to THE BABADOOK in that its title figure should be wearing a bright neon sign flashing "Metaphor!," THE MONSTER is an intermittently effective horror film that works better in the buildup that it does in the follow-through. It gets a lot from a pair of terrific performances by Zoe Kazan and young Ella Ballentine (also excellent in the little-seen STANDOFF) as a dysfunctional mother and daughter who stop fighting with one another when a car accident on a dark and desolate road makes a bad night even worse. Divorced Kathy (Kazan) is, to put it mildly, a trainwreck. A verbally and physically abusive alcoholic, Kathy drinks herself to sleep every night, usually leaving her ten-year-old daughter Lizzie (Ballentine) to be the responsible party in the relationship. Getting a nearly nine-hour late start to a road trip after hungover Kathy decides to sleep the day away, Lizzie demands they drive straight through for a planned visitation with her father for which she doesn't plan on returning, which keeps them on the road past midnight. Kathy crashes the car after hitting a wolf in a torrential downpour. An ambulance is running late, but a wrecker arrives and the driver (Aaron Douglas) is killed by a reptilian creature that looks like the result of a drunken hook-up between THE INCUBUS and a komodo dragon. After the ambulance arrives and the EMTs meet a similar fate, Kathy and Lizzie must figure out how to evade the monster and get off the road to safety.

Written and directed by Bryan Bertino (THE STRANGERS), THE MONSTER has a few genuinely terrifying scenes, with the director just showing brief flashes of the creature materializing in the background through sheets of rain. Kathy and Lizzie are stuck in what's essentially a CUJO situation, with their dysfunctional backstory being played out in periodic cutaway flashbacks. It's pretty easy to read the Monster itself as symbolic of Kathy's alcoholism and substance abuse (it's hinted that she's a recovering drug addict as well), with Lizzie determined to defeat it and emerge victorious. It's not quite as deep and disturbing as THE BABADOOK's representation of mental illness and the execution at times feels like an idea Bertino concocted in a high school creative writing class and didn't really expand upon over the years. It's sincere and well-made (and a huge improvement over Bertino's terrible MOCKINGBIRD), and the Monster is a nice old-school, practical man-in-a-suit for the most part, but the tension starts deflating in the third act (of course, once they get out of the car) and the film limps to a shrug of a finish, leaving all sorts of questions unanswered--things like "If Dad is the responsible parent, why is Lizzie is the custody of grossly neglectful Kathy and her succession of dirtbag boyfriends?" and "Why isn't anyone concerned about the ambulance that went out after midnight and still hasn't returned by daybreak?"(R, 91 mins)

EQUITY
(US - 2016)

The indie financial drama EQUITY had a chance to make a powerful statement about Wall Street wheeling and dealing from a woman's perspective, but it's almost completely sunk by two things. First is the obvious symbolism of a smug financial titan having an increasingly precarious Jenga tower on his desk. I wonder if that will coming crashing down by the end? The second is a throwaway bit late in the film where the main character is in the midst of watching the IPO she shepherded crash and burn and she loses her shit over being handed a chocolate chip cookie with only "THREE! MOTHER! FUCKING! CHIPS!" in it. And this film wants to be taken seriously? Not only does her utter shrieking hysteria come off as a negative stereotype considering EQUITY's POV, but it's overplayed to the point where it doesn't ring true in any way at all. And it was a lot better when Robert De Niro bitched in an equally insane but much quieter way about the blueberry muffins in CASINO over 20 years ago. Anna Gunn, a TV and stage veteran who stayed busy for years before breaking out and winning two Emmys as Skyler White on BREAKING BAD, stars as Paige Bishop, a powerful investment banker with a proven track record who's nonetheless being pilloried in the press over a recent IPO that performed far below expectations. She's about to rebound with Cachet, a new privacy company that's going public. When she isn't being treated condescendingly by Cachet's douchebag CEO (Samuel Roukin), she's being prodded about a promotion by her assistant and VP Erin (Sarah Megan Thomas) and hounded by Samantha Ryan (Alysia Reiner of ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK), an old college friend who's now a fed working with the white collar crime unit. Samantha is after Michael Connor (James Purefoy, who still hasn't wiped the smirk off his face from THE FOLLOWING), who's at the same firm as Paige and is suspected in insider trading with his asshole buddy Benji Akers (Craig Bierko), who runs a rival firm. Paige is romantically involved with Connor, which complicates things, and it only gets worse after a Cachet coder (Sophie von Haselberg, Bette Midler's lookalike daughter) informs Paige--in a clandestine meeting in a poorly-lit parking garage, of course--that there's several security issues with Cachet. It soon becomes apparent that someone is trying to sabotage the Cachet IPO and make Paige the scapegoat for its failure.

EQUITY occasionally works in fits and starts. Samantha's investigation generates some MARGIN CALL-like suspense, and Gunn is good until the third act, when director Meera Menon has her shouting every line. EQUITY was written, produced, and directed by women (Thomas and Reiner co-produced and have story credits) and it seems to think it can coast by just on that. It has some valid points about the struggle of women trying to make it in a boys club, especially in the way Paige is repeatedly passed over for consideration of her outgoing boss' (Lee Tergesen) job because she "ruffles some feathers" and "rubs people the wrong way," and how when Erin finally gets her overdue promotion not because of performance but because a coasting, borderline incompetent underling made a call to his uncle, who's a higher-up at the firm. But for every astute observation it makes, there's that Jenga tower and the chocolate chip cookie, and another ridiculous scene where pregnant Erin is getting her first ultrasound and can't be bothered to look at the screen because she's too busy taking an urgent call about Cachet. In the middle of an ultrasound. EQUITY may have noble intentions, but it's too forced and too melodramatic, and with the cast almost completely coming from television, it plays a lot like a pilot for an FX series that never got picked up. (R, 100 mins)

KILL COMMAND
(UK - 2016)

It offers little in the way of innovation, but KILL COMMAND is a not-bad B-movie that wears its '80s influences on its sleeve in a straightforward and dignified fashion. While its ideas echo classics like ALIENS and PREDATOR, it's really more like a sci-fi DOG SOLDIERS with a dreary, dystopian production design that Blockbuster Video regulars of a certain age will recall from 1990s straight-to-VHS Vidmark Entertainment fare like CYBORG 2 and DEATH MACHINE. Set in the near-future, KILL COMMAND has cyborg scientist Mills (THE CROWN's Vanessa Kirby) being sent by her employers at Harbinger to accompany a group of hard-ass US Marines on a routine training exercise on a remote island. Harbinger deals in weapons manufacturing and combat technology (and, judging from its name, pure evil), and Mills is their top programmer. She recognized a flaw in the code of their soon-to-be-rolled-out line of robot soldiers and is to observe the Marines in their mock combat with the robots on the island to see how the machines respond. After some extended set-up involving a lot of macho ballbusting and the establishing of everyone's mistrust of Mills, from no-nonsense Capt. Bukes (FLAME AND CITRON's Thure Lindhardt) on down, differences are set aside when Mills figures out one of the robots has gone HAL 9000. It's now capable of making its own decisions, programming the rest to mimic the battle action of the Marines and using the military's own techniques against them but with live ammo. After several are killed in the initial skirmish, Mills and the remaining survivors make their way to an abandoned compound for your standard-issue RIO BRAVO/John Carpenter scenario, with a small band of heroes fighting off the onslaught of sentient robots trying to get inside.

Little more than a pastiche of other movies' concepts, KILL COMMAND is pretty minor-league stuff but writer/director Steve Gomez, a veteran visual effects tech making his feature filmmaking debut, keeps things moving at a brisk pace once it gets going and works wonders with a small budget. Shot in 2014 and kept on the shelf for a couple of years, KILL COMMAND is a British production pretending to be American, so some of the American accents are a little off and the line delivery stilted (though Kirby and the Danish Lindhardt do alright), none more so than Mike Noble as the nervous Goodwin, with the actor's overbaked southern drawl constantly slipping into his own accent like some unholy fusion of Tennessee Williams and Guy Ritchie. It's ultimately slight and forgettable, but if approached with minimal expectations, KILL COMMAND provides atmosphere, action, and some solid effects on a low budget and ends up a reasonably entertaining 100 minutes for '80s and '90s genre fans in the mood for something directed by a second-string Neil Marshall. (Unrated, 100 mins)

LIVE BY NIGHT
(US - 2016)

Written and directed by Ben Affleck. Cast: Ben Affleck, Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper, Chris Messina, Sienna Miller, Brendan Gleeson, Elle Fanning, Remo Girone, Robert Glenister, Miguel J. Pimentel, Matthew Maher, Anthony Michael Hall, Clark Gregg, Max Casella, J.D. Evermore, Christian Clemenson, Benjamin Ciaramello, Derek Mears. (R, 130 mins)

Ben Affleck made his directing debut with 2007's excellent Dennis Lehane adaptation GONE BABY GONE, and after establishing himself as a solid filmmaker with 2010's THE TOWN and 2012's Best Picture Oscar-winner ARGO, he returns with LIVE BY NIGHT, based on another Lehane novel. Where GONE BABY GONE and THE TOWN (based on a Chuck Hogan novel) were set in contemporary Boston, LIVE BY NIGHT looks at the city in a Prohibition-era setting. While Affleck the director captures the look of late 1920s Boston, his script is all over the place and he's completely miscast in the lead role. Affleck isn't an actor who thrives in period pieces and the film would've been better served had he stayed behind the camera as he did with GONE BABY GONE and cast someone else (co-producer Leonardo DiCaprio, perhaps?). With his Panama hat and oversized suit, he never looks comfortable in the role of Joe Coughlin, a WWI vet and Boston stick-up man-turned-Tampa rum runner. There's simply too much story for a feature film, and here is yet another example of an overstuffed film that would've been better served as a cable miniseries where characters could be fleshed out and events wouldn't be so glossed over. The pacing is choppy and there's reams of sleepy,, mumbly Affleck narration to cover exposition and whole sections of plot that are missing, not to mention Scott Eastwood and Titus Welliver having their entire roles cut out (Welliver is still in the credits, but if he's there, I didn't see him). Robert Richardson's cinematography and Jess Gonchor's production design are top-notch and every now and again, there's a striking image (like a car engulfed in flames sticking out of a shallow lake) or a memorable line of dialogue (the "So what am I talkin' to you for?" bit is great), but the cluttered and muddled LIVE BY NIGHT is otherwise is just too familiar to make its own mark in the gangster genre, borrowing too many ideas from too many movies that came before it to tell a story we've seen countless times before.

Affleck's Coughlin is a small-time Boston hood who happens to be the son of a high-ranking police superintendent (Brendan Gleeson). He's also in love with Emma Gould (Sienna Miller), the moll of powerful Irish mob kingpin Albert White (Robert Glenister). Their plan to run away together is thwarted when she's intimidated into ratting him out to White, who beats him senseless and leaves him in a coma. After he wakes and serves a stint in prison, he's paroled only to find his father has died and Emma was killed by White. Hell-bent on revenge, Coughlin forms an unholy alliance with Italian crime boss Maso Pescatore (Remo Girone) to take over the booze operation in the Tampa enclave of Ybor City and cut White out of the picture. Heading to Tampa with his buddy Dion Bartolo (Chris Messina), Coughlin teams with Cuban gangster Esteban Suarez (singer Miguel, under his full name Miguel J. Pimentel) and falls for his sister and partner Graciella (Zoe Saldana). Coughlin has to deal with all sorts of pressure, from stern police chief Figgis (Chris Cooper) cordially warning him to stay in his territory and they won't have any trouble, to the local chapter of the KKK, led by Figgis' idiot brother-in-law R.D. Pruitt (Matthew Maher), who wants a 60% cut of the business since Joe's club caters to Cubans and blacks and because he's hooked up with Graciella. LIVE BY NIGHT also finds time for a subplot about Figgis' wholesome daughter Loretta (Elle Fanning) heading off to Hollywood to be a movie star but instead falling into drugs and prostitution. She then returns to Ybor City to become a fire-and-brimstone preacher warning the townsfolk about the dangers of gambling and "the demon rum," which stonewalls Pescatore's plans for Coughlin to build a casino.

There's also double-crosses against Coughlin by the increasingly greedy Pescatore, who wants his moron son Digger (Max Casella) to take over the Ybor City operation, a sudden reappearance by a character presumed dead for no discernible reason, and about four endings before the credits finally roll. People are introduced and things happen so quickly and at times randomly that it's sometimes difficult to process who's who and how they figure into the story. LIVE BY NIGHT is always nice to look at and Affleck has an undeniable flair with set pieces (including an intense early card game stick-up that he does in a single take), but it's lacking everywhere else. He tries to cover it up with all the narration, but the seams don't take long to show. Affleck's performance is curiously bland throughout, never seeming like a 1920s gangster but always like a modern actor playing gangster dress-up (and for a smart guy, Coughlin is pretty brazenly stupid about being seen in public with Emma). Graciella's character arc makes no sense, bemoaning her husband's (yeah, she and Coughlin get married offscreen and then it's casually mentioned several scenes later) dangerous career, seemingly forgetting that they met because she's a partner in a major Cuban crime organization. Gleeson and Miller have nothing to do, and Cooper's character never makes consistent sense from scene to scene. Veteran Italian character actor Girone (in his first American film in a career going back to 1974) and an outstanding Fanning fare best, even if her Loretta ends up being another underdeveloped plot tangent that briefly turns the film into an Eli Sunday sermon from THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Affleck tries to go for a MILLER'S CROSSING feel, but ends up with a rushed, lesser BOARDWALK EMPIRE, and his own lackluster performance never inspires you to care much about Coughlin. By the third or fourth ending, the relaxed pace starts to lend a second-tier Clint Eastwood feeling to the proceedings, further demonstrating the uneven tone of the entire project. LIVE BY NIGHT might've had potential, and perhaps a longer director's cut would help, but in the end, it's a formulaic, cliche-laden misfire from Affleck.

CLINICAL
(US - 2017)

Directed by Alistair Legrand. Written by Luke Harvis and Alistair Legrand. Cast: Vinessa Shaw, Kevin Rahm, William Atherton, India Eisley, Aaron Stanford, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Nestor Serrano, Wilmer Calderon. (Unrated, 104 mins)

A committed performance by Vinessa Shaw (EYES WIDE SHUT) isn't enough to salvage this sub-Shyamalianian bed-shitter that digs itself into a hole so deep that it can't possibly claw its way out. It starts out decently enough, with Shaw as Dr. Jane Mathis, a psychiatrist still traumatized two years after being attacked with a glass shard by a teenage patient named Nora (India Eisley, daughter of Olivia Hussey and David Glen Eisley, frontman for '80s hair metal B-listers Giuffria), who then used the shard to slit her own throat. Jane is still in therapy with her own shrink Dr. Terry Drummond (DIE HARD's William Atherton), dating nice cop Miles (Aaron Stanford, Shaw's co-star in the remake of THE HILLS HAVE EYES) and cautiously restarting her practice on a part-time basis at her home (is that ever a good idea?). One of her new patients is Alex (Kevin Rahm of DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES and MAD MEN), who's suffering from severe PTSD and anxiety after a car accident that took the life of his daughter and required multiple reconstructive surgeries that have left his face horribly scarred. Strange things begin happening: a sleepwalking Alex appears rummaging through Jane's garage one night, she keeps hearing noises outside the back door, she suffers from sleep paralysis and nightmares, and is having visions of a maniacal, blood-splattered Nora chasing her through the house. Is Nora really there or is it a manifestation of Jane's guilt over believing she mishandled her treatment, something she fears she's doing again with Alex?

Directed and co-written by Alistair Legrand (THE DIABOLICAL), CLINICAL is an acceptable slow-burner for about an hour and change until Legrand and co-writer Luke Harvis drop the Shyamalan twist and everything promptly falls apart. From then on, nothing makes any logical sense no matter how many times the characters explain it (and the culprit is one of these types who just talk and talk and talk). It's weird in that the twist is overexplained yet still doesn't make any sense, almost as if Legrand and Harvis are not so much spelling it out for the viewer as much as they're trying to convince themselves "Yeah, you see how with this and that, and...yeah, I mean, see...this works...right?" Legrand is pretty generous with the splatter and also throws in a few nice split diopter shots (the one with the snow globe is the foreground is well done) to let us know that he's seen some Brian De Palma movies. But by the end, you'll have pretty much given up on trying to figure out what the hell's going on with all the rapid fire revelations and just feel bad for Shaw, a journeyman who's never been out of work over her 25-year career and has been plugging away at it since her teen years (HOCUS POCUS, 3:10 TO YUMA, TWO LOVERS, COLD IN JULY, tons of TV guest spots). She really brings her A-game to this, as if she was certain this was the breakout that would finally take her to the next level. Shaw carries this entire project on her shoulders and it eventually crushes her, and despite some obvious competence behind the camera by Legrand, the weak script (much is made of the Christmas setting, but it doesn't really do anything with it) just seems like its last few pages were blank and everyone just crossed their fingers and hoped it would work itself out.

AMERICAN HONEY
(US/UK - 2016)

British filmmaker Andrea Arnold comes from the Mike Leigh and Ken Loach school of kitchen sink cinema, with films like 2006's RED ROAD and 2009's FISH TANK capturing the harsh and gritty world of lower-income and disenfranchised UK residents. Even her 2011 period adaptation of WUTHERING HEIGHTS was able to fuse Arnold's gritty vision to the Bronte classic. AMERICAN HONEY finds Arnold focusing on America, its impoverished, its socioeconomic inequalities, and like many foreign-born directors, she manages to vividly depict the look and feel of the "heartland" of middle America in ways that sometimes only outsiders can. Shot in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri, AMERICAN HONEY, like FISH TANK before it, has a non-professional Arnold discovery in the lead role. Houston native Sasha Lane was on spring break with friends when Arnold spotted her on a beach. Lane has moments where she shines, but fails to make the impact that Katie Jarvis did in FISH TANK. Part of the reason is that Jarvis' character was aggressive and in-your-face and that the debuting actress was a force of nature (Arnold approached Jarvis on a street where she saw the enraged young woman tearing her boyfriend a new asshole and knew she had the actress FISH TANK needed). Lane's Star is more of a passive observer throughout AMERICAN HONEY, taking in the sights and sounds of America, and while she finds herself on this journey, it's just not a very interesting one. 18-year-old Star leaves her dysfunctional home where she's sexually abused by a man we assume is her stepfather (it's never made clear) to join a free-spirited, vagabond magazine sales crew run by the stern, money-driven Krystal (Riley Keough). It's a rambunctious group of misfits prone to bacchanalian partying after hours but they take their jobs seriously as they travel by van from city to city, especially Jake (Shia LaBeouf), Krystal's top seller and master bullshit artist. Star falls for the charismatic--at least in the context of this film--Jake despite warnings from Krystal to stay focused on her work.

Shot almost completely handheld for maximum immediacy in Arnold's preferred aspect ratio of 1.33:1, AMERICAN HONEY finds hypnotic imagery in the utterly normal, with scenes in a K-Mart, non-descript convenience stores, skeezy motels, on desolate highways, and other locations providing a document of the sameness of the American landscape like Terrence Malick's otherwise forgettable TO THE WONDER. There's some effective scenes scattered throughout but with long sequences on the road and about ten too many mag crew sing-alongs, the meandering-by-design AMERICAN HONEY muddles its message and overstays its welcome by a good 45 minutes. While neophyte Lane acquits herself as best she can, Star simply isn't an interesting enough character to justify such a bloated and self-indulgent running time. (R, 163 mins)

THE WHOLE TRUTH
(US - 2016)

A throwback to the kind of John Grisham courtroom dramas that were opening every other week in the 1990s, THE WHOLE TRUTH is one of the dullest films of its kind, a sleepy shrug of a thriller that can't even be bothered to embrace some of its more tawdry elements. Lionsgate knew they had a dud on their hands, sitting on this for two years before giving it a stealth VOD burial, even with a cast headlined by Keanu Reeves and Renee Zellweger, in her first screen appearance in six years. Set and shot in the usual Lionsgate stomping grounds of Louisiana, THE WHOLE TRUTH has Reeves (a last-minute replacement for Daniel Craig, who wisely bailed) as Richard Ramsay, a cynical defense lawyer representing Mike Lassiter (Gabriel Basso), a 17-year-old on trial for the murder of his wealthy father Boone (Jim Belushi), who happened to be Ramsay's best friend. The film opens in the courtroom, the trial already in progress, with flashbacks filling in the backstory as witnesses testify. A picture is painted of Boone as a bullying, physically abusive, philandering drunk and all-around asshole who deserved the knife Mike confessed to plunging in the middle of his chest in a fit of blind rage. Friends and acquaintances tell of Boone's cruel and humiliating treatment of his wife Loretta (Zellweger), and even darker details are revealed when Mike eventually takes the stand, but is the whole truth being withheld? And could a major character be hiding a deep, dark secret that will be revealed in a thoroughly ludicrous twist ending? SPOILER: Yes.

I have to admit, when I woke up the day I watched THE WHOLE TRUTH, it's safe to say that one of the things I least expected to see before my head hit the pillow that night was a nude Jim Belushi violently restraining Renee Zellweger's arms and anally raping her against a marble banister. Mike's best buddy next door also spies on a nude Loretta in the shower (a game Zellweger going all in after her extended sabbatical), and we discover that Ramsay's co-counsel Janelle Brady (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) lost her job at her last firm after having a torrid affair with a married lawyer and went off the deep end as a crazy, obsessed psycho stalking him and his family. These are unabashedly sleazy elements that should be accentuated to a point but get thrown on the back burner by director Courtney Hunt, making her first film since 2008's acclaimed FROZEN RIVER, which earned her a Best Screenplay Oscar nomination as well as a Best Actress nod for Melissa Leo. The FROZEN RIVER Courtney Hunt isn't who showed up for this uninspired yawner. Hunt's also kept busy by directing a few episodes of LAW & ORDER: SVU, and even those have more flair and style than the static, sleep-inducing THE WHOLE TRUTH. The script is credited to one "Rafael Jackson," who's really Nicholas Kazan, the son of the legendary Elia Kazan and the writer of such revered films as 1982's FRANCES, 1986's AT CLOSE RANGE, and 1991's REVERSAL OF FORTUNE. Kazan hasn't scripted a film since the 2002 Jennifer Lopez thriller ENOUGH, and it should speak volumes that he had his name removed from THE WHOLE TRUTH but left it on ENOUGH (odd trivia bit: after the abysmal EXPOSED, this is the second 2016 Keanu Reeves thriller dumped on VOD by Lionsgate where he was an eleventh-hour replacement for another actor--Philip Seymour Hoffman was supposed to star in EXPOSED but died shortly before production began--and one of the key creative personnel had their names removed from the finished product). You don't generally see things like THE WHOLE TRUTH much anymore. Reeves (who's terrible), Zellweger, and Belushi (who's quite convincing as a total shitbag) could've headlined this in 1998 and it would've been exactly the same movie--age doesn't make Reeves any more believable as an attorney--only back then it would've cleaned up at the box office for a week until the bad word of mouth got around. Courtroom dramas are a tried-and-true formula that's tough to screw up. It's too bad THE WHOLE TRUTH bungles it from the start, never finding its way and lacking the courage to embrace its inherent pulpy Southern trashiness. (R, 93 mins)

DEATH RACE 2050
(US - 2017)

The Roger Corman-produced 1975 classic DEATH RACE 2000 already got a remake with 2008's Jason Statham-starring DEATH RACE. That film has spawned a series of DTV sequels with Luke Goss in place of Statham, with a fourth installment due out later this year. With DEATH RACE 2050, the belated DTV sequel to/unnecessary remake of the 1975 film, Universal now has two different DEATH RACE franchises going. But only DEATH RACE 2050 has the direct involvement of Corman. who wanted another DEATH RACE that recaptured the look and feel of Paul Bartel's original. The satirical element is definitely here, along with some IDIOCRACY-style roasting of American culture, self-aware Syfy snark, and over-the-top Troma levels of comedic gore. In the future of 2050, the United Corporations of America is run by the Chairman (Malcolm McDowell), and the biggest cultural event going is the Death Race, what the Chairman terms an annual celebration of "the freedom to sit on your big fat ass all day!" The top driver is Frankenstein (Manu Bennett), the reigning champion of the Death Race, where the key is to win the race but points are scored by running down pedestrians. Frankenstein's competition is comprised of macho but insecure Jed Perfectus (Burt Grinstead), a closet case unable to face his homosexuality; religious fanatic and right-wing domestic terrorist Tammy the Terrorist (Anessa Ramsey); and rapper/sex tape celebrity Minerva Jefferson (Folake Olowofoyeku). The final car is the self-driving A.B.E., the product of UCA ingenuity and the kind of technological advancement that Death Race co-host Junior (Charlie Farrell) calls a gift that "finally eliminated America's outdated burden of employment." The race is jeopardized by a Resistance movement led by disgruntled former network TV exec Alexis Hamilton (Yancy Butler), who's got a mole inside the operation in the form of Frankenstein's proxy navigator Annie Sullivan (Marci Miller).

DEATH RACE 2050 earns some goodwill by wearing its love of its predecessor on its sleeve, looking every bit as cheap as the 1975 film, with CGI that's probably intentionally bad filling in for some old-school matte work. The jokes fly fast and furious, with Farrell's Junior an almost carbon copy of the performance by The Real Don Steele, and the same goes for the way Shanna Olsen's sycophantic co-host Grace Tickle captures the cloying ass-kissing of Joyce Jameson's Grace Pander in the old film, right down to the repeated refrain of every famous person being "a very good friend of mine." Director/co-writer G.J. Echternkamp has some fun with the renamed cities and states of 2050 (there's "Nueva York," Baltimore is now "Upper Shitville," Arkansas is "Walmartinique," and Dubai is "Washington, DC"), the subplot with Abe suddenly quitting the race to drive off and find itself after an existential AI crisis ("What am I?" the computer voice wonders) is inspired nonsense, and with his crazy toupee, crude demeanor, and being surrounded by topless women, McDowell's Chairman is obviously a 2050 incarnation of Donald Trump. But a little of DEATH RACE 2050 goes a long way. The comedy is too blunt and heavy-handed, and the referencing a little too winking for its own good. It drifts off into post-nuke MAD MAX territory by the end, probably to take advantage of being shot on Corman's old Peru stomping grounds where several of his VHS mainstays from the late '80s and early '90s were made (Luis Llosa, one of Corman's top proteges from that period, went on to direct Hollywood movies like THE SPECIALIST and ANACONDA, and gets a producer credit here). As Frankenstein, the dull Bennett doesn't even come close to the stoical badassery of David Carradine, but shows he can adequately function as a backup Scott Adkins should the first choice be unavailable. In the end, DEATH RACE 2050 has its moments, and if approached with low expectations, isn't terrible by any means, even if it's just a significantly louder and much more obnoxious DEATH RACE 2000. (R, 93 mins)

TRAIN TO BUSAN
(South Korea - 2016)

At this point, there really isn't much anyone can add to the zombie genre, but the South Korean import TRAIN TO BUSAN finds ways to spruce up the familiar with clever ideas, inspired set pieces, interesting characters, and some unexpected instances of gut-wrenching emotion. Saek-woo (Gong Yoo) is a workaholic fund manager whose wife left him and their young daughter Su-an (Kim Soo-an), who's now mostly left in the care of Saek-woo's live-in mother. Upset at her father's distance and that her birthday gift is a duplicate of something he already gave her, Su-an insists on being taken by train to Busan to visit her mother. Once on the train, all hell breaks loose when a bleeding, nearly feral woman sprints about, bites a passenger, and unleashes a rapidly-spreading virus that turns victims into ferociously aggressive zombies. What follows is the usual scenario of a small band of resourceful survivors fighting their way through the train to safety, trying to outrun the contagion and the growing zombie horde as a state of emergency is declared and train station after train station is closed. An easy description of TRAIN TO BUSAN would be "WORLD WAR Z meets SNOWPIERCER," but it also plays a bit like DEMONS on a bullet train as well as demonstrating the tone of a 1970s disaster movie. Where writer Park Joo-suk and director Yeon Sang-ho help separate TRAIN TO BUSAN from the rest of the crowd is by packing it with one nail-biting sequence after another, with the stop at the Daejean train station cementing itself as an instant classic, culminating in the horrifying revelation that the military personnel sent to save them have already been infected and have turned. Other standout scenes include the devastating moment when Saek-woo calls his mother and expresses concern about the sound of her voice as her infection becomes apparent and he's forced to listen to her turn over the phone.

The bond that forms between the ever-diminishing group of survivors is strong and the actors excellent, making you really feel it when they start getting killed off. Saek-woo has an initial adversary in burly smartass Sang-hwa (a terrific performance by Ma Dong-seok), which isn't helped by Saek-woo not hesitating to leave Sang-hwa stranded in one of the cars with the zombies until the last second, but they set aside their differences, form a grudging partnership and take turns looking out for one another's loved ones, whether it's Su-an or Sang-hwa's very pregnant wife Seong-kyeong (Jung Yu-Mi). Self-absorbed Saek-woo undergoes a transformation into a selfless hero over the course of the film, starting out by telling his daughter "Look out for yourself before anyone else" when she offers her seat to an elderly woman who reminds her of her grandmother ("Granny's knees always hurt!" the compassionate child says). His daughter shows him the error of his ways ("You only care about yourself! That's why Mommy left!") and between that and Sang-hwa's merciless ballbusting ("Fund manager? No wonder you're an asshole"), Saek-woo becomes a hero. To go with the notion of this being an updated take on a '70s disaster epic, there's also the obligatory villain who makes an already bad situation worse with his actions: loathsome businessman Yong-suk (Kim Eui-sung) is this film's Richard Chamberlain from THE TOWERING INFERNO or Paul Reiser from ALIENS, an unbelievably duplicitous asshole who starts rumors, sabotages the safety of others, and puts his own well-being ahead of everyone, usually in the form of literally throwing other passengers at zombies in order to save his own ass. At one point, he even cavalierly sacrifices someone who comes to his assistance after he trips and falls running away from the zombies. This archetype is a staple of such films, and they've rarely been as off-the-charts despicable as Yong-suk, but true to TRAIN TO BUSAN's refusal to stick too closely to convention, even he gets a slightly redeeming trait by the end. The crux of the story with TRAIN TO BUSAN breaks no new ground, but there's enough tweaking and unexpected depth to its characters that it manages to separate itself from the crowd and successfully establish its own zombie bona fides. (Unrated, 118 mins)

THE DISAPPOINTMENTS ROOM
(US - 2016)

There's a legitimately sincere attempt at a modern gothic aesthetic to THE DISAPPOINTMENTS ROOM, but it just never takes off. It's co-written by PRISON BREAK star Wentworth Miller, who wrote Park Chan-wook's similarly gothic 2013 arthouse film STOKER, and perhaps this was intended as some sort of companion piece with its dark secrets and family tragedies. These are definitely recurring themes to Miller's work as a screenwriter, but THE DISAPPOINTMENTS ROOM's title becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously mangled in post-production and even after it set a land-speed record for vacating multiplexes--the DVD/Blu-ray and streaming version runs seven minutes shorter than what was in theaters last fall, omitting an apparently important scene where the main character has a meltdown in front of some dinner guests; here the guests are shown waiting for her then simply leaving as if the dinner never happened--the film was also left on the shelf for two years as a casualty of Relativity's bankruptcy woes. The end result is a film that feels unfinished and abandoned, even more so now that it's missing that dinner scene.

Architect Dana (Kate Beckinsale), her Mr. Mom husband David (the unbelievably bland Mel Raido), and their young son Lucas (Duncan Joiner) move to a decrepit mansion ominously known as The Blacker House. They're trying to get away from the city and some bad memories, namely the sudden death of their infant daughter. While exploring the house, Dana moves a large armoire and discovers a hidden room that's not on the blueprints and can only be locked from the outside. She learns from a local historian (Marcia DeRousse) that it's a "disappointments room," the kind of room where wealthy families in less enlightened times would lock away a deformed or mentally challenged child that would cause social embarrassment. Dana regularly visits the room and is soon plagued by visions of a young girl with a facial deformity as well as encountering the ghost of Judge Blacker (Gerald McRaney), the home's original owner, a rich and powerful local who kept his "disappointment" daughter hidden from the public. Dana goes off her meds, starts losing track of time and unknowingly becoming violent toward Lucas, all while engaging in a testy but flirtatious back-and-forth with stud handyman Ben (Lucas Till), one of many story threads that go absolutely nowhere as slowly as possible. Some of Miller's gothic intentions come through (a character is shown watching JANE EYRE on TV at one point), director D.J. Caruso (THE SALTON SEA, DISTURBIA) occasionally invokes a mood tantamount to a modern take on an early '60s AIP production, and the film seems to be trying to say something about motherhood and mental illness a la THE BABADOOK or LIGHTS OUT, but by the time the big reveal comes and the credits abruptly start rolling at 77 minutes, you're left with the realization that there's simply nothing here and the whole endeavor was just smoke and mirrors that can't even be salvaged by a pro like Beckinsale. Still, as disastrous as THE DISAPPOINTMENTS ROOM is, it has to get a little credit for the effective casting of McRaney as the ghostly villain. But that's all it's got going for it. (R, 85 mins)

SPLIT IMAGE
(US - 1982)

Directed by Ted Kotcheff. Written by Scott Spencer, Robert Kaufman and Robert Mark Kamen. Cast: Michael O'Keefe, Karen Allen, James Woods, Peter Fonda, Elizabeth Ashley, Brian Dennehy, Ronnie Scribner, Michael Sacks, Lee Montgomery, Ken Farmer, Cliff Stevens, John Dukakis, Peter Horton, Deborah Rush, Irma Hall, Bill Engvall. (R, 111 mins)

Journeyman director Ted Kotcheff (WAKE IN FRIGHT, NORTH DALLAS FORTY, UNCOMMON VALOR, WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S) had two movies in theaters in October 1982. One was the Sylvester Stallone sleeper hit FIRST BLOOD, a relatively serious drama that introduced the iconic John Rambo, loner Vietnam vet turned flag-draped American killing machine in a series of increasingly ridiculous sequels not directed by Kotcheff. The other was the barely-released SPLIT IMAGE, which only played on 129 screens at its widest release but found a major cult following in video stores and through constant cable airings throughout the decade. Made at a time when Jim Jones and 1978's Jonestown Massacre in Guyana were still in the public consciousness, SPLIT IMAGE followed the very similar 1981 Canadian drama TICKET TO HEAVEN, both involving a young man brainwashed by a religious cult until his family arranges for his kidnapping and subsequent deprogramming. TICKET was nominated for a whopping 14 Genies--the Canadian Oscars--winning four, including Best Film and Best Actor for star Nick Mancuso. SPLIT IMAGE is a bit more conventional take on the subject, with better-known actors for commercial potential, but still has moments of grueling intensity, unflinching brutality, and stomach-knotting suspense.

Following his Oscar-nominated performance in 1979's THE GREAT SANTINI and having 1980's CADDYSHACK stolen from him by four comedy legends, Michael O'Keefe stars as Danny Stetson, a college gymnast from a normal, happy, well-to-do upper-middle class family, with dad Kevin (Brian Dennehy), mom Diana (Elizabeth Ashley), and younger brother Sean (Ronnie Scribner). At a sports bar, Danny flirts with and is immediately attracted to Rebecca (Karen Allen, who had just been in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK), who invites him to a movie night at an outreach program called "Community Rescue." He then attends a weekend retreat where he and other visitors meet Neil Kirklander (Peter Fonda), the charismatic leader of "Homeland." Kirklander talks of life needing meaning and how Homeland needs to become a self-sustained community by turning their back on the greed and decadence of modern society (he rails against "Cuisinarts, Perrier, and designer jeans") to focus on love and "creating a better world." While longstanding members busy themselves with woodworking, pottery, and a print shop, newer members are deprived of sleep and sufficient levels of nutrition as a way of systematically breaking them down. Danny is immediately skeptical ("This is a religious cult, isn't it?") and thinks about leaving but as he soon discovers, none of the new recruits (another is played by ubiquitous '70s child star Lee Montgomery of BEN and BURNT OFFERINGS) are ever left alone, and a clingy Rebecca won't even let him go off to use the bathroom by himself. Eventually, Danny decides he's seen enough and attempts to escape in the middle of the night. He almost drowns in a river in the process, and is taken back to Kirklander, and it doesn't take long before an exhausted, scared, and emotionally drained Danny surrenders to what's been a slow and insidious indoctrination. He renounces his former life, burning his clothes and his belongings as Homeland renames him "Joshua," and he calls his mother to curtly inform her that he loves them but he's never coming home.

When an attempt to visit Danny at Homeland results in a scuffle that gets Kevin arrested, the desperate Stetsons have nowhere to turn. They're soon contacted by Charles Pratt (James Woods), an outwardly sketchy sleazebag who's actually an expert deprogrammer hellbent on taking Kirklander down. For $10,000 cash, Pratt and his team will find Danny, abduct him, and bring him home for deprogramming--"to clean out his mind and hang it out to dry"--which, in Pratt's experience, can take anywhere from one hour to several days. Pratt finds Danny handing out pamphlets and flowers on a college campus and his guys grab him and throw him in the back of a van, taking him back to the Stetson home and locking him in a room with boarded-up windows, where Pratt goes to work. Hours upon hours are spent with the aggressive, enraged Pratt breaking through to Danny/"Joshua" in ways that almost parallel an exorcism (Pratt's repeated invocation of "I will not leave this room until Joshua is dead on the floor and Danny is reborn!" is SPLIT IMAGE's version of THE EXORCIST's "The power of Christ compels you!"). Things approach a religious cult take on STRAW DOGS as Rebecca and other Homelanders show up at the Stetson residence under Kirklander's orders in an attempted home invasion to bring "Joshua" back to Homeland.

SPLIT IMAGE is a riveting experience--the sequence where the Homelanders get into the house and Pratt reveals just how driven, obsessed, and violent he can be is absolutely terrifying--filled with top-notch performances that can't help but pale next to Woods. Three years after his breakout in 1979's THE ONION FIELD, the actor was perfecting that twitchy, crude ("I live in a pisshole," he tells Diana), fast-talking "James Woods" persona that we saw in so many great performances in his prime years (FAST-WALKING, VIDEODROME, SALVADOR, BEST SELLER, COP), and his work in SPLIT IMAGE is right up there with the best of them (Woods and Kotcheff would reunite for 1985's much more low-key Mordecai Richler adaptation JOSHUA THEN AND NOW). Another standout is Dennehy (who would later team with Woods in the underrated BEST SELLER), for whom SPLIT IMAGE also helped establish a recurring onscreen persona. Dennehy's Kevin is a loving father but also a successful businessman used to throwing his weight around and getting his way, evidenced in the way he presumptuously assumes he can just buy Danny out of Homeland ("Look, I'm just gonna write a check to this yo-yo," he says of Kirklander). This is vintage Brian Dennehy, who's always been one of our greatest character actors when it comes to conveying overconfident arrogance, which Kotcheff also used for maximum effect in FIRST BLOOD, where the actor's Sheriff Teasle gets way more than he bargained for when he decides to start harassing quiet drifter John Rambo for no reason when all he wants to do is pass through town.

Though O'Keefe is fine in a difficult role, he's overshadowed by Woods, Dennehy, and a coolly sinister Fonda and ultimately undermined by an unconvincing wig he's forced to wear in the second half of the film when he gets his post-indoctrination haircut, almost sidelining him in the same way the quartet of Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight, and Bill Murray made him all but invisible in CADDYSHACK (no one cares about Danny Noonan and his college money and his Irish girlfriend anyway, right?). O'Keefe does get a few good moments, particularly in a creepy and absurdly comedic scene where a brainwashed "Joshua" is so overcome with desire for Rebecca--Kirklander forbids romance and any kind of sexual interaction and expression--that he's stirred awake in mid-ejaculation by a wet dream, which traumatizes him so much that he and Rebecca request an immediate meeting with Kirklander, who orders "Joshua" to speak in tongues to rid him of his filthy thoughts. There's some ahead-of-its-time commentary with a pre-emptive rebuking of the culture of greed of the '80s, only in its infancy here, but still voiced in criticism leveled at Kevin and Diana for not noticing that Danny was having a quarterlife crisis because they were focused on money and materialism. It's a facile argument that's not really explored to its full potential, and it's voiced by Danny's little brother Sean in a hackneyed speech that seems more than a little unlikely. SPLIT IMAGE has some other things that don't work. The time element isn't handled very well--it's not clear how long Danny is at Homeland before trying to escape and as a result, his brainwashing can either be seen as too abrupt or so subtle that you don't realize how well they've slowly worked him over (I'm guessing the filmmakers intended the latter, but it doesn't always play that way). And as great as Woods is here, we could use more background into his character. Was he a member of Kirklander's cult who got away? Did he lose a loved one Homeland? He's wearing a wedding ring but a wife is never mentioned. All we learn from the script, credited to Scott Spencer (1981's ENDLESS LOVE was based on his novel), Robert Kaufman (FREEBIE AND THE BEAN, LOVE AT FIRST BITE), and future KARATE KID screenwriter and frequent Luc Besson collaborator Robert Mark Kamen (THE FIFTH ELEMENT, THE TRANSPORTER, TAKEN), is that Pratt really hates Kirklander.

Things almost shit the bed with a terrible final scene that reeks of someone demanding a happy ending, as it just doesn't seem plausible that Kirklander and some of the more intimidating Homelanders would chase Danny and Rebecca (who's ready to leave the cult to be with the reborn Danny), finally corner them and just let them skip away hand-in-hand after Danny simply tells Kirklander to leave them alone. It's a pat and far too easy wrap-up when we should've had at least one confrontation between Pratt and Kirklander, considering how much they allegedly hate one another. It's an unsatisfying conclusion to an otherwise mostly solid film, one that managed to overcome its almost non-existent theatrical release to become a word-of-mouth cult movie on VHS and cable. SPLIT IMAGE has been hard to see over the years. It's never been released on DVD or Blu-ray, though it's available to stream on YouTube and still occasionally appears on late-night TV (Epix recently ran it at 2:20 am on a weeknight) if you scour the outer reaches of your onscreen cable guide.

SPLIT
(US - 2017)

Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Cast: James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley, Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula, Brad William Henke, Sebastian Arcelus, Izzie Coffey, M. Night Shyamalan, Neil Huff. (PG-13, 118 mins)

While most viewed 2015's THE VISIT as a comeback for wunderkind-turned-pariah M. Night Shyamalan, I was in the minority and hated it with a near-blind fury that even LADY IN THE WATER and THE LAST AIRBENDER couldn't touch. A tardy trendhop onto the found footage bandwagon, THE VISIT was the most cynical move yet in the cratering of Shyamalan's career and I was pretty much ready to write him off for good. But now there's SPLIT, an ingenious and ambitious horror film that's easily his best work since the post-SIXTH SENSE glory days of UNBREAKABLE and SIGNS. A complex Hitchcockian mindfuck, SPLIT opens with three teenage girls--birthday girl Claire (Haley Lu Richardson), her best friend Marcia (Jessica Sula), and quiet outcast Casey (THE WITCH's Anya Taylor-Joy)--being abducted from a shopping mall parking lot and kept in a locked room in a vast basement. Their captor is Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), who suffers from an extreme case of dissociative identity disorder and has 23 personalities existing within him. The girls were kidnapped by OCD neat-freak "Dennis," and the girls soon meet the prim, proper, British-accented "Miss Patricia," who wears a dress and explains that "Dennis knows he can't touch you.""Hedwig" is an eager-to-please, nine-year-old boy who knows what Dennis and Miss Patricia are up to: the two biggest troublemakers of the 23 personalities, they've planned an internal revolt and launched a coup in Kevin's mind, with Dennis even going so far as to pretend to be the affable, laid-back amateur fashion designer "Barry," the personality who regularly represents Kevin in his appointments with psychiatrist Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley), and the most conscientious and good-hearted of "The Horde," the collective name given to Kevin's personalities. All of this is to prepare for the coming of "The Beast," a powerful 24th personality brewing within the deepest recesses of Kevin's mind. Dr. Fletcher senses something is off about Barry in her sessions ("I'm gonna guess that you're....Dennis?" she asks at one point, and Dennis denies it) and is alarmed by the number of urgent e-mails he sends her, wanting to meet with her to warn her that something bad is about to happen but always overpowered when either Dennis or Miss Patricia step into "the light" or, the center of Kevin's head, making it necessary for Dennis to pass himself off as Barry to keep Dr. Fletcher from digging further.

"Dennis"

Among the girls, the focus is on Casey, who elects to hang back and survey the situation before attempting to escape. Casey has no friends and was only at Claire's party because Claire felt guilty about inviting everyone in her art class but her. Casey needed a ride home and was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time ("Dennis" has been stalking Claire and Marcia for days). Periodic flashbacks to young Casey (Izzie Coffey) and her relationship with her father (Sebastian Arcelus) and uncle (Brad William Henke) add depth to her character and help illustrate why she can read the situation more accurately and react to it more effectively than Claire or Marcia (sensing Dennis' germphobia and how to use it to their advantage, she advises Marcia to "pee on yourself" when she's carried into another room by Dennis, knowing he'll be too grossed out to touch her). To say anything more would risk spoilers, but SPLIT shows a Shyamalan that's rejuvenated and at the top of his game, with the film going into some disturbing places that stretch the PG-13 rating to its breaking point. SPLIT is a strange and inventive take on the psychological horror film, with a late development that has you scratching your head until a stinger early in the closing credits drops a ballsy twist that has you reconsidering the entire film from a different perspective once you realize exactly what Shyamalan has been up to for the last two hours. Shyamalan has demonstrated no shortage of arrogance and chutzpah over his career, to a detrimental degree in recent years, but the wrap-up of SPLIT is one that immediately goes down as one of the most daring and divisive that you'll see in any movie in 2017.

"Miss Patricia"

"Barry"

"Hedwig"

SPLIT wouldn't work nearly as well as it does without the tour de force performance of McAvoy in the most difficult role of his career. Though we only meet maybe eight of Kevin's 23 personalities, McAvoy is a sight to behold in each one, switching characters on a dime and also tasked with playing a personality impersonating another personality. He runs the gamut of emotions and acting techniques, sometimes playing to the back row as with the child Hedwig, or pursing his lips and emoting only with the slightest judgmental eyebrow arch that speaks volumes, as with Miss Patricia. The direction that SPLIT heads--and with it, Kevin's character and McAvoy's performance--requires a leap of faith from the audience that Shyamalan rewards with that reveal in the stinger. It doesn't so much change anything that happens before, but it does change your perspective on the film and what it's really doing. SPLIT isn't for everyone: it's a tad too long, Shyamalan still gives himself an annoying cameo, and some may find the extensive psychoanalytical dialogue a little too talky and clinical (though it does provide veteran actress Buckley with her most significant big-screen role in many years). Regardless, it's already going to go down as one of the strongest genre films of the year, with a go-for-broke, gives-it-everything-he's-got performance by McAvoy that's deserving of serious award consideration but will receive none. All is not yet forgiven, Mr. Shyamalan...but this is a huge step in the right direction and it's great to have you back for now.

In Theaters: MISS SLOANE (2016)

On DVD/Blu-ray, Special All-Seagal Edition: END OF A GUN (2016) and THE PERFECT WEAPON (2016)

In Theaters/On VOD: SOLACE (2016)

On DVD/Blu-ray: I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER (2016); SHELLEY (2016); and BROTHER NATURE (2016)

In Theaters: ROGUE ONE (2016)

In Theaters: MANCHESTER BY THE SEA (2016)

In Theaters: PASSENGERS (2016)

On DVD/Blu-ray: The DEPARTMENT Q Trilogy: THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES (2013); THE ABSENT ONE (2014); and A CONSPIRACY OF FAITH (2016)

On DVD/Blu-ray: GOAT (2016); PET (2016); and DAD'S ARMY (2016)

On Netflix: SPECTRAL (2016)

Retro Review: THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED (1969)

In Theaters: A MONSTER CALLS (2016)

In Theaters/On VOD: ARSENAL (2017)

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE MONSTER (2016); EQUITY (2016); and KILL COMMAND (2016)

In Theaters: LIVE BY NIGHT (2016)

On Netflix: CLINICAL (2017)

On DVD/Blu-ray: AMERICAN HONEY (2016) and THE WHOLE TRUTH (2016)

On DVD/Blu-ray: DEATH RACE 2050 (2017); TRAIN TO BUSAN (2016); and THE DISAPPOINTMENTS ROOM (2016)

Retro Review: SPLIT IMAGE (1982)

In Theaters: SPLIT (2017)