‘It’ (2017)

King novels typically fall into two modes: novels like “Gerald’s Game” and “Misery” consist of one or two characters alone in a house for 300+ pages, whereas novels like “The Stand” and “It” follow vast casts of characters for 1000+ pages as they deal with internal and external trials and tribulations. However, King’s imagination, ambition and humanity are on display at all times despite the number listed on the bottom right-hand corner of the final page.

In his novel “It,” Stephen King explores real horrors such as racism, homophobia, misogyny, and mental and physical abuse, through a filter that is at times surreal and supernatural, and at other times brutally realistic. There is an inherent cinematic quality to many King novels, but “It” is the adaptation that I have been waiting to see for what feels like my entire adult life. As a constant reader who also has seen most of the screen adaptations of his work, I can say cleanly that we now have the definitive film of King’s terrifying, cosmic coming-of-age epic.

Updated from the late 1950’s of King’s novel to the late 1980’s, director Andy Muschietti’s “It” unfolds as an unflinching coming-of-age story about a group of outcast kids who deem themselves “The Losers’ Club,” who form a special bond to face their worst fears, and track down and destroy the eternal evil that lurks below their city of Derry, Maine.

The film opens with a tour de force opening sequence in which little Georgie Denbrough (Jackson Robert Scott) meets a cruel fate during a rainstorm after his paper boat sails into a storm drain. His big brother, Bill (Jaeden Lieberher), makes the boat for him as a gift, and the two share a tender scene before Bill sends him out to sail the boat along the flooded street gutters.

As Georgie kneels down to peer down into the sewer, two glowing eyes open and a clown emerges from the damp shadows, greeting the boy with a warm, almost cartoonish “Hiya, Georgie.” The clown cheerfully introduces itself as “Pennywise the Dancing Clown” (Bill Skarsgård).

“It” gets off to such an impressive start with this sequence. Muschietti manages make what is arguably the most iconic scene from King’s novel feel fresh, unnerving, and unpredictable—in an interesting twist, Georgie’s fate remains unknown to the citizens of Derry, as his body is never officially recovered.

The film keeps up this momentum as it transitions to the summer after Georgie’s disappearance. Bill spends his days hanging out with his friends Richie Tozier (Finn Wolfhard), Eddie Kaspbrak (Jack Dylan Grazer), and Stan Uris (Wyatt Oleff). Richie is a loudmouth smartass, Eddie is an over-medicated germophobe, and Stan is a timid neat freak.

We also are introduced to the new kid in town, Ben Hanscom (Jeremy Ray Taylor), who is terrorized frequently by a gang of bullies led by Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton). Ben has a serious crush on Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis), who refuses to let her abusive father or the bullies at school break her spirit.

We also meet the town butcher’s son, Mike Hanlon (Chosen Jacobs), who struggles with having to kill sheep as part of the family business—they use a small gun that fires out a steel rod through the animal’s skull and into its brain, killing it instantly. After all seven of the “losers” are united, each of them reveals that they have had some kind of terrifying personal encounter with Pennywise, who has the power to shape shift into your greatest fear. Ben’s love for the library comes into play here, as he recounts to his friends all of his research into Derry’s sordid history.

Determined to learn the fate of his brother and the countless other missing children of Derry, Bill emerges as a natural leader—he develops a plan to hunt down Pennywise and, with the help of his friends, destroy It once and for all.

Like all of the best King adaptations, “It” has a stellar creative team behind the camera that understands and embraces the source material, but also contributes a strong, confident style that is unique from King’s approach. Muschietti directs the hell out of Gary Dauberman’s screenplay that, like Pennywise himself, existed in many different forms before evolving into this permutation. Many thanks to credited screenwriters Cary Fukunaga (“Beasts of No Nation,” “True Detective”) and Chase Palmer for taking a swing at adapting the story first and pushing it closer to the place where we are now.

Dauberman’s draft is an extraordinarily streamlined version of the children’s half of King’s story that still preserves the soul of the novel—it also sprinkles in plenty of deep-cut details for fans of the book to savor, which further shows how this team has really done its homework. Pieced together with Muschietti’s confident, stylish directing, pitch perfect casting, and a fantastically detailed and imaginative production design, “It” achieves the honor of being one of the best big studio horror movies to come out in years.

To adapt “It” into a successful film cannot have been an easy process. The one rendition that we have had to rely on for the last 27 years has been the 1990 Tommy Lee Wallace directed miniseries, starring the incomparable Tim Curry as Pennywise. Taken as a whole, it has not aged well and offers only a handful of treasures to us now, including Curry’s iconic performance.

Now we have Skarsgård’s performance, which is equal-parts animalistic, maniacal, erratic and childish. His is a completely different take on the character that carries shades of Heath Ledger’s Joker, Freddy Krueger, and a creepy Jim Henson Muppet. His volatility exponentially ratchets up the tension, and leaves us wondering when Pennywise—or one of Its other forms—is going to appear.

And then there are the young actors playing the “Losers’ Club,” who are firing on all cylinders at all times in this movie. The VIP’s have to be Wolfhard, who goes full trash mouth and kills it with the best one-liners, and Lillis, who brings Bev Marsh’s power, wit and general badassery to life in a way we’ve never gotten to experience before now. Everyone is terrific, and as we see these kids facing the demons of growing up, as well as the literal demon Pennywise, we believe them. That’s half the battle, for once we feel the pain and desire of the characters, the scares come and our skin crawls appropriately.

★★★★  (out of 4)

‘Split’

In 2002, Newsweek touted M. Night Shyamalan as the next Stephen Spielberg, “Hollywood’s hottest new storyteller.”

This was around the time of the release of  “Signs,” Shyamalan’s deeply effective, layered, and intimate take on extraterrestrial invasions and crop circle conspiracies—it was also to be his final film to reach both critical and box office success, which after “The Sixth Sense” (iconic) and “Unbreakable” (ahead of its time) had become the norm for the young Philadelphian filmmaker.

After “Signs” came the jarring stumble of flop after critical flop, and as much as I myself enjoyed the much reviled “The Village,” even this lifelong Shyamalan fan couldn’t quite get on board with the pretentiousness of “Lady in the Water,” the awkward silliness of “The Happening,” and… well, I took a hard pass on his big-budget blockbusters “The Last Airbender” and “After Earth.”

Shyamalan never belonged in the arena of action flicks and summer blockbusters in the first place. That’s why the scaled down, found-footage creep-fest “The Visit” led to his first critical success (albeit, a minor one) in more than a decade. This restraint in ambition and scope is also what makes his newest film “Split” so enjoyable.

“Split” concerns the kidnapping of three young girls (Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, and Jessica Sula) by a man who suffers from multiple-personality disorder—to be precise, Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) has 23 split personalities, including a 9-year-old boy named Hedwig, a British woman named Patricia, and a psychopath with OCD named Dennis.

The girls are held in an undisclosed underground facility and frequently tormented and bewildered by their captor’s behavior. Crumb’s various personalities share the duty of warning the girls of an impending 24^th personality they call ”The Beast,” which they say demands a human sacrifice (or three). Crumb becomes a ticking time bomb, and as the girls try to form an escape plan, Crumb’s psychiatrist, Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), attempts to piece together his crumbling mental state and increasingly bizarre conduct, and reach the real Kevin hidden beneath his cluster of personalities (Dr. Fletcher refers to them as “the horde”) before it is too late and “The Beast” emerges to claim his victims.

In many ways, “Split” is classic Shyamalan in the way it explores big ideas on a noticeably small scale. In the same quiet, quaint way “The Sixth Sense” explored the afterlife, “Unbreakable” explored the possibility of real-life comic book heroes and villains, and “Signs” explored a global alien invasion, “Split” takes a fairly standard sort of thriller and suspense premise, and gradually evolves it into something darker, and more surprising, peculiar and far-reaching in its scope than expected. It’s a cleverer script than Shyamalan has written in a while, a slow burn that consistently ratchets up the tension and peels away the layers of its mystery without ever really succumbing to the “Shyamalan twist ending” trope for which the writer/director has become known over the years.

That’s not to say that there isn’t some silliness scattered throughout “Split.” There is a good bit of pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo and sometimes some frustrating character behavior but, fortunately, veteran actress Betty Buckley is able to deliver much of the “scientific” material in the film with complete graveness and sincerity. I suspect her role in the movie will become more tragic on repeat viewings—I can’t reveal why, but trust me: she absolutely nails the role.

Casting McAvoy was a Shyamalan coup, as the versatile English actor is game when it comes to playing a guy with 20+ personalities. His stellar performance also helps to save the film from diving into complete nonsense. Taylor-Joy, who starred in last year’s brilliant gothic horror film “The Witch,” also brings a vital urgency to her character, whose development features what is certainly the darkest story thread Shyamalan has ever written.

While “Split” isn’t quite up to par with Shyamalan’s best work, it shows that he is still capable of making enjoyably quirky stylistic and storytelling choices while also showing restraint. With a knockout of an ending that will lead true Shyamalan fans to rejoice, “Split” is the closest thing yet to a full Shyamalan renaissance, a definite reminder and revitalization of the promise he once showed with his earlier films.

★★★ (out of 4)

‘Hush’ (2016)

Many of the elements of “Hush” are immediately familiar to us: A woman is alone in a remote cottage when a masked killer arrives and begins stalking her from outside, all the while harboring the threat of a home invasion that could (and in most movies, would) prove fatal to the home’s sole inhabitant.

But fortunately, “Hush” is not most movies. Although it does play around with the kinds of horror movie tropes that we’ve seen again and again in endless franchises of “slasher” flicks and home invasion thrillers, married writing duo Mike Flanagan and Kate Siegel’s screenplay fires a lightning bolt up the spine of the genre by introducing one of the most magnetic and sincerely developed heroines in horror history.

Her name is Maddie (Kate Siegel) and she an established author who is also completely deaf. Seeds are planted in the opening scenes that quickly grow into our realization of how ingeniously “Hush” is going to weave her disability into both the story and style of the film.

As Maddie cooks dinner, for instance, the sound design with its potent pops and crackles lends us a rich, textural experience that Maddie herself cannot hear but perhaps can still enjoy on a different level entirely—what we are able to hear, she is able to feel.

The same goes for her sign-language conversations with her friend and neighbor Sarah (Samantha Sloyan), as Maddie communicates to Sarah her secret to writing herself out of tough corners in her novels—she describes how she hears a voice in her head, one that sounds like her mother’s comforting voice, warning her of dead-ends in story and guiding her toward effective solutions. It is in these scenes that we get to know Maddie and enjoy her company.

This is an important factor in the horror and suspense to come, and it highlights how so many movies like this fail because they aren’t interested in making us care about the characters on the screen. Once they fail to gain our trust and empathy, and fail to truly inhabit their own world, the suspense evaporates pretty quickly. Siegel, who also co-wrote “Hush,” more than inhabits this world, as she creates a completely sincere and convincing character on screen.

It is while Maddie is washing dishes after dinner when the masked killer (John Gallagher Jr.) shows up and taps on the sliding glass door, only to realize that the girl alone in her house with her back turned to him cannot hear the tap-tap-tap of his fingers on the glass. He immediately realizes that her disability can be used to his advantage.

What he doesn’t realize is just how strong and resourceful Maddie herself is, and how determined she is to survive the night.

What follows is a cat-and-mouse game of the highest order, slickly directed by Flanagan whose 2013 supernatural film “Oculus” wove in many of the same brilliant story, style and genre techniques. With both “Hush” and “Oculus,” shades of Stephen King and Rod Serling allow for a comforting familiarity, while Flanagan keeps things taut, trim and entertaining. At a swift 80 minutes, “Hush” gets in and gets out without losing an ounce of steam—there’s no room nonsense in a film like this that soars on its simplicity and dares to think outside of the genre box.

★★★½ (out of 4)

 

My Top 10 Films of 2015

1.

Mad Max: Fury Road (★★★★)

Directed by George Miller

Written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris

Bold, ingenious, and completely bonkers all the way through, George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” is a visual masterpiece with a story so concisely drawn out and to the point, full of convincing characters with curtly explained backstories that it elevates an already brilliant film to the level of near-perfection.

The story is so concisely drawn out and to the point, and full of convincing characters with curtly explained backstories that it elevates an already brilliant film to the level of near-perfection. Furiosa, simply put, is one of the coolest characters ever created, her face smeared with black engine grease serving as her war paint, the fire in her eyes. There is a real passion to Charlize Theron’s performance as Imperator Furiosa that drives the story forward, as she strives for hope in a hopeless land, and carries scorn for those who have scorned her, but not malice.

It helps that she is paired with an engaging band of characters, including five excellent actresses as the wives, the oft-silent Max, played by Hardy with subtle brilliance in a performance that is a lot of physicality, but also a lot of expressions and eyes, and wasteland tyrant Immortan Joe’s sickly soldier, Nux, played by Nicholas Hoult in a revelatory performance full of humor and sadness.

It’s remarkable to notice this in a film with so few quiet scenes, but I emphasize that “Fury Road” is not your run of the mill summer blockbuster. I wish this was the standard, as opposed to soulless, dull and dead-eyed stuff like the “Transformers” franchise or  even movies that are playing it safe with formula and repetition, like many (not all) of the Marvel universe movies. Maintaining the sensibility and atmosphere of the previous “Mad Max” movies, but cranking the energy up exponentially, Miller realizes the full potential of this universe with “Fury Road” in a way that unsurprisingly took more than a decade to complete.

“Fury Road” establishes such an exciting new era of filmmaking for Miller, and proves promising for the modern action genre by indicating that there’s still hope to be foraged in what was starting to look like a hopeless genre. It’s the best film of the year.

 

2.

Anomalisa (★★★★)

Directed by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson

Written by Charlie Kaufman

Leave it to writer/director Charlie Kaufman to give us the most human, soul-piercing film of the year and to do it entirely with stop motion miniatures, and the voice talents of only three actors.

“Anomalisa” introduces us to Michael Stone (David Thewlis), a renowned self-help author who is visiting Cincinnati to speak at a customer service convention. We follow him as he arrives in town, takes a Taxi to the hotel where the convention will take place and where he will be staying. We also come to realize that everyone he meets has the same voice — that would be the great Tom Noon, who is credited for this film as playing “everyone else.”

That is Michael’s affliction, or perhaps it could just be Kaufman’s fascinating way of presenting a person’s perception of his or her life as having become completely mundane and passionless. Either way, what we experience with “Anomalisa” is a man caught in a strange, Kafkaesque state of mind where he no longer enjoys any kind of modulation among the people he meets — everyone is the essentially the same person with the same voice, even in the music that he hears through his ear buds and in the hotel lounge.

This monotony of spirit is brought to a sudden, startling halt when Michael, from his hotel bathroom, hears someone outside in the hallway… someone whose voice is different than all of the others — that would be the great Jennifer Jason Leigh, who creates a fully fleshed out and complex character here and helps us to forget for a time that these are just miniatures, and that we aren’t actual watching living, breathing actors on screen.

While “Mad Max: Fury Road” is certainly the finest crafted BIG movie of 2015, it goes without saying that “Anomalisa” is the most beautifully and meticulously crafted miniature movie. So much work went into making this small world a reality, and all efforts have led to this final masterwork of human communication, heartache, pettiness and hope.

Kaufman is the man who brought us such cerebral masterpieces as “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and “Synecdoche, New York,” all four-star films in my book, and as with all of his previous work, “Anomalisa” reflects the serious questions, anxieties, feelings and observations about life, death, love and existence that are caught and sifted out of the fascinating filter of their writer’s mind, and what a mind it is.

 

3.

The Hateful Eight (★★★★)

Written/Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Funny, violent, mean, but certainly not lean, Quentin Tarantino’s 8^th movie is his longest (nearly 3 hours for the wide theatrical release, well over 3 hours for the 70mm roadshow presentation), and darkest cinematic outburst — I think outburst is just the right word for what Tarantino does. As with his previous work, “The Hateful Eight” feels like an erupting surge of ideas, a culmination of story, ideas and characters straight out of the B-cinema that Tarantino treasures so much.

This time channeling Sergio Leone, Agatha Christie and John Carpenter, Tarantino creates eight of his most dastardly characters yet, shoves them all into a haberdashery to wait out a blizzard, and blends in elements of a Leone western, a Christie locked-room mystery, and Carpenter’s “The Thing.” Paranoia, festering grudges and racism pervade this small space, where in a post-Civil War Wyoming we see the threads of Tarantino’s quirky, quixotic style intertwine with a dark and complex history.

What’s really great is the way in which Tarantino takes his grandiose ideas about the United States then and now, and fleshes them out on a small scale. These ideas are personified by the eight main characters, including Tarantino regulars Tim Roth (as Oswaldo Mobray – the little man), Michael Madsen (as Joe Gage – the cow puncher), Samuel L. Jackson (as Major Marquis Warren – the bounty hunter), Kurt Russell (as John Ruth – the hangman), and Walton Goggins (as Sheriff Chris Mannix – the Sheriff).

Among all of these revved up, larger-than-life performances is that of Jennifer Jason Leigh (as Daisy Domergue – the prisoner), who is a newcomer to the Tarantino universe along with Bruce Dern (as General Sandy Smithers – the Confederate), and Demian Bichir (as Bob – the Mexican). Leigh gives the most nuanced performance and nearly steals the show away from the others, although to do so in a Tarantino movie when Jackson is involved is not a task to be taken lightly.

It must be said that “The Hateful Eight” is not Tarantino at his very best – that would be “Jackie Brown,” a film that displays both his complete control as a filmmaker and his ability to pay homage to past cinema, while also paving an entirely new way for himself. It also shows a balance of violence and depth of character and startling sensitivity that this, his eighth and most brutal film, lacks — although it serves up plenty of terrific plot twists and turns, abundant cutthroat, vengeance-fueled brutality, and still proves, yet again, that Tarantino is a filmmaker to be reckoned with.

 

4.

The Stanford Prison Experiment  (★★★★)

Directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez

Written by Tim Talbott

“The Stanford Prison Experiment” is a film of chilling relevance and brutal realism, in which director Kyle Patrick Alvarez weaves a disturbingly familiar portrait of how the power structures that we ourselves design can ultimately lead to a break down in our humanity in favor of something more animalistic, and more frightening.

What is perhaps most dramatic, upsetting, and infuriating about the results of the Zimbardo’s experiment is that although it featured only a mockup of these environments, and a simulation of the structure of power that exists in reality, between those who are trusted with the job of maintaining peace and order, and those who live behind bars, there is an undeniable and harsh reality that bleeds from that experiment and stains us as a society.

A rivalry that develops between the “guards” and the “prisoners,” all students who happen to be pursuing degrees at one of the world’s most prestigious universities. The question that the study poses is if these Stanford students will resort to this kind of behavior when placed within these circumstances, what does that suggest for actual correctional officers and prisoners who have to face conditions like this on an everyday basis, and for real? And how do these structures of power affect situations outside of the prison system?

Everyone’s performance in this film is incredible, and like so many great films, “The Stanford Prison Experiment” echoes the time and place in which it has been made. We see the everlasting significance of Zimbardo’s study, and the sweeping relevance of Alvarez’s film, which, with its impeccable timing, strikes a serious nerve and stays with you long after it’s over.

 

5.

Beasts of No Nation (★★★★)

Written/Directed by Cary Fukunaga

There is a tremendous sense of clarity and confidence built into Cary Fukunaga’s “Beasts of No Nation,” an incredible narrative and technical achievement featuring a powerful, ethereal score by Dan Romer, graceful writing, direction and cinematography by Fukunaga, and restrained, sincere performances all around.

Perhaps the most interesting observation I can make about this extraordinary film is how poetically the story is told. Fukunaga served as cinematographer on this film, as well as writer and director, and his visual style and fluid approach to storytelling calls to mind the transcendental work of filmmakers David Gordon Green (“George Washington,” “Joe”), Jeff Nichols (“Take Shelter,” “Mud”), and Terrence Malick (“The Thin Red Line,” “The New World”).

Fukunaga also has a way off taking more “showy” shots and blending them into the story without distracting us from it. There is one particularly amazing sequence that shows the fractured passing of time, and is communicates both Agu’s moral deterioration, and his lost perception of time and place, as the violence becomes such a frequent part of his everyday life that it actually begins to lose its impact on him.

The anonymity of the film’s setting enhances the urgency of the story and steers it out of the way of being a preachy, political sermon. This allows the film and us to focus on the real journey, where we witness a young boy’s loss of innocence as he is abandoned, and then rediscovered in a war-torn land. “Beasts of No Nation” above all is a human story, not one chiefly fixated on placing the blame, and who better than Fukunaga to guide us through the dark and find humanity living among the shadows?

 

6.

Entertainment (★★★★)

Directed by Rick Alverson

Written by Rick Alverson, Gregg Turkington and Tim Heidecker

When viewed shallowly, from a distance and with slightly squinted eyes, the very premise of Rick Alverson’s “Entertainment,” which he co-wrote with star Gregg Turkington and Tim Heidecker, is not an unfamiliar one. The idea here is that Alverson and company are taking something we have seen before in more conventional films about aging entertainers, and deconstructing it in order to get a fuller grasp, not on the story arc itself exactly, but more on what about this kind of story makes sense in a naturalistic sort of way, one that is not blurred or sweetened saccharine by clean resolutions or sentimental revelations.

Alverson’s film doesn’t contain a single disposable scene, or a scene out of place. It is refreshingly efficient in its storytelling, and proves Alverson to be one of the most focused, confident and uncompromising directors working today. He makes confrontational movies about confrontational people, and there’s something both unsettling and somehow completely brilliant and refreshing about his approach.

Turkington as a truly strange and fascinating to watch as he re-interprets his own real-life character for the film, which has been digested and reinterpreted by Heidecker, Alverson and himself, and then switches it off and becomes the hollow shell of a man. As the film progresses, the comedian struggles to communicate with others, both through his belligerent stage character (based on “Neil Hamburger,” a character that Turkington performs as in real life),  whose act is made up of subversive, carefully constructed hacky jokes of misogyny, homophobia and overall distaste, and in his life off-stage.

That inability to communicate builds, driving the always restrained and subtly affecting story into increasingly surreal territory that paints the American Southwest as somewhat of a wasteland of washed up opportunity and spent talent. There is a lot of humor, but none of it comes without a little bit of a sting. That’s the kind of film Alverson is interested in making.

 

7.

Spotlight (★★★★)

Directed by Tom McCarthy

Written by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer

“Spotlight” is a quietly harrowing thriller based on the 2003 Boston Globe investigation of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The Globe’s “Spotlight” team of investigative journalists published a story that year that revealed a staggering statistic, that 6% of Catholic priests have been guilty of pedophilia, and that the church itself has done everything in its power to conceal this fact from the public.

As we watch the true story of the investigation unfold, and witness the slow uncovering of this massive scandal by the Boston Globe journalists, the tension builds and builds. So does the characters’ (and our) exasperation with how far the corruption spans, within the church and beyond. There are scenes where victims are interviewed about their experiences of abuse that are completely devastating, and then there are scenes of rage where we see the lies and moral decay of the abusers and their allies.

There is also triumph, as the “Spotlight” team, with the publication of the story, at last reveals this issue to the world, and by extension provides a new avenue for hundreds of victims of abuse to come forward with their stories.

The best ensemble cast of 2015, including brilliant performance from Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Live Schreiber, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Billy Crudup, Brian d’Arcy James and Mark Ruffalo, and a slow-burning and emotionally searing screenplay by Josh Singer and director Tom McCarthy, make “Spotlight” one of the great investigative journalism films — “All the President’s Men” and “Zodiac” are perfectly fair comparisons.

 

8.

The Revenant (★★★★)

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Written by Mark L. Smith and Alejandro González Iñárritu

Last year, mad-scientist Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu managed to grab 3 of the big Oscars for Best Picture, directing and writing for “Birdman,” a razor-sharp take on acting, theater, blockbuster movies and… well, whatever else “Birdman” was about, it was a wild ride, shot and cut to appear as though the entire thing was done in one single shot — this was, I think, used to great effect, and helped to earn another Oscar for Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography, which will again be noticed in Iñárritu and Lubezki’s new collaboration, the equally insane and technically breathtaking frontier film, “The Revenant.”

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as fur trapper Hugh Glass in this blisteringly cold but beautifully savage story of suffering and revenge. Glass was a real person who, in the 1820s, was abandoned by his men after being mauled within an inch of his life by a grizzly bear while on a fur expedition. In “The Revenant,” we act as witness to this harrowing and prolonged attack, and then watch as his team of hunters, led by Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) attempt to resuscitate him and carry him onward back to camp.

Henry decides to lead all but two of the men back, and leaves the cutthroat John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), the younger and more naïve Bridger (Will Poulter), and Glass’ half-native American son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) to watch over Glass and see to it that if he is given a proper burial should he perish from his wounds. Fitzgerald is a true snake who decides he’s had enough, and after killing Glass’ son, convinces Bridger that they must leave Glass to die in order to escape an impending attack by supposedly nearby hostile natives.

Glass survives once they’ve left, and film then follows him as he journeys through a frozen hell, returned from the dead, and fueled by a thirst for retribution against those who abandoned him.

“The Revenant” is a technical marvel, and features some of the most brilliantly framed and captured photography we have seen on screen. The production was shot in staggeringly cold conditions, in entirely natural light, and in geographical locations that are so isolated and unlivable that many cast and crew have come back with utter horror stories of working on this.

All of these touches and sweeping decisions layered in have made “The Revenant” a truly remarkable experience. With a sad, sometimes eerie and often atmospheric score by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto, and brilliant work by both DiCaprio and Hardy, as well as Gleeson and Poulter who are great young actors working among giants and holding their own just fine.

Iñárritu is a treasure in the world of cinema, and carries onward a great legacy of films, from “Babel” and “21 Grams,” to “Birdman” and “The Revenant,” he has tirelessly delivered striking works of art that challenge, thrill and make us feel deeply.

 

9.

Sicario (★★★½ )

Directed by Denis Villeneuve

Written by Taylor Sheridan

Haunting: That is the word to describe “Sicario,” director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s descent into the dark world of Mexican drug cartels and CIA intrigue.

Hold tight for the first quarter of this film, as it’s a slow burn in which we are pulled gradually into an increasingly disquieting realm of secrecy, drug trade and unimaginable atrocities via our avatar, FBI SWAT agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt, never better), whose relatively naïve and innocent point of view — despite having helped discover dozens of decaying corpses hidden in the walls of a house, all victims of the cartel — matches ours. We know there are gruesome things going on, but are less aware perhaps of the extent to which the cartels are in charge. We also come to discover, as Kate does, the extent of our own country’s culpability for the drug-trade crimes being committed, and that is where the haunting really begins.

There are touches of Alfred Hitchcock and David Cronenberg here, as Kate is left in the dark about her involvement with the CIA task force led by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), and for an inordinate amount of time knows close to nothing about why she is being assigned to join Graver and his mysterious partner Alejandro Gillick (Benicio Del Toro) on a Cartel-related mission in Mexico. She eventually discovers the truth, as we do, and her reality spins faster and faster out of control until everything she though she understood about right and wrong, good and evil, and who she can trust is tested.

Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson delivers a brooding score that further enhances our sense of foreboding, and cinematographer great Roger Deakins captures some of the most striking and strange overhead shots of the Mexican desert I’ve seen, framing it almost as an alien place that could stand in for another planet in another galaxy. This adds to the out-of-place out-of-time anxiety that Kate begins to experience as she realizes she is way over her head.

Villeneuve, whose previous work includes “Prisoners” and “Enemy,” once again reveals as he did with those films his fascination with the fragile morality of man — this time, he layers it further into genre than ever before, weaving his themes into a story that is both a taught, nerve-shattering crime thriller, and a relevant web of horror that exists just south of the border.

 

10.

Krampus (★★★½ )

Directed by Michael Dougherty

Written by Todd Casey, Michael Dougherty and Zach Shields

Writer/director Michael Dougherty’s “Krampus” is perhaps one of the most unlikely and surprising genre masterworks in years. With his family cooped up in a house in the midst of a sinister winter maelstrom, 12-year-old Max Engel (Emjay Anthony) is teased and tortured by his visiting cousins, and angry about his parent’s looming separation, and so loses his temper, rips up his carefully composed letter to Santa Claus, tosses the shreds of paper to the wind, and unknowingly summons Krampus, the mythical demonic shadow of Father Christmas himself.

What follows is a tour de force of filmmaking, with creature and sound design that will rival any movie of its kind that has been released in the past decade. Drawing from a more practical bag of tricks than audiences are used to seeing these days (George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” notwithstanding), Dougherty crafts a truly masterful series of set pieces in which we witness the wrath of Krampus and his minions — these include demonic Gingerbread cookies, man-eating toys, and eerie elves wearing elaborate masquerade masks. Krampus himself is saved for the final course, and trust me on this: he’s a doozy.

As with Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” series, though, there is a great deal of humor cut with the cries of terror and bewilderment. Dougherty manages to establish a solid tone throughout the film, from the confidant set up of the family quarrels, to the sinister snowstorm that drifts in and turns the neighborhood into a claustrophobic winter wasteland, a nightmare reminiscent of Frank Darabont’s world in his screen adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Mist.”

Dougherty’s film takes a well-earned place beside Joe Dante’s “Gremlins” and Ron Underwood’s “Tremors” as one of the great horror-comedies. It offers real scares and real laughs, often times simultaneously, and with a pitch-perfect ending, invigorating practical effects and sincere performances that seriously invest in the material rather than treating it with a wink and a nod, “Krampus” has true potential to reach holiday-tradition status — families hopefully will try to squeeze a movie about a Christmas demon somewhere in between “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Elf” and “A Christmas Story.”

 

HONORABLE MENTION:

“Chi-Raq”

“Creep”

“Crimson Peak”

“Ex Machina”

“Inside Out”

“It Follows”

“Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens”

“What We Do in the Shadows”

‘Krampus’ (2015)

These are exciting times that we live in when Michael Dougherty’s “Krampus” exists.

The writer/director’s follow-up to his Halloween horror-anthology and cult hit “Trick ‘r Treat,” opens with a superbly bitingly satirical montage in which we witness hordes of people stampeding through a shopping mall to take advantage of holiday sales, and then begins in earnest when we are introduced to the Engels, a suburban family awaiting their considerably obnoxious relatives who are coming to visit for the holidays.

12-year-old Max Engel (Emjay Anthony) recognizes that his parents, Tom and Sarah (Adam Scott and Toni Collette) have drifted somewhat apart over the years, and feels sad that the holiday season and its spirit haven’t managed to pull him closer to them and his big sister, Beth (Stefania LaVie Owen). The only person Max feels he can talk to and confide in his German grandmother, Omi (Krista Sadler). Their relationship is something special in this film — they speak German to each other, and for those brief moments they share a private connection, sharing wisdom and compassion with each other in a way Max has trouble doing with the rest of his family.

When Max’s Aunt Linda and Uncle Howard (Allison Tolman and David Koechner) show up with their bratty, brutish twin daughters, their oafish son, and Linda and Sarah’s eternally unimpressed Aunt Dorothy (Conchata Ferrell), the adults bicker like children, and the children tease Max to his breaking point. Just when the family tensions and rivalries have begun to reach critical mass, Max loses his temper, and rips up his carefully composed letter to Santa Claus, tosses the shreds of paper to the wind, and unknowingly summons the eponymous Krampus, the mythical demonic shadow of Father Christmas himself.

What follows is a tour de force of filmmaking, with creature and sound design that will rival any movie of its kind that has been released in the past decade. Drawing from a more practical bag of tricks than audiences are used to seeing these days (George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” notwithstanding), Dougherty crafts a truly masterful series of set pieces in which we witness the wrath of Krampus and his minions — these include demonic Gingerbread cookies, man-eating toys, and eerie elves wearing elaborate masquerade masks. Krampus himself is saved for the final course, and trust me on this: he’s a doozy.

“Krampus” is perhaps one of the most unlikely and surprising genre masterworks in years. There is actual danger here, as the film gives every character a fair shot at survival and demise. As with Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” series, though, there is a great deal of humor cut with the cries of terror and bewilderment. Dougherty manages to establish a solid tone throughout the film, from the confidant set up of the family quarrels, to the sinister snowstorm that drifts in and turns the neighborhood into a claustrophobic winter wasteland, a nightmare reminiscent of Frank Darabont’s world in his screen adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Mist.” Frightening creatures lie beyond the relentless white maelstrom, as it threatens to envelope and hungrily consume everything in poor Max’s world.

Dougherty’s film takes a well-earned place beside Joe Dante’s “Gremlins” and Ron Underwood’s “Tremors” as one of the great horror-comedies. It offers real scares and real laughs, often times simultaneously, and with a pitch-perfect ending, invigorating practical effects and sincere performances that seriously invest in the material rather than treating it with a wink and a nod, “Krampus” has true potential to reach holiday-tradition status — families hopefully will try to squeeze a movie about a Christmas demon somewhere in between “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Elf” and “A Christmas Story.”

★★★½  (out of 4)

‘Tusk’

“Tusk” is not so much a movie as it is a companion piece to “Smodcast,” a podcast created by writer/director Kevin Smith (“Clerks,” “Chasing Amy”) and his producer and longtime friend Scott Mosier. The two of them met in their twenties, shared a love for filmmaking, scraped together $27,000 and made their first movie, “Clerks.”

20 years later, Smith has essentially moved on from filmmaking and waded more into podcasting, an outlet that perfectly suits his verbose tendencies and relentlessly graphic, pop culture-laced humor. The podcast also has spawned an endless stream of entertainment and creativity, including the root idea of Smith’s latest film, “Tusk,” which blossomed from a personal ad, of all things, that a listener discovered and sent in for the “Smodcasters” enjoyment and dissection.

The plot of “Tusk” sums up the content of the personal ad. Wallace Bryton (Justin Long) is a podcaster (!) whose shtick is to travel around the country, meet strange or unusual people and report their stories back to his co-host, Teddy (Haley Joel Osment). When an arranged meeting in Canada with an internet sensation falls through, Wallace ends up discovering a letter on a bulletin board in a bar bathroom.

It starts: “Hello. I am an old man who has enjoyed a long and storied life. And after eons of oceanic adventure, I know I do not wish to spend my remaining years alone while I have some stories to share… “

Wallace is intrigued, and so for the sake of the podcast travels far off the grid to meet the writer of the letter, an old, wheelchair-bound man named Howard Howe (Michael Parks). It doesn’t take long for Wallace to realize that something isn’t quite right with Howe, and by the time he figures this out for sure, Wallace blacks out from poisoned tea, courtesy of Howe himself, one of the strangest and most memorable (albeit undeveloped) movie villains in recent years.

That Howe remains in my memory is a tribute the great Michael Parks, an actor who, even when given silly, shallow material such as this, still manages to go all the way with his character. In this case, his character is a man who is physically, emotionally and psychologically obsessed (too tame a word) with walruses due to being saved by one once when he was lost at sea. His solution to this yearning is to turn Wallace into a walrus.

Yes… you read that correctly.

I will go no further with that, for with “Tusk,” Smith unfolds for us a truly strange tragedy of madness and obsession that falters constantly but, for a fan of Smodcast such as myself, also pays off in spades. It is for that reason that I cannot quite recommend “Tusk” to a wider audience, because although I enjoyed it the first, second and third time I watched it, it’s simply not made for everyone; it exists for the listeners of “Smodcast.”

“Tusk” is wildly uneven, often breaking its own established tone apart before reassembling it again in a completely different way, and then repeating — much the same way Howe treats Wallace in the movie. There is a parallel plot to Wallace’s plight, involving his girlfriend Ally (Genesis Rodriguez) and his buddy Teddy joining forces with a rogue French-Canadian detective named Guy LaPointe (disingenuously and hilariously credited as himself at the end… it’s an A-list actor who actually gives an excellent performance, who everyone will recognize despite the wig and prosthetic nose).

This stuff almost feels like it belongs in another movie, and highlights the overall stitched-together feel of “Tusk.” I laughed at lot, and became appropriately unsettled at Howard Howe’s Walrus monster-formerly-known-as-Wallace. But the movie is too self-referential and uneven for me to say, “go out and see it!” I will, however, recommend “Smodcast” to anyone who doesn’t mind some explicit language and pop-culture buffoonery. There is a certain genius to that podcast that doesn’t quite translate here. Neither are for everyone, but if you enjoy the podcast, odds are you’ll have something to appreciate about “Tusk,” just like I do. I’d say start there, then decide whether you want to take this bizarre journey.

★★1/2 (out of four)

‘The Babadook’

“The Babadook” is a horror movie about the things that haunt us in reality. It’s about the effects of grief, resentment and regret on the relationship between a mother and her son. Amelia (Essie Davis) and her husband get into a car accident on their way to the hospital to give birth to their first and only child. Her husband dies. She survives, as does her unborn son.

Years later, Amelia and her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), have an incredibly tense relationship. Samuel has hyper-imaginative tendencies, loves storybooks, and frequently mentions the circumstances of his father’s death to strangers. He does gleefully unaware of his mother’s forced smile and gritted teeth, as she tries to cope with her complicated feelings about her son, who only repeats the story because it’s his only connection to his father, whom he never knew. As their story unfolds, we come to understand that horror lurks in the shadows of reality, and not just in fiction.

That alone is such a strong base on which to effectively build a movie like this, for it gives a profoundly human weight to the story, which builds carefully and deliberately for a good hour before anything remotely supernatural occurs.

Then, one night, Samuel finds a strange and disturbing pop-up book called “Mister Babadook” on his bookshelf and asks his mother to read it to him. She does.

Then Mister Babadook arrives.

I’ll say no more, expect that whatever preconceived notions you may have about the horror genre, Kent’s film shakes them up, reassembles them and filters them through a frightening screen of humanity and understated horror with perfect grace and restraint. Inarguably, “The Babadook” is of the one the best horror movies made in the past decade. It’s a tour de force from Kent, who is an Australian first time writer/director, making this her big-screen debut—what an entrance.

To those two titles I would like to add rock star because she has crafted a stylish, scary and inventive film worthy of standing alongside the best work of Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski and John Carpenter, and she did it on a shoestring budget, proving once again the value of financial limits in filmmaking. I look forward to seeing her career unfold because, based on her first effort, I think she’s a true original.

For my money, Davis and Wiseman deserve the highest praise and if it were in my power, I’d hand over those gold statues to them immediately. The depths to which they reach to pull out these characters is astounding. Together, they inhabit this world with complete sincerity, and when they experience terror, we experience it with them.

“The Babadook” also calls to mind a wide spectrum of cerebral horror films, including flashes of F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu,” Nicolas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now,” Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” and Lynne Ramsay’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” Using almost all in-camera effects, Kent develops a deeply nuanced atmosphere that somehow feels equal parts old-fashioned and innovative. I’m not kidding, she does some things here that will blow your hair back, and remind you what it feels like to be 8 years old and terrified of the monster under the bed… or in the closet… or in the dark, damp basement.

★★★★ (out of four)