Eo

From the very beginning Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s latest film, an homage to Robert Bresson’s 1966 drama, “Au Hasard Balthazar,” is difficult to watch. It turns out this anxiety is warranted. As we follow the beloved circus donkey Eo — trained to play dead until revived by the pantomime of life-saving measures — as he canters into ever more desperate circumstances ending with the lingering sound of the slaughterhouse bolt pistol, Slolimowski turns what could have been a heartbreaking yet sweet fable into a sweeping treatise on the ways humans inflict cruelty on animals, with motives both malicious and indifferent. The erratic use of flashing red lights and a cameo by inscrutable French actress Isabelle Huppert further confuse the storytelling.

Cruelty depicted on-screen is only a fraction of the cruelty in the world, Skolimowski wants to repeatedly remind us. Anyone inclined to buy a ticket to a film in which a nonspeaking animal plays the main role is probably already distressed by this notion. Is it so wrong, then, to hope for a happy ending for at least one donkey this year, especially one already trained to come back to life?

Elvis

There’s nothing that creates a stronger sense of nostalgia in a generation than the loss of a cultural touchstone. But even before his death in 1977, at the age of 42, Elvis Presley had become a punchline to many; testament to the unofficial Hollywood adage that the bigger you are, the harder the public wants you to fall.

Elvis’ incredible and far-reaching renown, built on a charismatic sexuality deemed too dangerous for impressionable 1950’s youth that was as irresistible to thousands of screaming fans—far more than the modest 50,000 count from the RCA Victor compilation—as to dishy Ann-Margaret and sui generis cultural mooch Andy Warhol who captured it on the silver silkscreen in double and triplicate, was roundly being replaced by images of fat Elvis bursting out of his white jumpsuit, cheeks ostensibly shiny with grease from fried peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwiches— his favorite.

Although barely middle-aged, the King of Rock and Roll didn’t seem to belong to the same time period as Star Wars, Grace Jones and Atari. He was no longer the poster boy for pop culture, but a throwback — sad, lonely, pathetic.

In his latest film, Australian director Baz Luhrmann (The Great Gatsby, Moulin Rouge!) wants to resurrect the charismatic Elvis. In many ways, the film follows the standard musical biopic formula so easily satirized in 2007’s Walk Hard: a childhood in poverty and the defining moments that create driving ambition and opportunity. However, Luhrmann is also determined to redeem Elvis’ reputation and , excuse my use of the R-word, make him relevant again. Composer and executive music producer Elliott Wheeler peppers strands of hip-hop, techno and synth over scenes set in Memphis in the early days of Elvis’ career, as if in answer to questions about Elvis’ musical artistry and lasting influence and accusations of his appropriation of Black music and fashion.

It's said that the best defense is narrative, but what if its source is an unreliable narrator? Telling the story of Elvis is his infamous manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks)., who, shedding his Dutch identity, emigrated to the United States without documentation and reinvented himself as a carnival barker. A self-described “snowman,” referring to his ability to make it snow money, Parker recognizes the paradox that is at the heart of this business we call “show” : the power of attraction mixed with the simultaneous fear of that attraction. And Parker sees that Elvis has it in spades. For that insight, he rewards himself with 50 percent of the king’s earnings for the entirety of his career.

Even shrouded in prosthetics and a fat suit, Hanks can’t disguise his amiability. Delivering lines with that trademark twinkle in his eye, Hanks seems more like a sad, overreaching Santa Claus than a controlling predator driven by an addiction to gambling. This serves Luhrmann’s intent to show how rinky-dink Parker’s schemes, dependent on merchandising and sponsorship, are in comparison with the world stadium tours proposed by Steve Binder and Bones Howe, the creative team behind the famous comeback concert of 1968. Wondering where Elvis’ career could have gone had he fired Parker and his carnival tactics in favor of this new, modern creative direction is its own form of heady nostalgia.

Anyone hoping for real insight into Elvis will be disappointed by the film. Played by Austin Butler (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), a relative newcomer plucked like a ripe plum from the Disney and Nickelodeon talent juggernaut, this version of Elvis is nervous and entirely too earnest. When he first takes the stage, he doesn’t understand what all the screarming is about.

Yet, Luhrmann’s love of elaborate set pieces makes Butler’s time on stage, particularly during the rehearsals and performances for his Las Vegas show, the best moments of the film. They’re almost on par with Paul Dano as the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson in the recording session scenes in Love & Mercy, which holds the bar on musical biopics simply because of its depiction of Wilson’s creative process. But anyone who has seen the 1970 documentary, Elvis: That’s the Way It Is, available to stream, can attest that Butler’s portrayal is a near-perfect facsimile of those rigorous performances, with songs remixed to include Butler’s vocals. Despite these enlivened moments, the film is clear evidence that there’s never been a better Elvis impersonator than Elvis himself.

The Father

Almost four decades ago, Anthony Hopkins played a man so overwhelmed by the unconditional love required by parenthood that his feeling twisted into a bitter, obsessive anger. That movie, called The Good Father, put Hopkins’ range of exacting intensity in the spotlight (long before he won the Oscar for his portrayal of serial killer Hannibal Lecter, the perverse father figure to Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling). Now once again, Hopkins plays the role of paterfamilias — minus the ironic descriptor — for another cinematic tour de force.

In The Father, the feature directorial debut from French playwright Florian Zeller, adapted from his 2012 French-language play, Le Pére, and translated into English by Christopher Hampton (Atonement), Hopkins plays Anthony, a fictional namesake who shares the actor’s date of birth — New Year’s Eve 1937. When we’re introduced to Anthony, he’s sitting in a well-appointed London apartment, listening to opera: the portrait of calm and gentility.

Although Anthony is alone, he wears headphones. The music is Henry Purcell’s King Arthur. But it’s another king, Shakespeare’s Lear, that comes to mind when daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) interrupts the reverie to scold her father for chasing off yet another home caregiver.

You see, Anne is desperate to get help for her father. Her plan to escape her father’s sly tyranny — which she describes to the next potential caregiver (Imogen Poots) as “his ways” — by following a new love to Paris depends on it. The lesser favored daughter, Anne is Lear’s Cordelia and Goneril rolled into one.

As intruders played by Mark Gatiss, Rufus Sewell and Olivia Williams turn up in the apartment, swapping roles, it becomes increasingly clear that Anthony’s ability to recognize faces and places is compromised by dementia, and we’re trapped in a terrifying bewilderment with him. Like the mad king in the play, he no longer knows who he is but insists he’s still in charge.

We’ve seen Hopkins execute this perfect pirouette before. With effortless charm, he earns the trust of his keeper only to use it against her the next moment. What was that famous phrase? Quid pro quo, Clarice. But up against the ultimate adversary — mortality  — it’s less cruel trick and more survival tactic. This is a performance not to be missed.

Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on "The Exorcist"

Filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe is a movie fanboy at heart. Over the past decade, he has devoted himself to enthusiastic if superficial documentary-esque explorations of zombie films (“Doc of the Dead”), Star Wars fans (“The People vs. George Lucas”) and Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (“Memory: The Origins of ‘Alien’”).  Even 2017’s more focused “78/52,“ an appreciation of the “Psycho” shower scene, rarely gets beyond Film 101-level insights offered by a random assortment of industry nonexperts.  

So it’s a welcome surprise that “Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on ‘The Exorcist,’” a look at another seminal genre film, 1973’s “The Exorcist,” uses the creation of the groundbreaking horror film as a framework on which to hang a far more expansive and interesting conversation with notorious New Hollywood director William Friedkin. 

Unlike Philippe’s previous films, “Leap of Faith” eschews multiple sources, keeping the focus squarely on Friedkin as he sits beside a cozy fireplace in a standard talking head shot. For his part, Friedkin, 84, is still a top-shelf raconteur, and stories of his old-school directing techniques—slapping amateur actor and real-life priest William O'Malley in the face to generate a tearful take, firing a gun on set to prompt a genuine startle response—and feuds with two legendary composers over “The Exorcist” score confirm his reputation as a cinematic provocateur. 

But while the discussion revolves around “The Exorcist,” Friedkin—and Philippe, through editing of six days of interviews—broaden its scope by sharing the impact of Friedkin's earliest film experience (“Citizen Kane”), the role of what he calls “serendipity” or “fate” in both his directorial choices and his career path and the influences of director Carl Theodor Dreyer as well as paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer and Magritte on lighting and blocking choices in films such as “The French Connection,” “Sorcerer,” “Cruising” and “Bug.” Throughout, Philippe supports the discourse by cutting in illustrative still shots, clips and even original animations. 

Lacking other points of view, there is no one to question the accuracy of Friedkin’s recollections or to challenge his methods in light of cultural shifts over the intervening decades. And certainly, some of the stories and self-analysis seem more than a bit self-serving, entrenched as they are in auteur theory.

But this lack of balance turns out to be the film’s greatest strength, transcending objective truth to offer a genuine peek into the mind and process of a creative artist.

In fact, with "Leap of Faith," Philippe may have found his métier. I can imagine an entire series of documentaries featuring iconic directors reflecting in similar fashion on their signature films.

Centigrade

Before dropping us into this single-setting, claustrophobic thriller, first-time feature director Brendan Walsh plays the inspired-by-actual-events card, suggesting the story that follows strays so far from reality it may need its credibility preemptively shored up. Ninety-some minutes later, credibility is likely to be the last of an exhausted viewer's concerns.

As the film opens, American novelist Naomi (Genesis Rodriguez) and husband Matt (Vincent Piazza) wake in their rented SUV on the side of a remote road somewhere in Norway. Having dozed off while waiting out a snowstorm, they now find themselves stranded beneath a layer of snow and ice: engine dead, doors well and truly frozen shut and cell phone out of range.

What to do?

Naomi, who, it turns out, is in her final month of pregnancy—never mind the realities of OB-GYN or airline restrictions on international flight and cross-country travel—advocates for breaking a window and digging out. Matt, however, resists abandoning the provisional safety of their sealed vehicle for the unknown conditions outside. It's the first but not the last difference that will arise between the two as they (and we) wait and wait ... and wait for rescue.

At this point, a filmmaker must decide whether to use the confined set and limited cast to explore character and relationships, to develop a slow-burn suspense or to plunge viewers into the horrors of hunger, isolation and deprivation. The script by Walsh and Daley Nixon, however, never commits to a direction, and as a result, often seems to be treading water, much like its subjects in the SUV.

Developments vary from the predictable (does anyone not know what this pregnancy will lead to? One episode of “Call the Midwife” holds more suspense) to the irrelevant (a bit of news from Matt intended as a bombshell barely makes an impression and is quickly forgotten, much like the tin of chocolates conspicuously introduced in an early scene). Arguments are sprinkled in throughout the proceedings yet reveal little about the history or nature of this married couple's relationship, leaving viewers trapped for the duration with two generally unlikable people who don't seem to like each other much, either.

The Wretched

With nods to nail-biting predecessors from Alfred Hitchcock to Steven Spielberg, brothers Brett and Drew Pierce, billing themselves collectively as The Pierce Brothers, draw from familiar sources yet manage some genuinely disturbing chills in their second feature.

After an effectively creepy yet unnecessary prologue set three decades earlier, the film settles into the contemporary story of Ben, a teen troubled by his parents' impending divorce who has been sent to spend the summer with his father (Jamison Jones) in a small beach resort community. Ben arrives with a chip on his shoulder and a cast on his arm—shades of L.B. Jefferies from “Rear Window”—the result of his most recent instance of acting out.

This wooded hamlet by the bay—part Amity Island, part Camp Crystal Lake— seems the perfect place to straighten him out. He gets a job at the marina, where his dad works as harbormaster, and quickly befriends Mallory (Piper Curda), a cute, spunky coworker who has a crush on him.

Soon, Ben has developed an interest in the young family renting the house next door, which quickly grows into obsession when their kids go missing and the parents seem oblivious. As it turns out, a shape-shifting witch in the nearby woods is stealing children and inhabiting the bodies of their mothers.

The film benefits from creepily effective special effects and sound design. The shape shifting of the Wretch (the film's term for the creature) is utterly convincing as the new host's body contorts, seemingly from within, accompanied by gruesome cartilaginous cracks and pops. Cinematographer Conor Murphy adds to the sense of dread throughout with eerily still, low-angle camerawork.

Like many of their contemporaries (most notably, The Duffer Brothers with “Stranger Things”), the Pierces don't hide their influences: battery-operated toys suddenly activate as they did in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and Ben's dad gifts him a bike with a conspicuously “E.T.”-style front basket. Even the central conceit of a teen spying on the monster next door is cribbed from Tom Holland's still-effective 1985 horror-comedy “Fright Night.” Yet these shout-outs never overwhelm what is essentially a focused little tale.

That's not to say that everything works. A John Hughes-influenced subplot involving vacationing rich kids mistreating working class Ben goes nowhere, as does a gratuitous seduction and humiliation scene more appropriate for a raunchy ‘80s teen comedy. The labored attempts at last act twists are by turns convoluted and predictable.

Still, Ben's emerging relationship with Mallory is sweet and convincing, and lurking beneath all the nostalgia and body horror are some troubling reflections on motherhood as a force both nurturing and all-consuming.

Paradise Hills

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a director in possession of good production design must be in want of a script. This rendering of Jane Austin's famous opening line is borne out by Spanish fashion photographer-cum-film director Alice Waddington in her feature debut, Paradise Hills. The lavish visual imagery that will draw viewers into its alternately whimsical and menacing world is ultimately undermined by a script that cannot unify the film's wandering plot lines and philosophical dead ends. 

At the heart of Waddington's dystopian fable is a patriarchal and pecuniary challenge reminiscent of that faced by Elizabeth Bennet's family: the desire to rescue themselves by marrying off a daughter to a gentleman of means. Independent Uma (Emma Roberts), though, has no intention of being used for such mercenary purposes. Besides, we will find out she's in love with someone else, a member of the underclass known as a “lower.” Uma's mother has at her disposal, however, means the Bennets could never have conceived.

 After an unnecessary prologue, Uma awakes to find herself inexplicably transported to Paradise Hills, an island institution that is part sanitorium, part boarding school that resembles a mash-up of the Red Queen's Croquet-Ground and M.C. Escher architecture. The facility is presided over by The Duchess (Milla Jovavich), who beatifically floats along the garden paths in crinoline gowns and wide-brimmed hats, counseling her charges as she methodically clips the thorns from her cut roses. 

Of course, removing the thorns is what Paradise Hills is all about.  The students, all “difficult” girls like Uma, are subjected to regimens of yoga, makeovers and restrictive yet mandatory meals, as well as periodic psychological conditioning⁠—with more than a hint of the reprogramming that Alex undergoes in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange⁠—while strapped to a carousel horse and suspended several stories in the air. The official school uniform, white Victorian-style dress, Elizabethan collar, and straitjacket-style straps across the chest and shoulders, is a costuming triumph and the literal embodiment of the program's goal: feminine submission.

 Uma finds confederates in Yu (Awkwafina), Chloe (Danielle Macdonald) and Amarna (Eiza González), but their interactions are limited to dainty meals with large helpings of exposition as they begin to realize that darker forces are at work in Paradise. Screenwriters Brian Deeleuw and Nacho Vigalondo (Colossal) seem so concerned with setting up the Stepford Wives-meets-US twists in the third act (some inexplicable; others compelling but too late) that they forget to develop the characters to any significant degree. 

Still, for young girls unfamiliar with the film's touchstones, raising questions about class, identity and equality amid the wild, imaginative environs of Paradise Hills might have the same mind-blowing effect that Rollerball and Logan's Run—neither cinematic classics—did for certain young boys decades ago.

Mary

The question that Mary, a low-budget horror entry about a haunted sailboat, is most likely to inspire in viewers is not, “Who will survive?” or “What happened to them?” but, “How did Gary Oldman and Emily Mortimer get snookered into boarding this sinking ship?” 

Oscar winner Oldman plays David Greer, a fishing charter captain with dreams of starting his own business. When David's wife Sarah (Mortimer) comes across a promising vessel online and sends him to the auction, he finds himself instead mysteriously drawn to a decrepit derelict, seemingly in thrall to the siren song of the weatherworn female figurehead at its bow. David calls it fate; after all, the rusty tub shares the name of their youngest daughter, Mary. Sarah calls it a money pit, but after a cheerful renovation montage, the couple set sail with their two daughters, a boyfriend, and a burly mate to—where else?—the Bermuda Triangle. What could go wrong?

Unfortunately, any tension about how this shakedown cruise will turn out is undermined in the film's opening minutes by the introduction of an unnecessary narrative frame in which the frightened and waterlogged Sarah, having been rescued amid the vessel's remains, is interrogated by the feds. In the extended flashback, director Michael Goi and screenwriter Anthony Jaswinsky spin a tale composed largely of horror movie tropes: daughter Mary's crayon drawings turn violent and bloody and she's soon talking to an imaginary lady; doors slam shut; creepy dreams ensue; and someone or something pops into frame with a wearying regularity.

 Despite the time spent renovating every inch of the ship, it's only halfway into the trip that Sarah discovers records of its previous owners and their disastrous voyages. These records also include a poem about a sea witch looking to steal children, which should be familiar to viewers since it appeared 40 minutes earlier as the film began. Beyond those four lines of verse, the script offers little to explain the supernatural presence, though Goi, who also serves as a relatively competent cinematographer, turns the camera on the ship's figurehead at moments of crisis. Since the threat is unclear and the rules of engagement undefined, there's little for the audience to do except listlessly wait for the nest jump or bump in the night.

 Perhaps most disappointing is the filmmakers' failure to exploit the setting. A ship of this size, alone at sea, should offer plenty of opportunities to exploit feelings of claustrophobia and isolation. In Goi's hands, it might as well be a haunted house. 

For their parts, the stars give it a game try—Oldman underplaying, Mortimer going over the top. But without real characters to inhabit, both are left adrift in clichés.

Joker

Perhaps the most significant change director Todd Phillips makes in this reinvention of the Joker origin story is the choice to pluck it from the stylized, larger-than-life streets of comic-book Gotham City and set it in a gritty, grimy, recognizably American metropolis. Sure, it's still called Gotham, but Phillips takes the dark vision of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy and cranks the bleak quotient to 11, recreating the New York City of early Martin Scorsese films like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. The gritty production design by Mark Friedberg and washed-out street scenes of cinematographer Lawrence Sher suggest that despite its comic book subject, this film is going to take a hard look at how a cold, pitiless society can drive an anonymous Everyman to madness. Instead, what we get is a series of tropes and clichés that render everyone⁠—including the titular homicidal clown⁠—little more than caricatures. 

In the hands of screenwriters Phillips and Scott Silver, sad-sack clown-for-hire Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) begins his transformation into the Clown Prince of Crime already deeply flawed. Mentally ill, including an unspecified condition that causes him to cackle uncontrollably at the slightest stress, Arthur alienates everyone he encounters. He carries with him what he calls his “joke book”: a therapist-mandated journal filled with pornographic magazine clippings, bad puns and rambling manifesto-style rants. Fleck resents his smothering mother (Frances Conroy) with whom he lives, stalks the single mom, who has given him no more encouragement than polite eye contact on the elevator, from the apartment next door (Zazie Beetz) and fantasizes about a career as a stand-up comedian like his hero, late-night talk-show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro, taking over the Jerry Lewis role he played against in Scorsese's The King of Comedy), despite his apparent lack of comedic talent.

 The plot from here amounts to little more than a contrived, non-stop series of humiliations intended to justify Arthur's eventual embrace of violent homicide as a coping mechanism: in clown costume, he's beaten up by a gang of street kids, loses his clown gig, and, attempting to amuse a child on the bus, is warned off by the child's suspicious mom, triggering a hysterical laughing fit. He is then informed by his social worker that funds have been cut for both his therapy and his meds.

 When he is assaulted on the subway, in costume, by a trio of Wall Street wolves who accompany their attack, Clockwork Orange-style, with an unlikely multiverse rendition of Sondheim's Send in the Clowns, Arthur finally responds, in shades of the Subway Vigilante Bernhard Goetz, with the revolver. The effect on him is immediate and exhilarating, expressing itself in florid, balletic movements. In short order, the Joker has discovered his calling, and inadvertently becomes a symbol for Occupy-style protests against Gotham's one-percenters.

 References and allusions to historical events, art forms and other films such as these are often used to broaden the scope of a film's themes or meanings. Here, they seem like parlor tricks, because at its core, Joker does not seem to have any real themes or meanings. Phillips and Silver raise issues such as the '70s deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, the reduction of social services funding, the Occupy Wall Street movement and the psychological effects of everyday violence, but to what end? Do bullies on the subway deserve to die? Even glimpses of Arthur's journal offer little insight into Arthur's troubled mind. In a strictly comic-book way, at this point, Arthur is just “CRAAAAZY!”

 Phoenix, the very model of a modern method actor, fully embraces this role as the ultimate outsider, yet the portrayal remains strictly external. Gaunt to the point of emaciation, elbows and shoulder blades nearly protruding through his skin, Phoenix dances and writhes and rages with abandon. In tighty-whities and, eventually, in iconic purple suit, this Joker, like the movie itself, offers a memorable spectacle, but little more.

Depraved

For more than a quarter century, iconoclastic indie film writer-director-producer-actor Larry Fessenden has been using the monsters of American film and folklore to reflect on human nature as well as to explore modern issues such as addiction, AIDS and environmental exploitation. Two centuries after the publication of Mary Shelley's novel, Fessenden's latest film “Depraved” brings Dr. Frankenstein and his creation into the 21stcentury, bearing the contemporary baggage of battle-related PTSD, Big Pharma, and the American culture of war. Despite the big themes, Fessenden's retelling of the Frankenstein story succeeds due to its thoughtful and empathetic character studies of the creator and creation. 

A prominent tagline for James Whale's 1931 film version of “Frankenstein” proclaims its subject as “The Man Who Made a Monster!” Fessenden makes it clear from the beginning that he will be telling the story from the creature's perspective. A pre-credits prologue depicts a millennial couple—web designer Alex (Owen Campbell) and Met gift shop clerk Lucy (Chloe Levine)—who, after lovemaking, spat over his reluctance to father a child. Going out for a walk to clear his head, Alex is abruptly stabbed to death and abducted. When he awakens on a gurney in an adapted Brooklyn loft in the next scene, a mirror reveals not Alex, but an unfamiliar body covered in scars (courtesy of convincing makeup design by Peter Gerner and Brian Spears). Rings of broad stitches circle a milky eye and an ear. 

Alex's body may be gone, but his brain is on a new journey. 

This new patchwork frame is the work of research scientist Henry (David Call), a former war medic suffering from PTSD whose research is driven by the losses he witnessed on the battlefield. Unlike Shelley's doctor, who abandons his creation, Henry dutifully assumes his fatherly duties, leading Adam from Dr. Seuss to puzzles and ping-pong, and eventually to music and concepts such as gravity. Adam's mental processing is represented through mesmerizing montages (credited to cinematographer James Siewert) of floating green bubbles, time-lapse images and medical illustrations that dissolve into sprawling trees, river deltas and lightning branches. Eventually, flashes from Alex's past begin to surface, triggering post-traumatic symptoms in Adam.

 The scenes between Henry and Adam have an intimacy one doesn't expect in a Frankenstein film. To his portrayal of Adam, Alex Breaux brings not just the requisite cadaverous physique, but a quiet vulnerability which binds father and son, creator and creation.

 Henry teaches Adam that his survival relies on a large regimen of drugs with the reassurance, "Don't worry, most of America's on drugs.” Unbeknownst to Adam, however, he is the guinea pig for a new drug, RapX, for which Henry's off-the-books experiment is being bankrolled by partner Polidori (Joshua Leonard), the scion of a big pharmaceutical family impatient to cash in on the discovery. Named for the doctor present at the creation of the Frankenstein story, Polidori is cast as a recognizable contemporary figure. Acting as Adam's guide to culture, he fancies himself an art lover yet winds up introducing his charge to alcohol, cocaine and strip clubs, where he greets the strippers—Melania and Stormy—by name.

 With Adam torn between father figures, identities and value systems, it comes as no surprise when this experiment ends badly.

 What is surprising is the effect Adam has when he ventures into the world. A century ago, French director Abel Gance shocked viewers when he used soldiers injured in World War I to portray the returning dead in "J'accuse." These damaged faces and bodies would haunt a generation and inspire such arresting cinematic images as the dismembered hands clutching the No Man's Land fence in “All Quiet on the Western Front.” It says something, then, about a culture inured to constant war that when Adam, still covered with scars, flees the lab and ventures into a Brooklyn bar, a young woman named Shelley (Addison Timlin) doesn't recoil in horror; just tells him he looks like Iggy Pop and asks, “So what happened to you?”

Satanic Panic

Drawing on the burgeoning class resentment that has driven a recent strain of horror films — “US,” “Ready or Not,” and the shelved remake of “The Most Dangerous Game”—“Satanic Panic” returns to the notion that, in America, the game is rigged in favor of the rich, and, in fact, the wealthy prosper at the expense of the country's less privileged majority. But this film asks if the force stirring up all this class resentment could be … Satan?

For director Chelsea Stardust, the resounding answer is “yes.” She delivers her message through a darkly comic combination of camp and gore, but the film has difficulty balancing its gore-ific medium and satiric message. 

On her first day delivering pizzas, millennial Sam (Hayley Griffith) has been propositioned by every male who crosses her path and stiffed by every customer. Demoralized and broke, she desperately accepts a final delivery to a location outside her delivery area—a mansion in exclusive Mill Basin. But when the tony residents of the house write in a $0 tip on the $100 order and slam the front door in her face, Sam barges in to demand justice.

When Sam enters a sumptuous room filled with well-heeled Gen-Xers, viewers wouldn't be blamed for concluding that she's stumbled upon a corporate motivational seminar. Front and center, sporting a blood red gown and matching lip gloss, Danica Ross (Rebecca Romijn) fires up the room with business references to “unprecedented growth,” “team unity,” and “a major paradigm shift.” Like a distaff Tony Robbins, she asks the crowd, “Are you ready to be a winner?”

The paradigm shift turns out to hinge on bringing back to Earth the demon Baphomet, and the coven is missing the ritual's critical ingredient: a virgin. Unfortunately, Sam fits the bill, and most of the remainder of the film is an extended chase as she evades Danica's clueless yet horny husband Samuel (Jerry O'Connell) and teams up with the original sacrifice, Danica's recently deflowered daughter, Judi (Ruby Modine). 

Stardust spent much of the last decade as assistant to cinematic horror impresario Jason Blum, and the film is chock-full of nods to its inspirations: a first-person Steadicam prologue is reminiscent of “Halloween,” and the practical gross-out special effects (no CGI here) bring to mind the 80's body horror of Sam Raimi, Stuart Gordon and Frank Hennenlotter.

Still, “Satanic Panic” delivers less than it invokes. There's plenty of on-screen gore, from piles of intestines to regurgitated worms, but Stardust rarely pushes the envelope. One exception is the appearance of a “drildo” a conical, strap-on, rotating, serrated phallus, which makes a brief appearance (and might inadvertently serve as a litmus test of sorts for potential viewers). 

If a film is not going to outrage, then it needs to sting thematically. Yet, despite the class schism established in its setup, the script by “Mohawk” co-writers Ted Geoghegan and Grady Hendrix rarely rises beyond superficial name-calling such as “Martha Stewart wannabes, who drink white wine and smoke medicinal marijuana” and references to “Wal-Mart sweats” and government cheese. 

Add to this Stardust's reliance on wide shots and a static camera, and what should have been a gonzo tour de force or a scathing social critique winds up more like a direct-to-video feature.

Midsommar

For the second time in two years, director Ari Aster has used the horror genre as a vehicle to give voice to human anguish. Last year's “Hereditary,” his critically acclaimed debut, burrowed into the darkness of mental illness, externalizing its heroine's overwhelming anguish and guilt through metaphors of the supernatural; it's action unfolding, appropriately, within the shadows of a dimly lit home. 

“Midsommar,” both companion and counterpoint to “Hereditary,” sets its exploration of loss and pain against the wide-open spaces of the Swedish countryside and the relentless sunlight of the summer solstice. If not as concise as its tightly wound predecessor, “Midsommar” adheres more satisfyingly to its heroine's emotional journey. 

The central plot is familiar: American college students accompany a Swedish grad school friend to his people's secluded village to witness a rite performed just once every 90 years, but soon realize that their hosts may not be as innocuous as they appear. This plot, however, doesn't emerge for a good half hour. As with “Hereditary,” Aster uses those opening 30 minutes to introduce what this long strange trip is really all about: a dysfunctional relationship and the woman trapped within it. 

Dani (Florence Pugh) is struggling to maintain a relationship with anthropologist boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) while worrying about her bipolar sister. A single phone call tells us everything we need to know about them. The static camera stays close on Dani's face as she struggles to suppress tears while Christian grudgingly goes through the motions of listening. He may not be evil, but he's a bad boyfriend, selfishly encouraging Dani to accept his emotional detachment and to blame herself as “too needy.” Christian's friends, meanwhile, urge him to get on with what seems an inevitable breakup. 

When horrific tragedy strikes, however, their co-dependent die is cast, and Dani gets a reluctant invitation to come along to Sweden with Christian and his bros: Swedish host Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), fellow anthropologist Josh (“The Good Place”’s William Jackson Harper), and perennial horndog/Ugly American cliché Mark (Will Poulter). 

The approach to Halsingland, home of Pelle's people the Hårga, feels like a trip through the looking glass, or the wardrobe. Cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski's camera corkscrews upside down as it follows the visitors down a tree-lined road, eventually emerging with them through a huge sunburst-shaped portal into a startlingly bright and colorful world. Production designer Henrik Svensson has created a pastoral compound that is bucolic yet naggingly off-kilter. The people are friendly to a cult-like fault—all smiles and handshakes, flowing white gowns, flower crowns and … large hand-hewn wooden mallets? Strange geometric structures—a large yellow pyramid, dark featureless bulkheads—loom among the humble huts and barns. 

On top of this, the guests are plied with psilocybin mushrooms and suspicious flower teas, the effects of which are portrayed through subtle distortions of images. Throughout one scene, a flower in Dani's head wreath pulses hypnotically; at other times, objects on the dinner tables appear to shimmer and shift. Underlining these experiences is Bobby Krlic’s underlying score of writhing, wailing strings. 

While the Hårga's rituals become increasingly peculiar, even threatening, the visitors' responses remain the same—a tendency toward rationalization. More than once, a member of the American group admonishes the others that “it's cultural.” 

When violence finally occurs, it is in brutal and blunt and in broad daylight. Unlike most current horror films, Aster presents these horrors not as surprises, but as inevitabilities. Sharp-eyed viewers will have spotted harbingers in the illustrations that cover the walls of the visitors' overnight shelter. The Hårga's most unnerving secret, it turns out, is not the violence of their rituals, but the acceptance with which they embrace both the beautiful and the horrific. 

As her fellow travelers become increasingly panicked, fragile Dani seems to find her bearings. And it is Pugh's ferociously raw performance, moving from panic to ecstasy, that provides the core of this journey, spiraling deliriously toward a terrifying peak that is as troubling for its joyousness as for its perverse violence. 

Skeptical viewers will inevitably ask, “Why didn't they just get the hell out?” After all, the writing was literally on the wall all along. Exactly the question you might ask about a friend who stays in a bad relationship.

Red Joan

With “Red Joan,” famed British stage director Trevor Nunn takes a wealth of compelling elements—a communist spy ring in the United Kingdom; a lone woman working for England's atomic bomb program; a love triangle between this woman, her scientist boss and a radical student—adds Dame Judi Dench in the title role, yet still manages to deliver a dull though well-appointed trip through various spy and romance tropes. 

Although the nominal star, Dench appears only in the film's framing scenes as octogenarian Joan Stanley who is arrested for espionage and treason. The remainder of her performance consists almost entirely of brief moments in an interrogation room that merely serve to connect the scenes of a story told in flashback.

 These flashbacks, in a script by Lindsay Shapero, based on the true story of British spy Melita Norwood, follow young, provincial Joan (Sophie Cookson) as she arrives at Cambridge in 1938, unknowingly falls in with a trio of socialist revolutionaries, then falls for handsome and charismatic agitator Leo (Tom Hughes). Recruited for work on the Tube Alloys Project--a predecessor of, and contributor to, the Manhattan Project--she becomes involved with her predictably handsome and charismatic boss, professor Max Davis (Stephen Campbell Moore), at which point, Leo resurfaces, urging Joan to share nuclear secrets with Russia. 

The film raises interesting concerns: the seductiveness of ideas, the accepted sexism of the period (Joan's success as a spy is attributable, in part, to her near-invisibility as a woman in a male-dominated environment), the effects of past transgressions on one's progeny, the definition of patriotism, and Joan's eventual defense—nuclear proliferation as the only reliable deterrent. 

But, ultimately, “Red Joan” is not a movie of ideas. It is more concerned with the set-dressing porn of Cambridge quads and secret government labs than the passions that actually spark political and romantic revolution.

Woman at War

When we first meet Halla (Halldora Geirharosdottir), the titular character of the second feature film from Icelandic director Benedikt Erlingsson, she's single-handedly sabotaging power lines. With just a bow and arrow, a length of metal cable and a pair of dishwashing gloves, Halla shuts down a nearby aluminum refinery–but only temporarily. Accustomed to this form of eco-vandalism, the smelter switches to backup power, and on the news announces that its plans to expand are going forward.

Meanwhile, Halla races across the lush, primeval Icelandic landscape, hiding behind lava rock formations or concealing herself in a moss-covered crevasse to avoid being spotted by a police helicopter. Dressed in lopapeysa, the traditional, patterned wool sweater, and leather motorcycle pants, she's a cross between a detective in a Nordic noir and Tomb Raider Lara Croft. Except Halla's actions are accompanied by a soundtrack from an on-screen folksy trio playing upright piano, drum kit, and sousaphone.

No one suspects the 50-something-year-old Halla, who directs a small choir and decorates her bright flat with photos of Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, aside from her co-conspirator Baldvin (Jorundur Ragnarsson), a member of the Icelandic government. For instance, in the press the politicians blame terrorists--outsiders interfering in Iceland's industrial progress. But the police's prime suspect continues to be Juan (Juan Camillo), a Spanish-speaking tourist who's just trying to bicycle around the island.

The script, written by Erlingsson and Olafur Egill Egilsson, contains many moments of whimsy, which act to reinforce the film' message instead of diverting attention from it. It's a fairy tale, told in three acts, in which the wilderness is at the mercy of the evil in the world; not the source of it.

The wild is also what sustains Halla. She draws inspiration by lying flat on the moss and inhaling deeply, and at one point is even revived by a baptism of sorts in a hot spring. She's determined to see her plan, laid out in her Woman of the Mountain manifesto, to its end, despite, or even perhaps because of, a letter from an adoption agency informing her that the application she filled out years ago has now been approved and there's a war orphan waiting for her in the Ukraine. To do the most good, Halla argues with her identical twin (also played by Geirharosdottir), you must sometimes sacrifice what you want most.

The Wind

Documentary director Emma Tammi's feature film debut “The Wind” initially seems of a piece with recent female-centered Westerns such as “Meek's Cuttoff” and “The Homesman.” Focusing on German immigrant Lizzy Macklin (Caitlin Gerard), the film quickly draws viewers into the daily challenges facing a female settler attempting to establish a homestead with her devoutly religious husband in the vast and unforgiving landscape of the American West in the late 1800s. Omnipresent is an oppressive sense of isolation, embodied by the ceaseless whisper of the prairie wind. 

Or is it something more? Is something evil lurking outside in the dark, or is isolated, overwhelmed Lizzy simply unraveling? 

These are the questions posed as this feminist Western quickly slides into psychological, then literal boogey-man horror, which is, ultimately, the film's undoing. 

Further muddying the waters is first-time screenwriter Teresa Sutherland's decision to present the story through a series of flashbacks to various moments in Lizzy's prairie existence, including her failed pregnancy and the arrival of another couple—spoiled Emma (Julia Goldani Telles ) and inept husband Gideon (Dylan McTee)—who face their own disastrous pregnancy. 

Unfortunately, the outcomes of these events are revealed so early that any potential suspense is undermined, and the momentum of what should be Lizzy's slow spiral into paranoia when left alone is repeatedly interrupted. 

The film tantalizingly suggests potential influences on Lizzy's mental state: postpartum depression, religious zealotry inspired by a pamphlet titled “Demons of the Prairie” (which turns out to be little more than a list of demon names and titles), a romantic rivalry with Emma, gender inequality in the married relationships. Yet none of these are developed beyond brief scenes. 

The film is at its strongest when it focuses on the real. Early scenes of Lizzy wordlessly performing chores against the backdrop of the Great Plains, as captured by cinematographer Lyn Moncrief, evoke as much about the burdens facing women during America's westward expansion as the cheap jump scares and spookhouse specters that clutter the films final scenes.