Us

In a film that initially poses as standard home-invasion horror fare, Jordan Peele's “Us” broadens the social critique that powered his Oscar-winning “Get Out,” to both greater and lesser effect.

Representative middle-class nuclear family the Wilsons have headed out to their summer lake home. As they unpack, we are introduced to bespectacled goofball father Gabe (Winston Duke), tightly wound mother Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), taciturn teen daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and her grade-school-age brother Jason (Evan Alex), who is partial to wearing a werewolf Halloween mask. 

After a trip to the beach turns into a game of “keeping up with the Jonseses” with their bougier white counterparts, the Tylers—father Josh (Tim Heidecker), mother Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and twin daughters Becca and Lindsey (Cali and Noelle Sheldon)—the Wilsons return home for the night, only to be confronted by another family that seeks to usurp their position, this one dressed in blood-red jumpsuits and bearing over-sized gold scissors.

The new interlopers are true doppelgangers, but reflected in a perverse funhouse mirror. Played by the same actors, Gabe's double is a rampaging, inarticulate hulk; Zora's duplicate wields a grin as sharp and wicked as the blades in her hand; and the alternate Jason scurries about like a feral creature, his entire head obscured by a nylon hood. Enhanced by cinematographer Mike Gioulakis's (“It Follows”) creeping camera movements and Michael Abels's “Omen”-inspired chanting, the results are terrifying. 

It turns out that the invaders are led, as are the Wilsons, by a mother-figure, in this case, Addie's duplicate, Red, the only member capable of speech. Asked who they are, Red responds in the labored rasp of the drowning, “We're Americans.” The reply is both inscrutable and shocking. 

At this point Peele's film both expands its ambition and begins to stumble. If “Get Out” addressed the issue of racial prejudice within the very narrow confines of an upper-class enclave, “Us” seeks to expand that injustice to the entire political and social underclass. 

As the Wilson's flee their home, they realize that they are not the sole target of the self-described “Tethered.” Their neighbors, the Tylers, are also under assault despite the advantages of swankier digs and a top-of-the-line voice-activated in-house assistant. Television news reports reveal that the activity is not even confined to the area. 

With allusions to 1986's populist benefit gesture Hands Across America, Peele portrays a nation-wide uprising of the underclass. With a nod to Michael Haneke's “Funny Games,” Zora defends herself with one of the Tyler's golf clubs, and images of the red-clad Tethered taking to the streets are more than a little reminiscent of “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.” 

The problem comes in the delivery. To explain “the Tethered,” Peele's screenplay requires an extended monologue from Red, chockablock with flashbacks and backstory. Multiple twists and turns are involved, and even hough they are portrayed on-screen the audience is really getting it all second-hand, which undercuts the impact. 

“Get Out” had a bit of the same exposition problem, but Peele managed to work it into the action as a television broadcast. “Us” finds no such solution and ultimately leaves the viewer with more intriguing ideas and images than the movie has time to successfully develop. 

One lingering practical question remains: If you organized a nationwide revolution, would you arm your troops only with big scissors? And where would you get all those scissors?

We the Animals

For his first narrative feature film, director Jeremiah Zagar has adapted Justin Torres’ semiautobiographical debut novel from 2011. Co-written by Zagar and Dan Kitrosser, the script is a sensory-rich celebration of the imagination.

Shot in 16mm, the setting—upstate New York in the 1980s—looks both lush and beggared with its acres of wilderness moldering a former mill town; a paradise depressed. Brothers Manny (Isaiah Kristian), Joel (Josiah Gabriel) and Jonah (Evan Rosado) run feral, their parents (Raúl Castillo and Sheila Vand) preoccupied with their own heated, abusive relationship.

At 9, Jonah, alone, escapes from the poverty and violence into a narrative that he illustrates in notebooks he hides in the springs under the bed the three brothers share. These drawings cascade across the screen as colored-pencil animations, credited to Mark Samsonovich, providing a more precise point of view than the largely impressionistic inchoate mood that came before, and without which would yield the dulcet emptiness of Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life.” The result is a tough yet lyrical coming of age story, leading to a surprisingly sweet sexual awakening.

Stan & Ollie

Directed by Jon S. Baird and written by Jeff Pope, “Stan & Ollie” is not your standard biopic. Arriving nearly a century after the formation of the comedy  duo Laurel and Hardy, the film certainly is not relying on its subject to draw an audience. Likewise, it eschews the standard career arc rise-and-fall narrative, focusing instead on a brief period in 1953— well after their Hollywood heyday of the 1930s and 40s—when the duo reunited for a series of live appearances in the United Kingdom, in hopes of generating public interest and financing for a new movie. The resulting story is a bittersweet reflection on the complicated nature of artistic collaboration and the ephemeral nature of fame. 

From the start, the duo are faced with the indignities of faded stardom: half-empty houses in second- and third-tier theaters, cheap hotels, and back-handed compliments (“They're still doing the same old bits”). Yet onstage, the pair effortlessly recreate some of those “bits” with a grace and timing that belie their age. 

Simply seeing these routines brought to life again evokes a certain nostalgic joy, and one can only hope that viewers unfamiliar with the duo are moved to seek out the original shorts. Yet John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan deliver performances that go well beyond mimicry. Coogan's Laurel is the more strained performance, suggesting complex and shifting emotions with the mere raising of an eyebrow or crossing of a leg. Buried beneath a formidable layer of prosthetics, Reilly captures the gracefulness of Hardy's movements, the daintiness that was always so amusingly antithetical to the big man's imposing girth and bluster. 

Their interaction and timing off stage is just as deft, like two old friends who know each other so well that each can anticipate the other's actions, resulting in several moments of life imitating art, the line between the two often difficult to discern, even for them. And that ambiguity extends to the duo's famous on-screen bickering, mirrored in real life by a simmering resentment over a brief parting of the ways that occurred years earlier (an event that unfolds in an unnecessary prologue set in 1937). At one point, a real-life argument during a London reception actually generates applause. 

The wives—diminutive Lucille (Shirley Henderson), Hardy's third wife, and proud Russian-born Ida (Nina Arianda), Laurel's fourth—arrive on the scene, providing humor through their own forceful, mismatched personalities. Still, the focus throughout remains on the artistic marriage of Stan and Ollie, a partnership that weathered decades, wives, and changing tastes. 

Employing a muted palette reminiscent of sepia, Baird portrays these cultural giants as they face their twilight years surrounded by the signs of a world that is leaving them behind (the sounds of nascent rock and roll; one-sheets for their crass inheritors Abbott & Costello). Ultimately, “Stan & Ollie” looks back fondly, not just on the end of a career, but on the end of an era—when a tie flutter and a bit of soft-shoe could capture the world's heart.

Aquaman

Any Aquaman vehicle arrives with plenty of negative flotsam to overcome. For decades, DC Comics' pelagic paragon has been ridiculed in popular culture, largely based on the character's neutered portrayal in the old Super Friends cartoon, but also for his corny trident and goofy telepathic communication with ocean life. 

The powers that be that preside over the DC Extended Universe further hobbled this intellectual property by previewing him with cameo appearances in “Batman v. Superman” and “Justice League,” consequently associating him with two Zack Snyder critical disappointments despite a radical makeover in the form of Jason Momoa (“Game of Thrones”) as a tattooed aquatic biker. 

Given this baggage, the makers of Aqauman's stand-alone debut were faced with a decision: embrace the inherent ridiculousness of their subject (like Marvel's “Iron Man” and “Ant-Man”) or fight the character's cultural stigma by approaching the story and themes with a strong dose of earnestness (like DC's biggest success, “Wonder Woman”). Based on the resulting mish-mash of characters, story lines, and tones that fill this overlong (at nearly 2 1/2 hours) spectacle, the answer was, "All of the above." 

A pre-titles sequence attempts to set a serious tone as Aquaman's human father Thomas Curry, a lighthouse-keeper, spies a body washed up on the shore after a storm. Imagine the audience's surprise at discovering Nicole Kidman lying unconscious on the rocks in a scaly wetsuit with trident in hand. Apparently slumming as Atlanna, Queen of Atlantis, Kidman's merwoman takes up residence at the lighthouse and bears little Arthur Curry, the half-human, half-Antantean who will grow up to be Aquaman. 

Abruptly flashing forward a couple of decades or so, grown -up Arthur rips open the hatch of a submarine and drops in to save the vessel from pirates. As an electric guitar doodles something reminiscent of the Bill and Ted air-guitar riff, Momoa flips his drenched locks over his tattooed shoulder, smirks at the camera, and quips, "Permission to come aboard?" Arthur, it turns out, doesn't mind the occasional rescue, as long as it doesn't cut into happy-hour. And Momoa, for his part, doesn't seem to mind his role as aquatic beefcake. Perhaps, films are beginning to see the rise of a female gaze. 

These conflicting tones persist throughout the film as screenwriters David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick (“Wrath of the Titans”) and Will Beall (“Gangster Squad”) spin out a multitude of stories, characters, and backgrounds. There's a budding romance between Arthur and Antlantean warrior princess Mera (Amber Heard), who has ventured onto land seeking Arthur's help. His long-lost half-brother (Patrick Wilson), Orm, is intent on waging war on Earth's terrestrial inhabitants for ruining the ocean realms with our pollution. To defeat Orm, however, Arthur must retrieve the Trident of Atlan, which can only be wielded by the true king of Atlantis (get it: Arthur?). Meanwhile, one of those pirates from the sub has made himself an armored and, dubbing himself Black Manta, seeks revenge on Aquaman. Director James Wan (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring) is left the thankless task of trying to gather all these loose ends into a unified vision, something he achieves only fitfully. 

Arthur's first glimpses of the undersea civilizations are rendered with impressive CG effects, all florescent colors and coral-clad sprires, the screen bustling with man-bun-wearing mermen and jellyfish-attired merwomen astride sea horses and armored sharks or aboard spiny, finned vehicles shaped like eels and rays. However, scenes of the main characters moving about the same aquatic environment never successfully escape the impression of actors on wires.

 Regardless, any moments of wonder are inevitably interrupted by a never-ending series of battles, expository speeches and flashbacks. The subplot with archenemy Black Manta, feels like an afterthought, its scenes divorced entirely from the main plot and Manta histrionically gesticulating like a cheesy Power Rangers villain. Patrick Wilson feels completely miscast, reaching ludicrous peaks of fury as he routinely bellows to the ocean depths about his desire to become an "Ocean Master," whatever that is. 

At half the length and approached with a consistent tone, “Aquaman” might have managed to rise above its middling DC brethren.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Let's acknowledge, up front, that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a visual wonder. Combining modern computer-generated animation with 2-D hand-drawn techniques such as action panels, thought bubbles, Ben-Day dots, even the little squiggly-lined emanata that indicate “spidey-sense,” directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman have come darned close to capturing on the big screen the feel of old four-color pulp comics in textures that modern live-action superhero sagas do not. 

Beyond its technical triumphs, however, the film offers a Spider-Man origin story (its fourth cinematic re-telling of the 21st Century) that actually expands the character's cinematic mythos. Literally, Spidey's standard alter-ego Peter Parker is not the protagonist this time around (although he appears in two different incarnations), and thematically, screenwriters Phil Lord (half the creative team behind The Lego Movie) and Rodney Rothman emphasize that Spider-Man is not defined by gender, age, nationality, even species, that heroism derives from character, meaning “Anyone can wear the mask.” 

Drawing from a 2011 Marvel Comics storyline, Into the Spider-Verse introduces Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), an Afro-Latino high-schooler who is bright, talented but unsure of who—or what—he's supposed to be. Like most kids his age (and like Peter Parker before him), Miles is in search of a role-model, and while he's surrounded by several, including his strict-but-loving policeman dad (Brian Tyree Henry) and shady-but-hip Uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali), the question becomes even more complicated when he's bitten by the requisite radioactive spider.

 After witnessing the Peter Parker Spiderman (Chris Pine) brutally murdered by hulking crime boss, the Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) , Miles is left wondering if he can possibly fill his hero's unitard.

 Not to worry, Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) has also ripped a hole in the space-time continuum, releasing into Miles' world Spider-entities from multiple parallel dimensions, including hip new girl at school Gwen Stacy as Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld); laconic, trenchcoat-wearing Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage);  spunky pre-teen manga heroine Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn); and Looney Tunes-inspired Spectacular Spider-Ham (John Mulaney), who even manages to slip in Porky's famous line before all the action's over. 

Each of these alt-spider heroes is rendered with a distinctive animation style, coloring, and movement, which are preserved even in group scenes and amid on-screen action, a thrilling sight to behold. The voice talent on display is likewise impressive, including Lily Tomlin as a feisty Aunt May Parker and Kathryn Hahn as a creepy distaff Doctor Octopus. 

Miles' best guide, however, turns out to be Peter B. Parker (New Girl's Jake Johnson), a disheveled,  disillusioned version of the web-spinner (Miles initially describes him as “a janky old broke hobo Spider-Man”), who nonetheless manages to turn Miles' search for a role-model inward. 

The plot is convoluted, the villains too plentiful (Green Goblin, Prowler, Tombstone, and Scorpion all make appearances), and self-referential moments non-stop as the heroes ultimately band together to save the universe and return to their proper dimensions. Yet the directing trio keep the film's focus squarely on Miles' journey as he learns about selflessness, faith and identity. 

Right now, this is the superhero film to beat. Yet while the film's technical innovations may eventually lose their novelty, “Into the Spider-Verse” will remain relevant because of its its broad, inclusive vision and its big heart.

Green Book

“Green Book” tells the story, "based on real events," of a trip made by Tony "Lip" Vallelonga, an Italian-American bouncer from the Bronx, as driver and bodyguard for classically influenced black jazz pianist Don Shirley on a 1962 tour through America's segregated South, a politically-charged topic to say the least. Yet in its eagerness to offer a tonic for our nation's increasingly fraught racial environment, the film tones down its politically-charged subject until it's little more than an odd-couple road movie. The result is a 21st century film about race with a viewpoint that doesn't appear to have evolved since the period in which it's set, a time of quaint, self-congratulatory portrayals of racial relations like “The Defiant Ones” and “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?” 

The film's greatest strengths and weaknesses come via it's central characters. To play "Tony Lip," Viggo Mortensen has bulked-up considerably and delivers a larger-than-life caricature of the big galoot-with-a-heart-of gold: a loud, chain-smoking self-proclaimed "bullshit artist." Oh, and he's racist to the point that he tosses drinking glasses in the trash because they were used by black people. 

Mahershala Ali's (“Moonlight,” “Hidden Figures”) portrayal of the refined and affluent Dr. Shirley is less broad but still frustratingly shallow, largely due to a failure on the part of the screenwriters to view him as more than a foil by which to measure Tony's personal growth. The screenplay, written by Tony's son Nick Vallelonga with Brian Hayes Currie and director Peter Farrelly, presents Tony, despite his blatant racism and loutish behavior, as more relatable than the punctilious, demanding Shirley. And it is through Tony's eyes that we view their relationship. 

So it should come as no surprise that in this telling, Tony introduces Shirley to black culture by way of musical artists such as Chubby Checkers and Aretha Franklin ("These are your people, Doc!" he scolds) and fried chicken, because to a racist, fried chicken epitomizes black culture. It is Tony, too, who acquires the titular Green Book, the guide to African American-friendly food and shelter in the States, despite the fact that any black American of Shirley's education and experience would have been well aware of it. 

As the pair make their way through the Jim Crow South, they come upon the sort of casual and violent bigotry to which Tony's pales in comparison. And more than once, Tony rescues Shirley from the dangers that surround him. And for his trouble, besides being paid, Tony gets Shirley's help  composing, in Cyrano Cyrano de Bergerac fashion, love letters to his wife Delores (Linda Cardellini). 

Still, Ali captures the intelligence, wit, and frustration of a man desperately trying to maintain his dignity in a world that overtly denies it. Some of Ali's most powerful scenes are those that unfold as Shirley sits alone, silently reflecting on doubts, regrets, and fears that this movie, frankly, can't be bothered with (a scene revealing Shirley's homosexuality is introduced purely as another threat from which Tony can play savior). 

That's not to say that director Farrelly, one half of the Farrelly Brothers of “Dumb and Dumber” and “There's Something About Mary” fame, doesn't mine some genuinely amusing moments from this mismatched pair. But these laughs, like the Tony's wokeness, come far too easily, creating the dangerous illusion that American racism is little more than an amusing relic from a distant, less enlightened time.

Widows

For his latest release, director Steve McQueen (“Shame,” “12 Years a Slave”) adapted a 1983 British TV crime drama based on a novel by Lynda La Plante, best known for creating the “Prime Suspect” television crime series starring Helen Mirren. McQueen's script, which he wrote with Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl,” “Sharp Objects”) offers the same star turn for Viola Davis, whose performance as the bereaved Veronica Rawlings could have merited a change in the movie's title from the plural to the singular.

But Veronica isn't the only widow here. Her husband Harry (Liam Neeson) is the leader of a gang whose last heist—$2 million cash stolen from the campaign of crime boss Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry) in his bid to go legit as Chicago alderman (a move taken from “The Wire”’s Stringer Bell's playbook)—ends in a fiery confrontation with the Chicago police, killing the husbands of Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) and Amanda (Carrie Coon).

With Jamal and his brother Jatemme, played by a scarily unblinking Daniel Kaluuya, demanding their money back from Veronica, she uses Harry's notebook, his only bequest to her, to go ahead with his next job—$5 million stashed in a safe room of Jamal's established political opponent, the legacy ward boss Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell)—and threatens to give up the other women if they don't help her.

As a heist movie, Widows is a bungling wreck. Its twists are easily anticipated and the characters make frustratingly stupid decisions, such as not showing up to a meeting or using a known gathering spot. Additionally, there are subplots, including Amanda's reasons for not showing up to meetings, which could have been expanded. This seems to be the hallmark of Flynn's projects.

Beyond the film's problems with logistics are the backstories. Some are more successful than others. Watching Jacki Weaver as Alice's overbearing mother is to witness dysfunction leading to continued corruption, and Debicki excels at smoothing over Alice's desperation. Its parallel, one supposes is Tom Mulligan's (Robert Duvall) bullying of his son Jack, but his forthright views on nepotism, graft and bigotry are unnecessary. He's the one character not being squeezed by anything but his own hate and greed.

Need, more than avarice, is the driving force behind the movie. While some are being extorted others are fighting disenfranchisement; none more so than Belle (Cynthia Erivo), a casualty of the gig economy, and the only other character who can measure up to Davis' widow.

Wildlife

For his directorial debut actor Paul Dano (“Love & Mercy,” “There Will Be Blood”) took on the challenging task of adapting Richard Ford's 1990 novel of the same name. As could be expected from an attempt to visually represent Ford's endogenous storytelling, the screenplay, which Dano co-wrote with his partner, actor Zoe Kazan (“Ruby Sparks,” “The Big Sick”), doesn't adequately convey the interior of the characters in this domestic drama, making their actions seem overhasty and implausible.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Jerry Brinson, an overly personable golf pro who has moved his family from the Pacific Northwest to Montana in 1960. His wife, Jeanette (Carey Mulligan), and son, Joe (Ed Oxenbould), are reluctantly settling in to the small town, anxiously trying to keep up the pretense of optimism.

Despite his family's support, Jerry gets fired for betting with members of the golf club where he works, and instead of finding a comparable job or accepting the job back, he joins up with the oddballs and drifters, “the deadbeats,” as Jeanette calls them, who are trundled to the mountains to fight the wildfires burning the adjacent landscape.

For all her steely resolve to buoy her family in the first 20 minutes of the movie, including taking a job teaching some of the adult townsfolk to swim, Jeanette transforms almost instantly in Jerry's absence. Mulligan, whose expressive face conveyed the character's latent dread, which is all the more affecting because of its understatement, in these early scenes, explodes into a stagy stereotype; a Tennessee Williams' vamp without the Southern charm or caged-up edge. And because Dano shoots her from outsider her own point of view, we have no understanding of her feelings beyond wild, unfocused desperation.

When Ford granted Dano the rights to his novel, he told the aspiring director, “My book’s my book, and your picture’s your picture.” Still, some of the alterations he and Kazan wrote into the script are unjustifiable. Take, for example, the first line of the novel: "In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him." It's a concise cause and effect that's missing entirely from Dano and Kazan's script.

Where Ford also has the advantage is in the age and perspective of his narrator. On-screen, Joe is limited to his age at the time of the events, 14, and this choice restricts his understanding of them. But it doesn't seem to matter to Dano, who shoots this immature perspective through the unnatural, self-conscious angles of a first-time director.

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

From 1991 to 1993 celebrity biographer Lee Israel forged more than 400 literary letters, attributing her own bon mots to the likes of Noël Coward, Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker. She sold these, along with bona fide specimens she smuggled out of library and university archives, to appreciative booksellers and dealers who then resold them to collectors. Two of Israel's fakes even found their way into the first edition of “The Letters of Noël Coward,” published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2007. With this publication, Israel's career, needless to say, had come full circle.

For her second feature film, director Marielle Heller (“The Diary of a Teenage Girl”) took over production from writer/director Nicole Holofcener (Lovely & Amazing, Enough Said), who rewrote Jeff Whitty's script based on Israel's 2008 autobiography. While it's tempting to wonder what Holofcener's version, starring Julianne Moore and Chris O'Dowd, would have been like, irreconcilable "creative differences" with the former conspired to hand Melissa McCarthy a role that's truly worthy of her full dramatic range.

Heller offers a magical look back at New York and the fringes of its publishing world a full decade before the likes of Gawker put its navel-gazing online, and McCarthy's portrayal of Israel fits right in. She's sharp, well-read and much too scruffy and irreverent for polite society, embodied by her agent Marjorie (Jane Curtin), who answers Israel's calls only when she impersonates Nora Ephron—another great period detail—on the other end.

McCarthy's portrayal of Israel is as ribald as some of the characters for which she has become well known. Yet, she's grounded in reality—an important distinction. She's still just as foul-mouthed, but her talent in stringing together descriptive adjectives and nouns in surprising combinations isn't the only thing about her. For instance, Israel has a genuine affection for favorite gay dive bar, vaudevillian Fanny Brice and her sick cat, whose vet bills spur her crimes. In other words, there are things to know and like about her; it's just that she doesn't seem to like herself all that much.

This psychological perspective isn't all that unusual. There have been plenty of movies starring cranky misanthropes, but they're men (Jack Nicholson has made a late-stage career out of playing them) who find redemption through a younger woman. Israel's foil isn't another woman, though there is both an ex-girlfriend (Anna Deavere Smith) and an ill-fated love interest (Dolly Wells), but another moth-eaten alcoholic misfit, Jack, played mischievously by Richard E. Grant.

The two inhabit the tatty interiors of a Manhattan not yet completely overtaken by shiny corporations, finding joy in mutual animus and bottles of whiskey. It's impossible to resist their chemistry or the pull of nostalgia one can feel for book-filled apartments. So, when Heller, in the final scene between the two, brings the camera in for too many closeups, making it a surprisingly standard bittersweet ending, you must forgive her.

Suspiria

Moviegoers expecting more of the tasteful pleasures of the sea, the Italian landscape, and the male form which propelled director Luca Guadagnino's “Call Me by Your Name” to global acclaim may well emerge from his latest release feeling traumatized, the recipient of a nasty little Halloween trick. Even those who hold Dario Argento's original film in high regard are likely to be offended at the liberties Guadagnino takes with the source material. But for those with strong stomachs, open minds and a modicum of patience, this new Suspiria delivers a shocking, ambitious, and ultimately haunting meditation on female power. 

Little of Argento's film makes the transition besides its slim premise: American dancer Susie Bannion travels to a mysterious dance academy in Germany. 

Gone is Argento's expressive palette of garish primary colors. Guadignino unambiguously sets his film in 1977 Berlin—the year Argento's film was released—against the industrial grays of post-war Berlin in the midst of the German Autumn. Reports of  RAF bombings and the Lufthansa hijacking drift from televisions and radios, and the Berlin Wall looms over the academy from across the street.

 Gone, too, is Argento's central plot development: Susie's climactic discovery that the academy is a front for a coven. The screenplay by Guadagnino and David Kajganich (“The Invasion,” “Blood Creek,” “A Bigger Splash”) makes it clear early on that these are, indeed, witches. The focus, instead, is on Susie's personal transformation and empowerment under the tutelage of this matriarchy. 

Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) arrives at the Helen Markos Academy for Dance unannounced and uninvited in the wake of the sudden disappearance of another dancer. Despite a strict Mennonite upbringing in Ohio and the lack of any formal training, Susie's intuitive, primal improvisation convinces the school's head choreographer, Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton) to accept her into the school. 

Providing pupils free room and board, the academy represents a  refuge from the division and violence of the largely male-dominated world just outside its doors. The coven's power appears to be generated through dance as a kind of ritual magic, and the dance sequences, choreographed by Damien Jalet and captured by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, are convulsive yet beautiful, a convincing manifestation of power embodied in women. 

This all-female refuge, however, is no paradise, and tapping into its power comes at a price. Susie begins to have nightmares, which she soon discovers are endemic among her fellow students. One of the instructors cuts her own throat.  And when lead dancer Olga (Elena Fokina) challenges one of the instructors, she feels the wrath of the school's entrenched matriarchy.

 Dancing for Madame Blanc, Susie's movements take control of Olga, who is trapped in a rehearsal room below. In a brutally violent sequence, each of Susie's gestures are inflicted on Olga. Walter Fasano's editing draws a convincing connection between the two women until Olga's bent and broken body lies inert in a pool of blood and urine. 

As she has been prone to doing in recent years, Swinton plays multiple roles. But here, as opposed to, say, “Snowpiercer” or “Okja,” she demonstrates great restraint. As Madame Blanc, she's a sashaying, chain-smoking  taskmistress, deadly serious about the art she is creating. In the film's opening scene, Patricia, the missing dancer (Chloë Grace Moretz), in hysterics, seeks protection from the coven at the office of her therapist Dr. Josef Klemperer, also Swinton under layers of clothes and convincing prosthetic makeup. One of the few men who make an appearance in the film, Klemperer is kind and indulgent, and utterly useless, attributing her fear to paranoid delusions. For her part, Dakota Johnson also underplays her part, reserving the fireworks for the dances. 

As the bond between Madame Blanc and Susie grows, it becomes clear what the coven has in mind for its new star, but nothing is likely to prepare viewers for the climactic ceremony which conjures both “Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages” and the visceral extremes of David Cronenberg. 

Despite the film's epilogue, Guadagnino does not attempt resolution, for his viewers or his subject. The varied themes of creation and destruction, patriarchy and national guilt, art and suffering, are embraced in all their messy contradictions, and the film is ultimately stronger for it.

The Happy Prince

It will come as a surprise to exactly no one that for his directorial debut Rupert Everett has written himself into the role of the Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde. Everett has been aging into the portrayal since his famous turn as the waggish best friend in 1997's “My Best Friend's Wedding” and has been working to bring this story to the screen for the last 10 years. Still, his first performance as Wilde only recently came about, in the 2016 revival of David Hare’s two-act play, “The Judas Kiss,” as a replacement for the miscast Liam Neeson from the original 1998 production.

Everett's screenplay picks up where Hare's play leaves off: Wilde's last years in exile after serving a sentence of two years' hard labor for "gross indecency.” For this portrayal Everett undertakes a distracting physical transformation that lands him somewhere between Alfred Molina and Danny DeVito as the Penguin in “Batman Returns.”

Much of the story is based on mostly true accounts of Wilde's escape to France, with his literary executor and former lover Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas) and friend and fellow aesthete Reggie Turner (Colin Firth) loyally re-creating the salons of happier days in the rented rooms of a Paris hotel—when not having to fend off assaults from their less-forgiving countrymen abroad.   

Wilde could have lived in relative comfort this way, but the man who wrote the infamous line about being able to resist everything but temptation is enticed to reconcile with Lord Alfred Douglas, known as "Bosie” (Colin Morgan), his golden-haired companion in indulgence and imprudence. (Bosie encouraged a libel suit against Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensbury, which led to Wilde's imprisonment.)

They abscond to Naples, Italy, where they live beyond their respective allowances, doled out by the long-suffering women in their life; for Wilde it's his wife, Constance (Emily Watson). They befriend a handsome waiter and stage elaborate gentlemen's parties, at one belittling the waiter's Catholic mother as she searches for the harlots she assumes must be in hiding at one of the parties.

Hearing of his reunion with Bosie, Constance cuts off his stipend and any chance of a reunion with his two sons. But soon enough Wilde finds substitutes in a young Paris rent boy and his cheeky kid brother, products of Everett's imaginings, to whom he tells the story of "The Happy Prince," his story of a statue that allows a swallow to take his gold covering to feed the poor.

Everett, reaching for but failing to secure a poetic parallel, seems oblivious to the implications of showing Wilde narrating the story for his own sons at bedtime versus offering a story to a young boy with whom he has sex. This deafness to tone pervades more than one scene in the film, as if in his decade-long desire to bring the story to screen to play Wilde and provide a showcase for the famous quips, Everett has overlooked the actual story. “For each man kills the thing he loves," wrote Wilde in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” That sentiment has never been truer.

Crazy Rich Asians

As the latest movie from director Jon M. Chu (“G.I. Joe: Retaliation,” “Jem and the Holograms”) continues to top the box office, this financial success has intensified the hope that the film, or rather its all-Asian cast for leading roles—Scarlett Johansson not among them—signals a shift in American filmmaking. Regrettably, the dependence on box office in validating the argument for representation pits greed against racism without a thought for cultural or artistic merit.

1993's “The Joy Luck Club” was the last major studio movie to feature an all-Asian cast. For his effort Wayne Wang, working from a script adapted by Amy Tan from her best-selling novel, received mostly critical success and modest box office receipts.

That film's greatest legacy—and an unfortunate, unintentional drawback in that in the absence of other stories of the Asian American experience, the film has had to carry the burden of representation for a quarter century—is its centering of the differences between first-generation children and their immigrant parents as the filter through which the larger culture consumes on-screen stories about Asian-American identity.

Up to now it's been easy to dismiss Chu's movies as puerile fluff. Adapted from Kevin Kwan's bestselling novel by screenwriters Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim, Crazy Rich Asians is as much escapism as his previous work; it's romantic comedy, after all, and in many ways revels in the rarefied world of the super affluent. Yet, the film manages to expand the spectrum of representation beyond what's been offered to a mass audience before, presenting recognizable folkways to those it represents while also critiquing the ills of its own society.

An expert in game theory, New York economics professor Rachel (Constance Wu) travels to Singapore to with her boyfriend Nick (Henry Golding) to meet his mother, Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh), and extended family. On the plane Nick confesses he's the heir to a global multi-industry conglomerate, but Rachel doesn't understand the magnitude of Nick's family's wealth—and his responsibility to it—until her former college roommate Peik Lin (Awkwafina) fills her in.

During this set-up, the characters in the film seem flat, like pawns, rather than people. Peik Lin and her family, especially her father played by Ken Jeong, who has made a career out of playing a stereotype, border on offensive. As do the conspicuous displays of wealth—a flyover helicopter shot of Nick's family home, a bachelor party on a freighter ship, shopping sprees and spa treatments for the bachelorette party.

Is this meant to be aspirational? Why isn't Nick's deception alarming to Rachel? Frustratingly, Rachel's naïvete persists through the first two-thirds of the movie until Chu gives us his answers. Like in the best Baz Luhrmann movies, the glitz and glamour twist into grotesque pageantry and the truth is finally revealed. For this alone, it's worth putting our trust in Chu to be our guide in this universe. If the literal definition of escapism is to experience something outside our own lives, the majority of us will do so—and be better off for it.

For the first time Rachel hears her mother's true immigrant story and puts it in a context that lets her finally understand Nick's family and the moves she must make to have a place in his life.

Whether more stories of differing experiences get told should not depend on this film's financial success or its cultural significance. Instead, it's simply that these stories must be told.

Ant-Man and the Wasp

If there's little to dislike in this actively ingratiating Ant-Man sequel, there's not terribly much to recommend it either. Intended as an intermezzo between the heavy courses of Marvel Cinematic Universe tentpole films, “Ant-Man and The Wasp” swings so far in the other direction that it risks disappearing in a froth of wackiness. 

Paul Rudd again portrays former petty thief Scott Lang, now under house arrest for his participation, as Ant-Man, in the Avengers' destructive airport battle depicted in “Captain America: Civil War.” Consequently, Lang has ditched the Ant-Man suit and devotes his time instead to entertaining his visiting daughter with close-up magic and pretend robberies that require traversing human-sized Rube Goldberg-style structures that he's built throughout the house. 

Actually, a former superhero faced with the real-life strains of confinement, divorce, and shared custody is an intriguing premise. So naturally the human drama is quickly jettisoned by the film's committee of five screenwriters in favor of a more Marvel-ish mission: original Ant-Man Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and daughter Hope / The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), believe Lang can help them rescue wife, mother, and original Wasp Janet Van Dyne from the Quantum Zone where she's been trapped at sub-atomic size for the past 30 years. 

Needless to say, all of this requires a number of expositional monologues, including a hilariously inspired one from Scott's former partner in crime Luis (Michael Peña) in which the characters involved appear on-screen to lip-sync his comic motor-mouth delivery.

The Marvel plot also introduces not one, not two, but three antagonists: the FBI, after Lang for his parole violation; black market dealer Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins) and his assorted henchmen, who want to sell Pym's tech; and new villain Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), who is able to shift her molecules to pass through items but now requires Pym technology to keep from disintegrating. 

Despite the superhero trappings, “Ant-Man and the Wasp” has much in common with 70s Disney live-action comedies such as “The Shaggy D.A.” and “The Love Bug,” where plot takes a back seat to setting up sight gags. Here, the visual jokes hinge on shifts of scale: an enlarged Ant-Man using a flat-bed truck as a skateboard; a suddenly enlarged Pez dispenser used to stop a pursuing car; Hank Pym wheeling his shrunken block-sized research lab like a carry-on suitcase. And the two villains are so overwrought and underdeveloped that they seem about as threatening as Keenan Wynn in “Herbie Rides Again.” 

Rudd again relies on self-effacing humor and witty asides (he is credited as one of the screenwriters), but they possess less power to disarm this time around, more often suggesting how relatively useless he is compared to his co-star. It is The Wasp who is the true superhero here, with a cooler (double-winged) suit, better moves, and a far more self-possessed attitude (thanks in large part to Lilly's portrayal) than her partner. Unfortunately, in the Marvel universe, gender tends to trump aptitude. Despite the superheroes' shared billing, director Peyton Reed makes it clear throughout that this is Lang's story. 

One can only hope that someday (with next year's “Captain Marvel,” perhaps?), Marvel will finally achieve what the notoriously struggling DC Multiverse managed almost effortlessly with Wonder Woman: a shattering of the cinematic superhero glass ceiling.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

With “Jurassic World: The Fallen Kingdom”—the fifth film in the series and the middle chapter of the reboot trilogy begun in 2015 with “Jurassic World”—the franchise has achieved a milestone. Of sorts. Dropped into a story that's little more than a series of set pieces cobbled together with recycled plot contrivances and stock characters, the computer-generated dinosaurs,which generated such awe and terror 25 years ago, have finally been rendered boring, merely a requisite threat that could have been replaced by Transformers or zombies, for all it would affect the repetitious action beats of spot, scream, and run. 

As the film opens, the dinosaurs left roaming the theme park three years ago are now the center of a worldwide ethical debate due to the eminent eruption of the island's volcano: Should they be saved or allowed to return to extinction? It's an interesting philosophical dilemma. In congressional hearings, Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), “Jurassic Park”’s resident chaos theorist and Greek chorus, not surprisingly, recommends leaving nature to its own devices, an opinion which the U.S. government very surprisingly chooses to follow. 

Screenwriters Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connoly, two of the writers of “Jurassic World,” which Trevorrow also directed, are less concerned with philosophy, however, than with finding a rationale for getting folks back on that island again, face-to-snout with the colossal carnivores. 

Enter Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), former park manager but now head of the desultorily titled Dinosaur Protection Group, to lead a covert mission to transport the dinosaurs to a new sanctuary island funded by philanthropist billionaire Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) For reasons only vaguely explained, velociraptor-whisperer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) is critical to the operation, too. 

Ignoring good sense and the overwhelming evidence of four previous disastrous visits, a boat-load of adventure film types materialize, including a tough, tattooed female dinosaur vet (Daniela Pineda); an Urkel-syle IT nerd and dinophobe (Justice Smith); and Ted Levine, having a ball chewing the scenery as Ken Wheatley, the quintessential amoral white mercenary leading a crew of burly paramilitary henchmen (read: dino-fodder). 

That the mission devolves into chaos, double-crosses, and a volcanic eruption comes as no surprise. What does surprise is how little suspense all of this manages to generate. Spanish director J.A. Bayona, who crafted such atmospheric thrills with “The Orphanage, “ rushes through his cliffhangers so quickly that the impending dangers barely register. One scene, however, lingers: as the rescue boats depart, the head and elongated neck of an Apatosaurus left behind rises above the lava and smoke that engulf it, its bleats and bellows echoing across the water. 

Having barreled through what took their predecessors an entire film to unfold, the filmmakers abruptly shift locale and tone from doomed island expedition to gothic mystery by way of James Bond. 

Enter Toby Jones as Bondian-styled baddie Gunnar Eversol, who intends to auction off the dinosaurs--including a genetically-weaponized super-dino called the Indoraptor--from a preposterous secret lab in the basement of Lockwood's mansion to an assemblage of international kingpins straight out of “Goldfinger.” 

There's yet another precocious child throwing a spanner in the works and more talk about what John Hammond, the OG dinosaur cloner, would have wanted. Pratt and Howard strain, once again, to generate the least bit of chemistry. And it becomes apparent quickly how little awe and terror are generated by images of dinosaurs confined to titanium cages or attempting to rampage through narrow hallways. 

Near the end, however, another moment suggests what could have emerged had director Bayona not been saddled with such an unimaginative script. Scared silly at the sight of real dinosaurs, Lockwood's pre-teen granddaughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon) makes a beeline for her bedroom and burrows beneath the covers. As she peeks out, the shadow of the Indoraptor glides across the room's sheer curtains as it descends from the roof, and a large single talon clicks as it grasps at the tiny window latch. 

Here, with no larger context, it's completely out of place. But in a different film, a film of more atmospheric, more mythic roots—a film more suited to Bayona's peculiar sensibility—it could be the stuff of nightmares.

Beast

As depicted by British writer-director Michael Pearce in his feature debut “Beast,” the Channel Island of Jersey is, despite its relatively small size, a locale of striking contrasts, its bleak rocky coastline and dense woods giving way to manicured golf courses and suburban housing developments. Against this dichotomy between the wild and the civilized, Pearce present a tad-too-familiar murder mystery that works best when it focuses on the barely buried ferocity of its main character. 

Caught between two worlds is Moll Huntford (Jessie Buckley). Still notorious within her family's tony community for stabbing a bullying middle school schoolmate with a pair of scissors, Moll, now 27, lives at home under her mother's close and critical scrutiny, working as a bus tour guide and singing in the church choir, which her mother directs. 

It's clear early on, that the long-simmering Moll is nearing a boiling point. She finds hairs sprouting from her throat and, upstaged at her own birthday party by her sister's pregnancy announcement, retreats to the kitchen where she crushes shards from a broken glass inside her closed fist. 

So when rough outsider Pascal (Johnny Flynn) saves her from an attempted rape, it's not surprising that Moll falls for him. For a young woman exorcising a long-delayed rebellion, Pascal is a dream come true, representing, as he does, all that her family abhors (he works with his hands and wears jeans to a country club function!).

 He's also the prime suspect in a series of child murders that is terrorizing the island. No worries; Moll lies to the police and says she was with him when the last little girl went missing. 

Despite the TV news clips running in the background, lines of searchers walking open fields, and the occasional police interview, Pearce is not interested in crafting yet another British police procedural; he is interested in these two outsiders' identities--who they really are and whether one of them is a murderer. 

After all, both have violent tendencies. The gun Pascal uses to run off Moll's assailant he also uses to poach rabbits, a skill to which he introduces her. And despite her tears at her first kill, we're well aware of Moll's unexpressed rage.

 That the film's second half gets bogged down in soap-operatics and an ill-paced and heavy-handed resolution takes little away from the ferocity of Jessie Buckley's performance as the liberated Moll. Herself an image of striking contrasts— wild red tresses and willowy sundresses—Buckley takes Moll past any standard incarnations of middle-class teen rebellion. At times, she is positively feral. Chased from a funeral for one of the murdered girls, Moll finally turns on her harassers, two sizable men, and screams so long and with such anger and frustration that they stop in their tracks. 

That is a beast you can't take your eyes off.