Category: Film Reviews by Amy

A look at some new spooky season films

It’s hard to break away from your favorite scary or Halloweeny movies, but here are some recent-ish releases that you might look to add to your Halloween weekend viewing.

Shell (R)

I am really liking this recent, Glass Onion/Running Point-era Kate Hudson and I thoroughly enjoyed her performance here as ultra-rich wellness girlboss Zoe with an empire based on a quasi-medical rejuvenating but vague “Treatment.” Elisabeth Moss, an actress who can make a whole lotta something out of whatever slightly-more-than-nothing you give her, is Samantha, an actress trying to keep her career afloat in some slightly futuristic form of Los Angeles. But Samantha’s career is past its TV peak and her handlers suggest she try some Treatments to improve her castability, which Samantha reluctantly does. At first it’s all glowy skin and a movie offer, but soon Samantha starts to experience some of the freaky side effects. I could see how this movie could get written off as a lesser The Substance. But Moss and Hudson make this body horror a fun, compelling watch even when the going gets goofy. B+ Streaming on Paramount+ and available for rent or purchase.

Weapons (R)

Speaking of goofy, this strange and violent movie from the summer frequently tips over into laugh out loud goofiness. All children but one from the third grade class of teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) disappear one night, running into the dark from their homes, arms held creepily behind them. The movie is told from the viewpoint of several people involved, including Justine, sole remaining child Alex (Cary Christopher), Josh Brolin playing the father of a missing kid, Alden Ehrenreich as a police officer Justine is having an affair with, and others. Popping up into the story — and occasionally just into the frame — is Amy Madigan as Gladys, the terrifying orange-wigged powdered-white face that shows up in some of the movie’s trailers. Weapons didn’t quite wow me but it did have moments of scariness and a fun Big Bad and was frequently amusing. B+Streaming on HBO Max and available for rent or purchase.

The Hand the Rocks the Cradle (R)

This remake of the 1992 movie gets a bit of “this is a real movie” shine with its casting of Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Caitlin, the mom in this Evil Nanny tale. But as I dug in, the crime and the perpetrator, in this case Polly the Nanny as played by Maika Monroe, seemed a few notches too silly and operatic. I like that the movie ups the bonkers-ness on Polly’s backstory from the original even if it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. The movie also feels longer than it needs to be and could slice off some subplots to get us to the blonde-lady-smackdown faster. This one is perfectly OK if you want something new but also don’t want to have to pay close attention while you do house chores or pay bills. C- Streaming on Hulu.

M3gan 2.0 (PG-13)

Original M3gan, was a delightful surprise with its sentient, slaying (in both senses) robot. This sequel, like M3gan itself (voice by Jenna Davis, stunts by Amie Donald), is a lot more self-aware but still adequately fun. M3gan — who of course “survived” from the first movie, or whatever it’s called when a killer robot’s consciousness persists — spends a chunk of the movie as either a voice on the phone or a weird little toy robot, which is a nice bit of comedy business. This movie’s human tech bro villain is a different flavor of callow narcissist than last movie’s but still recognizable as the person whose comeuppance will be cheered. Gemma (Allison Williams) and Cady (Violet McGraw) return as flawed aunt-guardian and niece who seems to have absorbed a fair amount of M3gan sassiness. B- Streaming on Peacock and available for rent or purchase.

Get ready to feel super nostalgic, Gen X-ers and elder millennials, with this documentary about the 1997 through 1999 music festival Lilith Fair and its creation by Sarah McLachlan — just in time for the release of her new album Better Broken.

If you are old enough to have regularly purchased physical, not digital, albums and a person with a singer-songwriter interest, it’s likely you’ll realize as you watch Building a Mystery that you probably own or owned from nearly every singer who appears as a talking head or in clips from the fair (thank you, Columbia Record Club). These were the female musicians of the late 1990s. The documentary joyfully explains McLachlan’s vision — an all female show in a music business that still thought you couldn’t play two female artists’ songs back to back on the radio — and how she pursued it, expanding the musical genres featured and adding second stages. The second stages in particular offer some fun clips of artists at the beginnings of their music careers, including Dido, India.Arie and Christina Aguilera. The festivals sought to be good business for the performers but also provided local activists with places to do outreach and local nonprofits with donations. The documentary also highlights the joyful vibe of the concerts — from the teary videos of concert goers at the time to the memories of performers now about what a welcoming (and pregnancy- and baby-friendly) working environment the festival was. In addition to making you (or at least the “you”s of a certain age) wish you were there, the documentary highlights the way Lilith informed future concerts and performers. A Streaming on Hulu.

Liam Neeson’s Frank Drebin Jr. takes over from Leslie Nielsen — spiritually portrayed here as an owl that blesses this franchise continuation — as the lady-romancing member of the LAPD’s Police Squad. The movie begins with Drebin disguised, with the aid of one of those Mission: Impossible-style face masks, as a small lollipop-wielding girl to infiltrate a bank where thieves are stealing an item from a safe deposit box that is, as labeled, a “P.L.O.T. Device.” And pretty much there, you’re either in or you’re not. This movie is extremely stupid from the title card where the spacing has been misjudged and all the letters of the title can’t fit in the screen to the end credits song where Neeson is singing about boobs. And I mean “extremely stupid” in the most complimentary terms possible. Pamela Anderson is perfect as a breathy femme fatale who urges Drebin to investigate her brother’s death as a murder. Paul Walter Hauser is solid as Ed Hocken Jr., Drebin’s capable partner, and Danny Huston is appropriately villainous as a tech guy with a very dumb apocalyptic plan. Everybody here plays all their “take a chair” “no thanks, I have plenty of chairs at home” goofiness completely straight in exactly the right way. A- Available for rent or purchase.

The saga of the Crawley family comes to an end (probably, maybe) with this 1930-set story of generational baton passes among both upstairs and downstairs characters.

Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) scandalizes the country and is shunned by fancy people after her divorce from Henry “Matthew Goode is not in this” Talbot. Their divorce is front page of the evening news and she even has to be hustled out of a party before some lesser royals arrive, which is pretty funny and also, like, get ready for 1936, the U.K. This state of things adds to the difficulties between Mary and her father, Robert (Hugh Bonneville), who is still not totally cool with giving her control of Downton Abbey and all the estate management. They’re both pretty anxious about the inheritance hopefully coming to Robert’s wife/Mary’s mother, Cora (Elizabeth McGovern), from her recently deceased American mother since Mary’s various improvements have already spent about half of what they think they’re getting. But since the inheritance was being settled by Cora’s “Teapot Dome Scandal” brother Harold (Paul Giamatti), hopefully they’ve kept the receipts. Harold comes to England with his buddy Gus Sambrook (Alessandro Nivola), who he presents as sort of a financial adviser and who happens to be hanging around when the recently divorced Mary decides to let her hair down a little.

Meanwhile, among the downstairs crowd, Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol), now happily married to the farmer Mason, is about to retire and hand the kitchen over to Daisy (Sophie McShera). Daisy’s husband Andy (Michael Fox) is on the verge of taking over the butler position from Mr. Carson (Jim Carter), who is still/once again retiring. Carson’s wife Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan) is still working as the Downton housekeeper and Miss Baxter (Raquel Cassidy) is still serving as Cora’s lady’s maid while married to Mr. Molesley (Kevin Doyle), former footman and teacher, current screenwriter and forever staff goofball. Mr. (Brendan Coyle) and Mrs. Bates (Joanne Froggatt) are still on staff and are expecting their second child.

Also present are Edith (Laura Carmichael), who is absolutely killing it as the wife of big-time noble person Bertie (Harry Hadden-Paton), and Tom (Allen Leech), the closest thing the Crawleys have to a “regular guy” relative and father of Crawley granddaughter Sybbie (Fifi Hart). They all wind up back at the Abbey to pitch in with finding solutions to Mary’s social shunning and the family’s general financial woes with some help from Cousin Isobel (Penelope Wilton), famous actor Guy Dexter (Dominic West), former footman and Guy’s partner Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier) and Noël Coward (Arty Foushan).

The movie kind of ends up in a riff on Gosford Park, which like Downton was written by Julian Fellowes and like this movie takes place in the early ’30s while the great house ecosystem still exists but is clearly fading fast. We get the big party, with fancy people gathering around a piano and staff and kids listening from the hallway — very sweet, very nostalgia-while-it’s-happening. And that sort of characterizes the movie overall. We get all of our still living characters back as well as shout-outs to some of the non-living ones and enough tributes to the late Dame Maggie Smith as Dowager Countess Grantham that she still feels like part of the movie. While the TV show had more tartness — Mary’s Mr. Pamuk, Edith’s child out of wedlock — the movies have felt a little softer, with edges sanded down, and more repetitive (it feels like Carson has been retiring for a decade). But these are still the same Crawleys and it’s enjoyable to spend time with them. B+ In theaters.

Highest 2 Lowest (R)

Denzel Washington is the head of a record label at a crossroads in this Spike Lee-directed riff on an Akira Kurosawa movie (that I haven’t seen — 1963’s High and Low, which is streaming now on HBO Max). David King (Washington) is contemplating a profitable buyout of his company and/or not selling and buying back the controlling interest that he sold years ago. One option gives him a mountain of cash; the other gives him the ability to get back to the art of finding and developing new musicians (but requires a mountain of cash from him). Then he gets a call that his teenage son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) has been kidnapped. David and his wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) are willing to give up any amount of money to get him back. Twists in the plot, however, muddy David’s willingness to give his actual money to the kidnappers — with police not offering great hope that they will be able to solve the crime.

Jeffrey Wright plays Paul, David’s longtime friend and driver, and Wright and Washington are terrific in their scenes together. Washington is, of course, magnetic in all of his scenes making the sometimes stagey dialogue feel natural to the ego-filled but conflicted David. The movie is highly watchable — even if Spike Lee maybe could have edited away some of the ideas that he stuffs in around the central action to keep up the movie’s pace. But I think an occasional slowdown of the forward momentum of the movie is worth those extra Spike Lee touches. There is a standout action sequence in the middle of the movie that hits that exact right Spike Lee-style “this is a New York City story” beat. That sequence — and the opening credits of the sun rising on the city — also makes the movie a nice addition to a triple feature about NYC characters in high tension situations with the elegiac 25th Hour (streaming on Amazon Prime Video) and the tight-as-a-drum heist story Inside Man (on Netflix). B+ Streaming on Apple TV+.

Ed and Lorraine Warren do One Last Job in 1986 Pennsylvania in this final (allegedly) entry in The Conjuring series, though who knows what that means for your Annabelles and your The Nuns.

The Warrens are still out there giving presentations about the supernatural, now to mostly empty auditoriums. Due to Ed’s (Patrick Wilson) recovery from a heart attack, Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) doesn’t want to take on any new investigations. Meanwhile, their now-grown daughter Judy (Mia Tomlinson) is newly engaged to boyfriend Tony (Ben Hardy). The usual family drama about a daughter growing up is heightened because Judy has some of the same spirit-y sight abilities that Lorraine does and she seems to be having more of these intrusive visions lately.

Meanwhile meanwhile, the Smurl family in Pennsylvania is being terrorized by spooky who-knows-whats after grandparents bought a Smurl daughter a clearly haunted (and quite ugly) full-length mirror for her confirmation. It is objectively a terrible gift just for its carved creepy cherub-y figures on the frame and its many obvious dust-collecting nooks. What the Smurls don’t yet know is that we saw the mirror in the movie’s prologue from Ed and Lorraine’s younger days (when they are played by Orion Smith and Madison Lawlor) when the mirror so spooked Lorraine that it sent her into labor with Judy.

These two storylines — the Warrens and Judy’s visions and the Smurls and their terrible in-law gift — stay mostly separate for more than half the movie until the Warrens are drawn in to the Smurls’ haunting. Most of what unfurls throughout is pretty well telegraphed from the beginning and though we get some perfectly respectable jump scares, the who and what and why of the haunting feels very secondary to the Warren of it all. But then, these movies always sort of floated along on the square hotness and cornball chemistry of Wilson and Farmiga in these roles. They are entertaining to watch together and entertaining to watch separately as they approach whatever is causing people to float in mid-air and holy water to smoke. If you need to tell yourself there is more heft to this story, I guess you could make something of a throughline about Lorraine trying to teach Judy over the years to suppress the supernatural side of herself and the way that speaks to a parental desire to fix what you perceive as your flaws in your children. But I think you can also just enjoy the spooky surface, all creepy things in the dark and Patrick Wilson making pancakes. B- In theaters.