Reviews

There's enough to like in this genre mishmash. It's a noir in most respects, the plot mainly skulking around nighttime Chicago with a disillusioned cop (Gig Young) who's tempted to burn down his married life and light out for California. The anodyne Young is merely OK here. The supporting cast (especially the reliably oily Edward Arnold and the edgy William Talman) livens things up. The location shooting is often terrific, making you wish the production had just ditched much of its dull soundstage material and run around those dark, lonely Chicago streets where, we learn, the alleys are home to dice games and Caesarean sections.

Weirdly, the script by the well-traveled Steve Fisher who once adapted Raymond Chandler works at cross purposes. He's glued a Capraesque fantasy redemption tale onto the grittiness, replete with a guardian angel, that causes things to bog down whenever the body count is getting promising. He also can't resist some Tennessee Williams pastiche about a tormented ex-actor (Wally Cassell). This subplot, sappy though it is, has a grotesque allure. But none of this cuteness and wallowing keeps faith with the story.

What has aged badly are the characterizations. Young's mopey cop is suffering from a fairly unusual problem in 1953: his wife makes too much money. Sapping his will to carry on protecting the city that never sleeps, income envy has driven him into the arms of a cabaret floozy, a most hardboiled Mala Powers, here milking her bad girl tropes like a bottomless udder. Meanwhile, as bodies are dropping all around, the cop's wife is ready to go back to homemaking if it will restore domestic bliss. See what happens in the city that never bakes?

It wasn't a big transition from this stuff to the 1970s TV shows (Starsky and Hutch, Fantasy Island) that closed out the writer and director's careers.

The suspicion you feel watching M. Night Shyamalan movies is that his heart just isn't in horror. The jumps and scares are there, but that's to fill seats. What really makes his pulse skip is the Gumpian possibility of sweet, orderly redemption. This isn't an isolated case of Spielbergitis. Nearly all the biggest grossing movie product of our time treats horror as if the supernatural or grotesquely human were just mosquitos getting in the way of life's picnic. Millennial horror is the setting for chaste teen romance ("Twilight"), coming-of-age triumphs over nasty adulting ("The Hunger Games") and hymns to family unity and girl power ("A Quiet Place"). The myths that people pay the most to hear in the 21st century are flattering selfies.

M. didn't write Devil, but it's his storytelling DNA through and through. I was amused by the hallucination of Philly as a shiny, clean American city -- one where, as the opening credits tell us, normal life is about to be turned upside down. There, for one awful day in paradise, a spiffy corporate skyscraper populated with employees straight out of the Andy Griffith Show just can't catch a break. If only there was a noble Philly police detective with a strong whiff of Springsteen about him to ride to the rescue! And a security guard whose mama told him quaint folk tales that track with the plot, so the movie can forego any boring metaphysical sleuthing! Funny you asked...

The devil used to have a good agent, if the evidence of classics like Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist is anything to go by. Even into the late 80s, a smart noir tale like Angel Heart gave the devil his due. Then something happened in the culture; they dressed the devil in Prada, and it was all over. It is all over. Shyamalan's Devil is a remix of The Towering Inferno with the ensemble bickering of Hitch's Lifeboat and big lashings of Saw. The goofy mixture makes you feel you're watching the WWII era, the big budget disaster spectacles of the 70s and the teen torture sleaze of the 00s all at once. I'll say this for it: it's impressive how much cliche you can cram into one elevator.

If you like Asian horror, you probably aren't looking for the equivalent of Abbott & Costello Meet The Spooky Chick With Long Hair. That's close to what Hong-jin Na has done with his half-parody, half-serious take on his supernatural material. He's more serious than not, but he's also fatally hung his tale on a cop protagonist who's a pudgy bumbling wimp. We're meant to see multiplying local horrors as the forge that helps officer Jong-goo man up, if not in the eyes of his bored wife then at least to save his cutie pie kid. He's determined to scream and run for it like a Korean Lou Costello.

This prefab spook house is filled with slapstick, zombies, ghosts, plagues, exorcisms and gore, but Na's predictable and it's always obvious where he's going next. He has an OK eye, a plodder's pacing and a manga's paint-by-number characters. His action sequences typically involve the same repeated pratfalls -- he's no Yeon Sang-ho! He does, however, pull out all the stops for a berserk tongue-in-cheek shamanic ritual that's the only memorable sequence in the film.

Admittedly, I watched the movie as sociological research. I wanted to see

a) what the Tea Party is filling its head with

b) how Mr. Scientology is holding up as a brand; and

c) the brilliant Werner Herzog showing these amateurs what's what

And I was not disappointed. Like all vigilante stuff, the film is at heart a right wing fantasy draped on the idea that the law is for wimps. It devotes lots of time in the second reel to lecturing us about how defense attorneys always let bad guys off. Wouldn't you like to frog-march those namby-pamby criminal-coddlers into the homes of the grieving families so they could be taught a thing or two and maybe even threatened with guns? If you bought a ticket for this, you got your money's worth.

There is a military theme, too, given less screen time but persistent and more important. It isn't quite what you'd expect from the movie's branding (fearless Cruise next to an American flag). In fact, without spoiling anything, I'll say the movie taps into popular discontent about the Iraq war. In the Reacher character, McQuarrie gives us an ex-soldier who, in a heartfelt if hackneyed speech, reveals he isn't sure his service was worth it. To Reacher, it doesn't seem that the freedom he spent years defending actually exists. Now, this was mildly interesting -- existential dread rumbling beneath the giddy bloodshed and maniacal beatings. I don't know whether it's true to the source material or an overlay by McQuarrie, but it certainly livened things up for me. Then, predictably, it was right back to the clichés. It must be a bitter pill for the director who, in another life, actually made a film of some merit in The Usual Suspects.

Cruise inhabits his new post-matinée idol skin pretty well. The movie is at pains to tell us he isn't past it -- McQuarrie (at his star's insistence?) including a number of reaction shots in which every woman who sees Jack Reacher walk by swings her head and starts to drool. This is fairly desperate, and unnecessary. Cruise is at his best when looking troubled, worn out, unconvinced. Kubrick brought this out of him much better than anyone else, but Kubrick was stuck with the pretty boy actor. Years later, Mr. Scientology, famously battered about by real life in recent times, is convincingly unpleasant when allowed to be. The Lee Child readers seem troubled by the fact he isn't their dream of a 250-lb. "killing machine," but as his face turns to leather Cruise has in him the potential to be the next Charles Bronson.

The most interesting aspect is the way McQuarrie has cribbed from 1970s Hollywood. It's kind of an awkward fit to the material. He has the look of the French Connection down in places, but not its soul; he isn't Friedkin and Cruise is no Hackman, and as for Lee Child... So, Cruise swaggers about sounding like a guy transported into the present from 1959 --conveniently enough, he's skipped every part of the last 50 years that didn't fit his True Grit world view. The anachronisms pile up: we have a woman defense attorney who is required to let her mouth hang slack as Reacher explains to her, scene after scene, how it's really a man's world and only he has the answers. And of course she'll need saving eventually. Here the movie reaches out to reassure 21st century males hankering for the good old days. Boys, it says, we're back in charge!

The one and only grace note comes when Herzog lights up the screen, albeit looking as if he'd just been decomposing in lye. As the brooding ex-Siberian prisoner who gnawed off his fingers to stay alive, he puts in an afternoon or two of acting that simply changes everything around him. One minute we are in a mostly-competent commercial vehicle meant to give a fading big star work in his declining years. The next we have this odd, hideous genius stepping out of the shadows like a latter day Orson Welles as Welles did when he'd go slumming in junk for pay. His milk-white eye hanging in a haggard face, and his nightmare voice, are the best parts of the film. I recommend fast-forwarding directly to his scenes.

If you've seen Brad Anderson's earlier thrillers, you know he has gifts for atmospheric suspense and compelling characters. Two films from the early 2000s are the standouts of his career, Session 9 with desperate businessmen trying to keep it together as they perform asbestos work in a decrepit mental asylum and The Machinist with its eerie disintegration in the life of an extreme insomniac.

Those films had fascinating characters. This dud is only a high concept idea, barely peopled in cardboard. The actors mug furiously hoping to get somewhere, but their generic identities are as wispy as the haunted shadows snatching at them.

What little tension there is comes entirely from a holdouts-against-the-horde idea borrowed explicitly from zombie movies and given a little frisson here and there of cringe-worthy spiritualism. He wants to channel Rod Serling. He isn't even M. Night Shyamalan. It doesn't help that it looks like he was stuck hiring Syfy Channel interns to do the CGI.

I should have stopped watching after the 20-minute intro. As an old admirer of the director I stuck with it in fading hope, finger on the fast-forward button. A glance at his IMDb filmography reveals that he's spent years since his better days making mediocre television; it's evidently rubbed off on him.

There are so many things Ralph Smart got right in the earliest Danger Man, it's almost a pity he couldn't stick to the commercially problematic 30-minute format. The stories are taut, clever Cold War mystery-thrillers. Within the hurried time constraints it isn't all plot as Smart finds room for characterization and texture, even to interject some interesting ideas and questions. A lot of this is done by way of the mercurial Patrick McGoohan but Smart had no shortage of talented collaborators in directors and actors.

McGoohan's early performances are fluid yet quirky. While he projects a kind of reserved elan, he also draws on a trove of itchy, improvisational mannerisms that allow us into more than a few nooks--not all of them pleasant--of John Drake's anxious cynicism. (McGoohan is to the TV spook what the late Jeremy Brett was to Sherlock Holmes: a perturbable, high-strung exotic, haunted but smirking.) I prefer him here to the more celebrated Prisoner, in fact, where he's customarily arch and lacks the variety of situation and emotional register. His narration is another treat, delivered in one of the most delectably ironic voices in dramatic TV history.

The writing bests most on TV, then or now. The tone in the better scripts is wry, veering toward acid, with more than a hint of melancholy. This is not the Cold War as a stage for Kennedyesque moxie, and certainly not the idiotic glamorization found in Bond, but rather as in Le Carré, a stage for the peeling away of deceptions that are as likely to originate at home as in dens abroad. This is not to say it isn't above the occasional stereotype; see, for instance, the leering North Koreans in the episode The Honeymooners. But a mark of this generally very humane work is that it more typically treats nationalistic conceptions of the enemy with skepticism, and even pits Drake in frustration against his own morally ambiguous NATO bosses. Nor is the day always won, and some seeming victories prove Pyhrric. How refreshing this is to watch in 2007, for obvious reasons.

The production design, fairly cheapo and simplistic, never detracts (charmingly, old file inserts make do for exterior locations) and in fact the studio sets somehow hold surprise delights: here a gloomy early 60s facsimile of a Munich street recalling Carol Reed's chiaroscuro in The Third Man, there the lobby of an International Style hotel with its sexy mid-century modernism. That it's all in gorgeous high-contrast black and white only deepens the interest: shadow play for shadowy deeds.

A word too about the memorable score by Albert Elms, particularly his incidental music. The understated jazz is part and parcel of the sensibility here--aloof and insinuating. There is so much intelligence pulsing through Elms' music and the series as a whole that it seems vaguely unlikely; watching this work, I can't help but admire its virtues while ruing what's become of the medium.

Danger Man in this early incarnation is grown-up art on TV, the likes of which in the U.S., anyway, we rarely hope to find today outside of HBO, practically its last refuge. A treasure.

Meet the western, deglamorized: gunslinging makes you feel guilty, your ex is a prudish school teacher too hung up on your trail of corpses to see you, the town where you've decamped is filled with half-witted bums, puritans, celebrity-gazers and a most unlikely marshal, and somewhere on your trail are three brothers of the dead smart ass who drew on you in the last town. Jesus, do you need a whiskey.

No ordinary genre film, "The Gunfighter" (1950) is both a hugely satisfying entertainment and a conventional studio film with surprising depths. The surprise comes from the nature of the western in the mid-century where, with few exceptions, the black-and-white morality plays are as plain as the gunfire. Not so here, where we get the treat of seeing Gregory Peck play an antihero who has stepped far outside of conventional morality and now wants readmission, even though the bloodstains won't wash out. Welcome to Ambiguiety Gulch.

It's tempting to say that "Gunfighter" looks forward to the spaghetti western, especially in its themes of alienation and social revulsion. Frankly, though, it feels less like a western and more like a film noir. The feeling of claustrophobia is always near, whether in Peck's fear of another violent summons or in subplots involving the closeted desires of various townspeople to kill him (one gritty sequence in a boarding room is more unsettling than anything in Hawks or Ford). Surfaces are untrustworthy, motivations questionable, psychological derangement hovers in the wings, the "law" is both more and less than it appears, and as characters make startling pacts with their bloody pasts you can almost sense the triumphalism of the post-war years turning to anxiety and dread.

Acerbic, intelligent, honest and brave, "Lucky Louie" has everything going for it but what it needs most: laughs. In what may be the first U.S. sitcom to fully appreciate the new Wal-Mart culture, Louis C.K. overturns all the bad soil of Bush America and up wriggle the worms: bad jobs, urban misery, hopelessness, racism, crime, and the prospect of painful decline. Sexual dysfunction cracks inject a note of cheer.

If the satire isn't all that funny, maybe it's because the real concern is showing us the pathos of low circumstances. The show is a social mirror, a harsh one. Do we like what we see? Can we chuckle along with portraits of people being crushed by a society that flatters itself to believe that the McMansion is just over the hill?

It's pretty transgressive stuff. I liked Jim Norton's portrayal of the drug-dealing sleazeball Jim, who in a moment of eavesdropping through a tenement wall gives us his porn-trained translation of the noisy maneuvers going on behind it. But a lot of the time the humor is wince-worthy tragicomedy; this is a comedy in need of comic relief from its own moroseness. Talents like Chris Morris, Ricky Gervais, and in the U.S. the creators of the short-lived 1999 Fox gem "Action" have shown that when done right, this vein can be much funnier. 6/10.

Slow, boring and visually dead, this stinker doesn't come close to the original. The reason isn't mysterious: the director Ferdinando Baldi was no Sergio Corbucci.

An assistant of the great Leone, Corbucci was a poet of ugliness. His mud-soaked towns, leering hookers, sadistic racists, and unforgettable image of Franco Nero dragging his coffin through it all made Django (1966) a high point in the genre. This was the western without Hollywood's vigorous airbrushing: Django an anti-hero shooting holes in the Klan and unsavory allies alike, his penitential coffin hauled through the muck of a corrupt post-Civil War society.

Baldi is just a hack trying his best. Operating with no budget and rather less of a script, he turns in something like a bad, overlong TV episode. You get the watchable Terrence Hill, but few will want to suffer the bland cinematography and craptacular pace.

This turd won't send many running to Thomas Berger's rich novel, which is a shame. The book is everything the film failed to be: a scathing satire on moronic American suburban life.

The problem is a director far out of his depth. Though armed with a script largely faithful to its subversive source material, director John Avildsen (Rocky, Karate Kid) is a maker of feel-good entertainment who hasn't a clue how to handle satire or absurdity. It's like asking John Ashcroft to rap.

While Belushi is serviceable and Akroyd is fun, we can only imagine how this last partnership might have turned out in competent hands. They're frequently misdirected by Avildsen who thinks he's doing Reagan-era Abbott and Costello. Painful; read the novel.

If you're a filmmaker venturing into William Peter Blatty territory today, you have two crosses to bear. First, in the three decades since "The Exorcist," the material has been resurrected over and over. Second, ongoing sex scandals in Catholicism have weakened the church's usefulness as a context for supernatural horror; it's hard to worry about evil bogeymen when reality is so competitive.

That said, "The Order" is an ambitious genre piece with a number of creepy virtues let down by pedestrian execution. There's little sense of urgency. And there are jarring shifts in tone and intention: does it want to be a brooding Vatican mystery, an occult thriller, or a priest buddy pic? (There's even a misplaced Hammer subplot, looking creaky as, well, hell.) It's slightly better than the IMDb score suggests, and happily Peter Weller's performance and a few good surprises help atone for its sins. 6/10.

Lynne Ramsey makes arresting images, and Samantha Morton can summon feeling with a gesture. So what a drag to discover their talents wasted on this mannered, pretentious lark.

Ramsey can't bring Callar to life. Her attempts are too arty and oblique. Repeatedly her camera lingers on long silent shots of the agonizing actress as if Morton's obliterated gaze alone could supply character. We are in a blank Warholian hell of self-indulgence: for a film that has minutes to spare on bugs crawling across the floor, you might think it could get round to fleshing out its protagonist. But how will it do so if she rarely speaks? Without the novel's interior monologue, the celluloid Morvern Callar is nobody. Small wonder Ramsey has Morton undress often.

That said, the first ten minutes were so impressively acted, shot and edited that my hopes were soaring. Give the film that much: it knows how to make promises, if not how to keep any.

Gloriously weird, Crispin Glover's performance seems to boil out of the rage-fueled emotionalism of an era before Botox: think Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, blended with the latter-day fragility and introspection of Sean Penn. This role gives him the room to show off some astonishing gifts.

Glover is the best but far from the only reason to recommend this remake, superior in most ways to the 70s original. (There's some homage along the way, including a tongue-in-cheek set piece done to Michael Jackson's famous warble, "Ben". How time has made that hymn to interspecies love sound creepy!) Writer-director Glen Morgan has crafted a chewy little parable about capitalism, and his sardonic depiction of the real rat race, with a reliably savage Lee Ermey flogging his office employees behind a motivational sign reading "Prudent Aggression," gives the film more than the usual B horror subtext. The production design is sweet, too.

A terribly nice 100 minutes, and one of the best B horrors since Reanimator.

It was a long fall for director William Friedkin from the heights of The Exorcist and The French Connection. This last gasp of the old talent is muffled by bad dialogue and a noisy synth soundtrack from 80s beep-maker Wang Chung. Friedkin still has the eye--roving over urban decay as it once did poetically more than a decade earlier--and a few sequences wheeze up some of the old gift. But the pacing is lethargic, the story predictable, the characters banal, and the score risible. The casting stand-outs are Dafoe and Turturro, but their material is desperately thin. The lead, Petersen, is a one-noter without range or nuance. In the 70s, Friedkin, Coppola and a few others briefly restored to the Hollywood film a language of social realism and critical honesty which they used to explore the corrupt heart of American institutions; that was not going to last, obviously, and it could not survive transplant to an MTV-style aesthetic. Watching this flop is like watching a former prize athlete spit up blood on a barstool.

Any hopes I had for "Mermaid" were soon awash in the gallons of pus and blood and ranks of maggots that oozed and sloshed and swarmed out of the poor thing's belly, which is already looking like a bubbling peanut-and-butter jelly sandwich by the 15 minute mark. And may I say: nice pustule make-up, guys. Even in closeup, with the straight razor lancing them, you'd swear those are real cankers. To quote from the script: "Aaaaaiiiieeeeee!"

And that's it, alas. Hideshi Hino has a powerful imagination only hinted at here, in this little squiggly glistening exercise. The sewer sequence, with its monologue about memory and loss, and the Poe homage as the painter settles down to immortalize his dying mermaid suggest we're in for deeper treats. Nope: maggots, mainly. And OK already: you can hardly blame a gore film for being gory. But as readers of his horror manga know, Hino, like his heir apparent Junji Ito, can be a captivating storyteller. Here he's only skin deep.

If you appreciate the renaissance in Asian horror, don't bother with Gawi. The film scarcely deserves mention alongside A-list work such as Ringu, A Tale of Two Sisters, Cure, and Ju-On (or even such good material as The Eye or Inner Senses). Those films brim with subtleties, unexpected imagery, rich characters, and a decidedly non-Western take on what's frightening. Gawi is strung together with the leftover limbs and organs of everything that has made American horror lousy for the past twenty-five years.

The film tries to blend Asian ghost story and Hollywood slasher flick, but it's a bad fit. One aesthetic is bound to smother the other; guess which? Having no story of their own to tell the filmmakers loot Ringu for an evil-child subplot, but the situation is hopeless. Clichés, crap characters, witless plotting, a dull ghost, ho hum.

The single camera is fixed on a wide shot of a sparsely-furnished, eerily-lit apartment, a subdued den of deco and menace. Yes, a glance confirms, Mr. Lynch is caretaker here.

For five minutes, as Badalamenti's synths sigh over distant fog horns and muted thunder, we watch the rabbit people--actors in cheap rabbit suits worn under drab human clothing. Their day is winding down. They work at an ironing board, sit on the art deco sofa, rise, sit down again, exit, return, sing some verses about "dark, smiling teeth," and trade dark, smiling dialogue. The rabbit people play to an unseen studio audience, which greets their entrances with on-cue applause and their oblique lines with canned laughter. Minutes pass. . . Then: a superimposed mouth begins a demonic incantation. A huge match burns. The camera blurs out of focus, and then--you'd better believe it!--refocuses.

That's it. The result is weird, beautiful, unnerving, and, frankly, never far from being boring.

The best 25 minutes of Clint Eastwood's career lurk inside this uneven grab bag of shorts by five directors, among them greats. So good is he in Vittorio De Sica's brilliant segment (as the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit who unleashes his wife's libidinous Walter Middy) that you wonder what would have happened had Eastwood done more comedy. His gifts were wasted on spaghetti and spurs.

De Sica's imagination is the star here. The rest of the material is mildly charming, middling, dated, watchable only for Silvano Mangano, or, in the case of the Pasolini, dreadful.

The fears of sacrilege were misplaced!

Snyder and Gunn's "Dawn" remake is more terrifying, visually intelligent, and unsettling than Romero's groundbreaking 1978 film. No one who loves horror will wish for that masterpiece to disappear: it's always going to be a brilliant sardonic take on the themes of 20th century American decline (consumerism, social Darwinism) and its radical vision helped take US horror cinema out of a long oafish funk. But the original "Dawn" is wearing its aging deathmask somewhat lopsidedly today. Next to contemporary work like this remake and the icily brilliant "28 Days Later," Romero's shambling rotters are at risk of becoming the equivalent of ghosts in sheets, just as the once-poignant setting of the shopping mall is no longer revelatory as it was in the 70s. Boo! is not the same for every age.

The new film lifts its sprinting zombies from Danny Boyle and its ideas, structure and best lines ("When there's no more room in hell...") from Romero. Everything else is Snyder's feel for the texture of the new American century, frail and uncertain of hiding behind banal excess: in fact, the genius of the film is to locate its opening set piece in the midst of an anonymous, pre-fab American suburb--the very heart of sham solace. By the time we escape to hunker down in the mall for the start of the second act, the torn landscape outside is as savage an apocalyptic vision as any yet on film.

Snyder's cast is likable, his eye good, and his luck in an editor and fx crew superb (we are treated to an astonishing cgi spectacle: a veritable ocean of the dead). Gunn's script is perfectly serviceable, even without Romero's nuances. 8 out of 10.

Richard Kelly's love letter to outsiders is eerie and finally heartbreaking. It's hard to think of anything quite like it in contemporary American cinema. There is a passing similarity to the work of Lynch, at least in the hypnotic narrative style that gives the film its sense of dislocation and alienation, but Kelly's concerns are less idiosyncratic and his work more accessible. Thematically, there's also something of the compassion found in the early work of M. Night Shyamalan (although none of the syrup of "Signs"). And the acute social observation brings to mind another extremely gifted young writer-director, James Gray ("Little Odessa").

All this in a horror film. Why not? Horror is undergoing a renaissance now that it is the most subversive of genres left in the corporatized, nerve-deadened film industry, *the* place to smuggle meaning into the movie theater. Like 2001's rather good "Session 9," "Donnie Darko" is a film that looks through and beyond its genre, knows and cares about more than its effective scares. Its technique of unsettlement also takes into its ambit the American appetite for cultish pop psychology, the savagery of our schools, the wreckage of community, and the crowbar of conformity - material that it handles with some very well-aimed satire and also a deepening, Pynchon-like paranoia. But its biggest accomplishment is the creation of Donnie himself, a Holden Caulfield to whom has been whispered the most terrible secret of all. Jake Gyllenhaal's performance is something quite special.

On the merits of this film alone, Kelly looks to be a major talent; encore!