Theatrical Archives - Page 26 of 65

The Campaign (2012)

August 9, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Satire, Theatrical

*/****
starring Will Ferrell, Zach Galifianakis, Jason Sudeikis, Brian Cox
screenplay by Chris Henchy & Shawn Harwell
directed by Jay Roach

by Walter Chaw Empty, apolitical, and ultimately cowardly, Jay Roach's The Campaign appears this election year with a promising head of steam that fast dissipates. Honestly, the only thing really memorable about the film to me is that the high-powered rifle that shoots Will Ferrell's corrupt Democratic congressman through the leg is a crossbow in the ubiquitous TV spots. Blowback from the Aurora shooting? Possibly–but if that's a case, why wasn't it changed in the movie proper? And if it is changed some time between the press screening and Friday's opening, what will they do with the next scene when someone says something about how great it is that a candidate received a bump in the polls for shooting someone? A better question is how all of this could go down without mention of the National Rifle Association. Being more comfortable with assaulting the general stupidity of rednecks, gentried or free-range, than the dangerous politicism of the NRA is just one example of how The Campaign never misses a chance to miss a chance. Except for a couple of brief swipes, it doesn't even take on the Bible Belt, or gay marriage, or the hypocrisies of our representatives beyond the not-stunning revelation that Big Money controls the course of our country's political fortunes. On the scale of observations, that one fits snugly between "duh" and "no shit."

The Queen of Versailles (2012)

August 9, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Theatrical

***/****
directed by Lauren Greenfield

by Angelo Muredda Lauren Greenfield's greatest boon with The Queen of Versailles, an absorbing and unfailingly intelligent documentary that rises Phoenix-like out of some spotty origins, might lie in how it makes the life of two wealthy Americans seem unliveable, stressed on the verge of system collapse. Starting in the heyday of time-share emperor and Westgate Resorts CEO David Siegel (who ambiguously claims to have gotten Bush 2.0 elected in 2000, but won't explain how), the film starts off–and hints at its initial purpose–as a portrait of an industrious man building himself a monument, a house to contain his every desire. A smart but not tasteful man, he models the 90,000 square foot Orlando palace after Versailles; when asked why he needs to build it at all when his current home is already enormous (although, as he points out, "bursting at the seams"), he simply smiles and says, "Because I can." But pride, as they say, goes before the fall, and the recession hits before Versailles can be completed, leaving each of David's two hands on a very costly loose end: a massive unfinished home that's impossible to sell in a collapsed housing market; and a resort industry that filled its coffers with the life-savings of the newly foreclosed, run on hypothetical money that has run out of currency.

Celeste and Jesse Forever (2012)

August 2, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Rashida Jones, Andy Samberg, Chris Messina, Elijah Wood
screenplay by Rashida Jones & Will McCormack
directed by Lee Toland Krieger

by Angelo Muredda A long-overdue showcase for "Parks and Recreation" star Rashida Jones, Celeste and Jesse Forever never makes it out of the generic romcom woods it wants so badly to escape, and the strain leaves everyone involved looking exhausted. That's especially disappointing, because Jones is a comic talent, burdened by a script–her own, co-written with fellow TV vet Will McCormack–that insists on lifting beyond its weight class to subvert the story it's telling. Bridesmaids seems to be the model here (and not just because the star is her own screenwriter), although director Lee Toland Krieger has little of Paul Feig's ease in modulating tone. You could think of Judd Apatow's protagonists as one man with many faces and varying accessories, and while Apatow is AWOL here, his presence is felt in the way that Jones's Celeste, a professional trend-watcher for a PR startup, suggests a more financially secure version of Kristen Wiig's pastry chef in Bridesmaids. From the start, we get the impression that she's happily married to unemployed graphic designer Jesse (Andy Samberg, in his second marriage-themed movie this summer), with whom she shares an easy rapport too-obviously signalled by their obnoxious habit of making restaurant orders in the voice of Dieter from "Sprockets." It turns out they're separated, though still best friends–at least until romantic complications wedge them farther and farther apart for the remaining 90 minutes or so.

Total Recall (2012)

August 1, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**/****
starring Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback, based on a screenplay by Ronald Shusett & Dan O'Bannon and the short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" by Philip K. Dick
directed by Len Wiseman

by Walter Chaw For about forty minutes, maybe less, Len Wiseman's ironically forgettable Total Recall redux demonstrates energy, inventiveness, and proper respect for Blade Runner's production design, at least, if not for its own predecessor. By the end, it's just a bigger-budget Lockout that not only doesn't do anything with the Philip K. Dick source material, but is also wholly incapable of trumping the absolute, tripping-balls perversity of the Paul Verhoeven original. It's a problem that not even resurrecting the three-titted hooker can solve, especially since her appearance in this Total Recall highlights not the mutagenic strangeness of Mars but the oddness of…Australia? It's Colin Farrell this time around as everyman Douglas Quaid, stepping in for Ah-nuld of course and, in so doing, making the film's one possible narrative reality that Quaid is actually a Bourne-like super-agent less a possibility. Farrell is in fact too good at being ordinary–the long introduction that establishes Quaid's boring workaday existence is arguably the best thing about the whole thing. There's real pain there when he doesn't get a desired promotion, real desperation in his coming home to a sleeping wife before going out again to drink cheap beer with his assembly-line buddy. The result of Farrell's being kind of a really great actor is that he (like Guy Pearce in Lockout) instantly reveals the vehicle and its execution to be not nearly good enough, its aspirations not nearly high enough. And whatever questions the picture asks in the pursuit of metafiction, well, Farrell is capable of conveying more.

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

July 12, 20122012, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Coming of Age, Drama, Family, Theatrical

**/****
starring Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry
screenplay by Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin, based on Alibar's play "Juicy and Delicious"
directed by Benh Zeitlin

by Angelo Muredda The trailer for Beasts of the Southern Wild promises a harmless experience, but woe to anyone who goes in expecting a triumphal horn concert only to find Benh Zeitlin's accomplished yet exasperating debut, a libertarian wolf in a fuzzy Aurochs suit. That the film is far trickier than its marketing hook suggests is at once refreshing and troubling, given what it actually has up its sleeve. An oyster banquet pitched on a burial site, it's the sort of ethnographic celebration of a disenfranchised people that ends with the unspoken maxim, "And then they all died like men, and faded into legend."

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011)

July 11, 20122011, Authors: Walter Chaw, Romance, Teen, Theatrical, Vampire, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Billy Burke
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by Bill Condon

by Walter Chaw Appalling by pretty much every measure, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (hereafter Twilight 4.1) is the predictable end result of a film based on a book written by an illiterate Mormon housewife mistaking her profound ignorance for profundity. It's about a really old guy who talks a really young girl into marrying him and enduring really, really painful childbirth as her portion of God's judgment on her kind; and then it's about another kind of pedophilia, wherein a 19-year-old badly in need of acting lessons gets turned on by a baby and decides he's going to marry that infant once she's old enough to breed. Still with me? So, yes, I knew it was going to be bad and, yes, I went anyway. And you know what? For as girded as I was to the raw incompetence of this franchise, Twilight 4.1 still managed to plumb a few new depths. See, Twilight 4.1 is an apologia for spousal abuse and a clumsy pro-life screed (what about this crap isn't clumsy?) before turning into cartoon Grand Guignol horseshit meant to freak out an audience of pre-teens and lonely housewives who think that this object of their devotion is selling them anything except loneliness and delusion. It's sledgehammer racist in its depiction of a native housekeeper cast as Maria Ouspenskaya, and it has a moment in which a circle of wolves "think-talk" to each other in some ineffable evocation of an Optimus Prime pep talk. It's completely inexplicable, in other words, and irritating for it.

To Rome with Love (2012)

July 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Italy, Music, Romance, Spain, Theatrical

**/****
starring Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Penélope Cruz
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda There's an odd moment early in To Rome with Love that makes you sit up and wonder if Woody Allen has made good on the promise shown by his surprisingly warm Midnight in Paris. Stumbling out of a movie theatre with his wife and another couple, regular schmo Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni) mounts a rousing defense of Saverio Costanzo's The Solitude of Prime Numbers, offering that its openness to human mystery makes it far superior to The King's Speech. I can't say I agree with him, but how nice to see such an idiosyncratic opinion voiced in earnest. That's a good sign, coming from a director whose characters often sound like variations on one another in his lesser works–but it's also a false one, when much of what follows plays out like a flat homage to omnibus city movies.

Savages (2012)

July 5, 20122012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Blake Lively, Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Johnson, John Travolta
screenplay by Shane Salerno & Don Winslow & Oliver Stone, based on the novel by Winslow
directed by Oliver Stone

by Walter Chaw Another disgusting piece of crap that Oliver Stone makes watchable and even fitfully interesting, Savages sees Stone returning to ground he already plowed in Salvador, his screenplay for Scarface, and arguably his best film in hindsight, the filthy U-Turn. One possible excuse for its foulness, in an ocean of possible excuses, is a cast headlined by Taylor Kitsch, the new Paul Walker; Aaron Johnson, the new Skeet Ulrich; and Blake Lively, the new…I don't know, Bridget Fonda? Another possible explanation is a godawful script by Don Winslow (author of the novel upon which the film is based), Shane Salerno, and Stone hissownself that opens with a ridiculously bad voiceover tease and ends with same, sandwiching in between a tale of blissed-out California marijuana kingpins Chon (Kitsch) and Ben (Johnson) vs. the Mexican cartel, led by Lado (the always amazing Benicio Del Toro) and Elena (Salma Hayek). Sound awful? It's awful. And it would have been even without an embarrassing John Travolta, wheedling and whinging through an entire performance as a corrupt DEA agent. With him, however, Savages at least has the benefit of occasionally elevating from entirely-useless to sometimes-whimsical camp artifact.

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

July 2, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Sally Field
screenplay by James Vanderbilt
directed by Marc Webb

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The only reason for choosing (500) Days of Summer helmer Marc Webb to steer the Spider-Man property in a new direction is the hope that Webb would somehow inject into it a twee, precious, emo-romantic pheromone irresistible to Zooey Deschanel-brand nerd-chicks. Think: Twilight for girls who aren't illiterate. It's not a bad movie in and of itself, but I'm ambivalent about its nominal success, just because rebooting a franchise that's still so fresh (Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 was a mere five years ago) proves a terrible distraction. As much as I like Andrew Garfield, the new Peter Parker, I spent a lot of time comparing his performance to Tobey Maguire's in the same role (ditto Emma Stone (the new Gwen Stacey) and Kirsten Dunst (the former Mary Jane)) and wondering what Raimi would have done with a Lizard (Rhys Ifans) voiced/motion-captured by Dylan Baker, had he been allowed to finally pay off that thread. I spent a lot of time, too, distracted by cool emo touches, like having Peter decorate his room with a lovely, vintage Rear Window poster, ostensibly because this Parker is soulful enough a 17-year-old to not only have seen the film but also perhaps modeled his own photography jones after that film's shutterbug protagonist. But what about Rear Window's hero being a voyeur? A scene early on in The Amazing Spider-Man where Parker snaps a surreptitious photo of Gwen hints at a draft of the screenplay that maybe wanted to deal with Parker as a real, honest-to-goodness fucked-up kid. Sad that only moments now and again suggest any kind of depth or greater purpose. Sad, too, that the movie's not otherwise exciting or innovative.

The Female Eye Film Festival

June 21, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blog, Film Festivals, Theatrical

by Angelo Muredda Following the boys-only slate of the Cannes Film Festival, which made room for tepidly-received efforts from the likes of Andrew Dominik and Lee Daniels but shut out women in a comparable phase of their careers, June has been a surprisingly fruitful month for female directors of North American independents. Not that it's compensation for that snub, but it's heartening to see Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister and Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz get the lion's share of positive indie press in recent weeks, putting them in good company with Wes Anderson, whose Moonrise Kingdom did make Cannes's official selection. You could think of the Female Eye Film Festival, now entering its tenth year and running through June 24^th at Toronto's Carlton Cinemas, as a low-key companion to those higher-profile releases.

Brave (2012)

June 20, 20122012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
screenplay by Mark Andrews and Steve Purcell and Brenda Chapman and Irene Mecchi
directed by Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman

by Walter Chaw Brave…isn't. Not very. It's by far the most conventional Pixar film, and while it's better than either Cars, that's only because the Cars movies are simply awful. Brave has a plucky girl heroine who disobeys her mother, makes a hash of things, then solves everything at the end through the murder of the antagonist. It has an adorable animal sidekick (three of them, actually), treats an entire culture like a broad ethnic joke, and misses every single opportunity to be about something. Huzzah! When we say as a culture that something's for children, we mean that it's better–unless we're talking about media culture. Brave is for children, and its only connection to things like WALL·E, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, or Ratatouille is its company's pedigree, fading fast until Brad Bird or Andrew Stanton decides to strap 'em on and jump back in the ol' computer-animated saddle, riding to the rescue as the company founded on their beautiful complexities descends into absolute, uncontroversial, shallow mendacity.

Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present (2012)

June 19, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Theatrical

***/****
directed by Matthew Akers

by Angelo Muredda Forty years into a celebrated career kicked off by the intense bodily exposures of 1973's Rhythm10, a solo show in which she put herself through twenty rounds of five-fingered fillet, Marina Abramović has earned the right to call herself the grandmother of performance art. "I don't want to be alt anymore," the Belgrade-born, New York-based artist admits early in Matthew Akers's engaging bio-doc Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, indulging for a rare moment in her accomplishments. It's a testament to both her frankness and Akers's tasteful curatorial approach to her oeuvre that there's nothing pretentious about the statement, only a clear-eyed assessment of the distinct phases in an artist's life and work.

That’s My Boy (2012)

June 14, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Theatrical

**/****
starring Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, Leighton Meester, Susan Sarandon
screenplay by David Caspe
directed by Sean Anders

by Angelo Muredda For the first time since 2009’s Funny People, That’s My Boy finds Adam Sandler straying from his usual stable-mate Dennis Dugan, this time putting his trust in Sex Drive director Sean Anders and “Happy Endings” showrunner David Caspe. At first, you wonder why he bothered. The opening, a 1984-set flashback to the sexual misadventures of a young Sandler (Justin Weaver) cut from the same cloth as The Waterboy‘s eminently punchable Bobby Boucher, isn’t promising: vagina jokes drop from the sky with the leadenness of an unaired pilot, and everyone’s features are shellacked into oblivion by floodlights on loan from life-insurance ads. Things aren’t much better in the present, where we meet the adult Donny spitballing ways out of a financial crisis–he owes the IRS some $40,000–with New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan, on hand for no discernible reason except to make us miss the Brett Favre scene in the Farrelly brothers’ much funnier There’s Something About Mary.

The Woman in the Fifth (2012)

June 13, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Mystery, Poland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

La femme du Vème
*½/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Kristin Scott Thomas, Joanna Kulig, Samir Guesmi
screenplay by Pawel Pawlikowski, based on Douglas Kennedy's novel
directed by Pawel Pawlikowski

by Angelo Muredda Midway through Pawel Pawlikowski's The Woman in the Fifth, Romanian femme fatale Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas) tells glum American writer Tom (Ethan Hawke) not to worry about his writer's block. "You have the makings of a serious work now," she reassures him: "A broken life, down-and-out in Paris." Intended as a key to the film, a hint that we aren't watching real events at all but rather their translation into an American's grim European masterwork, this exchange does nothing so much as outline the limits of Pawlikowski's imagination. His first feature since 2004's unsettling My Summer of Love, this is an odd misstep, the kind of bad movie that can only be made with the purest of intentions. I don't doubt that Pawlikowski, working from a thriller by American writer Douglas Kennedy, believes in this idea that good novels are born of wretched experiences–that being a disgraced literature professor and stalled artist shaking down phantoms in run-down Paris gives you a direct line to authenticity. But it's the sort of half-baked conceit that defines countless shallow genre texts shooting for arthouse credibility, the hallmark of a Secret Window knockoff that begs to be taken as seriously as a good Paul Auster novel.

Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (2012)

June 7, 20122012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Theatrical

***/****
screenplay by Eric Darnell and Noah Baumbach
directed by Eric Darnell, Conrad Vernon, Tom McGrath

by Walter Chaw Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted (hereafter Madagascar 3) is easily the best one yet and the product, I'll bet, of co-directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath's foray into the rigors of gag-writing for an animated TV series ("The Penguins of Madagascar")–though I wouldn't discount the influence of credited screenwriter Noah Baumbach, either. Madagascar 3 is deeply involved in surrealism, rivalling Disney's pink elephants on parade in a circus sequence that, if not as good as Dumbo's, is not as good because it's scored by a genuinely dreadful Katy Perry song. The picture's so cheerfully, indefatigably strange, in fact, that at times it approaches the Golden Age of Looney Tunes. It's an effervescent little artifact housing a psychotic, bestial gendarme named Capt. Chantel DuBois (voiced maniacally by Frances McDormand), who, in a moment of extreme cultural insensitivity, rouses her comatose henchmen with a rendition of Edith Piaf's "Non, He Ne Regrette Rien," right there in an Italian ICU. The picture is lawless in this way: Chris Rock's Marty the Zebra has never been blacker (his signature song this time around has something to do with a circus afro), David Schwimmer's Melman the Giraffe was never more of a kvetch, Bryan Cranston's Russian tiger Vitaly is depressed and bellicose, and Martin Short's brilliantly-conceived sea lion Stefano is enthusiastically, effervescently, Roberto Benigni-stupidly Italian.

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

May 30, 20122012, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth, Sam Claflin
screenplay by Evan Daugherty and John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw A handful of arresting images aside (and even those owe more than a passing debt to artist Bev Doolittle, or Terry Gilliam minus the tchotchkes–and here's Lily Cole again, post-Parnassus), Rupert Sanders's dreary Snow White and the Huntsman plods along without much sense on its way to producing not much with little impact and no purpose. Though beaten to it by Gary Oldman's legendary turn in the inexplicable Tiptoes, it has a gaggle of hale British actors playing dwarves, including a humiliated Bob Hoskins, tasked with being blind-guy exposition for little miss Joan of Arc. And it has a gorgeous Charlize Theron, demonstrating in full fetish-wear that she has no idea she's in a Twilight ripper by turning in a pretty good character performance as an evil step-witch who's spent way too much time reading The Beauty Myth. Indeed, the Big Bad Wolf in this fairytale is Naomi Wolf.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

May 29, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola
directed by Wes Anderson

by Angelo Muredda In his post-mortem of the 65^th Cannes Film Festival, over which he presided as jury president, Nanni Moretti complained that a number of Competition filmmakers seemed "more in love with their style than with their characters." Whether Moretti had festival opener and Competition entry Moonrise Kingdom in mind is debatable, but this is the kind of criticism Wes Anderson has faced throughout his career. Moonrise Kingdom won't win many holdouts over to Anderson's corner: Those who think he's spent the last 16 years building dollhouses may snicker from the first sequence, where the camera laterally tracks through an actual dollhouse of a set to find a mid-1960s family sequestered in tiny rooms, parsing their magazines and adventure novels. Those baffled by The Darjeeling Limited's juxtaposition of Kinks songs with snippets of Merchant-Ivory and Satyajit Ray scores may also scoff as the camera tracks past a battery-operated record player pushing out Benjamin Britten's "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra," an educational piece narrated by a disembodied voice that neatly introduces "all the separate parts of the orchestra." As if to facilitate a no-hard-feelings exit for the unenthused, Anderson telegraphs his aesthetic from the overture.

Last Call at the Oasis (2012)

May 24, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Theatrical

**/****
screenplay by Jesica Yu, based on the book The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century by Alex Prud'homme
directed by Jessica Yu

by Angelo Muredda Last Call at the Oasis is the latest casualty of Michael Moore's success. Like virtually every other North American informational doc with an activist slant since Moore's Bowling for Columbine, Jessica Yu's film tackles a serious issue–unequal access to the world's dangerously finite freshwater supply–with a barrage of animated charts, righteous talking-head interviews, ironically spliced music cues (Johnny Cash's cover of Bob Nolan's "Cool Water," Pink's "Raise Your Glass"), and archival footage from less enlightened educational fare, in this case 1948's "The Adventures of Junior Raindrop." Besides having an obvious facility with these tropes, Yu has her heart in the right place; as with Participant Media's other non-fiction efforts (among them, An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for "Superman"), with which this film shares its DNA, the politics are sound, landing firmly on the side of the disenfranchised and the weak, in hopes of bringing attention to what might otherwise be a lost cause. But there comes a point where the deluge of aesthetic shortcuts overwhelms the message, and makes the good work these movies are striving to do seem hopelessly routine.

Men in Black 3 (2012)

May 23, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, United Arab Emirates, Will Smith

**/****
starring Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Emma Thompson
screenplay by Etan Cohen, based on the Malibu comic by Lowell Cunningham
directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

by Angelo Muredda That Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black 3 isn’t garbage comes as a surprise ten years after the first terrible sequel, and amidst reports of a troubled shoot that got underway before there was even a screenplay. As detailed in a NEWSWEEK piece on the production, Will Smith’s enormous trailer guzzled fuel and idled for months while the script was hashed out on dirty napkins, looking like a readymade symbol for a lead balloon in the making. Still, that it isn’t the bust it could have been shouldn’t make us too generous towards what’s essentially a bloated and very expensive nostalgia trip not to its setting of 1969 but to the first film’s release year of 1997, a time that’s probably too near to really miss.

The Woman in Black (2012) + The Innkeepers (2011)|The Innkeepers – Blu-ray Disc

April 23, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE WOMAN IN BLACK
*/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Ciarán Hinds, Janet McTeer, Liz White
screenplay by Jane Goldman
directed by James Watkins

THE INNKEEPERS
***½/**** | Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, Kelly McGillis, George Riddle
written and directed by Ti West

by Walter Chaw A beautifully outfitted, brilliantly designed Victorian jack-in-the-box, James Watkins’s The Woman in Black will likely be remembered, if it’s remembered at all, as Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter commencement (given that no one saw December Boys). Alas, it squanders a pretty nice, ‘Tim Burton Sleepy Hollow‘ set-up in bumfuck England for a solid hour of crap jumping out of shadows. Popping up from behind bushes is startling, but it isn’t art (it’s not even clever), and at the end of the day, it’s only really entertaining if you or your date is a sixteen-year-old girl. Carrying the Hammer imprint and boasting production design so good that long stretches of the film are devoted to looking at it, the piece only ever honours its legacy and appearance with the brutality with which it handles its dead children and a delirious dinner scene in which a grief-besotted lady (Janet McTeer) treats her little dogs like babies and carves something on her dinner table whilst possessed of a hilarious fit. The rest of it is garbage.