-
A |
**** |
+0|
Teens & Up*
Steven Spielberg’s breakout hit is a perfect storm of primal fears (man-eating predators, the unseen, the ocean), shrewd, emotionally riveting direction combined with sympathetic lead performances, and that classic two-note theme from John Williams’ edgy score.
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-
A- |
**** |
+1-1|
Adults*
Lecter fascinates us because he embodies qualities that we associate with civilized, reasonable existence, yet he is murderously sociopathic. In our therapeutic age, he’s a shocking reminder that, beyond all psychobabble about “behavior modification” and the like, there remains the sheer reality of good and evil. The doctor is in: God help us all.
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-
A- |
**** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
A ubiquitous tagline and a mind-bending
climactic twist made M. Night Shyamalan’s breakout hit The
Sixth Sense a monster sensation — yet this deliberately
paced, psychologically sensitive paranormal thriller is much more
than a one-trick puzzle movie, and holds up well to multiple
viewings.
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-
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
The most remarkable thing about Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is neither Johnny Depp’s mesmerizing performance, nor ILM’s literally eye-popping skeletal ghost-ship crew, but the sheer fact that the movie works at all.
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-
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Though diminished by decades of pop-horror incarnations, the vampire remains uniquely evocative of both dread and fascination, horror and seductiveness. Monsters from werewolves to Freddy Krueger may frighten, but neither victims nor audience are drawn to them. By contrast, the vampire suggests the horror of evil working on our disordered passions.
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-
B+ |
***½ |
+2-2|
Teens & Up
As imagined by Tim Burton in stunning, wildly stylized stop-motion animation overtly reminiscent of The Nightmare Before Christmas yet technically far beyond it, this macabre fairy tale becomes, variously, a poignant meditation on the daunting weightiness of the vows of marriage, a raucous danse macabre in jumping jazz rhythms and florid colors, a visually rich celebration of Edward Gorey Gothic-Victorian and Charles Addams grotesque, and, perhaps most surprisingly, a touching portrait of tragedy, doomed love, empathy, and sacrifice.
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-
B+ |
***½ |
-1|
Kids & Up*
Stop-motion animation cult heroes Wallace & Gromit, the brainchildren of British animator Nick Park of Aardman Animations, may not be unchanged in the transition from their charmingly dotty, wildly funny shorts to their first feature-length film, but they’re still recognizably themselves.
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-
B+ |
*** |
+2|
Teens & Up
This line from Macbeth, quoted by
small-town librarian Charles Halloway (Jason Robards), perfectly
evokes the unsettling milieu of Ray Bradbury’s dreamlike thriller
about a creepy carnival coming to a small Illinois town.
Significantly, this line is immediately followed in the film by
the following verse from Longfellow, also quoted in the book:
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-
B |
***½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Then re-anchor the story to reality by asking whether there
are really any ghosts at all — whether apparently spectral
manifestations might not in fact be no more than an unstable
woman’s imaginings, or the cruel pranks of a spiteful child, or
the malicious work of mysterious servants with unguessable
motives. Bear in mind that moviegoers are increasingly wise to
Sixth-Sense style tricks, and will carefully analyze each
of these characters in turn, trying to figure out what might not
be as it seems.
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-
B |
*** |
+2-2|
Adults
A line in the trailer for The Exorcism of Emily Rose, felicitously cut from the final film, observes that “There’s no pill for the devil.” More to the point, there’s no diagnostic test or scan for him, either.
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-
B |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
In a way, Monster House is a bracingly icy breath of fresh air, a tween-oriented family film that is unabashedly out to frighten.
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-
B- |
*** |
+1-2|
Adults*
Is The Wicker Man anti-Christian? Anti-pagan? Anti-religion? Where are its sympathies? Does it have any? Like baffled, blustering Sergeant Howie, blundering about the clannish Summerisle community trying to investigate a missing child, we are asking the wrong questions, assuming the wrong rules, wandering ever further off course, walking into a trap.
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-
C+ |
***½ |
+2-3|
Adults*
“You just take your pills and you’ll be fine, really,” Chris (Ellen Burstyn) promises her daughter Regan (Linda Blair), but part of the film’s brief is that pills aren’t the answer to everything, and faith and religion may have answers science doesn’t.
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-
C+ |
*** |
-2|
Adults*
The making of Nosferatu — the first (if unauthorized)
film version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and one of the 45
films on the Vatican
film list — has passed into legend. Denied rights to
Dracula by Stoker’s widow, German director F. W. Murnau
simply had an adapted screenplay written with alternate character
names: Count Dracula became "Count Orlock," Jonathan Harker
became "Thomas Hutter," and so on. (Substantial changes were so
minimal that at least one English-language edition actually
restores Stoker’s original names in the title cards.)
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-
C+ |
*** |
+1-2|
Adults*
The original 1971 Willard, a nasty
B-grade horror flick about an oppressed misfit whose
only friends are an ever-growing army of rats, was not a movie
that cried out for a remake. Given the decision to make one,
though, it’s hard to imagine a more fitting casting choice than
Crispin Glover.
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-
C |
** |
+1-2|
Adults*
The comic-book Constantine is a blond Brit based in Liverpool
(think Sting by way of Christopher Lee in Terence Fisher’s The
Devil Rides Out). For the film, the casting of Keanu led to a
change of setting to California and LA. Similarly, the casting of
Shia LaBeouf (Holes) as
Constantine’s ally Chandler turned the character from a seasoned
comrade in arms into a Jimmy Olsen-like junior sidekick.
(Whatever happened to casting actors who fit the part?)
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-
C- |
** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
For all their evident interest and affinity for the material, though, the filmmakers haven’t made a very good movie. They’ve figured out how to get Blaze (Cage), the motorcycle-riding hellion who makes a deal with the devil, into the same picture as Carter Slade (Sam Elliott), the originally unconnected (and not even supernatural) Ghost Rider of the Old West. But they haven’t figured out either who Johnny Blaze is as a character, or what the Ghost Rider is all about.
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-
C- |
** |
-2|
Adults*
The Wolfman retells the classic werewolf story, but has little to add besides volume and gore. Jump moments pile up to the point that you stop jumping and merely feel annoyed at the obvious, heavy-handed manipulation. Alone in the dark in his ancestral home, Lawrence Talbot seems to hear a creepy whisper, but it turns out he’s just remembering something from his youth. Then a minute later it happens again. Later on there’s a gotcha dream, with a menacing figure rising from the shadows and leaping at Lawrence in his bed — but then he wakes up. Or so it seems, but then it happens again — but it’s a dream again. It’s like a haunted house where they never stop jumping out and saying “Boo!”
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-
D+ |
** |
-2|
Adults
But when the plot then descends into a Lethal Weapon-type action-chase scene, it’s clearly gone off the rails: a proper ghost story has an entirely different atmosphere from a Lethal Weapon action flick.
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-
D- |
** |
-3|
Adults*
As directed by Ridley Scott (Gladiator), Hannibal is
stylishly mounted and has its entertaining moments. Ultimately,
though, it’s like most horror movies: repellent where it should
have been frightening, and, in the end, uninvolving and hollow.
So many characters suffer such ghastly things, yet none of it
seems to matter much.
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-
F |
***½ |
-4|
The Cell gives imaginative and
visual shape to as it were the very soul of misogynism,
perversion, depravity, sadism, and the supreme nihilism and
egotism of the damned. The film also has some images of beauty,
peace, and serenity; even some Christian symbolism — but all this
is quickly overwhelmed, even betrayed and subverted, so that the
dark themes dominate the film.
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-
The religious themes in the B-movie horror films directed by Terence Fisher for Hammer Films could fill a book. In fact, there is such a book.
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-
Horror represents a field many Christians approach with trepidation, and rightly so. The horror shelves of bookstores and video stores are very largely a wasteland of mindless, tasteless trash; indeed, there may be no other genre as disproportionately overrun with junk. Yet the grotesque, the macabre, and the frightful have an abiding place in human imagination and culture — a place that Christian sensibility has historically not seen fit to reject or condemn, at least entirely.
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-
You won’t find the gospel in movies like Hellboy. What you may find is signs of a world that has been touched by the gospel — a world that retains some awareness of sinister forces to be avoided or resisted, of evil that cannot be overcome by therapy or education or communication, that calls for a response from another realm entirely.
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-
Chastity is a precious thing, and the struggle to be chaste is both an inevitable part of a moral life and a legitimate subject for narrative art. In part, this quest for chastity may legitimately form some part of Twilight’s appeal. At the same time, a narrative that wallows in the intoxicating power of temptation and desire, that returns again and again to rhapsodizing about the beauty of forbidden fruit, may reasonably be felt to be a hindrance rather than an affirmation of self-mastery.
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