Bent twig

Hereditary

Crit

This is three-quarters of what might have been the best so far of the current horror golden era. It is spectacularly good for that long, with an excruciating plot spinning out in a direction that could be all psychological or all supernatural, and with Toni Collette doing some of her best work (which is tall cotton) as the very troubled mother of two very troubled children, played with troubling persuasiveness by Milly Shapiro and Alex Wolff. (The troubled husband is played by Gabriel Byrne, so that role is in good hands too.)

So we're put into such a squirmy uncertainty, exacerbated by one of the most horrible events we've ever seen on the screen, that an aural cue of less than half a second induces a theaterwide tremor, and we're just having exactly the experience we come to a smart 21st-century scare flick for, and then . . .

It takes a sharp turn into the certainty of a familiar trope, and becomes overlong and, by the end, almost boring.

Still, some kid named Ari Aster, in his writing and directing feature debut, has left a calling card I'm going to hold onto. If he can make 75% of a great film, he seems a good bet to close the deal later.

A month of Sundays

First Reformed

Crit

Ethan Hawke's Reverend Toller (and how's that for an unsubtle preacher name?) struggles with guilt, faith, alcohol, irrelevance, the social justice imperative, relationship issues, and, probably, soon-to-be-fatal stomach cancer. Paul Schrader's film is a descent into various hells, but an ascension, too, an uneasy but rewarding slice of ecclesiastical life.

Coaxium never sleeps

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Crit

Various irrelevancies:

• I'm grateful for the subtitle, without which I would have expected a biopic of talented but troubled former U.S. women's goalkeeper Hope Solo. The 3D might have seemed an odd choice, but Hope is larger than life
• Truly, they must have gone to a galaxy far away to find someone as bland as Alden Ehrenreich to play the title role. Apparently no actual pieces of furniture had the slot available in their schedules.
• Thing is, though, neither the lead actor's deep-space vacuousness nor the waste of Emilia Clarke in a role unworthy of a dragonmother matters. Because: see subtitle again.
• In fact, it's altogether fitting that the most engaging character be the feminist, socialist, ultimately revolutionary droid L3-37, voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge (and if you haven't watched Fleabag, begin immediately).
• Best human character, obviously Donald Glover's Lando (and if you haven't watched Atlanta, ditto)
• Did anyone else notice that John Williams cribbed a persistent phrase from "Hey Hey, My My"? Hey, steal from the best.

Did I like it, you ask? Another irrelevancy, really, but yeah, kinda.

Overnight angel

Tully

Crit

One of my favorite films of 2015 was Young Adult, so I was predisposed to love a film reuniting screenwriter Diablo Cody, director Jason Reitman, and star Charlize Theron, and I was loving the tale of motherhood and sisterhood until . . . well, I can't tell you until what without switching to invisible ink. If you're new to this Cheeseblabbery technique, simply use your mouse to define the text below, and you'll be able to read it--but only if you've seen the film or don't care about having it spoiled.

"Did you see it coming?" I asked the other guy who stayed to the end of the credits. "Oh, yeah," he said. "I saw it coming a mile away." "I didn't see it coming," I admitted, "but then again I didn't see it coming in Fight Club, either."

And there you have it: this is Fight Club, only with milk-tender boobs instead of fist-loosened teeth. I like Fight Club, but once I registered the theft, I couldn't feel as warmly toward this one anymore.

Spoiler alert

Lean on Pete

Crit

Wow, this is certainly not your standard Disney horsey film. Seriously, there are people I know who should not see this excellent film. Especially people who love horses. Have I made myself clear?

That said, this is a beautiful, moving (well, kinda bumming-out, mostly) film, with a splendid performance by Charlie Plummer, as a kid who falls in love with someone he shouldn't have fallen in love with.

A boy's best friend

Love after Love

Crit

Andie MacDowell plays the matriarch of a family in a narrative that takes chronological jumps in a way that put me in mind of Hannah and Her Sisters, which is not a bad thing. Here we have brothers instead of sisters, and here the brother who starts out as "the good one" (Chris Dowd) churns through wives and affairs all the while it's clear to the viewer that he'll never be in love with anyone as he's in love with his mother. Not in a creepy way, just in a possessive, clingy way. OK, yeah, that's pretty creepy.

Also, the sloppy-drunk black-sheep brother (James Adomian), whose talent, he says, is for writing short things that no one will ever want to read, gets to deliver the unexpected (and very funny) comic monologue that serves as the centerpiece of the film.

Oh, and about MacDowell: (1) either I've never given her enough credit as an actor, or she has suddenly blossomed, but (2) she really needs to start at least vaguely resembling the 60 she turned today; took me awhile to recognize in the opening scene that her character and Dowd's were mother-son, not a couple. (Though given what I've said above, maybe that was just smart filmmaking.)

No one knows you're a dog

Ready Player One

Crit

There must be some films not alluded to in Steve Spielberg's intentionally outlandish exploration of online gaming, social media, and the conventions of teen-centered films about future dystopias, but I can't think of any right offhand.

Fetching

Isle of Dogs

Crit

Yes, yes, yes, I know: why set a fable of police-state wall-building in a long-peaceful land, for decades a key American ally, almost three-quarters of a century removed from the status of defeated enemy? Why cast so few Japanese actors (and why is the best known someone who has lived on Central Park West for decades?)? Why engineer the plot such that a savior is the only American? And what's with her hair?

But sorry, I tend to watch Wes Anderson films less with my brain than with my heart, and my heart got the spastic dog-licking that it went for.

Soviet kitsch

The Death of Stalin

Crit

A strange and mostly exhilarating mix of plausible history and slapstick that follows (and imagines) the infighting and backstabbing en route to the rise of Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi, fronting a brilliant ensemble cast) to the leadership of the Soviet Union.

Unsane

Crit

It may seem implausible that a film whose main claim to originality is really bad cinematography generated by an iPhone and whose lead character (played by Claire Foy, who could be Emily Blunt's little sister) is patently unappealing could earn a guardedly positive review from me, but here it is: I found it worth watching, despite the is-she-crazy beginning, the even-paranoids-are-sometimes-right middle, and the will-she-escape climax.

It's permanent

Oh Lucy!

Crit

Don't let the exclamation point in the title, the blond wig on the Japanese pseudo-title character in the poster, or the presence of Josh Hartnett in the cast fool you: this is one dark film. Also a very good one, about infatuation, alienation, depression, and betrayal. And let me tell you: if Shinobu Terajima (Setsuko, dubbed Lucy by Hartnett's English-teaching John) didn't actually get a tattoo during the shoot, the film's makeup staff did a brilliant job of simulating the angry look of a brand-new tat.

Chemical reaction

Red Sparrow

Crit

OK, this is one that Manohla Dargis liked but the majority of critics panned, so I had to see the reverse of the scenario for the other two recents.

And she's right again: this is good, goofy, trashy, borderline prurient stuff, with a spectacularly good cast, many of them using spectacularly bad Russian accents. (Good rant by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker about the weirdness of having foreigners speak English but with accents that label the English we're hearing as meant to be understood as the speaker's native language.)

It's no Ninotchka, or even Silk Stockings, but then what is?

The key to my peace of mind

Sanpo suru shinryakusha (Before we vanish)

Crit

An extremely low-budget, low-production values reboot of the body snatcher trope, with pretensions of a tunneling down into the essence of humanity. This is like something really smart and talented high schoolers might make.

An usher asked whether it's worth watching--then, when I hesitated, added, "in the theater?" That made it easy: there's nothing big-screen about it, and it's probably better off being watched on a home screen.

Una mujer fantástica (A fantastic woman)

Crit

Daniela Vega is riveting as the transsexual widow in all but name of a man whose family wants to obliterate all trace of her from its history, while all she seeks is the right to mourn as part of a community rather than as an outcast. A beautiful, moving film.

Muddy track

Thoroughbreds

Crit

Two films in less than a week w/ great Rotten Tomatoes numbers but a dissent from Manohla Dargis, and in both cases (though less so here that with The Party), I'm with Ms. D.

Like the other, this is wicked, and wickedly well acted, but it falls short in direction and writing (though here at least it's not pretentiously "smart" writing; it's just storytelling that makes little sense).

I was hoping for Heavenly Creatures redux, but while the young actors (in this case, the already familiar Anya Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke, plus the tragically terminated Anton Yelchin) make their marks, I don't think we'll be looking back at writer-director Cory Finley years from now as we did the earlier film's writers and director.

Winter's bones

Нелюбовь (Loveless)

Quad

Boris and Zhenya are not the world's worst parents, but they're in the middle of a divorce, and they're trying to sell their apartment, and each is involved with a new lover (Boris's girlfriend is very pregnant), and then there are their jobs, and, well, they just don't have much attention or warmth to spare to Alexey, who was an accident that befell two teenagers to begin with, and whom they sort of blame for forcing them into a terrible marriage.

So not the world's worst parents, but self-involved enough to be in, say, the 70th percentile. Moreover, Alexey is the focus of an unusual custody battle: each parent wants the other to take him.

So the miserable boy runs away. And then things really get miserable. A brutally excellent film from Andrey Zvyagintsev, writer and director of the brutally excellent Leviathan.

Everything was fine until the pastry shells burned

The Party

Ang

Live by the Rotten Tomatoes score, die by the Rotten Tomatoes score. A criminally good cast tries to make the best out of a stagy production and dialogue that toggles between banal and precious. Only Bruno Ganz succeeds, largely because his character toggles between banal and precious. A dreadful waste, with a wasted twist.

Extremely Old Trafford

Early Man

AMC Kips Bay

Holy pigs, I didn't realize this was going to be all about football (you know, . . .)! The first of 3 mornings of pre-Big Ten tournament basketball was just the sort of goofy delight we've come to expect from the Aardman animation studio.

As with Annihilation, it starts with a meteorite, one that the Stone Ages quickly discover is too hat to be handled, but can be kicked to entertaining effect. No surprises, but enough wit and bad puns to make us not care.

Natural selection

Annihiliation

Crit

Who doesn't love a goofy-science pic? Meteorite strikes the base of a lighthouse and excavates a gigantic uterus, whence emerge . . . well, let's call 'em mash-up spores: they produce a huge alligator with sharkish dentition, an adorable little deer with willow-branch antlers, and a film with the scrambled DNA of a score or more sci-fi, war, and romance pics.

It's all very silly, but really good looking--less smart than it imagines itself (and less thought-provoking than writer-director Alex Garland's previous film, Ex Machina), but a Grade A popcorn-muncher.

Homo ludens

Game Night

Crit

Some films require not just a willing suspension of disbelief but an expulsion thereof, but if you can check your skepticism at the door, as I did, mostly (though it's tough when a guy gets shot clean through the arm and a couple of hours later is still losing enough blood to defile a poodle, but seems none the weaker for it), this is some good, cynical criminal fun.

It's also the first of two films I saw on the weekend in which a bereaved spouse begins to refer to "our bedroom," then stops and corrects him/herself. Zeitgeist note.

What a waste of space

Oscar-nominated animated shorts

Balancing the live-action and documentary shorts, which I found to be the best since the nominees were first shown together in theaters, this program is the meh-est I've ever seen.

Crit

• Dear Basketball--Seriously? An undistinguished love letter from Kobe Bryant to his sport, with undistinguished animation, gets an Oscar nomination? This is the meh-est of the meh.
• Negative Space--If I had to choose, this might be my choice: a melancholy meditation on a psychic legacy passed from father to son. With a punchline you see coming from a mile away.
• Lou--Playground bully redeemed. This isn't how Disney and Pixar became Disney and Pixar.
• Garden Party--Amphibian exploitation of the aftermath of a gangland hit. One of the more interesting and visually arresting of the group.
• Revolting Rhymes, part one--Half of a film based on Roald Dahl's twisted Red Riding Hood and Snow White mashup, it ends just as things are promising to get interesting. 

As always, some unnominated shorts are added to fill out the program--more than usual, as the cumulative running time of the nominees is just 54 minutes. I don't have my notes with me, and none was memorable, so never mind.

Interregnum

Black Panther

Crit

So I'm guessing that more people are going to see Chadwick Boseman as King T'Challa of Wakanda this weekend than have seen him portray Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson, and James Brown combined. Which, OK, this is a fine superhero flick, and an excellent Black Lives Matter document, but you know, proportion?

Having enjoyed myself thoroughly, I have two bits of contrarianism:

1. The white guy. Look, I like Martin Freeman, dating back to The (original) Office through Shaun of the Dead and all the Hobbit thingies to (not original) Fargo, but (a) wouldn't it have been a lot more interesting if the CIA guy were black and shared a broader wavelength with the Wakandans and especially with Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan; damn, wanna bingewatch the first season of The Wire and the later seasons of Friday Night Lights)? and (b) if he has to be white, could he at least be played by an actual American? There are a few talented white actors who could play the role without doing an unconvincing accent.
2. This whole technocracy thing. Wakanda has secretly been technologically advanced for centuries, far beyond the Western colonizers who thought of (I won't use present tense, the express scatological opinions of certain national leaders notwithstanding) Africa as the Dark Continent. (T'Challa has his very own Bondian Q in the family, in fact: his sister Shuri [Letitia Wright].) And OK, that's cool and empowering, but aren't we supposed to be past worshiping technology? Aren't we supposed to recognize that African culture is no less than ours because of culture, not because a meteorite gave them an infinite cache of the strongest material in the solar system, which also has curative powers and the ability to transfer energy and to let you stream Netflix with no buffering even in a waterfall?

But I quibble.

Trailer of note

• Solo--At last, the biopic about the troubled former goalkeeper of the U.S. women's soccer team. Oh, wait, no: this one bears the subtitle A Star Wars Story. Does not look promising, but open mind.