GRANT US PEACE

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Heretic--One rainy day two American LDS missionaries, young women, go to the door of an ugly, rambling house in Scotland. The resident is what would be called, in door to door sales, a premium lead: he's expressed interest in the product.

The gent in question, Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), solicitously invites the young ladies in out of the rain. They explain that, for safety's sake, they aren't allowed to go inside without a woman present, but he charmingly insists, saying that his wife will join them once she's finished baking a blueberry pie in the kitchen. So Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) follow him into the oddly cheerless front sitting room--it looks like the waiting room of a funeral parlor--and he locks the door behind them. But they can smell blueberry pie, so they aren't too alarmed, yet.

Needless to say, the two of them aren't going anywhere anytime soon, except farther into the house. This shocker, co-written and co-directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods of A Quiet Place, belongs to the horror subgenre in which one or more women are held prisoner by a maniac. Earlier examples include The Collector (1965), with Terence Stamp and Samatha Eggar, Crawlspace (1986) with Klaus Kinski tormenting Talia Balsam, the notorious Human Centepede (First Sequence) (2009) by Tom Six, or Room (2015) with Brie Larson. Heretic has echoes of all of these, but it's highly original all the same.

Although it seems to safe to say that there's a sexual subtext to the motivations of all the captors in these movies, the overt reasons vary. In The Collector, for instance, there's a class element; in Crawlspace there's a Nazi guilt angle, and so on. In Heretic, the crazy derives from religious studies.

Mr. Reed, you see, is a fanatical questioner of all religious "iterations," and debunker of the idea that any of them represent the "one true religion" as they claim to. As the facade that his guests are free to leave whenever they like gradually but steadily melts away, he lectures them, in the manner of a raffish college professor, about the innumerable links and parallels between modern mainstream faiths and ancient religious traditions, using pop culture and popular music as analogies.

It would be a rather agreeably stimulating summary of Comparative Religion 101, if they weren't being held hostage and all. Sister Paxton even makes a brave attempt to debate her self-appointed pedagogue, but while there may be arguments against Mr. Reed's theses, the ones Beck and Woods place in her mouth seem thin and non-sequitur, which, in context, makes her desperation all the more touching. Mr. Reed, however, remains affably unmoved.

The heart of Heretic is Grant. I've always been a fan, but I've especially enjoyed his work as a comic villain in recent years in stuff like Paddington 2, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. His Mr. Reed is a good deal darker than any of these, to be sure, but the performance is still based in the diffident, apologetic, wryly sheepish Grant persona familiar from his romcom work. It's one of the best roles he's ever had, and you can feel his pleasure in it.

His two young costars are also strong. Chloe East, hilarious and adorable as the girlfriend in Spielberg's The Fabelmans, gives Sister Paxton some of the same gushy avidity. Balancing her is Sophie Thatcher as Sister Barnes, of more worldly background and thus more reserved and alert. Thatcher also sings a haunting cover of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" over the end titles.

Eventually Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton are offered a "Lady or the Tiger" type of choice, and find themselves in the basement. From here, Heretic goes full-on gothic, and gory, and the blueberry pie re-enters the tale. And as so often when thrillers tip over from literate tension into gruesome grappling, it seems to shrink the movie a bit.

Not enough, however, to diminish the value of these performances, or of the rising dread, shot through with chilling wit, that infuses the film. The sexual politics would seem to have some slight relevance at this moment in our history, too; Mr. Reed's practice of what he considers the One True Religion appears to be devout, zealous mansplaining.

By the way, as we left the press screening I attended in the Valley, the marketing company handed us small blueberry pies, custom made for the evening by Süss Pastries here in Phoenix. I took mine home and passed it on The Wife, who proclaimed it good. I can't say, however, that Heretic particularly gave me an appetite for blueberry pie for a while.

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG BOYCHIK

In theaters for Thanksgiving (a safe and Happy Thanksgiving, by the way!):

The Fabelmans--It begins with little Sammy Fabelman being taken to his first movie, in New Jersey in 1952. A cautious, slightly fretful 7-year-old, Sammy (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) is not sure if he's up for the experience; he's heard the people onscreen are gigantic, and the idea worries him. So his adoring parents attempt to reassure him, from opposite sides: his practical-minded, scientific dad Burt (Paul Dano) explains how film works technically, while his whimsical pixie of a mom Mitzi (Michelle Williams) says that movies are beautiful dreams.

The dream in question turns out to be DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, and the big train wreck scene hits Sammy's psyche like...well, like a speeding train. He tries to re-create it with the Lionel train set he gets for Hannukah, and later he films his re-creations with a home movie camera.

As you probably know, this is Steven Spielberg's autobiographical coming-of-age movie, scripted by Tony Kushner from a synopsis they worked up together, and made by the usual gang: filmed by Janusz Kaminski with a score by John Williams. The episodes that follow depict the family's life as Burt, a computer genius, chases work in the budding industry from New Jersey to Arizona, where Sammy makes war epics, to northern California, where he encounters anti-Semitic bullies.

Mitzi, who gave up a career as a concert pianist to be a wife and mom, shows signs of restlessness and depression, except when she's interacting with Burt's best friend Bennie (Seth Rogen), or when she impulsively buys a monkey, who she names Bennie. All of these strands are filtered through the growth of the relationship between Sam (Gabriel LaBelle as an older kid) and the art and craft of moviemaking.

Even though he's one of the most commercially successful popular artists in the world, I think that Spielberg has, in a sense, been critically underappreciated for decades. After the initial, unprecedented splash he made with Jaws,  Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark, he went through a slump in the late '80s and early '90s and cranked out some real bummers; cloying, heavy-handed, trying-too-hard stuff like Hook and Always that made him seem like a phony.

I'm not sure that many critics noticed the way he rediscovered and deepened and sharpened his style with the films he's made in recent years, even when their scripts have sometimes been uneven. Works that range with seemingly equal ease from crisp yet almost invisible technique like The Post to Hitchcockian panache like Bridge of Spies to flashy showmanship like West Side Story suggest an artist who has matured, and who might have something interesting to say about his own life.

And so he does, by turning his gaze outward. Sammy is likable enough, but he's not a rich or idiosyncratic protagonist. What's important is his point of view on Burt and Mitzi. Spielberg here dramatizes the anger and terror, the sense of betrayal, that can result when you begin to see your parents--as Sammy does through his footage of them, while editing home movies--not as stock figures in your story but as complex characters in their own.

And Dano and Williams create vivid, warm portraits of imperfect but unconditionally loving people. So does Rogen, and so does Judd Hirsch in a showcase role as a crazy visionary uncle who tells Sammy hard prophetic truths. So do Jeannie Berlin and Robin Bartlett as the Grandmas, and so do the excellent kids who play the younger sisters. So for that matter, does the monkey.

Not everything in The Fabelmans comes off. There's maybe a scene or two more than is needed of Williams sadly playing sad piano, and the stuff with the bullies, who look like they stepped out of Nazi poster art, feels psychologically confused and uneasy. A scene in which Sammy has a fraught confrontation with a bully he's tried to flatter through moviemaking is potentially interesting for what it hints at about the director's willingness to use his art calculatingly, but it thrashes around and fails, somehow, to come into dramatic focus.

On the other hand, the scenes involving Sammy's early romantic encounters are livened up by the hilarious Chloe East as Monica, his both religiously ecstatic and sexually avid girlfriend, who sees Jesus as one more teen heartthrob. While chaste in the typical Spielbergian manner, they offer a peek at the character's, and the director's, bemused reaction to Christianity.

The movie closes with a depiction of Spielberg's familiar anecdote about his first brush with Hollywood greatness. It allows him to end the film with a self-deprecating "meta" joke that also slyly reminds us that what we've just seen, however honestly intended, is nonetheless a carefully curated official story.