UNBELIEVABLE

Opening in theaters this week:

The Exorcist: Believer--Two 13-year-old girls go missing one day after school. Their panicked parents, single Dad Victor (Leslie Odom, Jr.) and evangelical couple Miranda (Jennifer Nettles) and Tony (Norbert Leo Butz) frantically search their Georgia suburb, but three days later the girls turn up alive.

These early scenes of this sixth Exorcist follow-up are tense and gripping, convincingly dramatizing a dread familiar to parents, but also deploying a few well-executed cheap scares. Soon after the girls reappear, they start showing unmistakable signs of demonic possession. The nonbelieving Victor is skeptical at first, but before long he has enlisted the aid of Chris McNeil (the radiant Ellen Burstyn), who went through a similar experience with her daughter Regan up in Georgetown half a century earlier.

Act Two of Believer is mostly devoted to a rather ecumenical exorcism, with Catholics, Evangelicals and what appear to be Voodoo practitioners all participating, among others. This section falls flat. We get all the obligatory stuff--levitation, projectile tummy trouble--but none of the elliptical yet grueling intensity that the late William Friedkin brought to the 1973 film. Put simply, the second half of the movie just isn't very scary.

Part of what made the first film so potent was its harsh, judgy small-c conservative Catholicism. It seemed to suggest that Chris McNeil's worldly career and single life left the door open for the devil to take her daughter. The new film almost gets this right; it implies that Victor's daughter's yearning to communicate with her dead mom gives the demon a foothold, as Regan playing with a Ouija board invited in "Captain Howdy" back in the original.

But the kum-ba-yah sensibility of Believer's interfaith exorcism weakens this blood-and-thunder atmosphere. Don't misunderstand; I agree, on the whole, with the sentiments expressed in this movie's mild little homilies about faith and community and hope. But I don't think they're the most effective way to scare an audience. Decades ago I had a girlfriend, a lapsed Catholic, who found the original Exorcist so terrifying that she could barely stand to have it mentioned (I used to tease her by imitating the demon's voice).

The new film lacks the ruthlessness that could create that sort of reaction. Nor did I really find it plausible that these staunch traditionalist faiths could practice this archaic rite in harmony. As soon as anything went wrong, wouldn't they start blaming each other?

The director, David Gordon Green, works from a script that he wrote with several hands including Danny McBride. They were the team behind 2021's Halloween Kills, another honorable but unsuccessful revival of a classic horror franchise. The cast here is capable, with one standout--that splendid, always reliable warhorse Ann Dowd as a nurse with a relevant past who befriends Victor.

This much more, if little else, can be said for Believer: although the insolently absurd yet imaginative spectacle of John Boorman's 1977 Exorcist 2: The Heretic has its fascinations, Believer can probably still claim to be the best of the Exorcist sequels. But that's a low bar.

KNIFE GOES ON

Now in theaters:

Halloween Kills--Well, it certainly seems to, at the box office, at least. The new installment in the slasher series slaughtered at the multiplexes this weekend, even though it was available to stream for free on video. This suggests that people may still want the communal experience of moviegoing, at least for certain kinds of movies, horror flicks being an obvious example. I find this a cheering thought.

Unfortunately, it's not very good. It's handsomely produced, with a look and a premise and some cast members that link it nostalgically to John Carpenter's 1978 original, and it has some good ideas. But it fumbles almost all of them, and fails to be deeply scary.

Despite being burned alive at the end of the previous sequel (2018) generic masked killer Michael Myers still is not quite dead, and he plods around Haddonfield racking up more victims. Jamie Lee Curtis is back as Laurie, hospitalized with a wound and fretted over by her daughter (Judy Greer) and granddaughter (Andi Matichak). The focus this time, cleverly, is on the characters who were little kids in the '78 movie: Anthony Michael Hall as Tommy, Robert Longstreet as Lonnie, and Kyle Richards, who returns to the role of Lindsey which she played in the original (the fact that the little girl from Halloween is now in her fifties is scarier than anything onscreen). Tommy raises an angry mob of townies to kill Michael, just like the torch-and-pitchfork-bearing gang at the end of Universal's Frankenstein.

I was irked when I saw clips of these scenes in the trailer; this does not strike me as the most auspicious moment in our history to extoll the virtues of mob uprisings. I was pleased that screenwriters Scott Teems, Danny McBride and director David Gordon Green did not, at least, fall into this trap; indeed, mindless mass rage is repudiated by the film, and Michael is described as a personification of fear, and the reckless destruction that can arise from it. The reactionary subtext of Michael's hostilities is also hinted at; his targets this time include a middle-aged gay couple and a middle-aged interracial couple.

Something really interesting could have been done with all this, but the movie is muddled and slow and clumsily structured, and--very much unlike the original--it falls back on gore. Buckets more blood are spilled, but Halloween Kills never comes close to capturing that pervasive sense of archetypical dread that Carpenter's film had.

Certainly I'm a fan of the idea of flinty old Jamie Lee Curtis, past her fear and ready to rise up and kick Michael's ass. The trouble is, they already made that movie, back in 1998. It was called Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, and while it wasn't in the same league as the original, it wasn't a bad picture. It's where the series should have ended, but of course, the prospect of the kind of box office that Halloween Kills is having is the surest way to make a masked killer rise again.

TROPHY LIVES

Opening this week:

Trophy--If you want to hear the incongruously squeaky bleating that a young rhino makes beside its dead mother, or the oddly resigned groans and sighs of a mortally wounded elephant, this is the movie that will put them in your head, along with many other unshakeable sounds and sights. In other words, this documentary is not the sort of thing you recommend to just anybody.

It is, however, a painfully potent work that digs into commercial big-game hunting, and that industry's claim that it's a part of wildlife conservation efforts. It's full of blood-boiling sequences of pampered rich tourists being led by local guides within rifle range of pre-selected majestic animals, then giggling with excitement after they put a bullet in them, which usually only begins the process of killing them. The hunters seem entirely without self-consciousness about behaving this way on camera; they don't seem to realize that they're coming across like happy psychopaths.

Even so, this isn't just agitprop. The movie makes a serious attempt to get the bottom of the psychology that drives people--like the Jimmy Johns guy, like Trump's sons, like the dentist from Minnesota who killed Cecil the Lion--to seek grinning selfies with the carcasses of animals they've just killed. It also tries to make sense of the weird and maddening economics that underlie the pursuit, like the irony that "canned" hunting may indeed, through the breeding it requires, bolster the populations of some threatened animals.

Trophy focuses on several figures, but probably the most intense scrutiny is of a man named Philip Glass, not the minimalist composer but a sheep farmer and hunting enthusiast from Texas. Glass hopes to kill the "Big Five" of African game: Cape buffalo, leopard, lion, elephant and--most expensive because most scarce--rhino.

Near the beginning, Glass, speaking as a farmer, dismisses the naivete of people who view "all animals as pets" and can't see that "you raise a chicken to kill a chicken to eat a chicken." Even those of us who aren't vegetarians and live daily with some version of that equation can admit (if we're honest) that its implications aren't quite so simplistic, but in any case what Glass does on his carefully guided "hunts" in Africa has nothing to do with where McNuggets come from.

A soft-spoken, seemingly sweet-natured man, Glass insists, and truly seems to believe, that he loves the animals he shoots, and says that the act fills him with joy. But a different sort of release is suggested when he shoots a young elephant in Namibia, crows "Got him runnin' away!" and then smokes cigarettes with his guides, as if post-coital. This is tacitly contrasted, later, with the reflections of a Zimbabwean anti-poaching official who must occasionally, in the line of duty, legitimately kill an elephant that has become a threat to local people, and who describes how sad he finds it.

On the anti-hunting side of the equation, we meet John Hume, a South African businessman turned conservationist who keeps more than a thousand rhinos on his ranch. His tactic is to regularly harvest the horns. This makes the beasts worthless to poachers, but Hume would also like to be allowed to legally sell the horns in order to finance his operations. The trouble is that the South African government banned the sale of rhino horn, with the result that illegal poaching promptly spiked. It's another infuriating irony: the desperate Hume wants to use the absurd belief in the medicinal value of rhino horn--the main threat to the creatures--as a means to continue his preservation efforts.

The director here is Shaul Schwartz, of 2013's remarkable Narco Cultura, which explored a similar kind of cognitive dissonance in the form of the Mexican Narcocorrida music culture that celebrates drug-gang murders. With Trophy, Schwartz (with co-director Christina Clusiau) manages an even more epic sweep and, more significantly, richer and more disturbing human insights.

In an interview late in the film, Glass seems on the verge of revealing something telling about his relationship with his late father, who taught him to hunt (as he is shown teaching his own young son). But he just hints at his anger and stops short, and his smile seems frozen and queasy. It's intensely poignant and uncomfortable; one more in a movie full of moments that make you want to turn away, but also demand you look.

Stronger--Jake Gyllenhaal plays Jeff Bauman, a Bostonian Costco employee. A nice enough guy but an unreliable, less-than-ideal boyfriend, Jeff did manage to show up to cheer on his fed-up girlfriend Erin Hurley as she ran in the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. As it happened, he was standing right next to one of the explosives that went off during the terrorist attack that morning. He lost his legs.

This sort of material has TV-movie written all over it, but director David Gordon Green and screenwriter John Pollono keep things restrained, refusing to exploit the story for melodrama or lurid shock. Make no mistake, there are brief scenes of graphic horror from which Green's camera doesn't flinch. But the focus is on Bauman's painful physical and psychological recovery, and the new level of maturity it gradually brought him.

On the other hand, Stronger doesn't offer us cheap uplift either. As played by Gyllenhaal, Jeff is fully-equipped with self-pity and excuses, not to mention confusion at why people keep calling him a "hero" for happening to stand next to a bomb. Yet what comes to the surface at his moments of greatest crisis--like when he learns his legs are gone--is humor, courage, perception. It's believable that his far more responsible girlfriend would be unable, despite all his faults, to fully disconnect from him.

Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black is very touching as said girlfriend, by the way. Also excellent is Miranda Richardson as Bauman's addled mother, the best loving but dysfunctional Boston Mom since Melissa Leo in 2010's The Fighter.

One other thing: Costco comes across so well in this movie that you may wonder if they paid for product placement.

FOR IT'S ROOT, ROOT, ROOT FOR THE CUBBIES

Opening in the Valley this weekend:

Bears—For parents, Bears may be the most suspenseful movie of the year. The Disneynature documentary follows a mother grizzly bear and her two cubs as they come out of hibernation and cross a vast expanse of the Katmai National Park in southern Alaska, heading for the salmon runs. Mom must not only keep her babies alive, but gorge herself on the fish sufficiently that her milk doesn’t run out in the middle of next winter’s snooze.

Like 2012’s Chimpanzee, this film has the feel of an old-school Disney nature movie, with folksy, jocular narration. In Chimpanzee this was provided by Tim Allen; in Bears it’s John C. Reilly, who mentions, near the beginning, that almost half of all bears don’t survive cubhood. And herein, of course, lies the parental suspense.

I watched this movie with my kid next to me. I was pretty sure that Disney wouldn’t have released it if neither cub had survived, but I was on the edge of my seat because I thought it was just possible, especially after the 50/50 chance noted in the narration, that they’d let kids and their folks tough it out through the loss of one. Don’t read any farther if you don’t want to know what happens.

OK, now I presume that I’m only writing to cowardly parents who want to keep their kids comfortably sheltered from the grim realities of life. Nice to be among kindred spirits. And to you I say: Bears is safe. It’s touch and go at times—the male cub keeps landing in peril—but at least for this season, cubs and Mom all make it.

It’s hard to know to what extent this footage had to be finessed in the editing to build a narrative. But, as with Chimpanzee, no amount of Disney corniness can obscure how astonishing are the scenes that the directors, Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey, and their crew have captured here. Grizzlies snagging fish in mid-leap, male bears roaring and grappling, predators stalking, cubs romping—these are iconic nature-film tropes, and it’s possible that they’ve never been done better than in Bears, all to the accompaniment of a stirring score by George Fenton.

Be forewarned, however: The movie may leave you with a craving for salmon. On the other hand, it may put you off salmon for good.

Joe—Nicolas Cage plays the title character in this adaptation of Mississippi author Larry Brown’s 1991 novel. A Joe of the working-class variety, he spends his days leading a timber crew in the miserable and probably toxic work of killing junk trees by chopping into them with a poison-squirting hatchet.

He’s a shaky alcoholic and a brawler, with enemies and a stint in prison in his past, but we’re also meant to see that Joe is a hard-working, honest man, liked and respected by those who know him. He gives a job to a homeless teenager (Tye Sheridan) who squats in a nearby abandoned house with his family. Wreck though Joe is, he quickly proves a vastly better father figure to this kid than his actual father, a tyrannical, dangerously abusive drunk played by Gary Poulter, a homeless guy in real life who died in the streets of Austin, Texas, still homeless, shortly after Joe wrapped.

Directed by David Gordon Green, Joe is a southern-fried lower depths melodrama in the vein of Sling Blade and Mud. It’s more ferociously violent than either of those films—be forewarned, it includes animal violence—but it has the same agreeable streak of sentimentality, and it has terrific performances, especially by the bleak-eyed Cage. After many tours of movie star duty at the center of big-budget idiocies, you can almost feel Cage’s pleasure in creating a character again.

Happy Easter, Passover, etc. everybody. Check out my Topless Robot list, in honor of the redoubtable Easter Bunny, of badass pop-culture bunnies.