CRIMSON PEAK

The haunted house is back, in time for Halloween, with the new movie Crimson Peak.  This film, directed and co-written by Guillermo del Toro, is a 19th century horror-thriller-mystery film that's almost painfully Gothic.

As a little girl Edith Cushing was visited by the skeletal ghost of her mother, who warned Edith to beware of Crimson Peak.  Jump ahead 14 years, and Edith (Mia Wasikowska) is a writer, often telling people that her story isn't a ghost story but "a story with a ghost in it."  She's not interested in romance or society, so naturally she catches the eye of two prominent gentlemen in society.  Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnan) has been interested in her for a while, but she considers him just a friend.

Then there's Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), a struggling aristocrat from England.  Thomas has come to America to earn capital from Edith's father Carter (Jim Beaver) to build a machine to mine the rare red clay from his family land.  Edith is entranced by Thomas, even while Carter is suspicious of the man.  Thomas' strange piano-playing sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain) is also there.

Jump ahead, and Edith has joined Thomas and Lucille at Allerdale Hall, the family mansion of the Sharpe family.  The mansion is decaying, with rotting or missing boards, creaking at all hours, and the sound of rushing wind; even the red clay results in red oozing from the floors and making the tap water run red.  Thomas warns Edith not to descent beneath the main level, while Lucille keeps certain rooms locked from Edith.  The mansion is far from town, with Edith's only friend being a small dog the Sharpes thought would have perished.  And Edith investigates the mystery surrounding the Sharpes, as she gets sicker and sees more skeletal ghosts in the house...

I appreciate a supernatural movie that offers intelligence and investigation rather than simple spooks and scares, but Crimson Peak was disappointing.  While the movie had an interesting color scare, it felt like it was cramming element of the Gothic tradition into the movie, without it adding up to much.  The acting was adequate but not more, the surprises and revelations were easy to predict, and the movie quickly gave up on being scary early on, without replacing it with suspense or consistency.  (The ending also left the audience with some unnecessarily unresolved elements.)  Crimson Peak is too focused on being Gothic to be really entertaining.

Overall grade: C-
Reviewed by James Lynch

THE MARTIAN

One of the most primal human instincts is survival, even in the face of impossible odds.  The Martian celebrates and explores this, on a literally alien terrain.

The movie opens on Mars, as a six-person NASA team headed by Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain) is collecting rock and soil and samples.  A terrible storm forces the team to board the rocket and leave -- but debris hits Mark Watney (Matt Damon), separating him from the others and apparently killing him.  The rest of the team makes it back to the orbiting spacecraft and begins the long trip back to Earth.

 However, Mark survived the storm and made it back to one of the structures -- but that's just the beginning of his problems.  Even if the structure doesn't have any problems (which could kill him instantly), the next mission to Mars is years away -- and the food left for the team won't last nearly that long.  He also needs to communicate with Earth, to figure out how to get to the landing site of the next Mars mission, and to stay alive and sane (the latter through recorded video messages).

Back on Earth, NASA director Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels) has reported that Mark has dies a hero's death --  but engineers Vincent Kapoor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Mindy Park (Mackenzie Davis) learn fro satellite images of Mars that Mark has survived.  Pretty soon everyone in NASA -- and several other places -- is working on a way to get supplies up to Mark, to find a way to bring him home, and to let him know that they're doing all of that to help him survive and return.

It's hard for a science fiction film to work as a procedural, but The Martian does a very good job of portraying a potentially realistic future scenario about a planet no human has yet set foot on.  The supporting cast is very good, but the film rests on Matt Damon's shoulders -- and he delivers.  Damon manages to make Mark hopeful, desperate, smart, creative, and even funny ("I'm going to have to science the shit out of this").  Mars becomes both beautiful and desolate, and the events -- from the nation rallying around the missing astronaut to the hope from success and despair from setbacks -- feels very genuine.  The Martian is an exciting, intelligent, and very human trip off-planet.

Overall grade: A
Reviewed by James Lynch

TAKE SHELTER

What happens when you want to protect your family, but you may need to protect them from yourself?  Take Shelter is a slow, deliberate examination of one man's fears for his family.

Curtis (Michael Shannon) has a good life.  He has a steady job on a drilling crew, where he works with friends.  He loves his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and his young daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart), who is deaf.  They have their own home, enough savings to go on vacation, and even the possibility that surgery could restore Hannah's hearing.

Then the visions and nightmares start.  During the day, Curtis imagines seeing massive storms on the horizon, muddy brown rain, birds flying in unusual patterns, and attacks from faceless people.  At night, he has nightmares of storms and attacks that impact his behavior.  (For example, after dreaming that his dog bites his arm, Curtis keeps the dog outside the house.)

 Curtis is aware enough that this is abnormal that he speaks with a counselor (LisaGay Hamilton), as well as visiting his mother (Kathy Baker) who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.  But he also becomes obsessed with the oncoming storm, as he takes out a loan, borrows work equipment and recruits a friend to help him build a tornado shelter in his backyard.  It's not long before his behavior becomes an obsession, impacting his marriage, his daughter, his friends and his job.

Take Shelter is thoughtful, which is both a strength and weakness of the movie.  The film shows the gradual effect of one man's visions and struggle to decide whether he's protecting or harming his family by trying to shelter them from an apocalyptic storm no one else seems aware of.  There are times this struggle makes the movie slow and boring, but it's also more realistic -- and leads to a believable breakdown.  Michael Shannon is very good as the regular man becoming worried about what he sees, and Jessica Chastain is good as his loving but suffering wife.  Take Shelter isn't perfect (I wasn't thrilled with the end) but it's a thoughtful and (mostly) believable drama.

Overall grade: B-
Reviewed by James Lynch

MAMA

It's not easy raising kids; apparently, it's harder when a homicidal spirit has raised them for several years in the wilderness.  This is the basis for Mama, a horror movie with a few nice touches and a lot of cliches.

Mama begins promisingly enough with something different from most horror: current events.  During the stock market crash of 2007, Jeffrey (Nikolaj Costas-Waldau) cracked up, killing his bosses and wife and taking his daughters -- three-year-old Victoria, one-year-old Lily -- on a terrifying car ride on an icy road.  They crash, wander to an abandoned cabin, and Jeffrey is going to kill his kids; before he can, though, he's killed by a floating, dark spirit -- who then gives the girls food.

Jump ahead five years, and the searchers paid for by Jeffrey's brother Lucas (also played by Costas-Waldau) have found the cabin and the girls.  Victoria (Megan Charpentier) remembers a bit of society, while Lily (Isabelle Nelisse) only remembers a few words and clings to her older sister.  Lucas and his punk-rock girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain so much better in Zero Dark Thirty) take in the girls.  To keep their Aunt Jean (Kate Moffat) from taking the girls, psychiatrist Dr. Dreyfuss (Daniel Kash) arranges for a house where the family can live, and where he can interview and study the kids.

But the girls didn't come back alone.  Victoria and Lily both mention "Mama" as keeping them safe in the woods and at their new home.  Dreyfuss first thinks "Mama" is a part of Victoria's psyche, but he soon gets investigates a story of a 19th-century mental patient Victoria shouldn't know about but does.  Strange things start happening around the new house, and when Lucas is injured Annabelle becomes the surrogate mother.  And then the killing starts...

Mama works best early on, and the little kids hide and scutter about like animals as they readjust to human lives.  There are nice glimpses of something unusual going on, as the strangeness seems to happen out of the corner of the filmgoer's eye.  Unfortunately, too soon the movie becomes a series of loud noises and sudden camera close-ups, plus a fairly routine cgi critter.  The movie doesn't seem to have any consistency to its own rules (the monster kills people, or injures them, or puts them to sleep, almost at random) and the terrific feral kids are soon reduced to shrieking.  Mama starts strong, but it could have used more of its woodland element and subtle side and less of the rampaging monster.

Overall grade: C

Reviewed by James Lynch

ZERO DARK THIRTY

It can be tough to tell a story where everyone knows the end, but the movie Zero Dark Thirty manages to turn the hunt for Osama bin Laden into an engaging procedural of an international manhunt.

A year or two after the 9/11 attacks, CIA operative Maya (Jessica Chastain) arrives from Washington to Pakistan to hunt down every lead in order to find and kill bin Laden.  She's paired with Dan (Jason Clarke), a CIA operative who introduces her to the harsh necessities of physical and psychological torture of terrorist prisoners.  Maya soon becomes convinced that the key is finding Abu Ahmed (Tusharr Mehra), who she believes is the courier working directly with bin Laden.  There are plenty of obstacles, though, from her boss Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler) wanting her to focus more on domestic terrorism cells, to the terrorists attacks involving Maya and her team.  But she bounces around the Middle East -- mostly in Pakistan and Afghanistan -- putting together the clues and evidence that leads to the inevitable Navy Seal raid on what is now a familiar compound...

Zero Dark Thirty has become infamous for mixing fact and fiction and coming up with the conclusion that the U.S. torture of prisoners was key in getting bin Laden -- and that's an undeniable part of the movie.  Maya's initial abhorrence at seeing the way prisoners are treated soon becomes forgotten in her quest to piece together information -- what the prisoners lie about, as well as what they reveal -- and find her courier.  Indeed, characters acknowledge that they'll be taken to task for torture but they never feel any regret or remorse over doing what they felt was necessary.    

But Zero Dark Thirty is a work of fiction, and it's a credit to the movie that it feels so much like a factual account.  Director Kathryn Bigelow (who looked at the addictive nature of war in The Hurt Locker) takes us into a place where Maya's whole world is the unrelenting pursuit of what she believes is her biggest lead.  When a higher-up asks what else she's done for the CIA and she says "Nothing.  I've done nothing else," it's not an exaggeration: We know nothing about her family, friends, or life at all before her quest.  Her whole life -- from friends to world outlook -- is the hunt; even when Dan leaves to try and life a somewhat normal life, she can't think of anything but staying behind.  This world isn't glamorous (sources betray their cause for money, while coverage of real-life terrorist attacks remind us of the continual danger) but it all leads up to the final raid -- which is somehow ironic, given that all the street planning and moral sacrificed led to a clean, high-tech assault.  Jessica Chastain is terrific as the woman of absolute determination; there are a variety of actors making brief appearances (from James Gandolfini, to Mark Duplass to John Barrowman), but for all the teamwork, deals, and betrayals, it's Maya who is at the center of everything.

Zero Dark Thirty has stirred up controversy and discussion -- which is something a good movie does -- but even those who disagree with its methods will be hard pressed not to feel gripped by its unrelenting realism and pursuit of America's most wanted villain.

Overall grade: A-
Reviewed by James Lynch