Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007): written by Kelly Masterson; directed by Sidney Lumet; starring Philip Seymour Hoffman (Andy Hanson), Ethan Hawke (Hank Hanson), Marisa Tomei (Gina Hanson), Albert Finney (Charles Hanson), Rosemary Harris (Nanette Hanson), Aleksa Palladino (Chris), Michael Shannon (Dex), Amy Ryan (Martha), and Brian F. O'Byrne (Bobby):
The great humanist director Sidney Lumet's final film is an acting showcase for everyone in it, as Lumet's films generally were. It feels like a great, lost Jim Thompson novel re-earthed -- a twisted tale of crime, incompetence, chance, and family. Philip Seymour Hoffman has a scene in a car that's an all-time great freak-out.
Revealing much of the plot actually spoils the plot really quickly. Suffice to say, Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play desperate brothers, Marisa Tomei spends an ultimately unsettling amount of time topless, and Michael Shannon does an early version of his Unsettling Michael Shannon Character.
Filmed in and around NYC, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is the last addition to Lumet's catalogue of urban, paranoid (melo) drama. The weirdest trivia about this movie is that it reunited Lumet and Albert Finney after more than 30 years. Lumet directed Finney as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot in the 1970's all-star film version of Murder on the Orient Express. The two movies -- and two Finney performances -- couldn't be much more different while still sharing a 'detective' arc for Finney's character in both movies. Highly recommended.
First Reformed (2018): written and directed by Paul Schrader; starring Ethan Hawke (Reverend Toller), Amanda Seyfried (Mary), Cedric the Entertainer (Reverend Jeffers), and Philip Ettinger (Michael): Ethan Hawke plays a pastor in upstate New York who's lost most of his faith after the death of his son and his wife's subsequent leave-taking because the son died as a military chaplain because his father urged him to join the service.
Hawke's Reverend Toller presides over a historical church with few parishioners but a groovy souvenir ship, with that church owned and operated by a nearby MegaChurch run by Cedric the Entertainer. Whew!
I'll leave you to look up the stylistic influences on writer-director Paul Schrader. Suffice to say they result in a lot of long shots in distance and duration, very slow camera movement when the camera moves at all, and a lot of symmetrical and near-symmetrical shot compositions. It can all be almost overwhelmingly slow, especially in the first half. Stick with it, though, and the cumulative effect is affecting and somewhat mesmerizing.
First Reformed tackles several big questions in a serious way. The acting is stellar across the board. Ethan Hawke holds the whole thing together with his grim, increasingly haunted priest. Cedric the Entertainer is a revelation as the reverend of the MegaChurch, a man who can deliver a toxic sermon about anxiety while nonetheless being portrayed overall as a decent man. Amanda Seyfried is also solid, especially as she has to work with being a pregnant woman named Mary in a movie about Christianity...
How this wasn't nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and several Acting nominations... well, that's the Oscars! It's a fine, nuanced work that nonetheless manages to intelligently shock the viewer. Bonus points for having a choir sing a 2014 Neil Young song at a funeral. Highly recommended.
The Purge: written and directed by James DeMonaco; starring Ethan Hawke (James Sandin), Lena Headey (Mary Sandin), Max Burkholder (Charlie Sandin), Adelaide Kane (Zoey Sandin), Edwin Hodge (Bloody Stranger), and Rhys Wakefield (Polite Leader) (2013): Efficient little dystopic pot-boiler that would probably have benefitted from having a no-name cast. Still, the actors are fine in this story of an America that purges its violent tendencies every year with 12 hours of state-sanctioned violence. Yes, it's the Red Hour from the original Star Trek episode "The Return of the Archons." Rich people either hide behind fancy security systems or go out hunting the poor; the poor run around and hide. The allegory is so transparent that I'm not sure it qualifies as allegory. Less than 90 minutes long, though, including credits! Huzzah! Lightly recommended.
Pacific Rim: written by Travis Beacham and Guillermo del Toro; directed by Guillermo del Toro; starring Charlie Hunnam (Raleigh Becket), Idris Elba (Pentecost), Rinko Kikuchi (Mako Mori), Burn Gorman (Gottlieb), Charlie Day (Geiszler), and Ron Perlman (Hannibal Chau) (2013): Still fun the second time around, even on the home screen. About the only problem is that on a smaller scale, a couple of the giant robot-armour fighters are virtually indistinguishable from one another in the final battle scene. Or maybe I'm just getting old. Still, pretty much the modern gold standard for giant robots punching giant monsters. Highly recommended.
Sinister: written by Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill; directed by Scott Derrickson; starring Ethan Hawke (Ellison Oswalt), Juliet Rylance (Tracy), Fred Dalton Thompson (Sheriff), and James Ransone (Deputy) (2012): From the producers of the Paranormal Activity movies (which I mostly enjoy) comes another supernatural tale pitting dumber-than-average humans against the forces of darkness.
The title, as with the similar Insidious, has no specific relevance to the movie. It's a generic horror title, so don't start watching with the expectation that the monster's left-handed or anything.
Ethan Hawke plays a formerly best-selling true-crime writer who needs a bestseller to pay the mortgage. Juliet Rylance plays his wife, who's never in the house during the day but doesn't seem to have a job, either. Their older boy suffers from a combination of Night Terrors and sleep-walking, which seems a bit odd to me given that Night Terrors generally involve sleep paralysis, but I'll go with it. Their younger daughter likes painting on walls.
Hawke's character cleverly moves the family into a house where a brutal multiple murder took place about a year earlier. Ah ha, but he doesn't tell his wife! And as his wife apparently neither speaks to anyone in town or is in any way curious as to why they moved where they moved, she doesn't find out the truth until fairly late in the movie.
Anyway, the supernatural forces in this movie really enjoy recording everything on Super 8 film. Then they stick the Super 8 projector and carefully labelled film canisters in the attic for the next family to find. Yes, there are a series of serial murders taking place across America. As one of the murders involved setting fire to a car inside a garage in the dead of night, I'm a little unclear as to how the house in that case survived for someone else to move into. I assume they had really good fire suppression installed. But not monster suppression, more fools they!
Sinister is nicely photographed. Much of the horror comes from the voyeurism of watching (fictional) snuff films along with Ethan Hawke. But boy, is everybody in this movie dumb except for Sheriff Fred Dalton Thompson and Vincent D'onofrio in a cameo as an expert in occult mythology and iconography. There's probably a pretty good movie to be made about D'Onofrio and his trusty coffee-dispensing sidekick Jessica, but I'm not sure these filmmakers could make a movie about what happens when smart people deal with occult forces, and do so by actually going to a library instead of relying solely on the Internet for potentially life-saving information. Lightly recommended.
The Awakening: written by Stephen Volk and Nick Murphy; directed by Nick Murphy; starring Rebecca Hall (Florence Cathcart), Dominic West (Robert Mallory), Imedla Staunton (Maud Hill) and Isaac Hempstead Wright (Tom Hill) (2011): Broody ghost story set in 1921 follows the efforts of professional debunker Rebecca Hall to solve the mystery of whether or not a boy at a boarding school in the North of England was a-scared to death by a ghost.
World War One is the major intertext here, as Hall lost her fiance and several of the teachers fought in the conflict and came home with both physical and mental wounds. Hall's character also has a somewhat bizarre past, as she was adopted after her parents were killed and she was mauled by lions.
Debunking and debunkers are again portrayed as sad bastards screwing it up for everyone else, which seems to be the default setting of every fictional movie that ever dealt with debunkers. Given the real-world cost that awful, awful 'psychics' such as Sylvia Browne exact when they insert themselves into police investigations (which Browne has never once actually helped solve) and the lives of the bereaved (whom Browne has put through the wringer on numerous occasions by describing horrible modes of death for victims who in fact did not actually die the way she described), it would be nice if a movie dealt with this fairly important aspect of debunking: namely, that it keeps 'psychics' from doing terrible things to innocent people in the name of publicity.
In any case, once you realize that Hall's character is indeed another sad orphan who really wants to believe, you know where the movie is going. Well, sort of. The final major plot twist verges on O. Henry Playhouse territory, though it is somewhat foreshadowed. Enjoyable and atmospheric. Lightly recommended.
Trouble with the Curve: written by Randy Brown; directed by Robert Lorenz; starring Clint Eastwood (Gus), Amy Adams (Mickey), John Goodman (Pete) and Justin Timberlake (Johnny) (2012): Once you get through the hilarious scene of octogenerian Eastwood talking to his bladder, this is a slight, pleasant movie about an old baseball scout, father-daughter issues, and how wily old baseball scouts are way better than computers at locating baseball talent, even though in the real world they actually aren't. Lightly recommended.
