MOVIE REVIEWS
‘DADDY’S HOME 2’
PG-13 1:40 Not screened for critics
Dusty (Mark Wahlberg) and Brad (Will Ferrell) have joined forces to provide their kids with the perfect Christmas. Their newfound partnership is put to the test when Dusty’s old-school, macho dad (Mel Gibson) and Brad’s ultra-affectionate and emotional dad (John Lithgow) arrive just in time to throw the holiday into complete chaos.
Starring: Will Ferrell, Linda Cardellini, Mark Wahlberg, Mel Gibson and John Lithgow. (Suggestive material and some language)
— Rottentomatoes.com
‘THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER’
R 2:01 ★★★★
The work of Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos isn’t for everyone. But there’s a deep satisfaction to be found in his highly ironic, studiously styled and bizarre explorations of the human condition — just so weird that they’re profoundly true. His latest film, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” is possibly his darkest work yet, in an oeuvre that has never shied away from the dark or distressing.
Lanthimos is fixated on dystopian family dynamics and insular cultish groups where reality is tilted off its axis and morphs into a strange, often violent and abusive ritual. “The Killing of A Sacred Deer” keeps with tradition. It’s a nightmarish fable about the destruction of a family under the oppression of an “eye for an eye” morality code.
The film confronts from the start, with a long shot of an open chest and beating heart during surgery. Lanthimos dares you to look away while inviting you to observe the beauty of this image in abstraction. Our protagonist is a cardiologist, Stephen Murphy, portrayed note perfectly by current Lanthimos muse Colin Farrell.
Stephen has a beautiful wife (Nicole Kidman) and family, but he also has a strange relationship with a teenage boy, Martin (Barry Keoghan), motivated by a sense of guilt. Martin’s father died on Stephen’s operating table, and now Martin has decided that because Stephen killed someone in his family, he will kill someone in Stephen’s. His children fall ill with mysterious paralysis as a warning.
Farrell and Kidman prove that there is currently no better pairing of two actors peaking at the same moment. Farrell draws Kidman into Lanthimos’ vision of reality, and she becomes delightfully, coldly dominant. Her character’s reliance on logic is her downfall as there is no logic to be found here.
Stephen becomes hopelessly ensnared in the manipulation of this doe-eyed teenage Rumpelstiltskin, a seemingly magical creature. Stephen is doomed to an eternity of haunting for his past mistakes, but his refusal to own his actions backs him into this quandary, twisting himself into a deeper, more demented hole.
Keoghan, who had a memorable role in “Dunkirk” earlier this year, stuns in his performance as innocently menacing Martin. He slips seamlessly into Lanthimos’ off-kilter reality, hitting the sweet spot of irony and affect, and he’s simply astonishing. This film seeks to expose the fallacy of vengeful logic, and it’s perfect that the bearer of this standard is a teenager, who hasn’t experienced the complexities of the world. It’s a blunt, stunted perspective wreaking havoc on an entire family.
The surprising Sunny Suljic and Raffey Cassidy, who play the children, Bob and Kim, are equally stunning in their emotional and physical performances. Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymis Filippou maintain an arch sense of humor, even in the most deranged moments. Lanthimos uses patterns of stylistic motifs — lateral pans, zooms and fisheye lenses — to create a sleek, sophisticated look and rhythm, though the cinematic choices are always a bit off and uneasy.
Lanthimos plays with the theme of eyes and sight in his work, potent symbols in a visual medium. Loss of sight can be a blissful ignorance, shutting off the horrors of the world, but in “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” Lanthimos forces us to look, observing the inherent madness that isn’t all too far from the surface. But an eye for an eye? They say it leaves the whole world blind.
Starring: Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Barry Keoghan, Sunny Suljic, Raffey Cassidy, Alicia Silverstone and Bill Camp. (Disturbing violent and sexual content, some graphic nudity and language) — Katie Walsh, Associated Press
‘LBJ’
R 1:29 ★★½★
Lyndon Baines Johnson has been a hot commodity of late, at least in the entertainment world.
Liev Schreiber took at stab at portraying the 36th president in the 2013 film Lee Daniels’ “The Butler.” In 2014, Tom Wilkinson, as LBJ, joined forces with Danny Oyelowo’s Martin Luther King Jr. in “Selma.” Last year there was a bumper crop, with both John Carroll Lynch (in “Jackie”) and Bryan Cranston (in HBO’s “All the Way,” based on the stage play) portraying versions of the late commander in chief. Each portrait had its upside.
But I suspect that none of these actors had as much fun bringing to life the cagey and colorful political vulgarian as his fellow Texan, Woody Harrelson, seems to be having in “LBJ,” crudely and rudely drawling his lines behind a wall of latex makeup, plus size prosthetic ears and hornrim glasses that obscure his own facial features.
It’s a kick to watch Harrelson’s blustery good ol’ boy threaten to take a hatchet to one underling’s male member after the aide fails to deliver an exact vote count on a bill, and later, as he indulges in a leisurely opendoor bathroom break during a meeting with two political advisers. Yet director Rob Reiner keeps the movie surrounding these shenanigans reined in.
The result feels like an installment of a 1980s miniseries that’s been preserved in amber rather than a complete and fulfilling production. Punctuated by regular flash-forwards to Nov. 22, 1963 — when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated — the film presents a mostly linear account of how Johnson, then a U.S. senator, went from losing the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination (to the handsome young candidate from Massachusetts) to becoming Kennedy’s running mate — before finding himself seated in the Oval Office after Kennedy’s death.
As “LBJ” tells it, in a screenplay by Joey Hartstone, the New Englander brought sex appeal to the ticket, while the Southerner provided experience in the trenches. Together, this odd couple fought to deliver a progressive agenda that initially pivoted around what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But, suddenly, LBJ had to fly solo, and steady a grieving nation.
Given the recent sharpening of racial tensions and violence, it’s easy to imagine why a Hollywood liberal like Reiner would focus on that part of Johnson’s legacy — rather than, say, Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War, which would prove to be LBJ’s downfall. Buttressed by a sly, low-key performance by Jeffrey Donovan as JFK — who rejected the distrust of Johnson by his attorney general, and brother, Bobby (Michael Stahl-David) — Hartstone’s story suggests that this political alliance was just the start of a mighty partnership that ended too soon.
If “LBJ” feels stunted as a film, it compensates with some fine acting: Jennifer Jason Leigh, sporting a bouffant hairdo, transforms herself into Johnson’s supportive wife, Lady Bird. And the ever-reliable Richard Jenkins is a standout in the role of Johnson’s N-word-spouting friend, Georgia senator Richard Russell Jr., whom the president tries to nudge toward enlightenment.
It’s telling that the one real lump-in-the-throat moment arrives in the form of an archival news clip, as TV anchor Walter Cronkite struggles to share the news that Kennedy has died. If we can survive that, the film reminds us, we can get through almost anything.
Starring: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Woody Harrelson, Bill Pullman and C. Thomas Howell. (Crude language) — Susan Wloszczyna, Washington Post
‘MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS’
R 1:54 ★★½★
Kenneth Branagh’s “Murder on the Orient Express “is a visual feast, bursting with movie stars, glamour and production value so high, you might just exit the theater experiencing some time-warp whiplash. Certainly no studio would make a straightforward, classical whodunit with a budget the size of a modest superhero pic (and no superheroes to speak of) nowadays, you think. What year is this anyway?
But against all odds and logic, here we have, in the waning days of 2017, a perfectly decent adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1934 novel with the likes of Michelle Pfeiffer, Penélope Cruz, Johnny Depp, Judi Dench and Branagh himself lighting up the big screen and chewing the decadent scenery like old-fashioned stars.
Branagh plays the lead, Hercule Poirot, a dandy Belgian detective with a gloriously over-the-top mustache who can only see the world as it should be. Imperfections, he says, stand out, whether it’s two soft-boiled eggs that are of different sizes or, you know, the kind of incongruities that make it immediately obvious to him who has committed a crime. This is all laid out quite neatly in a lively opening sequence at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem where he theatrically solves a theft in front of a crowd of locals on the verge of rioting.
Chance brings him aboard the Orient Express, which should really have its own credit in the film, where he meets an odd group of strangers — a sultry widow (Pfeiffer), a secretive governess (Daisy Ridley), the doctor whom she pretends to not know (Leslie Odom Jr.), a gangster-like art dealer (Depp), his valet (Derek Jacobi) and his bookkeeper (Josh Gad), a princess (Dench) and her maid (Olivia Coleman), a religious zealot (Cruz), a volatile dancer (Sergei Polunin) and his sick wife (Lucy Boynton), a German professor (Willem Dafoe) and a count (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo). And then one of them dies — there’s at least a chance someone reading doesn’t yet know who — and everyone remaining becomes a suspect.
Got all that?
Don’t worry. It’s more than a little overwhelming to keep track of who’s who in this bunch and quite a few get the short shrift. But it’s still fun enough to see Depp hamming it up with a thick New York accent, Pfeiffer vamping around the train’s hallways and Branagh careening between giddy parody and self-seriousness as a man who delights in a well-constructed pastry and a good turn-of-phrase from Charles Dickens but can’t seem to comprehend moral ambiguity in the slightest.
Unfortunately, the movie loses its steam right when the intrigue is supposed to be taking over. The discovery process isn’t nearly as fun or engaging as it should be, and despite the energetic start, the film becomes a bit of a slog waiting for the big answer (for those who already know it, either from the source material, Sidney Lumet’s 1974 film or any of the other adaptations, this might be even more tedious).
Branagh certainly steals scenes as Poirot, but the director might have taken some more time to ensure that all of his characters were given as loving a treatment as his own, or the setting, which is truly quite splendid to behold and even makes up for some of the deficiencies of the storytelling.
As odd as it might sound, it is somewhat refreshing to sit in a theater and watch a grand scale production that’s not set in space or predetermined by the pages in a comic book. Then it goes and mucks it all up by leaving the door conspicuously open for a sequel.
Starring: Kenneth Branagh, Penélope Cruz, Willem Dafoe and Daisy Ridley. (Violence and thematic elements)
— Lindsey Bahr, Associated Press