‘THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS’
PG 1:44 HH ½H
Spookiness rattles the screen just enough to give kids a betterthan-good shiver — and more than a few solid laughs — in “The House with a Clock in Its Walls.” Since it takes place in 1955, neither laptops nor cellphones figure into this engaging, if less than wholly transformational, story.
The scary movie is based on a 1973 book by John Bellairs, with illustrations by Edward Gorey — the first in a 12-book series, so beware of sequels. The filmmakers have said that they hoped to capture the magic of “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and “Gremlins” (both coproduced, as is this film, by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment), but it doesn’t hit that stratosphere. “House” sometimes loses track of convoluted plot points and skimps on exteriors. But it does a fine job of capturing the childlike wonderment that suffused those earlier films.
Looming Victorian mansions with spiky wrought iron fences greet the film’s young protagonist, Lewis (a somewhat flat Owen Vaccaro), a newly orphaned 10-year-old who gets off the bus in small-town Michigan to live with his eccentric — and that’s putting it mildly — uncle Jonathan (Jack Black).
Sad and lonely, Lewis wears goggles that have sentimental value, clinging to a Magic 8-Ball that he hopes will bring messages from his dead parents. But he’ll need more than that to get through the adventures ahead.
Jonathan’s mansion has room after room of ticking clocks and life-size automatons, as well as a recliner that behaves like a dog and an ever-changing stainedglass window. (Production designer Jon Hutman deserves much credit, as does the film’s special effects team.)
“The house likes you,” Jonathan tells his nephew, which is how Lewis learns that his uncle — an amateur warlock sporting a beard, beer belly and full-length kimono, and driving a smoke-belching jalopy — practices magic. Jonathan’s next door neighbor and best pal (Cate Blanchett, in fine regal form), is a witch, with whom he trades affectionate insults.
Screenwriter Eric Kripke walks a neat tonal tightrope in his adaptation of the book, shifting its 1948 setting to the 1950s, and bringing a zappiness to the banter and scary stuff that should satisfy 21stcentury kids.
Horror-meister Eli Roth (“Hostel”) directs with a solid feel for the way kids like to be frightened, then reassured, lacing nearly all the frights with humor, which is, after all, right in Black’s irreverent wheelhouse.
The movie often echoes the “Harry Potter” films, as Lewis begs Jonathan to teach him magic, and his uncle makes him read books and practice spells. Here, however, the teacher is an amateur, and the small town atmosphere feels quite different from Hogwarts.
At school, Lewis tries to impress a potential friend (Sunny Suljic), inadvertently raising an evil magician (Kyle MacLachlan) from the dead — one who had hidden a doomsday clock in the walls of Jonathan’s mansion.
“The House with a Clock in Its Walls” is a throwback to an earlier era of filmmaking, in which the benefits of new technology are neatly disguised in old-school storytelling. Starring: Jack Black, Cate Blanchett, Owen Vaccaro, Kyle MacLachlan. (Mature thematic elements including sorcery, some action, scary images, rude humor and strong language.)
— Jane Horwitz, Special to The Washington Post
‘LIFE ITSELF’
R 1:53 HH HH
How much of life is destiny, and how much of it is luck? That’s the question that “Life Itself” attempts to explore, by looking at life’s seemingly random, occasionally magical coincidences and their meaning — if there is any meaning.
“Attempts” being the key word here.
Writer-director Dan Fogelman (creator of “This Is Us,” the NBC series) interweaves stories about two families over multiple generations. Will and Abby (Oscar Isaac and Olivia Wilde) are a young New York couple who met at college and are now expecting their first child. Javier and Isabel (Sergio Peris-Mencheta and Laia Costa) are a Spanish couple just starting out together; they live in a caretaker’s cottage in Andalusia, where Javier oversees the land of a wealthy olive grower (Antonio Banderas). Repeatedly — and unknowingly — these two pairs are tied together, in a series of mostly tragic events.
The film invites us to think about how historical events come together to create the people who are now living. Here’s an ancestor who escaped the Plague. There’s another one snatched from her homeland, a soldier who didn’t fall while those around him did. One little change in time, the film suggests, and everything that comes after changes. It’s a lesson we all learned from “Back to the Future,” and clearly it intrigues Fogelman.
The major problem with “Life Itself” is that the filmmaker doesn’t trust his audience to find that lesson as interesting as he does. (The movie is distributed by Amazon Studios. Amazon chief executive Jeffrey Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Movies should invite viewers in, taking them on a journey together with the characters on-screen. Unfortunately, “Life Itself” is less journey than lecture. To make sure we get his points, Fogelman fills the script with impassioned, overlong speeches that communicate the Very Important Things he has to say.
There are other problems: Every fall in love is instantaneous, every fall out of it devastating. Every man is passionate, every woman beautiful, smart and a little weird. (Note to lazy writers: “Quirky” is not a personality trait.)
Perhaps “This Is Us” fans will catch glimmers of the creative genius behind the Tuesday night juggernaut here. The rest of us are more likely to feel cheated by the film’s often outlandish coincidences, which Fogelman uses to keep making (and remaking) his point. In other words, your hard-earned entertainment budget might be better spent on an entirely different movie — maybe even one chosen entirely at random.
Starring: Oscar Isaac, Olivia Wilde, Annette Bening, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Laia Costa, Mandy Patinkin, and Antonio Banderas. (Coarse language, including sexual references, some violent images and brief drug use.)
— Kristen Page-Kirby, The Washington Post
‘FAHRENHEIT 11/9’
R 2:05 HH ½H
After presenting, in its first few minutes, a brief recap of election night 2016, we watch as the evening of Nov. 8 slowly fades into the morning of Nov. 9 (the date referenced in the film’s title, which is also a play on Moore’s 2004 film, “Fahrenheit 9/11”). Moore asks in the film, “How the (expletive) did this happen?”
You were expecting maybe “fair and balanced”?
Trump, Moore argues, was never serious about running.
But although director Michael Moore cracks wise in his new documentary “Fahrenheit 11/9,” he’s dead serious about his central thesis, which presents Flint, Michigan, as a microcosm of the country, using the city’s disillusionment with politics as usual — a direct result of the water crisis there — as an explanation for why Trump won. The filmmaker, who was born in Flint and who had long argued that Trump should not be written off, has made what feels, in some ways, like a dispiriting I-told-you-so.
Gradually, “Fahrenheit 11/9” painstakingly pivots from a movie that seems to be working overtime to depress us to a movie that means to inspire us. By the second half, the film is presenting such political upstarts as New York’s congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who unseated a 10-term incumbent in this summer’s primary, and David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting, as inspirations for other grass-roots activists who are impatient for change. “The America I want to save,” he says, “is the one we’ve never had.”
Starring: Michael Moore. (Crude language and some disturbing material and images.)
— Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post
‘BLAZE’
R 2:08 HHHH
The great singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt used to say there are two kinds of music: the blues and zip-a-dee-doo-dah. Both are on full, florid display in “Blaze,” an absorbing, illuminating film about the late musician Blaze Foley.
Foley isn’t a household name; he’s best known as the subject of Van Zandt’s own song “Blaze’s Blues” and Lucinda Williams’s “Drunken Angel.” (Foley also wrote “Clay Pigeons,” most famously covered by John Prine). But Foley comes charmingly, roaringly, maddeningly into his own by way of a masterful title performance by Arkansas-Philly musician Ben Dickey, who doesn’t so much portray as channel the real-life version of his character through equal parts homage and inhabitation.
Inspired by “Living in the Woods in a Tree,” a memoir by Foley’s wife, Sybil Rosen, “Blaze” chronicles the couple’s idyllic love affair, Foley’s promising but often selfsabotaging career as a performer and writer and, finally, his death in 1989, when he was shot in Austin.
Directed by Ethan Hawke from a script he wrote with Rosen, “Blaze” is structured around a radio interview in which Van Zandt (played to near perfection by Austin guitarist Charlie Sexton) and a composite sideman character named Zee (Josh Hamilton) recall the influence their colleague had on proto-Americana culture. Toggling between the interview and flashbacks to Foley’s final show, which turned into the recording “Live at the Austin Outhouse,” Hawke tells the story in impressionistic, elliptical swoops, revisiting particular episodes in Foley’s life while one of his songs plays over them.
For the most part, the story is one of once-charmed, now-wistful romance, as a younger Foley falls in love with Rosen, acted with down-to-earth equanimity by Alia Shawkat. From the self-described treehouse in Georgia, where the two live in blissful, Edenic isolation, they make the move to Austin, the better for Foley to be discovered.
He is. But he also discovers some things himself, including a penchant for alcohol, cocaine and carousing; the strains of the road and its beckoning temptations; and a love-hate relationship with audiences he’s as likely to alienate as entertain. Hawke, who directed the terrific documentary “Seymour: An Introduction,” about pianist Seymour Bernstein, brings a natural affinity for music to “Blaze,” in which he gracefully integrates Foley’s witty, literate, cosmically inclined songs into the narrative, often following anonymous side characters with his camera as a way of linking past and present.
Anyone who’s seen the terrific Rom-com “Juliet, Naked,” in which Hawke appears as an iconic folk singer, will appreciate the karmic balance of his making a movie about just the kind of storied cult figure the earlier movie gently lampoons. “Blaze” fairly stands accused of declining to probe the myth too harshly. But it possesses the kind of raw authenticity and ambered nostalgia that fans of Foley, Van Zandt, Williams and their peers often worship to the point of parody.
That’s thanks to Hawke’s sensitive direction and his wisdom in casting Dickey, Shawkat and Sexton, each of whom wisely dispenses with hero-worship and instead plays a flawed, utterly grounded human. (As for the musical performances, they are eerily on-point, including a heartbreaking version of “Pancho & Lefty” that Sexton and Dickey perform in an addled but weirdly perfect duet.)
With his bearlike physicality and unstudied air of emotional honesty and vulnerability, Dickey commands the screen from start to finish in “Blaze,” making even the film’s most self-pitying asides not just tolerable, but also full of genuine regret. We’ve seen the story of rock ‘n’ roll dissolution and self-destruction before. But “Blaze” revisits a familiar tale in a way that’s both ancient and new, introducing most viewers to an artist who clearly deserves to be memorialized.
Van Zandt, who died eight years after Foley, would most likely approve, as well: “Blaze” strikes that rare, commendable balance between the blues and zip-a-dee-doo-dah.
Starring: Ben Dickey, Alia Shawkat, Charlie Sexton, Josh Hamilton. (Strong language throughout, some sexual content and drug use.) — Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post
‘ASSASSINATION NATION’
R 1:50 Not reviewed
After a malicious data hack exposes the secrets of the perpetually American town of Salem, chaos descends and four girls must fight to survive, while coping with the hack themselves.
Starring: Odessa Young, Hari Nef, Suki Waterhouse. (Disturbing bloody violence, strong sexual material including menace, pervasive language, and for drug and alcohol use — all involving teens.)
— imdb.com
‘I THINK WE’RE ALONE NOW’
R 1:33 Not reviewed
The apocalypse proves a blessing in disguise for one lucky recluse — until a second survivor arrives with the threat of companionship.
Starring: Peter Dinklage, Elle Fanning, Charlotte Gainsbourg. (Language.) — imdb.com
‘MOSES AND THE TEN COMMANDMENTS: THE MOVIE’
PG-13 2 hours Not reviewed Moses leads the Hebrew people from the slavery of Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land. This film is a edited version from the (Brazilian) series “Moses and the Ten Commandments” (2015). It includes new scenes and a different ending.
Starring: Guilherme Winter, Sergio Marone, Camila Rodrigues. (Thematic material and some violence.) — imdb.com