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in MoviesBest Movies and TV Shows Streaming in December: ‘Reacher,’ ‘Doctor Who’ and More
Holiday fare arrives, with “Candy Cane Lane,” and “Dr. Who” and “Shape Island” specials. “Percy Jackson” and “Culprits” also land this month.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of December’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Candy Cane Lane’Starts streaming: Dec. 1Eddie Murphy reunites with his “Boomerang” director Reginald Hudlin for this fantastical, special-effects-driven holiday comedy. Murphy plays Chris Carver, a suburbanite whose obsession with winning his neighborhood’s lights and display contest leads to him making a deal with a malevolent elf named Pepper (Jillian Bell), who secretly plans to trap her new client permanently in the form of a plastic figurine. When Pepper’s dark magic leads to every gift in the song “The 12 Days of Christmas” coming to life and wreaking havoc in the Carver family’s quaint community, Chris and his wife, Carol (Tracee Ellis Ross), have to enlist their children and Pepper’s previous victims to try and prevent the spell from ruining Christmas.‘Reacher’ Season 2Starts streaming: Dec. 15Alan Ritchson returns as the hulking, nomadic ex-military policeman Jack Reacher, for a second season of mystery-unraveling and bone crunching. This batch of episodes is based on Lee Child’s novel “Bad Luck and Trouble,” and sees the beefy do-gooder calling on some old colleagues — Frances Neagley (Maria Sten), Karla Dixon (Serinda Swan) and David O’Donnell (Shaun Sipos) — to help him figure out who is killing the members of Reacher’s former U.S. Army MP Special Investigations unit. As with Season 1, this latest round of “Reacher” combines fisticuffs and shootouts with scenes of friends and strangers alike marveling at the eccentricities and capabilities of the stoic hero.Also arriving:Dec. 6“Hollywood Houselift With Jeff Lewis” Season 2Dec. 7“Coach Prime” Season 2Dec. 8“Merry Little Batman”Dec. 12“The Farads” Season 1Circle (voiced by Gideon Adlon), Square (voiced by Harvey Guillen) and Triangle (voiced by Scott Adsit) in “Shape Island: The Winter Blues,” a holiday special.Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘Shape Island: The Winter Blues’Starts streaming: Dec. 1Based on a series of picture books by the author Mac Barnett and the illustrator Jon Klassen, the charming animated series “Shape Island” teaches young kids about friendship via quiet, simple stories about three very different shapes: the nerdy Square (voiced by Harvey Guillén), the goofy Triangle (Scott Adsit) and the cool and wise Circle (Gideon Adlon). In the holiday special “The Winter Blues,” Circle and Triangle try to cheer Square up by inventing a monster-themed holiday; but they struggle to maintain the illusion when their pal starts asking too many questions about the magical yeti they created. The show’s adorable sets and characters look even more enchanting covered in ice and snow, though as always the core appeal is the interactions between these three, who reap the rewards of companionship by making an extra effort to get along.Also arriving:Dec. 1“Frog and Toad: Christmas Eve”“The Snoopy Show: Happiness Is Holiday Traditions”Dec. 6“John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial”Dec. 15“The Family Plan”From left: Leah Sava Jeffries, Aryan Simhadri and Walker Scobell in “Percy Jackson and the Olympians.”Disney+New to Disney+“Percy Jackson and the Olympians” Season 1Starts streaming: Dec. 20A decade ago, when pretty much every popular young adult fantasy fiction series was being adapted into megahit movies, the first two books in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson saga hit the big screen. Both did OK with audiences, but neither became a sensation on the level of the Harry Potter or Hunger Games films. So Riordan and the writer-producer Jonathan E. Steinberg are now trying something different with the novels, starting over at the beginning and telling Percy’s story as a Disney+ TV show. Walker Scobell plays the young hero, who discovers he is the secret son of Poseidon. Percy joins forces with other gods, demigods and magical creatures for adventures that bring the perils of ancient myths into the modern world.“Doctor Who Holiday Special: The Church on Ruby Road”Starts streaming: Dec. 25For the 60th anniversary of the long-running British science-fiction series “Doctor Who,” the show’s former writer-producer Russell T Davies is overseeing a series of specials that feature — for a brief stretch — the return of the actor David Tennant, playing a new version of the time-traveling Doctor he had previously played from 2005 to 2010. Disney+ will be carrying all three of those specials (“The Star Beast,” “Wild Blue Yonder” and “The Giggle”); and then with that nostalgia trip out of the way, Davies will begin the new “Doctor Who” season with a holiday-themed special, “The Church on Ruby Road,” which will properly introduce the next Doctor, played by Ncuti Gatwa. Details about what Davies has planned are being kept under wraps for now; but fans of the franchise are looking forward to some of the series’ biggest changes in years.Also arriving:Dec. 1“The Shepherd”Dec. 2“Doctor Who: Wild Blue Yonder”Dec. 8“Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Christmas Cabin Fever”Dec. 9“Doctor Who: The Giggle”Dec. 22“What If…?” Season 2From left: Tara Abboud, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Gemma Arterton and Kirby in “Culprits.”Des Willie/DisneyNew to Hulu‘Culprits’ Season 1Starts streaming: Dec. 8The writer-director J Blakeson — best-known for the clever thriller films “The Disappearance of Alice Creed” and “I Care a Lot” — adapts the crime fiction anthology “Culprits: The Heist Was Just the Beginning” into a pulpy, structurally complex series, set in the aftermath of a caper. Nathan Stewart-Jarrett plays an aspiring restaurateur who is living a peaceful life with his fiancé when he discovers that someone is trying to kill everyone who was involved in a heist he participated in years ago. Each “Culprits” episode jumps between the present day and the past, filling in the details about the original crime, which was masterminded by a hyper-controlling boss (Gemma Arterton). The show is partly a mystery and partly a character study, considering the long-term effects of a criminal gang’s big score.‘The Mission’Starts streaming: Dec. 8Back in 2018, the Christian missionary John Allen Chau made international news when he was killed while illegally trying to make contact with a secluded island tribe. The National Geographic documentary “The Mission” digs beneath all the online jokes and outraged reactions to Chau’s death, offering a more thoughtful reflection on who this young man was — and a more detailed consideration of how the drive to convert hostile strangers has had a long and often tragic history. The film’s co-directors, Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (who previously made the excellent documentary “Boys State”), bring a fair-minded approach throughout, taking fervent faith seriously while also acknowledging the damage it can do.Also arriving:Dec. 6“We Live Here: The Midwest”Dec. 9“Maestra”Dec. 11“Science Fair: The Series”Dec. 13“Moving” Season 1“Undead Unlock” Season 1Dec. 14“Blue Jean”“Dragons: The Nine Realms” Season 8Dec. 15“CMA Country Christmas”“Such Brave Girls” Season 1Dec. 18“Archer: Into the Cold”Dec. 20“Dragons of Wonderhatch” Season 1Dec. 22“Maggie Moore(s)”Dec. 26“Letterkenny” Season 12Carol and Charles Stuart, as seen in “Murder In Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning.” Ira Wyman/Sygma via Getty Images/HBONew to Max‘Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning’Starts streaming: Dec. 4In 1989, a woman named Carol Stuart was shot and killed in Boston. During the investigation into the murder, her husband, Chuck, described the shooter as a Black man. It was later discovered that he wasn’t being entirely truthful; but by the time the case was closed, the city’s long-simmering racial hostilities had boiled over. Directed by Jason Hehir (best-known for the Emmy-winning Chicago Bulls docu-series “The Last Dance”), the three-part “Murder in Boston” features archival news footage and new interviews that, working in conjunction, explain what the cultural environment was like in Boston in the 1970s and ’80s and how the Stuart case represented a turning point.Also arriving:Dec. 5“Great Photo, Lovely Life: Facing a Family’s Secrets”Dec. 12“Trees and Other Entanglements”Dec. 16“Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?”Dec. 21“Gary Gulman: Born on 3rd Base”Dec. 28“Oprah and ‘The Color Purple’ Journey”Dec. 30“Time Bomb Y2K”Michael Jackson, center, in the documentary “Thriller 40.” Paramount+ with SHOWTIMENew to Paramount+ with Showtime‘Thriller 40’Starts streaming: Dec. 2The director Nelson George’s “Thriller 40” goes deep on one of the best-selling albums of all time, serving as an unofficial conclusion to a trilogy that was begun by Spike Lee’s two Michael Jackson documentaries (one about the years leading up to “Off the Wall,” and one about the making of “Bad”). George and his crew interview some of the personnel who worked on the “Thriller” LP and its groundbreaking music videos; and they also speak with some famous fans (including Usher, Misty Copeland, Mark Ronson and Mary J. Blige), who talk passionately about what “Thriller” means to them. The main selling point for this documentary, though, is all of the rare video and audio from the studio, where Jackson and his producer Quincy Jones shaped the songs that would go on to dominate the pop charts, expanding the commercial and creative possibilities for Black artists.Also arriving:Dec. 1“The World According to Football”Dec. 5“Geddy Lee Asks: Are Bass Players Human Too?”Dec. 7“The Envoys” Season 2Dec. 8“Baby Shark’s Big Movie”Dec. 11“The Billion Dollar Goal”Dec. 12“Born in Synanon”Dec. 15“Finestkind”Tony Shalhoub returns as Adrian Monk in “Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie.”Peter Stranks/PEACOCKNew to Peacock‘Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie’Starts streaming: Dec. 8Fourteen years after the USA Network’s long-running, Emmy-winning detective dramedy “Monk” aired its series finale, most of the cast returns for this sequel movie, which catches fans up on how the obsessive-compulsive sleuth Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub) has been doing in the decade since he finally solved his wife’s murder. In short? Not great! Rattled by the pandemic and feeling adrift without murders to investigate, Monk finds a renewed sense of purpose when someone close to his family dies under mysterious circumstances, possibly at the direction of an arrogant billionaire (James Purefoy). In “Mr. Monk’s Last Case,” Monk once again has to overcome his neuroses with the help of his friends and former colleagues, working together to make the world feel a little saner.Also arriving:Dec. 1“The Exorcist: Believer”Dec. 8“Christmas at the Opry”Dec. 12“Barry Manilow’s a Very Barry Christmas”Dec. 15“A Saturday Night Live Christmas Special”Dec. 21“Dr. Death” Season 2 More
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in Movies‘La Syndicaliste’ Review: Power Plays
Isabelle Huppert plays a union representative swept up in a byzantine conspiracy in this French movie, which is based on a true crime.Sometimes the best reason to watch a movie is because Isabelle Huppert is in it. That’s pretty much true of “La Syndicaliste,” a tangled if certainly watchable French true-crime drama about dirty political doings in the nation’s nuclear energy industry. Filled with men and women with furrowed brows, running and declaiming and sometimes explosively blowing their tops, the movie yearns to be a 1970s-style American thriller but is basically just a vehicle for Huppert’s talents. Even when it’s unclear what her character — a labor representative — is up to, she commands your attention with feverish focus and urgency.Huppert plays Maureen Kearney, a leading union representative of Areva, a state-controlled French nuclear technology company. A no-nonsense, hard-charging official, Maureen takes her mandate seriously — Areva has more than 50,000 employees when the story opens in 2012 — and her resentful male colleagues somewhat less seriously, at least outwardly. She’s brassy and a bit flashy (she likes perilously high heels and slashes of red lipstick) and close to her boss at Areva, Anne Lauvergeon (Marina Foïs), a smooth number who’s about to lose her job because, as she explains, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to replace her before the next election.It isn’t obvious why Sarkozy thinks that firing Anne will help him; she suggests it’s because she’s a woman, stoking the gender war that percolates throughout this movie. Whatever the case, Sarkozy fires Anne, eventually losing the presidency to François Hollande, all of which adds real-world context to the story without illuminating it. The director Jean-Paul Salomé gives the movie a lively pace, but he crowds it with filler scenes, too many characters and political arcana. He also throws in an allusion to Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” — cue the blond chignon — that does his movie no favors. (Salomé wrote the script with Fadette Drouard.)“La Syndicaliste” follows Anne as she tries to work with her new boss, Luc Oursel (an amusingly villainous Yvan Attal), a patronizing sexist who cozies up to Maureen even as he busily conspires against her. The extent of his schemes begin to emerge after a whistle-blower sneaks Anne a document showing that a shadowy figure who heads up another state-controlled utility, E.D.F., is clandestinely negotiating with a Chinese consortium to build low-cost plants. (Got it?) The idea is to turn E.D.F. into a world nuclear power and ruin Areva, which Maureen helpfully explains, “will be awful for our employees.”The scheme proves worse for Maureen, who tries to bring attention to the E.D.F. plan, only to be largely met with indifference. As she continues rattling cages, she is met with escalating hostility, and then one grim morning while she’s home preparing for a big government meeting, an intruder puts a mask over her head and rapes her. Much of the rest of the movie involves Maureen navigating the aftermath of the assault as she submits to invasive medical examinations and police interviews that grow progressively antagonistic. The cops are stumped — there are no fingerprints, witnesses or surveillance visuals — and then they accuse Maureen of inventing the rape as a way to gin up sympathy for her political struggles.Based on a 2019 book of the same title by Caroline Michel-Aguirre, “La Syndicaliste” never satisfyingly meshes the story’s corporate-political thriller elements with Maureen’s traumatic ordeal. Salomé’s handling of the rape doesn’t help. The movie opens right after a maid finds the bound Maureen in the basement of her home, and then the story flashes back several months at which point it begins to unwind chronologically. That’s fine, even if the structure is drearily familiar, but it ends up turning the rape into a narrative high point, which is just gross. Huppert, who makes her character’s pain and rage visceral, is enough.La SyndicalisteNot rated. In French and Hungarian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More
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in Movies‘South to Black Power’ Review: A Great Migration in Reverse
In a new documentary, the opinion columnist Charles M. Blow calls for Black Americans to move to the South to gain political footholds.The documentary “South to Black Power” — directed by Sam Pollard and Llewellyn M. Smith — employs many of the gestures a newspaper opinion piece might. Which is apt, since Charles M. Blow, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, is the film’s searching guide — but also, at times, its expounding subject.Based on his 2021 book, “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto,” the film revisits Blow’s argument that the only way for Black Americans “to lift the burden of white supremacy” is head to the South. With this “Great Migration in reverse,” they can build a majority and take hold of the political levers of those states and their legislatures.During the 2020 presidential election, Georgia, where Blow now resides, offered tantalizing evidence of the kind of might he envisions. In this documentary, which is filmed in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, Blow visits Mississippi, Alabama, the Carolinas (with a warm stopover at his childhood home in Gibsland, La.).He bolsters his thesis but also stress tests it with people who have never left, who have left and returned, or, like the author Jemar Tisby, who have put down new roots with uplift in mind.In a nice bit of journalistic even-handedness, several of Blow’s interviewees are not entirely convinced by his thesis, or they believe there are other paths to political gains. For example, the community strategist Asiaha Butler shares why she decided to stay in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, despite the gun violence and the tug of family in the South. Her story of how seeing a young girl playing alone in a vacant lot and throwing bottles into the street cinched it — she had to remain — is as moving as it is authentic. And her reasons are as committed to empowering Black Americans where they are as Blow’s call for mass migration.South to Black PowerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on Max. More
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in Movies‘Eileen’ Review: Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway Thrill in Adaptation
Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway star in a period thriller that brings cathartic nastiness to a cold New England Christmas.Exceptions exist, of course, but protagonists in mainstream movies labeled feminist tend to fall along two lines. One is the endearing woman who has to break out of the cage she hadn’t even known she was in (think the girlbossing of “Barbie,” more or less). The other is the hot mess rom-com heroine, who is, as advertised, both super hot and an agent of abject chaos, her life and habits and relationships in perpetual ruins.The pleasure of “Eileen” is that its titular protagonist is all of these and none of them: repellent, bitter, repressed and in search of liberation that arrives in a decidedly unsexy manner. In some ways the story is familiar — small-town girl with a terrible life yearns to break free, and meets someone who represents that freedom — but it’s all filtered through a dirty mirror, a noir with shmutz rubbed onto the lens. Eileen’s unpleasantness is also her appeal; this girl certainly is no boss, she’s incapable of rousing speeches, and she’s never going to mutate into a heroine. She is, in other words, familiar.The movie she’s in is a psychosexual thriller, kind of. Ottessa Moshfegh, along with Luke Goebel, adapted Moshfegh’s 2015 novel into a screenplay that’s relatively faithful to the original, but with a few key twists that ensure tension for viewers who’ve read the book. Yet the outlines remain the same: It is the early 1960s, and Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie) lives with her alcoholic ex-cop father in some gray, nameless New England town. Eileen’s clerical job at the local boys’ correctional center is stultifying and upsetting, or it would be if Eileen, who is in her mid-20s, could muster the ability to be upset anymore. (“Everyone’s kinda angry here — it’s Massachusetts,” she tells someone.)One day right before Christmas, the new prison counselor turns up, a pulled-together platinum blonde named Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) who seems to have floated in from another dimension. She’s educated, she jokes with the staff and she dresses in a way that emphasizes her curves. Rebecca is comfortable in the world in a way Eileen finds magnetizing. Swiftly, Rebecca becomes her center of gravity, the encapsulation of her dreams. It’s the sort of infatuation a teenager might develop, somewhere between wanting a person and wanting to be a person, but with Rebecca around, Eileen’s bloodless life is injected with sudden fire, and danger, too.McKenzie’s accent is a bit wobblier than Hathaway’s, but once you’re over that hump, the pair are thrilling together. McKenzie plays Eileen as a wide-eyed girl in arrested development who might have been an ingénue if she’d ever had a moment to sparkle. Instead her flat affect, which on someone else might be mysterious and intriguing, turns her invisible. Eileen’s own father tells her, in a moment of uneasily companionable boozy candor, that there are people in the world who live like they’re “in a movie,” the “ones making moves,” but that Eileen is the other kind of person: “Easy. Take a penny, leave a penny. That’s you, Eileen. You’re one of them.”So Rebecca, whom Eileen’s father would probably term a “dame” (or maybe a “hussy”), comes like a bolt from the frigid blue, though more sophisticated eyes than Eileen’s can detect some kind of performativity in her self-presentation. She is, after all, a female Harvard graduate (not, she emphasizes, Radcliffe) in early ’60s New England. She’s been educated with men and now works in a prison for boys and seems perfectly comfortable taunting men in a dive bar. She’s developed a kind of bombshell casing, for reasons unknown but easy to guess at. Hathaway’s performance is pure Hollywood siren wrapped in a wool skirt suit. What she is hiding, her motivations — that’s all opaque, and despite a veneer of vulnerability, there’s something just a little seedy about her.These sorts of women, off-putting and maddeningly erratic, tied to the physical in a way that makes others uneasy, are familiar territory for Moshfegh. She’s perhaps best known for her 2018 novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” about a young woman who in response to grief develops an addiction to sleeping pills and their accompanying twilight state. In Moshfegh’s imagination, emotional states are signaled by bodily obsessions viewed with disapproval in polite society. For Eileen, this manifests in compulsive behavior: masturbating while spying on a couple in a car, only to stuff snow down her tights to stifle the impulse, or chewing candies and spitting them back out by the bowlful, in an attempt to control her body size. (In the novel, she’s also scatologically fixated, downing laxatives and frequently commenting on fecal matters; the film, perhaps necessarily, carves this part away.)But the story is also a perfect pairing for its director, William Oldroyd, whose previous film, the 2017 thriller “Lady Macbeth,” introduced Florence Pugh to the world. Oldroyd’s cold but keen eye for women pushed to the edge of a nervous breakdown by boorish, violent men meets rich ground here. Not just Eileen, but Rebecca and several other female characters are not good or angelic women, and yet they’ve clearly bent themselves to fit molds made by men. The film’s titles, its grain, its shots that bathe Rebecca and Eileen in glowy red lights and deep shadows — it’s all meant to evoke the period, but also an era where women like these fit in like a wrong-handed glove.All of this adds up to discomfort and a bitter aftertaste. Unlike this year’s big movies about women breaking free from oppressive circumstances — the aforementioned “Barbie,” the forthcoming “Poor Things,” among others — it is not obvious that Eileen is destined to find a fuller, richer life free from the confines of patriarchy. She may not be the kind of person who really can. She is, in fact, rather ordinary, not — to return to her father’s statement — the kind of person who’s in a movie, who makes decisions and does things.Except, of course, she’s the lead of her own movie now. Refusing to make Eileen into a girlboss or a heroine or even an example is what makes the whole thing so delicious, so cathartic, so strangely realistic, even if the viewer is left a little horrified. “Eileen” is a mean movie, but I intend that as a compliment: There’s no lesson here, no revelation, no good vibes to wander away with. Spiky and cold, it’s a bitter holiday treat.EileenRated R. A whole lot of nasty business. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More
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in Movies‘Eileen’ Review: Sudden Fire, Sudden Danger
Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway star in a period thriller that brings cathartic nastiness to a cold New England Christmas.Exceptions exist, of course, but protagonists in mainstream movies labeled feminist tend to fall along two lines. One is the endearing woman who has to break out of the cage she hadn’t even known she was in (think the girlbossing of “Barbie,” more or less). The other is the hot mess rom-com heroine, who is, as advertised, both super hot and an agent of abject chaos, her life and habits and relationships in perpetual ruins.The pleasure of “Eileen” is that its titular protagonist is all of these and none of them: repellent, bitter, repressed and in search of liberation that arrives in a decidedly unsexy manner. In some ways the story is familiar — small-town girl with a terrible life yearns to break free, and meets someone who represents that freedom — but it’s all filtered through a dirty mirror, a noir with shmutz rubbed onto the lens. Eileen’s unpleasantness is also her appeal; this girl certainly is no boss, she’s incapable of rousing speeches, and she’s never going to mutate into a heroine. She is, in other words, familiar.The movie she’s in is a psychosexual thriller, kind of. Ottessa Moshfegh, along with Luke Goebel, adapted Moshfegh’s 2015 novel into a screenplay that’s relatively faithful to the original, but with a few key twists that ensure tension for viewers who’ve read the book. Yet the outlines remain the same: It is the early 1960s, and Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie) lives with her alcoholic ex-cop father in some gray, nameless New England town. Eileen’s clerical job at the local boys’ correctional center is stultifying and upsetting, or it would be if Eileen, who is in her mid-20s, could muster the ability to be upset anymore. (“Everyone’s kinda angry here — it’s Massachusetts,” she tells someone.)One day right before Christmas, the new prison counselor turns up, a pulled-together platinum blonde named Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) who seems to have floated in from another dimension. She’s educated, she jokes with the staff and she dresses in a way that emphasizes her curves. Rebecca is comfortable in the world in a way Eileen finds magnetizing. Swiftly, Rebecca becomes her center of gravity, the encapsulation of her dreams. It’s the sort of infatuation a teenager might develop, somewhere between wanting a person and wanting to be a person, but with Rebecca around, Eileen’s bloodless life is injected with sudden fire, and danger, too.McKenzie’s accent is a bit wobblier than Hathaway’s, but once you’re over that hump, the pair are thrilling together. McKenzie plays Eileen as a wide-eyed girl in arrested development who might have been an ingénue if she’d ever had a moment to sparkle. Instead her flat affect, which on someone else might be mysterious and intriguing, turns her invisible. Eileen’s own father tells her, in a moment of uneasily companionable boozy candor, that there are people in the world who live like they’re “in a movie,” the “ones making moves,” but that Eileen is the other kind of person: “Easy. Take a penny, leave a penny. That’s you, Eileen. You’re one of them.”So Rebecca, whom Eileen’s father would probably term a “dame” (or maybe a “hussy”), comes like a bolt from the frigid blue, though more sophisticated eyes than Eileen’s can detect some kind of performativity in her self-presentation. She is, after all, a female Harvard graduate (not, she emphasizes, Radcliffe) in early ’60s New England. She’s been educated with men and now works in a prison for boys and seems perfectly comfortable taunting men in a dive bar. She’s developed a kind of bombshell casing, for reasons unknown but easy to guess at. Hathaway’s performance is pure Hollywood siren wrapped in a wool skirt suit. What she is hiding, her motivations — that’s all opaque, and despite a veneer of vulnerability, there’s something just a little seedy about her.These sorts of women, off-putting and maddeningly erratic, tied to the physical in a way that makes others uneasy, are familiar territory for Moshfegh. She’s perhaps best known for her 2018 novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” about a young woman who in response to grief develops an addiction to sleeping pills and their accompanying twilight state. In Moshfegh’s imagination, emotional states are signaled by bodily obsessions viewed with disapproval in polite society. For Eileen, this manifests in compulsive behavior: masturbating while spying on a couple in a car, only to stuff snow down her tights to stifle the impulse, or chewing candies and spitting them back out by the bowlful, in an attempt to control her body size. (In the novel, she’s also scatologically fixated, downing laxatives and frequently commenting on fecal matters; the film, perhaps necessarily, carves this part away.)But the story is also a perfect pairing for its director, William Oldroyd, whose previous film, the 2017 thriller “Lady Macbeth,” introduced Florence Pugh to the world. Oldroyd’s cold but keen eye for women pushed to the edge of a nervous breakdown by boorish, violent men meets rich ground here. Not just Eileen, but Rebecca and several other female characters are not good or angelic women, and yet they’ve clearly bent themselves to fit molds made by men. The film’s titles, its grain, its shots that bathe Rebecca and Eileen in glowy red lights and deep shadows — it’s all meant to evoke the period, but also an era where women like these fit in like a wrong-handed glove.All of this adds up to discomfort and a bitter aftertaste. Unlike this year’s big movies about women breaking free from oppressive circumstances — the aforementioned “Barbie,” the forthcoming “Poor Things,” among others — it is not obvious that Eileen is destined to find a fuller, richer life free from the confines of patriarchy. She may not be the kind of person who really can. She is, in fact, rather ordinary, not — to return to her father’s statement — the kind of person who’s in a movie, who makes decisions and does things.Except, of course, she’s the lead of her own movie now. Refusing to make Eileen into a girlboss or a heroine or even an example is what makes the whole thing so delicious, so cathartic, so strangely realistic, even if the viewer is left a little horrified. “Eileen” is a mean movie, but I intend that as a compliment: There’s no lesson here, no revelation, no good vibes to wander away with. Spiky and cold, it’s a bitter holiday treat.EileenRated R. A whole lot of nasty business. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More
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in Movies‘Silent Night’ Review: On the First Day of Christmas, Kill.
John Woo’s latest is as violent and merciless a revenge thriller as you can imagine.It’s a widely-held proposition that great artists mellow as they age. That hasn’t held true in filmmaking. Robert Bresson ended his career in his 80s with two of his most fevered and angry works, “The Devil Probably” and “L’’Argent.” Martin Scorsese, now 81, put out the tortured and indignant “Killers of the Flower Moon” this year. And now the inspired action filmmaker, John Woo, 77, delivers the merciless revenge shoot-em-up, “Silent Night.”Woo’s pictures have always operated on the “pure cinema” principle. Simply put, he prefers showing to telling. And what he shows are emotional extremes and their violent fallout. For this picture he put his prodigious staging, shooting and cutting skills to a test that won’t surprise his fans: The movie is practically free of dialogue. Joel Kinnaman plays Brian, a father living near California gang turf, driven mad by grief after seeing his young child killed by a stray bullet fired during a battle. In his initial maniacal reaction, he’s shot in the throat by a drug dealer with slashes of black tattooed on one side of his face.The attack happens around Christmas, and once Brian emerges from a monthslong drinking binge, he shapes up, takes up arms, and marks the next Christmas on his calendar: “Kill them all.” And so it goes. Car chases, motorcycle chases, stabbings, shootings, bone-breaking. Even without the talking (Catarina Sandino Moreno, as Brian’s beleaguered wife, mutters “OK” once or twice), there’s a lot of sound and fury and it works: This is suspenseful and cathartic, and even the schmaltzy stuff is so distinctly John Woo that it’s welcome.Silent NightRated R for, well, violence. No language, though! Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More
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in Movies‘Godzilla Minus One’ Review: Bigmouth Strikes Again
Japan’s famous monster franchise returns with an appetite for destruction but also a notably sober outlook.You have to like Godzilla’s style. Confident, with an almost stately groove to his step — and why not? With “Godzilla Minus One,” the giant prehistoric lizard is heading toward the 70th anniversary of his Toho studio franchise. Once again, Japan emerges from World War II only to face this atomic colossus, whose appetite for destruction remains unabated and a reliable spectacle.In a prelude, Godzilla makes landfall during the war on an island where a kamikaze pilot, Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), has just detoured to desert. Koichi survives the monster’s attacks, becoming a ball of guilt and shame. He resettles in Tokyo’s rubble with a stranger, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who’s caring for someone else’s baby.They’re a nuclear family, as it were, but remain unmarried, simply co-survivors. Koichi’s camaraderie with crew members on a mine cleanup ship lightens the mood, but soon Godzilla rears his leathery head again with attacks on ships, streets and the people unfortunate enough to be there.Less vengeful or bored than just a phenomenon, Godzilla stomps and chomps away, spiky, dead-eyed, his hide rough as cooled magma. Signature moves include the snap-and-toss (grabbing and flinging a human or train-car aside) and his blue ray (not the high-resolution disc but rather an explosive thermonuclear beam). The writer-director, Takashi Yamazaki, integrates crowds and effects with a sure hand, and endows the violence with a dour air.The mood suits as citizens band together and decry Japan’s wartime disregard for life. The heroic arc is creaky, but despite the chintzy clichés about Godzilla movies, this one keeps bringing blockbuster brio to heel with a sometimes heavy heart.Godzilla Minus OneRated PG-13 for monster mash. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More