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      ‘Mama’s Boy’ Review: Mother and Son Pave the Way Forward

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      In this documentary, the Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black looks at how his relationship with his mother motivated his L.G.B.T.Q. activism.Dustin Lance Black’s acceptance speech for best original screenplay at the 2009 Academy Awards is featured twice in “Mama’s Boy,” the new HBO documentary about Black and his mother, Anne. It’s no wonder that the writer, who won his Oscar for “Milk” (2008), the biopic of the L.G.B.T.Q. rights activist Harvey Milk, ended up in Hollywood on that podium: He’s a commanding and affecting speaker. Even when Black’s voice wavers onstage or during interviews for this film, his belief in storytelling as a tool for empathy and activism pours from each word. That stalwart belief has its advantages and disadvantages.Adapted from Black’s memoir, the film has him tracing the life of his mother chronologically, from her childhood in small-town Louisiana and her unwillingness to surrender to polio to her gradual acceptance of her son’s gay identity. Black’s childhood memories, and how his life was irrevocably shaped by both his mother’s conservatism and her resilience, appear to be the backbone of Laurent Bouzereau’s film. Anecdotes about their intimate bond, such as Christmas traditions, give texture to the film’s thesis.Yet “Mama’s Boy” lands as somewhat naïve in the contemporary climate of L.G.B.T.Q. rights. That the screenwriter’s mother was changed by her empathy for people different than her is an admirable value to have. But the film takes a somewhat myopic approach to Black’s reach-across-the-aisle activism philosophy, focusing primarily on his work toward marriage equality. It doesn’t consider how political polarization can make the strategy of sharing space with others, as his mother did, difficult to execute when many places go out of their way to bar those different from them from even entering in the first place.Mama’s BoyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

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      Robert De Niro’s Career in Five Artifacts

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      The actor recently donated hundreds of boxes of scripts, props, notes and other objects from his work on “Raging Bull,” “Taxi Driver” and more. We dived in.AUSTIN, Texas — When Robert De Niro heard that Marlon Brando’s personal, annotated “Godfather” script was for sale on eBay, he was not too happy. How could such an important cultural artifact, created by an acting icon, a true artist, be as easy to bid on as an old pinball machine, or a Las Vegas coffee mug?This was around 2006, and De Niro had been looking for a place to donate the extensive collection of props, costumes, scripts, letters and mementos he had accumulated throughout his six-decade career. He did not want his “Taxi Driver” script notes to wind up deteriorating in a stranger’s closet in Des Moines, so he sought out a place where the archivists and staff would care for and preserve each piece, including the red boxing gloves and leopard-print robe he wore as Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull” and the pages of letters he and his “Last Tycoon” director Elia Kazan wrote each other. “I wanted to keep it for my kids and I wanted to keep it all together,” De Niro told me just after he viewed an exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin showcasing part of his archives. He was in town last month for the show, and for a gala celebrating the Ransom Center’s 65th anniversary. Leonard Maltin served as the master of ceremonies, and Meryl Streep hopped over to Texas to honor her longtime friend and colleague with a speech.“I don’t know, if you’re spelunking around in there, if you’re going to be able to find the secret of his power and what he does,” Streep said in her speech. “His strength comes from what he doesn’t say.”Texas might seem like an odd home for De Niro’s two Academy Awards and personal photos, but he wanted an institution that would provide easy access to students, researchers and cinephiles from around the world. As he said in his own speech that night: “I had accumulated an appalling amount of stuff. It was going to be either the Ransom Center or an episode of ‘Hoarders.’”The center houses the papers of the acting teacher Stella Adler, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Tom Stoppard, Tennessee Williams and Frida Kahlo, to name a few. In his speech, De Niro said he chose the center because of the company his archive would be in. “I imagine my papers talking to their papers, or trying to anyway, and their papers asking my papers, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’”The “Robert De Niro Papers” show runs through January and features a portion of the 537 boxes, 601 bound volumes and 147 folders of items De Niro donated. Here are a few treasures on display, with insights from De Niro and the curator of film, Steve Wilson.Early Headshot and Résumévia Harry Ransom Centervia Harry Ransom CenterThe black-and-white photo of a very clean-cut-looking young De Niro is accompanied by one of his early acting résumés, back when his film roles had names like Friend of Lead. De Niro said he remembered typing those résumés, and when I asked him if he maybe, possibly exaggerated anything, he said, “I think I may have. Maybe I said I was in a play or had a role in a play, and I’d just done a scene.” Wilson said the résumés helped the archivists date some of the items from early in his career, like his old makeup kit, which holds used brushes, tubes and cosmetic sticks that helped De Niro get into character during his early years as a student, before he went to work onstage and in dinner theater. “The existence of these résumés was really interesting to me,” Wilson said. “It does look like he was probably padding résumés. For example, he might say he was in a touring play, but we know he performed a scene at Stella Adler or something.”Fedora From ‘Mean Streets’via Harry Ransom CenterWarner Bros.The hat, and the role, marked the start of one of cinema’s most enduring and powerful collaborations, between De Niro and the director Martin Scorsese. When the actor wore this brown fedora to read for the role of Johnny Boy, the neighborhood punk, Scorsese knew De Niro was his guy, he told New York magazine a few years later. In Vincent Canby’s 1973 review of the film for The Times, he wrote, “The look, language and performances are so accurate, so unselfconscious, so directly evocative.” De Niro’s performance (opposite Harvey Keitel, above left, and David Proval) and that now iconic hat helped create the visceral realism that still manages to feel in-your-face and raw, almost five decades later. “I wore that hat as a kid,” De Niro told me when I asked where it came from. “I just liked it.” When it came time to audition for Johnny Boy, he said, he felt that it fit the character. “He had been keeping wardrobe items that he would use for auditions, like hats and glasses, for a long time,” Wilson said. “It was kind of an arsenal.”License From ‘Taxi Driver’via Harry Ransom CenterTo prepare for his 1976 role as Travis Bickle, a haunted, lonely Vietnam veteran turned New York cabby, De Niro spent a little over a week actually driving a taxi. This was just after he had won an Academy Award for “The Godfather Part II,” and one passenger recognized him and commented that things must be especially tough for actors if an Oscar winner was trying to earn money driving a cab. The license is another piece of the collection that illuminates his dedication to character and the lengths he goes to fully inhabit another life.The exhibition also includes one of De Niro’s annotated “Taxi Driver” scripts, opened to a page where Bickle stares into the mirror. The action simply reads: “His eyes are glazed with introspection. He sees nothing but himself.” Just below that, in blue ink, De Niro wrote, “Mirror thing here?” That “mirror thing,” of course, became “You talking to me?” It’s an improvised moment that has become a hallmark of his career. College-age kids still yell that line to De Niro sometimes when he’s out in public. As for the license, as soon as Wilson saw it for the first time, he “knew immediately that it was the image of the archive. It speaks to his process and says it all. It’s a great piece.”Military Dog Tags From ‘The Deer Hunter’via Harry Ransom Center“I can’t remember if I wore those through the whole production; it was a long time ago,” De Niro said of the ID his character, Mike, wore in Michael Cimino’s 1978 film about a group of friends from a Pennsylvania steel town whose lives are forever scarred by their experiences in Vietnam. Besides the dog tags, the archive displays De Niro’s prep work, including medical records from actual Vietnam veterans, articles about “returning vet syndrome” (now known as PTSD), and detailed notes he took on the dialect of the specific area of Pennsylvania his character hailed from. (Sample: “these ones” and “those ones” can be used interchangeably.)“I think this is where the archive really starts,” Wilson said. “There is a giant uptick in the amount of research material that we have for any particular film once we get to ‘Deer Hunter’ and beyond. Sometime around 1979 or 1980 is when he really got serious about keeping things.” When the dog tags arrived, Wilson noticed they were covered in plastic, as they would have been in real life to keep the metal from making noise and alerting the enemy. By the time the dog tags reached Austin, the plastic was yellowed and leaching liquid, so the archivists removed the decaying material and had them encased again, to stay true to the object’s original form.‘Raging Bull’ Annotated Scriptvia Harry Ransom CenterLike most of the screenplays in the collection, De Niro’s “Raging Bull” draft, dated “2-1-79” and revised by “M.S. and R.D.N.” (the director and actor), is covered in handwritten notes. The hefty version is enclosed in a brown leather folder. Wilson said several of the scripts “seemed to have a personality of their own,” and that there were notes in the pockets of the folder, including one to De Niro from Vikki LaMotta, the real-life wife of De Niro’s character.The script is displayed in a glass case next to the writer Paul Schrader’s handwritten scene outline, scribbled on a yellow legal pad. Several writers were credited in the film, but De Niro and Scorsese went away for a few days together to work on a final draft before production began. De Niro said they headed to the Caribbean because “it just seemed like a nice place to go. We worked on the script and on getting it to a good place. We worked on the character.”The notes across the script pages are tough to decipher. When De Niro stepped away for a moment, I overheard his young daughter telling Wilson that her father had horrible handwriting, so bad that she didn’t even think he used the same alphabet as everyone else. That hard-to-decipher handwriting will probably not stop film lovers and researchers from traveling to the Ransom Center in their quest to decode De Niro’s career, his technique and the mystery of his process, one script note, costume choice and scribbled-on napkin at a time. More

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      Robbie Coltrane, the Beloved Hagrid in ‘Harry Potter’ Films, Dies at 72

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      The veteran Scottish actor and comedian also played a gambling-addicted psychologist in the 1990s crime series “Cracker.”Robbie Coltrane, the veteran Scottish actor who played the beloved half-giant Rubeus Hagrid in the “Harry Potter” films and starred in the cult British crime series “Cracker,” died on Friday in Larbert, Scotland. He was 72.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Belinda Wright, his British agent. Ms. Wright said that Mr. Coltrane’s family had not disclosed a cause, but that he had been “unwell for some time.”Mr. Coltrane veered from the comic to the gritty in a 40-year career in film and television, with turns as an antihero detective in “Cracker” (1993-96), a K.G.B. agent turned ally to James Bond and a gangster who disguises himself as a nun after betraying his fellow criminals in “Nuns on the Run” (1990).But those roles did little to prepare Mr. Coltrane to play Hagrid, a fan favorite from the “Harry Potter” books whose transition to the big screen would face the sky-high expectations of millions of young readers.Mr. Coltrane successfully embodied the 8-foot-6 half-giant. He appeared in all eight “Harry Potter” films, infusing the franchise with warmth even as he towered over the young witches and wizards at the center of the series who were embroiled in a fight against evil.The first film, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” opened in November 2001 and went on to gross more than $1 billion worldwide, building on the already fervent global fan base of J.K. Rowling’s book series.Ms. Wright, Mr. Coltrane’s agent of 40 years, said the role was the reason he received a “stream of fan letters every week for over 20 years.”Fiercely protective of his privacy, Mr. Coltrane gave few interviews and could be hard-edged with reporters. But he said he had to cast that gruffness aside when he was embraced by a legion of young “Harry Potter” fans.“Kids come up to you and they go, ‘Would you like to sign my book?’ with those big doe-eyes,” he told The Guardian in 2012. “And it’s a serious responsibility.”Mr. Coltrane was born Anthony Robert McMillan on March 30, 1950, in Rutherglen, Scotland, outside Glasgow. His father, Ian Baxter McMillan, was a doctor; his mother, Jean Ross Howie, was a teacher.He grew up on the outskirts of Glasgow and enrolled in Glasgow School of Art, where he studied drawing and painting but struggled to capture his ideas on canvas.“I wanted to paint like the painters who really moved me, who made me want to weep about humanity,” he told The Herald, a Scottish newspaper, in 2014. “Titian. Rembrandt. But I looked at my diploma show and felt a terrible disappointment when I realized all the things that were in my head were not on the canvas.”As the prospect of a future as a painter dimmed, he was encouraged by a drama teacher who told him that he had acting talent after he appeared in a staging of Harold Pinter’s one-act play “The Dumb Waiter,” The Herald reported.After adopting his stage name as a tribute to the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, Mr. Coltrane found steadier footing when he moved to London. He worked as a stand-up comedian and actor, picking up theater roles and small parts in television and film productions.He attracted critical acclaim as Dr. Edward Fitzgerald, known as Fitz, the chain-smoking criminal psychologist in the hit series “Cracker,” whose alcohol addiction echoed Mr. Coltrane’s own issues with drinking. The role earned him the BAFTA award for best TV actor in 1994, 1995 and 1996.A turn as Valentin Zukovsky, a former K.G.B. agent turned Russian mafia kingpin, in the James Bond films “GoldenEye” (1995) and “The World is Not Enough” (1999) exposed Mr. Coltrane to a broader audience, particularly in the United States.There was nothing, however, that could compete with the global fame he found after he was cast as Rubeus Hagrid in the “Harry Potter” series. With his bushy beard and growling voice, Mr. Coltrane brought the beloved character to life. Mr. Coltrane, center, as Rubeus Hagrid in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” (2009), with Jim Broadbent, left, as Professor Horace Slughorn, and Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter.Alex Bailey/Warner Brothers PicturesThe young actors who grew up on the sets of the “Harry Potter” films fondly remembered Mr. Coltrane as someone they could count on to lift their spirits with a joke or a word of encouragement.Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter, said on Friday that Mr. Coltrane “used to keep us laughing constantly as kids.”“I’ve especially fond memories of him keeping our spirits up on ‘Prisoner of Azkaban,’” Mr. Radcliffe said in a statement, “when we were all hiding from the torrential rain for hours in Hagrid’s hut and he was telling stories and cracking jokes to keep morale up.” James Phelps, who played Fred Weasley in the series, wrote on Twitter that when he was 14 years old and nervous on his first day on the set, Mr. Coltrane came over and said, “Enjoy it, you’ll be great.”Mr. Coltrane is survived by his children, Spencer and Alice, and a sister, Annie Rae. In the HBO Max retrospective “Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts,” which premiered on Jan. 1, Mr. Coltrane reflected on the role that introduced him to a new generation of fans.“The legacy of the movies is that my children’s generation will show them to their children,” he said. “So you could be watching it in 50 years’ time, easy. I’ll not be here, sadly, but Hagrid will, yes.” More

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      With Halloween Approaching, Here are Five Horror Movies to Stream Now

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      Halloween is around the corner, which means the annual scary film dump-a-thon is on. But don’t fear: These frightening treats will do the trick.‘Watcher’Stream it on Shudder.My pick for the scariest movie of the year is Chloe Okuno’s nerve-shredding feature debut about a young woman who swears she’s being watched and stalked by a man in an apartment building across from hers.The setting is Bucharest, where Julia (Maika Monroe, so good) has moved with her husband, Francis (Karl Glusman), after he gets a promotion. A killer is on the loose, so it makes sense that Julia has her suspicions about the creep she sees standing at a window seemingly observing her, the same guy she thinks followed her around a supermarket. Is she right? Or paranoid?Boldly feminist and intensely chilling, “Watcher” is a Halloween movie for people who think they don’t like horror but want to give a really scary and (mostly) gore-free horror movie a shot. (Watch it during the day if you’re antsy.) Okuno dishes out the heebie-jeebies with ruthless precision — watching is like being on a roller-coaster incline and seeing the tracks ahead splinter. Be warned: You may never look at grocery bags the same way again.‘Here Before’Stream it on Hulu.Laura (Andrea Riseborough) lives with her husband and teenage son on a quiet street in a small town in Northern Ireland. There’s a new family next door: Marie, her husband and their young daughter, Megan, who reminds Laura of her own little girl, who died in a car crash.When Marie fails to pick Megan up from school one day, Laura gives her a ride home. But on the way, Megan (Niamh Dornan) asks Laura if she remembers a cemetery — a bizarre question, one of many to come, that makes Laura start to wonder if Megan might be her own daughter reincarnated. Laura loses her grip on reality as she obsesses about who or what is possessing Megan, until a final, jolting twist torpedoes reality.Stacey Gregg’s feature debut, which she also wrote, is an intimate psychological thriller that relies not on mayhem but on moments so delicately icy, they should be stamped as fragile. A scene at a playground with tiny feet dangling in the air had my nerves on edge — one of many small but shattering moments that make this film an affecting and effective scare. Chloë Thomson’s cinematography is strange and spectral.‘Nocturna: Side A — The Great Old Man’s Night’Stream it on Shudder.Ulysses (Pepe Soriano) is old, and he’s feeling it. He gets lost in the building where he lives with his nagging wife, Dalia (Marilú Marini), and he can’t remember their estranged daughter’s name.Late one night, their neighbor Elena (Desirée Salgueiro) frantically bangs on their door with pleas for unspecified help. They refuse, terrified that if outsiders see the condition of their home, they’ll be one step closer to eviction. When Elena winds up dead, Ulysses wonders if she might have been a scared, lost ghost in need. The answer — depicted in touching flashbacks and distorted supernatural flourishes — is heartbreaking.The writer-director Gonzalo Calzada skillfully weaves together dread and sadness in his haunting Spanish-language ghost story that’s as much about forgiveness and regret as it is about the terrors of aging and our fear of death. (He also directed a shorter companion film subtitled “Where the Elephants Go to Die.”) With one finger, he plucks your nerves and with another he tugs at your heartstrings, which makes this a movie for a great scare and a good cry.‘Spirit Halloween: The Movie’Rent or buy it on Amazon.It’s not in the same league as KFC’s meta-camp holiday romance about Colonel Sanders. But this family-friendly horror comedy, made in collaboration with the Spirit Halloween retail chain, is delightful.The film starts in the 1940s when a witch (Michelle Civile) curses and kills an evil codger (Christopher Lloyd!) who wants to take over an orphanage. Fast forward to the present, when his spirit has made its way into the hulking animatronic characters at a Halloween store where middle school friends Jake (Donovan Colan), Bo (Jaiden J. Smith) and Carson (Dylan Martin Frankel) have secretly camped for the night. The kids battle a possessed teddy bear and other monsters until dawn, when Bo’s grandmother (Marla Gibbs!) reveals a prophetic secret.The director David Poag has said that for his feature debut he wanted to explore what was “most terrifying to our 10-year-old minds.” He nailed it, combining a heartfelt message about the tough transition from tween to teen with the us-versus-aliens spirit of “Stranger Things” and the trapped-in-a-store thrills of “The Mist.” Horror-curious kids 8 to 13 will get a kick out of it.‘Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo!’Rent or buy it on most major platforms.This new animated film made news recently for speaking out loud that which discerning Scooby-Doo fans have known since the series’s first episode aired in 1969: Velma likes girls. The young woman who makes the nerdy sleuth’s glasses melt is the evil-chic Coco Diablo, the exacting head of a Halloween costume crime syndicate.If you’re a longtime queer fan of the Scooby-Doo franchise, or animation at all, this exchange between Velma (played by Kate Micucci) and Daphne (Grey DeLisle) will be lesbian music to your ears:“Who am I kidding?” Velma asks, her voice desperate with puppy love. “I’m crushing big time, Daphne. What do I do? What do I say?”“Just be yourself,” Daphne replies.Beyond its queer significance, Audie Harrison’s film is my pick for young kids, as long as they won’t be too scared by cackling ghouls, and for nostalgic adults who want to introduce their kids to “The Ballroom Blitz.” Put it on with the family while you’re carving pumpkins or gorging on Halloween’s candy windfall. Or invite friends over for cocktails and homemade Scooby snacks and debate what Velma and Coco would wear at their wedding. More

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      ‘The Curse of Bridge Hollow’ Review: Attack of the Halloween Décor

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      A father and daughter team up to save a town after she sets loose a spirit that brings spooky decorations to life.“The Curse of Bridge Hollow,” a lighthearted horror comedy from the director Jeff Wadlow, boasts an appealing premise: The plucky teenager Sydney (Priah Ferguson), futzing around with a Ouija board, unwittingly sets loose a demonic spirit, which brings to nefarious life every Halloween decoration in town. Her father, Howard (Marlon Wayans), is a high school science teacher and hard-nosed skeptic; when the awakened skeletons, zombies and clowns terrorize the town, the rational father and credulous child must team up and meet each other’s views halfway. And in what seems like the perfect conceptual addendum, the town is widely renowned for its Halloween decorating. “Everyone picks a theme, and then you go big time on that theme,” explains a zealous neighbor (Rob Riggle), whose yard is decked out with zombies in tribute to “The Walking Dead.”This setup promises a gleeful escalation of comic pandemonium, but the film fails to deliver. One early set piece, in which deadly spiders run amok in a nursing home, shows potential but swiftly devolves into a tedious slog of limp action clichés and irreverent quipping. The most flagrant problem is the film’s lack of visual imagination. Wadlow, a good horror director, seems hamstrung by the family-friendly context and struggles to develop tension in the absence of a plausible threat of violence. (For a movie rife with fights and chase scenes, it has a body count of zero.) The creatures are dull and unoriginal across the board, failing to capitalize on the range of styles of decorations, while the evil spirit who is the film’s ultimate villain looks like he’s been outfitted from the discount bin of a Spirit Halloween.The Curse of Bridge HollowNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Plan A’ Review: Seeking Vengeance for the Holocaust

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      Set in postwar Germany, this film dramatizes the true story of a group of Jewish survivors who sought revenge through an astonishing undercover operation.Movies about the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust often focus on the long journey to begin life anew, but “Plan A” dramatizes attempts by some survivors first to seek retribution — on a huge scale. The directors, Doron and Yoav Paz, fashion an undercover thriller from the true story of some 50 Jewish vigilantes called the Avengers who tried to poison millions in German cities.Max (August Diehl) returns to Germany in 1945 to search for his family and finds antisemitism still widespread. He meets a Jewish brigade of the British Army that is secretly targeting war criminals for off-the-books executions. They’re efficient — cue a montage sequence of Nazis being shot in the head — and Max helps them until he learns of the Avengers, or Nakam, which means revenge in Hebrew.Max joins their mission to infiltrate a water plant, while their leader smuggles toxic substances from abroad. The scale and ambition of the plan can’t fail to create some suspense, even as it falls apart. But the storytelling is surprisingly slack, while it grasps for anguished romantic tension between Max and another plotter (Sylvia Hoeks). Diehl moves from looking stricken to single-minded but doesn’t bring much weight, moral or otherwise, to his pivotal protagonist.An opening voice-over asks what you would do if your entire family were murdered. Despite sounding like a preview trailer’s hook, the blunt question emotionally situates us in the Nazi hellscape more effectively than the film’s visuals of ruins and hide-outs. The rest of “Plan A” never quite rises to the challenge posed by this remarkable chapter in history.Plan ANot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Halloween Ends’ Review: It Probably Doesn’t

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      David Gordon Green wraps up his reboot trilogy for a horror franchise that never stays dead for long.Can we imagine future Halloweens without a new “Halloween”? We might have to, if David Gordon Green’s “Halloween Ends,” the wrap-up film of the reboot trilogy he began in 2018, plants a full stop on a 44-year-old franchise. Savvy viewers, though, will intuit the title’s missing question mark, understanding that Michael Myers, one of cinema’s fustiest boogeymen, is unlikely to remain interred for long.And for a spell in “Halloween Ends” it seems as if Green might be offering a creative hand to his possible successors, only to withdraw it in favor of business as usual. Four years have passed since the events of “Halloween Kills,” and Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has given up the gunslinging-granny look and doomsday prepping in favor of a cottage-core aesthetic and memoir writing. She and her granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), have inexplicably remained in Haddonfield, Ill., where the townsfolk still blame Laurie for inciting Myers’s last stabbing spree and, presumably, for their plummeting property values.Also shunned by the locals is Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a geeky lad whose disastrous babysitting exploits three years earlier resulted in a dead child, a murder trial and an acquittal. Clearly, he’s perfect boyfriend material, and after saving him from the town bullies, Laurie introduces him to Allyson. Things go swimmingly until Corey encounters Myers one night in a dank cave beneath an underpass and learns there might be more to life than enduring insults and suffocating shame.At first, Corey’s involvement with the visibly declining Myers (again played by James Jude Courtney) is strangely ill-defined, a cross between caretaker and understudy. But as proximity to evil causes Corey to change — being an acolyte apparently does wonders for the libido — his too-rapid transformation constitutes a missed opportunity for the franchise. By pumping up Corey’s psychological damage, Green could have made a passing-the-torch movie, giving Corey a clear framework for his capitulation to the allure of slaughter. This also would have meshed perfectly with Laurie’s declaration that evil doesn’t die, it just changes shape.Changing shape, though, is something that exhausted movie properties struggle to do, and Green and his three co-writers soon revert to the comforting beats of the body count. This time, the townspeople — after virtually hijacking the previous installment — have dwindled to a few familiar faces, and there’s a touching reunion between Laurie and a flirty Officer Frank Hawkins (nice to see you, Will Patton, however briefly). He doesn’t know she’s already taken.The twisted bond between hunter and hunted that’s common to many serial-killer narratives (though rarely more overtly and eloquently than in Bryan Fuller’s terrific TV show “Hannibal”) has always been this franchise’s backbone. As if attempting to honor that, Green has made a movie that’s less frantic and more intimate than its predecessor, one that unfolds with a mourning finality. For me, its most evocative image is of a severed tongue circling lazily on a record turntable — maybe Green’s way of letting us know that he, at least, has nothing more to say.Halloween EndsRated R. Don’t pretend you don’t know why. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters and available to watch on Peacock. More

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      ‘Decision to Leave’ Review: A Labyrinth of Desire

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      Park Chan-wook’s latest, about a forlorn detective falling for his beautiful suspect, is an exuberant, destabilizing take on a classic film noir setup.One of the many pleasures of the feverish “Decision to Leave” is that the director Park Chan-wook clearly had as much fun making the movie as you will have watching it. A heady, baroque mystery infused with the kind of old-fashioned romantic fatalism that makes noir-darkened hearts flutter, it is a story of impossible love — though even a determined admirer may wonder if it’s also impossible to get a handle on this sly, ingeniously slippery movie.Never fear, though, as someone once cautioned me about visiting Venice, you will get lost. But navigating a mystery’s enigmas, sifting through its clues and unlocking its secrets are what draw us to stories like this, and here, even if you find yourself at an apparent dead end, Park will guide you back on track. Both times that I’ve seen “Decision to Leave” I questioned whether the movie was overly addled or I was, both being possible. Who’s the lovelorn gangster, I wondered. What does this or that plot kink have to do with the mystery woman? And why does one detective keep thumping his partner with an electric massager?Park drops you into the movie so abruptly that you would be forgiven for thinking that you had missed the first 15 minutes (or a prequel). As the staccato of bullets fills the soundtrack, a flurry of rapidly deployed scenes zip by, and the movie jumps from two detectives shooting at an indoor firing range and chatting, and then working a case and talking some more. The opening draws you right in with its destabilizing jump cuts, controlled freneticism, narrative ellipses and oddball swerves — cut to a fog-wreathed discussion about insomnia — which creates an inviting ambiguity. It’s unclear what’s happening; it will remain unclear for a while.There’s a dead body, of course, which soon materializes with the first glints of the main story. While hiking, a man has died under suspicious circumstances, leaving a broken watch and beautiful widow, Seo-rae (Tang Wei, wonderful), who’s called in for questioning by the two detectives. The lead investigator, the sleep-challenged Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), is instantly and conspicuously drawn to her. By contrast, the other detective, Soo-wan (Go Kyung-pyo), the guy with the electric massager, is more leery, harshly noting that she doesn’t seem especially upset by her husband’s death. Hae-joon replies that his wife wouldn’t be either, a revelatory comment about a man who proves more complicated than he appears.Hae-joon puts Seo-rae under surveillance and before long, in classic old Hollywood detective fashion, he falls for her, hard. He trails and watches her, tracking her every move whether she’s at work (she’s a caregiver for older, housebound patients) or at home with her cat and droning TV. Sometimes, he imagines himself in Seo-rae’s apartment — you see him there, too — where he hovers near her, almost within kissing distance. And when she falls asleep sitting on her couch, eyes closed as a column of smoldering ash precariously droops from her cigarette, he also imagines himself holding an ashtray under its burning tip.Sometimes a dying cigarette isn’t just a cigarette, but an intimation of later smolder and ash. While Hae-joon’s solicitousness toward Seo-rae can read as sweetly considerate (or stalker-ish), his investigation rapidly morphs into fascination and then life-changing, brain-fogging obsession. Under the cover of his detective work, he insinuates himself into Seo-rae’s life — or does she coax him in? — until they’re sharing rooms, meals and rainy walks. He loves her, but even as they grow close, he remains distrustful. From the start, he has decided who she is, putting her in a box, an idea that Park literalizes at one point with a shocking, gasp-inducing shot of her seated alone in the multiple square-shaped rooms of her apartment.On the most elemental level, “Decision to Leave” is a classic detective story driven by Hae-joon’s desire for Seo-rae and by his desire (one shared by the viewer) to know who’s done it and why. But nothing is ever straightforward with Park, an exuberant, adventurous maximalist who likes to kink up narrative and delights in the plasticity of the medium. Here, he plays with time and space, blurs the past with the present and inventively employs flashbacks and fantasy sequences that deepen the mystery, disrupt the flow and draw attention to the filmmaking itself. The effect can be dazzling, and enjoyably dizzying.Park’s most obvious touchstone is “Vertigo,” Hitchcock’s sublime 1958 l’amour fou about a detective who falls in love with a woman he thinks he’s lost only to find and lose her again. Park scatters several amusing nods to the Hitchcock picture throughout “Decision to Leave,” notably with lurid close-ups of eyes, rooftop chases and a gnarled tree jutting atop a treacherous precipice. Like the detective in “Vertigo,” Hae-joon — who periodically uses eye drops — spends a great deal of time looking at the woman he falls in loves with, though whether he ever actually sees her remains a question that’s teased throughout the story.However informed by Hitchcock, “Decision to Leave” is pure Park Chan-wook — his earlier movies include the original “Oldboy” and the erotic thriller “The Handmaiden” — through and through in form, style and temperament. And while Hae-joon may be outwardly driving the story, it is Seo-rae — and Tang’s devastating performance — who imbues “Decision to Leave” with its deep, then deeper wells of feeling. From the very first destabilizing moments of this movie, Park dazzles you with the beauty of his images and the intoxicating bravura of his unfettered imagination. And then, just when you think you have found your bearings, he unmoors you yet once more, blowing minds and shattering hearts, yours included.Decision to LeaveNot rated. In Korean and Chinese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. In theaters. More