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    ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Review: Kristen Stewart, Crazy (and Scary) in Love

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    In this neo-noir, the ever reliable, always watchable actress plays a small-town loner who’s struck by the unexpected arrival of a mysterious drifter.Watching Kristen Stewart is always an adventure. A performer who makes good movies better and dreary movies tolerable, she has a restlessness that has made her one of the more interesting attractions in American film. She has a gift for making a character’s inner life transparently readable, and while she can be subtle and withholding, it is her fascinatingly unquiet presence that draws you in, an itchy intensity that can keep her (and you) on edge. Pauline Kael wrote that Jane Fonda’s “motor runs a little fast” — so does Stewart’s.In her latest vehicle, “Love Lies Bleeding,” a neo-noir in a violent and winkingly nasty key, Stewart plays Lou, short for Louise, a small-town loner somewhere in New Mexico, yearning to escape a classic dead end. If this were a 1940s noir, Lou would be fixing jalopies in a dingy garage while waiting for a dame to stroll in to change his fate. That’s more or less what happens here, except that it’s the ’80s, and Lou is a woman who works in a gym where she’s wasting away, unclogging toilets and slipping steroids to bulked-up juicers. Then, a beautiful stranger walks into the gym and changes her life, as sirens sometimes do in movies.The stranger, Jackie (a good, physically imposing Katy O. Brian), immediately catches Lou’s eye. It’s destiny, Old Hollywood style, and it lights the movie up and sets it on its incendiary way. What happens is hot, yummy stuff, but romances like these need something to get in their way, whether it’s a bag of loot, a jealous ex or just a contrivance. This movie obliges with violence, lots of guns, spooky flashbacks and a classic villain, played by a fantastic Ed Harris with a sneer and an epically terrible wig. There’s a lot of extravagantly and comically bad hair in “Love Lies Bleeding,” along with equally rotten teeth and souls.It’s a good guess that the director Rose Glass (“Saint Maud”) has read James M. Cain or seen some of the films made from his hard-boiled books; she may have thumbed through a few Jim Thompson novels, too. (Glass wrote the script with Weronika Tofilska.) “Love Lies Bleeding” isn’t on par with Cain or Thompson, and overselling a comparison would be silly. Even so, when Jackie first walks into the gym, the world-altering effect she has on Lou recalls the moment when the drifter in “The Postman Always Rings Twice” meets his kismet: “Then I saw her,” he says, “her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.”Lou and Jackie’s don’t connect until after the gym closes and the darkness is wrapping them in its embrace. Outside, they meet and greet, sizing each other up with hungry eyes and faint smiles. First, though, they need to deal with some narrative interruptus. One of the gym rats hits on Jackie after the gym closes, but when he grabs at her, she punches him, hard. He hits her right back in an exchange that, among other things, announces the movie’s bad-ass attitude as well as Jackie’s fearlessness, her recklessness and rage. It also effectively serves as violent foreplay to Lou and Jackie’s progressively unhinged and dangerous romance.They fall into bed quickly, and the story soon heats up, too. A bodybuilder en route to a contest in Vegas, Jackie has drifted into town, as mysterious types tend to do, where she soon lands a job to earn some cash. She crashes with Lou, who — after a steamy night and a cozy morning-after breakfast — is understandably eager for Jackie to stick around. Yet Lou also remains super-jumpy and wary, like someone permanently looking over her shoulder, and Stewart gives the character a tremulous energy that vibrates in her every look, gesture and head bob. At times, you can almost see the anxiety spreading under her skin like an electric current.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Consecration’ Review: Something Unholy

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      This unsatisfying horror film follows a woman’s search for clues after her brother’s mysterious death at a seaside convent.“Consecration,” a new horror film from the director Christopher Smith, begins with a cryptic declaration from its protagonist, Grace (Jena Malone): “My brother used to believe I had a guardian angel. And I used to believe in nothing. Now, I’m not so sure.” During this voice-over, an older nun saunters over and points a gun at the camera, which is to say, at Grace’s face.The film eventually gets to what prompts this toothlessly jarring shot, but the payoff isn’t particularly satisfying. Grace, an eye doctor, travels to the seaside convent where her brother, a priest, died. Her brother, a suspect in the murder of a fellow priest, is believed to have taken his own life, but Grace has her doubts. Suspicious of the nuns, stern traditionalists led by a dour mother superior, Grace begins looking for evidence of foul play. While she searches, she’s haunted by apparitions and visions of death, and the film often flashes back to her grim childhood in which the religious and the darkly supernatural were entwined.Yet the mythos of Grace’s past isn’t filled in thoughtfully or interestingly enough to buoy the present story’s mysteries and twists. The plot, as a result, can’t quite find its momentum; it doesn’t help that most of the film’s scares fall flat on a visual and technical level. Malone does what she can to keep it all afloat, and Danny Huston lends a bit of gravitas as Father Romero, a visiting priest who may or may not be there to help Grace. Either way, it’s not much of a thrill to find out.ConsecrationRated R. Bloody, violent content and some language. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Adopting Audrey’ Review: Building a New Home Out of Nothing

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      Jena Malone plays a young woman who’s seeking to be adopted by a gruff patriarch. Deep down, he has, you guessed it, a heart of gold.“Adopting Audrey,” the second feature film from the director M. Cahill (“King of California”), resembles many of the quirky domestic dramas that have populated the film festival circuit since “Little Miss Sunshine.” There’s a wayward young woman (Jena Malone) searching for guidance, and a gruff patriarch, Otto (Robert Hunger-Bühler), in need of human connection to soften his heart. There’s an absurd twist to this stock premise, however: The wayward adult, Audrey, would like to be adopted, which is how she meets Otto and his forlorn wife, Sunny (Emily Kuroda).It’s a little too outlandish to get behind. While Cahill has insisted in interviews and press materials that the film is based on a true story, as a reviewer, I still felt the urge to Google “types of adult adoptions” to double-check the validity of such an arrangement outside of formalizing an inheritance or reuniting with a birth parent. Even if you’re able to suspend disbelief, the bond between Audrey and Otto is weighed down by stilted dialogue and hackneyed attempts at drama.Audrey draws suspicion from Otto’s adult children, John (Will Rogers) and Gretchen (Brooke Bloom), who suspect their relationship is sexual in nature, but that plotline ends abruptly with a sudden freak accident. Sunny’s misery is treated as a shrug at best and a punchline at worst. And Cahill’s attempt to characterize Audrey’s neuroses — her watching puppy videos on her phone for hours on end — might be the laziest effort at capturing millennial malaise.The one bright spot of “Adopting Audrey” is the acting from Malone and Hunger-Bühler, who imbue their characters with more pathos than they probably deserve. Malone especially has made a welcomed return to a protagonist role — hopefully one she can replicate with more substantial material.Adopting AudreyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More