Viola Davis gets fierce as a warrior

 

  An actress of intense focus, Viola Davis might have been born to play a female warrior — not a Wonder Woman style superhero but a a battler born of hard experience and bone-deep commitment. With a swaggering walk and steely gaze, Davis mixes indomitable will and commitment to principle.

   Inspired by a true story, The Woman King introduces us to the so-called Amazons or in terms of Dahomey culture, the Agojie. These were women trained for war in the Kingdom of Dahomey after many of  its men were captured and sold into slavery by the rival Oyo empire. 

  The conflict between Oyo and Dahomey forms a backdrop for plentiful action sequences in which the women prove their formidable strength. 

  Director Gina Prince-Blythewood, working from a screenplay by Dana Stevens and Maria Bello, finds the heart of the movie when she introduces Nawi (Thuso Mbedu),  a young woman who’s handed to the Agojie by her father.

  Cocky and arrogant, Nawi must learn to submit to the Agojie ethos, which roughly amounts to one for all and all for one: Military success relies on the smooth functioning of the group rather than on individual heroics — although there’s plenty of the latter,  The Woman King being a movie not a historical tract.

  Men don’t much feature in the story, primarily because the Agojie are housed in a separate and restricted part of the king’s palace.    

   John Boyega portrays the Dahomey ruler, King Ghezo, a monarch with many wives and mildly conservative views. Davis’s Nanisca tries to convince the king that selling Africans is wrong regardless of the ethnic group to which someone belongs. 

  Two additional women (Adrienne Warren and Lashana Lynch) distinguish themselves as Agojie warriors, mentors and confidants.

   European intrusions arrive in the form of a white slave trader (Hero Fiennes Tiffen) and his pal Malik (Jordan Bolger). Born of an Africa mother and a white father, Malik has been sent to Dahomey by his mother to find his roots. 

  Nawi catches his eye and the screenplay toys with a dubiously plotted romance while trying to remain true to the notion that the last thing the Agojie need are male protectors. 

   The Woman King team creates an alluring Dahomey village where the Agojie train and where Nanisca eases her strained muscles in the azure waters of an indoor pool, perhaps the 19th century equivalent of a hot tub.

    If the Dahomey village has been idealized, so be it. Viewers may find other suggestions of the kind of cultural celebration that existed on a much more hyper-realized level in Black Panther. 

   Aside form the slavers, the principal villain in the piece arrives in the person of Oda (Jimmy Odukoya), who rules over the Oyo and ruthlessly participates in the slave trade in alliance with the Portuguese. Nanisca has her own reasons for wanting to vanquish Oda. 

   The Woman King was filmed in South Africa, not in the West African nation of Benin, as the former Republic of Dahomey now is known. Presumably, the rituals and dances staged by Prince-Blythewood  reflect a degree of authenticity.

   As for historical accuracy, a little time with Google will let you know that the movie cuts corners, opting to provide what might might be considered an outline of the forces at work in West Africa during the second decade of the 19th century.

   Whatever its shortcomings, The Woman King has Viola Davis, who’s playing a character enhanced by conviction and strength wrought from the punishing toil of living.

    The sight of Nanisca charging an enemy, her scimitar pointing skyward, will make you believe that she can strike fear into the hearts of anyone who would do her wrong.

A reason to be afraid of the dark

Lights Out efficiently delivers the expected shocks.

Swedish filmmaker David F. Sandberg makes his feature debut by expanding his award winning short, Lights Out. If you want to get a feel for the scare tactics used in this minimalist hunk of horror, you can watch Sandberg's short on You Tube. The idea is simple: Turn out the lights and a threatening but ill-defined monster appears. To get beyond the jump scares of the short, Sandberg and writer Eric Heisserer add a rudimentary story: A young woman (Teresa Palmer) rescues her 10-year-old half brother (Gabriel Bateman) from the home of their disturbed mother (Maria Bello). Mom's mental issues -- she was once committed to an asylum -- lend a patina of psychology to a movie that consciously toys with the audience, and expects the audience to recognize and appreciate the manipulation. That's part of the fun. Because it's only partially seen, the shadowy monster (Alicia Vela-Bailey) proves plenty eerie. If you want to make something more out of Lights Out, you could talk about the inner darkness that haunts Bello's character, extending to everyone she touches. But mostly, Lights Out offers 81 minutes worth of scares without really penetrate nightmare terrain. One caution: A shocking finale proposes a solution for destroying the monster that no therapist would endorse.

A thriller under heavy thematic weather

Prisoners is one of the most effectively grim thrillers in a long time.

Denis Villeneuve's new thriller, Prisoners, brings an alarming shiver to the screen, not only because its story generates a dire and escalating sense of creepiness and dread, but because cinematographer Roger Deakins's corroborating imagery tends to be dark, damp and as unforgiving as the hard-driving rains of a Pennsylvania winter.

The French-Canadian Villeneuve (Incendies) has made a movie that sometimes feels as if it's happening in an alternate reality, one in which moral rot has penetrated the heart of a small Pennsylvania city.

That may sound more like the basis for a horror movie than a thriller, and it's worth knowing that Villeneuve -- working from a script by Aaron Guzikowski -- stirs suggestions of horror into the movie's intensely dour mix.

The title is apt in many ways, not the least of which is the way in which Villeneuve and Deakins depict the American landscape as one imprisoned by gloom, almost as if nature has become an accomplice in some ill-defined decline.

The story could have been inspired by any number of real-life crime scenarios. Hugh Jackman plays Keller Dover, a struggling carpenter whose life -- and that of his wife (Maria Bello) -- receives a terrifying jolt when his young daughter is kidnapped along with the daughter of a neighboring couple (Viola Davis and Terrence Howard).

Dissatisfied with the work of a local detective (Jake Gyllenhaal), Keller takes matters into his own hands, kidnapping a prime suspect, a young man (Paul Dano) who hasn't progressed beyond the mental age of 10. After being questioned by police, Dano's Alex Jones is released for lack of evidence.

Davis and Howard gradually slip from view as the script concentrates its moral ambiguities in the hands of Jackman (fierce and uncompromising) and Gyllenhaal (a cop with an eye twitch and a bad haircut).

Believing that only Jones can lead him to his daughter, Keller proceeds to imprison and torture the mentally challenged man, and the screenplay begins introducing a near-barrage of red herrings.

The initial disappearance of the children takes place during a Thanksgiving dinner that's being shared by Jackman and Bello and Howard and Davis. It's clear that the two families -- each of which also has an older child -- are accustomed to spending time together, but as the story progresses, it also becomes clear that Jackman's Keller is the most extreme member of this quartet; he's a recovering alcoholic, a hunter and an amateur survivalist who's deeply schooled in the notion that men take care of themselves and that society -- with its wafer-thin veneer of laws -- cannot be trusted.

The screenplay doesn't overemphasize Keller's dissatisfaction, but he's the kind of blue-collar guy who easily could feel that the system -- however he defines it -- might, at any moment, betray him.

Sporting gray hair and the shuffling walk of a woman aged beyond her years, Melissa Leo plays Alex's aunt, the woman who helped raise him.

Of course, we feel the anxiety of parents who aren't sure that their children remain alive. Of course, we feel the brutal effectiveness of torture scenes that take place in an abandoned apartment building that Keller owns but can't afford to renovate. And the film holds our attention through its 2 1/2-hour length.

It's difficult to discuss much more without spoilers, but know that Prisoners -- though encompassing, well-acted and morally ambitious -- includes a bit of overreaching in its finale, perhaps an attempt to underline the movie's thematic seriousness. at times, the screenplay loses credibility amid Villeneuve's thickening applications of tension and mood.

Unlike more traditional thrillers, Prisoners does not offer a totally cathartic sense of relief. It wraps things up, but the physical and moral dampness that pervades everything feels as if it might never dry.