Sex, torture, and the hired help

   The Housemaid may not be a great thriller, but it hosts enough plot twists to sustain interest while offering a lush  mixture of sexual and psychological maneuvering.

  Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney team as a wealthy woman and her housemaid Millie, a woman hired to keep Seyfried's Nina's NewYork manse in shape and care for her bratty young daughter (Indiana Elle). 

  No fair telling more, but Seyfried's Nina may have more in mind than benefiting from some help around the house.

   As for Millie, she’s on parole from a sentence for murder. She needs the job lest she be returned to the slammer.  The more abusive Nina becomes -- and she's very good at it -- the more trapped her live-in housekeeper feels. 

   Brandon Sklenar portrays Andrew, Nina’s hunky, empathetic husband,  a guy who seems to have become rich without breaking a sweat. Andrew, who might have fallen into the movie from a soap opera, stands up for Millie when Nina’s torments reach intolerable levels. 

  Previously homeless and in need of a safe heaven,  Millie falls hard for him. 

   This could be a big year for Seyfried, whose performance in The Testament of Ann Lee, due on Christmas, probably will win her an Oscar nomination. Sweeney was better in Christy, the story of a woman who made boxing history, but her performance in Housemaid hits enough of the right notes.

    Although she doesn't have a big role, a severely coifed Elizabeth Perkins impresses as Andrew’s bitchy mother.

    Based on a novel by Freida McFadden, The Housemaid might be another two hour and 11-minute movie that could have hit harder at an hour-and-a-half. But director Paul Feig (A Simple Favor) knows how to manipulate our sympathies, and Seyfried’s performance adds elevated vigor.

   Some of the movie’s violence and its over-cooked sex scenes earn it a well-deserved "R" rating. A grisly scene involving a tooth adds a talking point that may make you flinch. 

    Inspired trash? Not really, but Housemaid earns additional points for glamor and unabashed guile. 

 

A homebody's best friend disappears

Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively play a snappy duet in A Simple Favor, a thriller with as much comedy as mystery.

In A Simple Favor, Anna Kendrick plays a woman who's determined to be an ideal mother. Kendrick’s Stephanie Smothers is a widow who immerses herself in her son's pre-school activities and in a cooking vlog that she begins with a trademark greeting that defines her vision of an audience. "Hi, Moms,' she chirps.

Stephanie is the kind of mother who brings out the resentments of parents who aren’t quite so gung-ho about pre-school. She drives less conscientious crazy.

Stephanie gives Kendrick an opportunity to go for laughs while keeping us guessing about whether there might be something less controlled under Stephanie's ultra-organized surface.

At first, I thought Kendrick might be overdoing Stephanie's diffidence, offering a near parodic version of a kid-and-kitchen obsessed suburban mom, but her performance grew on me.

Kendrick finds an able comic accomplice in Blake Lively, who plays Emily a woman whose confidence contrasts mightily with Stephanie's timidity. Director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) makes it clear from the outset that Emily qualifies as a career-obsessed woman who brings a take-no-prisoners attitude to everything she does. When it comes to being a mom, Emily is ... well ... indifferent to the point of neglect.

The movie opens with Stephanie telling her video blog followers that best-friend Emily has disappeared. Emily left her young son with Stephanie, who picked the kid up from pre-school along with her own son. Emily's husband is tending to his sick mother in London.

Once Emily goes missing, A Simple Favor turns into a jaunty, comic mystery built around events that unfold after Emily vanishes.

Enter Sean (Henry Golding), Emily's husband, a novelist who hasn't published anything for a decade but who lives with Emily in a sleekly modern home that evidently is supported by Emily's work as a high-power PR woman for a fashion firm and by ample amounts of debt. Fresh from Crazy Rich Asians, Golding once again is called upon to be handsome, emotionally vulnerable, charming and, in this case, perhaps a bit devious.

I wish the movie had made more time for Rupert Friend, who plays Dennis Nylon (great name), the taste-arbiter who runs the fashion firm at which Emily ruthlessly plies her PR trade.

In this case, though, it's the women -- Kendrick and Lively -- who give the movie its spark as Stephanie turns into an amateur sleuth. She searches for Emily, gradually learning that her friend might not be all that she seemed. Then again, Stephanie isn't all that she seems, either.

As a mystery, A Simple Favor doesn't always work. Feig offers a big reveal too early and an over-stuffed wrap-up threatens to tie the movie in knots.

But Feig keeps A Simple Favor marching to a snappy cadence. He also includes enough satirical garnish to heighten interest without cutting deep enough to draw blood. That's not a criticism. Feig points the movie in the right direction. Simple Favor never extinguishes its sparkle. It's a good-natured helping of venom.

Women vs. ghosts, no winners

If you thought a female version of Ghostbusters would save the summer, think again.

For some time now, a stream of on-line scorn has been directed at the new Ghostbusters, which attempts to reboot the 1984 original with women in the principal roles.

A confession: I don't regard the original, which starred Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd and Ernie Hudson, as an inviolable work or even a great movie. And in a time of remakes, do-overs and sequels, a Ghostbusters reboot should do little to denigrate anyone's pop-cultural sacred cows.

So, no, the idea of the movie doesn't bother me in the least. The movie? Truth be told, it didn't bother me, either, but it also didn't make me laugh enough to enthuse over it.

As a special-effects driven comedy, the 2016 edition of Ghostbusters can't scare up enough yucks to haunt a closet, a problem that should come as a surprise to those who believe that Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon are capable of brilliant comic work.

McKinnon outdoes her comic compatriots, but this quartet gets slimed by the overblown scale of the production.

Adding Chris Hemsworth as a sexy but dumb receptionist was an interesting comic idea in gender reversal, but one that's beaten to death before the original Ghostbusters gang begins to turn up in dutifully placed cameos.

The wittiest cameo belongs to the late Harold Ramis, who appears as a bust on a mantel in the background of an early scene.

As for the rest: There's plenty of green slime and a few chuckles, but mostly the movie wastes an opportunity to bring four gifted comic actresses together for what should have been one of summer's surefire bets.

Director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) might have been in the unenviable position of having to keep fans of the original happy and make a refreshing new comedy.

Plot? Yeah, there's a semblance of one, but who really cares? I can't imagine you'll shiver because of Neil Casey, who plays Rowan, a creep with evil plans.

The movie's idea of feminist assertion arrives in the form of an online barb one of the characters shares with her colleagues. "Ain't no bitches gonna bust no ghosts."

Ghostbusters, of course, is meant to challenge that notion as its quartet of ghost fighters aims ray-spewing devices at a series of phantoms.

But the movie is too mired in blockbuster sensibilities to say much of anything. And if it has little to say and too few laughs, what exactly is the point?

Still, I guess Ghostbusters can be considered a form of progress. Why should only men be able to make silly, bloated comedies?