Luc Besson's bite of 'Dracula'

  If nothing else, director Luc Besson deserves high praise for turning the title character of his Dracula into a supremely ridiculous sight. This Dracula's rotting face is topped with a crown-like mound of white hair. White locks droop down the sides of his face. 

 We probably don't need another Dracula movie, but Besson, who broke onto the scene with 1985's Subway and who released La Femme Nikita in 1990, has never been one to shy away from stylish overkill that, in this case, sometimes borders on grand indulgence.

  Besson's approach to Dracula can be called semi-serious, probably more "semi" than "serious." I chuckled at some of Besson's conceits and at the richly garnished melodrama he presents, treating Dracula's story as a journey toward an exalted  expression of sacrificial love.

 Romanticism or schmaltz? Maybe both.

 Caleb Landry Jones, who starred in Besson's Dogman (2023), takes on vampire duties, which, in this case, extend over four centuries. Dracula's story begins in 1480 when we see him romping sexually with his beloved Elisabeta (Zoe Bleu).  Still in pre-vampire mode, Drac seems enthralled, but his sexual marathon is disrupted when he's summoned to war. The Ottomans must be vanquished.

  A reluctant Dracula agrees to battle for God’s cause — so long as the local archbishop guarantees that Elizabeth will not die during the fighting, a promise no one can fulfill and which would have to be broken anyway, if the story is to proceed.

   When Elisabeta is killed during the fighting, Drac slips into a long period of inconsolable mourning. He searches for Elisabeta's reincarnated self, recruiting an army of vampiric followers to help with his quest. His lovelorn yearning obliterates other concerns. The guy knows how to focus.

  Most of Dracula takes place in Paris in 1889. A priest (Christoph Waltz) appears, bringing  a large stock of vampire expertise with him. A church-sanctioned vampire hunter, Waltz's character meets a member of Dracula's legions who has been captured, a writhing prisoner played by Matilda de Angelis. 

   But Waltz's character has his eye on bigger game; he wants to drive a silver stake through Dracula’s heart, perhaps even with Drac's consent.

  Dracula, by the way, has concocted a special and irresistible perfume that makes him irresistible, which is how he catches his prey. At one point, he visits a convent to test his seductive wiles on a group of nuns. He may look like a decaying corpse, but he smells great.

  Eventually, the film introduces the reincarnated Elisabeta, who turns up as Mina, the fiancee of a lawyer (Ewens Abid) who arrives at Dracula's castle to discuss a property matter. Drac recognizes her and swoons.

  Besson doesn't go heavy on gore, but he includes weirdly playful touches, notably gargoyles that spring to life in Dracula's castle, adding a cartoonish flourish. 

  I appreciated Besson's refusal to mire Dracula in pseudo-seriousness. He's not looking for deep meanings in the way of Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. He displays no particular reverence for Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, which he could have treated as holy writ that shields secrets only he can reveal.

   The cast yields to Besson's playfulness and his penchant for overdoing things. The movie's costumes, color, and intermittent amusements add to the spectacle of a movie that doesn’t always seem to know whether it’s trying for parody or romance.

    Whatever the case, Dracula runs out of steam before the vampire takes his last bite. Too bloody bad, but excess has a way of tiring itself out.

A desert foray among the irresponsible rich

In The Forgiven, Ralph Fiennes displays his mastery as a contemptuous alcoholic physician whose bill for negligence may finally come due. Director John Michael McDonagh teams Fiennes with Jessica Chastain, who plays the other half of a battling couple who’ve been invited for a party weekend at an isolated villa in Morocco. Fiennes laces his performance with rueful cynicism in a movie that, among other things, takes aim at the cultural bigotry of the irresponsible rich. The key event: Driving through the desert at night, Fiennes David runs over and kills a Moroccan boy who's trying to sell fossils to tourists. No one at the villa seems overly concerned when David and his wife, Jo, show up with the dead boy in the back seat of their car. Complete with a pool and Moroccan servants, the villa belongs to Richard (Matt Smith), who shares the place with his aggressively boorish lover (Caleb Landry Jones). Based on a novel by Lawrence Osborne, The Forgiven eventually brings David into  contact with Abdellah (Ismael Kanater), the father of the dead boy. Abdellah wants to reclaim his son's body and insists that David accompany him to his home for the boy's burial. A man of few words, Abdellah travels with Anouar (Said Taghmaoui), an affable fellow with whom David is instructed to communicate. During David's trip with Abdellah, Jo keeps the laissez-faire approach to morality rolling,  sleeping with an American financial analyst (Christopher Abbott). The Moroccan landscapes add mystery and exoticism to an obvious takedown of Western decadence and elitism. David's tense encounter with Abdellah gives the story dramatic weight that almost saves the movie. Almost.

Those 'nice' folks are plenty scary

Jordan Peele makes his directorial debut with Get Out, a horror movie with a sharp and entertaining satirical edge about racism..

Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Allison Williams) have reached the point in their relationship when it's time for him to meet her parents. Meeting prospective in-laws can be nerve-wracking under any circumstances, but Chris and Rose bring an added dimension to the situation: They're an interracial couple.

Before you start thinking I'm about to tell you about a retooled version of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, you should be aware that the new movie, Get Out, was directed by Jordan Peele, half of the highly inventive comedy team of Key & Peele.

But don't be mislead by Peele's work on Comedy Central, either. Get Out isn't a comedy, at least not in any conventional sense. It's a horror movie enlivened by a wicked satirical bent and it has something to say about the pressures imposed on black people, often by condescending whites.

When Chris and Rose meet the parents (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford), they're greeted by instant acceptance, even though Rose hasn't bothered to tell them that Chris is black. Earlier, Rose had assured a wary Chris that everything would be OK because her dad would have "voted for Barack Obama three times if he could have."

From the start, things seem a bit off-kilter, Whitford's character tires way too hard to show his comfort in the situation, even confessing to some embarrassment about the fact that the family employs two Africa-Americans (Betty Gabriel and Marcus Henderson) to help around the house, one working outside and the other taking care of the kitchen.

This strange pair seems to have arrived from another world, one in which everyone is polite but in a slightly off-kilter way. They're wax-works versions of people, and they seem disassociated from anything that looks either spontaneous or real.

So far, I haven't mentioned anything about the movie's horror aspects, but it's probably best that you discover them in a theater. Be aware, though, not much happens in Get Out that Peele can't shake a bit of thematic resonance out of it.

A high point arises when family friends show up for a party, a collection of white folks who manage to convey a variety of deep-rooted prejudices without breaking stride. And, of course, they seem a bit odd as well, almost parodies of white people.

The only black guest at the party (Lakeith Stanfield) is as strange as the others; he's dressed like a refugee from a country club and accompanies an older white woman.

Much of the movie hinges on Kaluuya's ability to convey Chris's reaction to all the alienating weirdness that he encounters. Kaluuya's performance never sacrifices Chris's dignity or humanity. As a photographer, Chris becomes the movie's eyes. We're seeing the white world from his perspective. It's not a pretty sight.

Signs of looming trouble emerge when Rose's bother (Caleb Landry Jones) shows up, and immediately makes it clear that he's gone over some sort of hostile edge.

To further complicate matters, Keener's character is a psychiatrist who knows how to hypnotize people. Scenes in which Chris falls under a hypnotic spell and free falls through space are rendered in an abstract way that Peele manages to pull off.

Lil Rel Howery hovers around the story's edge, providing the most obvious comic relief. He's Chris's best friend, a TSA agent who -- from the outset -- urges Chris to be suspicious about what he's getting himself into. He's a comic figure, but also the voice of common sense -- and perhaps even conscience.

Because Get Out has no interest in concealing its horror-movie pedigree, Peele can't resist a bit of end-of-picture gore, but there's a satisfying revenge aspect to all the carnage.

Get Out marks Peele's directorial debut; he has accomplished something brave, sinister and stark. Amid the jolts and creep-outs, he has made a perceptive movie about the intermingling of racism and ordinary life.

I suppose you have to have some taste for horror fully to enjoy Get Out, but Peele has served up the season's sharpest hunk of weird fun; by the end, Get Out has turned into a bloody (I mean that literally) good time.

Doped up and on the streets

I'm glad people make movies such as Heaven Knows What, a hard-core immersion into the world of homeless New York City drug addicts. That doesn't mean that the movie, directed by Ben and Joshua Safdie, should be seen by everyone. In fact, Heaven Knows What can become a bit of an endurance test. The Safdies' rough-edged look at wayward, inarticulate characters seems longer on urgency than insight. The film springs from an unpublished memoir by Arielle Holmes, who also stars in the movie as Haley, a young woman torn between two guys. Caleb Landry Jones plays Illya, a young man who opens the movie by encouraging Holmes' character to commit suicide, a pretty good signal that she probably shouldn't be expecting any Valentine's Day cards. Buddy Duress appears as Mike, a drug dealer who's a little less abusive when it comes to Haley. I'm not entirely sure why we need to know what it's like to live on the streets of New York, do drugs and develop self-destructive loyalties, but the raw power and authenticity of many of the movie's scenes can't be denied and the casts' commitment -- particularly that Holmes -- qualifies as nothing short of total.

A filmmaker's story continues

Director John Boorman's Queen and Country is a belated but agreeable follow-up to his 1987 Hope and Glory.

Near the beginning of John Boorman's Queen and Country -- a much-belated sequel to the director's 1987 Hope and Glory -- a young man watches as a small crew films the shooting of German soldier who's trying to cross a river, presumably on the run from Allied forces.

The movie ends with that same young man doing his own filming in the very same spot. Boorman's final image: A picture of what appears to be the young man's 16 mm Bolex camera, its winding crank dutifully turning before the credits roll.

These scenes take place on an island in the Thames in the town of Sheperton, home to a famous film studio, which explains why the German soldier met his doom in a river more associated with London than with his homeland.

Although Queen and Country can be viewed as a semi-autobiographical look at Boorman's life, little else about it directly involves filmmaking,.

Still, aspiring film students could do worse than spend a couple of hours with Boorman's film, which takes place during the 1950s as opposed to the war years chronicled in Hope and Glory.

The reason I suggest young filmmakers take a look has nothing to do with stylistic breakthroughs or insider insights. This story about a clever but callow young man can be seen as a necessary prelude to a filmmaking career.

At 18, Bill Rohan (Callum Turner) is on the verge of being drafted. Bill hopes to avoid conscription, but -- alas -- the fateful day arrives. He's drafted into the army.

The military that Bill discovers is quite different from the one that he probably fantasized about as a kid in London during the Blitz. Neither Bill nor any of his fellow recruits seem to take the army seriously, and Britain itself isn't under attack.

Bill finds his immediate supervisor, Sgt. Major Bradley (David Thewlis), to be small-minded and laughable. He's also at odds with another sergeant major (Brian F. O'Byrne), a career soldier who loathes conscripts and believes in the letter of military law.

Richard E. Grant appears as a major, who seems to regard military affairs as an intrusion into whatever passes for his life.

Bill and his best pal Percy (Caleb Landry Jones) aren't exactly living the warrior's life. They wind up teaching typing to other soldiers, a task which they find mildly risible, a sentiment most of their students share.

Of course, typing beats service in Korea, which is where those who get crosswise with the base leadership are sent.

Pat Shortt plays Pvt. Redmond, a soldier with a strong aversion to finding himself in Korea, where the weather is frost-bite cold and soldiers are getting shot.

Because Bill is a teen-ager, part of his evolution naturally turns to love. He falls for a beautiful, upper-class woman (Tamsin Egerton) he meets in the town where he's stationed. She likes him, but she's involved with someone else.

Percy is taken by a more attainable romantic target, a nurse played by Aimee-Ffion Edwards.

It's not necessary to have seen the first movie to appreciate this one. Queen and Country functions on its own, but it may mean more if you remember from Hope and Glory that Bill's mother (Sinead Cusack) didn't marry for love, that her husband (David Hayman) fought in the war, and that Bill's older sister Dawn (Vanessa Kirby) got pregnant during the war and married a Canadian. She returns to England while Bill's still away from home, and seems hellbent on trying to be uninhibited when he returns on leave.

So, back to what I said about Queen and Country being valuable for aspiring filmmakers.

It's just this: It takes a bit of living to become a good filmmaker, and that includes the kind of exposure to reality that Bill faces as he leaves home, presumably for the first time.

Before the movie's done, Bill begins to understand what made some of the soldiers he so disdains into the people they are. He realizes that not all love is requited. He learns important lessons about friendship and loyalty, and living with imperfection. He's a lot less smug.

I'm an admirer of Hope and Glory and of much of Boorman's career, which includes movies such as Point Blank (1967), Deliverance (1972), Zardoz (1974), Excalibur (1981), The Emerald Forest (1985) and The General (1998).

I wish I could say that Queen and Country was a masterpiece, a summary work by an 82-year-old filmmaker who has matched and even exceeded what he accomplished 28 years ago.

That's not the case. But if Queen and Country isn't a great movie, it's an agreeable one, a reminder that it's best if artists live a little before they think about unleashing themselves on the world.