‘Backrooms’ isn't about making sense

   Backrooms, an addition to the growing list of self-consciously inventive horror movies, arrives with a pedigree that may impress aficionados. Produced by horror masters James Wan and Osgood Perkins, the movie also features performances by actors with hefty resumes: Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. 

  A bit about the movie's background: It springs from a movement called "creepypasta,'' i.e., horror stories posted and shared on the internet. Director Kane Parsons, now 20, began uploading Backrooms episodes in 2022, expanding  a previous "creepypasta" concept into 22 short films.

   I learned this from Googling and had no exposure to Backrooms before I saw Parsons' movie. I say this because Parsons' movie may have more appeal to those familiar with his online work than I am.

  On one hand, Backrooms can be seen as a creative immersion in a liminal world composed of endless rooms. Liminal worlds, by the way, are currently big in horror, bland, sometimes transitional locations that resonate with eerie emptiness.

   Set during the 1990s, Backrooms slips easily into its  off-kilter tale, partly because of the aural atmosphere the film creates, a mixture of unintelligible voices and synth music by Edo Van Breemen and Parsons.

    The movie has a story of sorts, which Parsons shows us is being watched by ill-defined researchers,  a conceit that adds more cause for apprehension. 

   Ejiofor plays Clark, a furniture store owner whose life is headed in the wrong direction. His wife recently left him, and Clark has been unable to launch his desired career as an architect.

    To get on the right track, Clark visits Mary (Reinsve), a therapist he hopes will open new doors for him. She's written a book conveniently titled The Window Within. 

    Displaced from his home, Clark has been relegated to sleeping in his store. He also appears as a peg-legged pirate in awful commercials made by one of his employees (Finn Bennett). We never see any customers in Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire, one more ploy that augments the sense of vacancy that permeates Backrooms -- absence that's meant to be felt.

    When Clark discovers a portal in the store's basement, he enters a weird alternate reality. Upon returning to "normal," he shares his discovery  with his therapist, who probably thinks he's delusional.

     To convince a skeptical Mary that his experience was "real," Clark convinces Bennett's Bobby and another employee (Lukita Maxwell) to pass through the portal with him. Clark wants Bobby to film their trippy experience so that he can prove the existence of the rooms that both frighten and attract him.

      It doesn't take long for Mary to visit the store, find the portal, and enter the weird dimension in which Clark has lost himself.

     Working from a screenplay by Will Soodik, Parsons includes flashbacks to Mary's childhood with a paranoid mother. Her childhood home was demolished by developers leaving only a shard, a handprint she saved from the rubble of a concrete driveway. It will come in handy.

    Parsons offers a variety of surreal sights: piles of discarded furniture, a stop sign with the word "stop" spelled backwards, and glimpses of figures who make us suspect that the place is occupied and dangerous.

     Parsons excels at alternate-reality building: rooms full of wall-to-wall carpeting and yellow walls, and, eventually, figures with distorted features. Are we seeing funhouse reflections of the reality of Clark and Mary's lives? Maybe.

      Not surprisingly, we're primed for the big reveal that will make sense of everything we've been watching. The movie, which functions as an inventive tease, has little interest in tidying up after itself, offering only the notion that we trap ourselves in behaviors we keep repeating, no matter how many times they lead us nowhere.

       Neither Ejiofor nor Reinsve has much to develop. Mostly, they react to the movie's increasingly alienating atmospherics. Mark Duplass turns up in a role that seems as if it's going to provide the explanation we've been waiting for, but his character doesn't seem to know much about what's happening,  either. 

        Blood and gore are in short supply, and some of the movie's twisted jokes, expressionless human figures whose insides can be scooped out and eaten, feel as if they've popped out of nowhere.

      There's talent on display in Backrooms, notably Danny Vermette's creative production design, but the found-footage quality and art-horror atmospherics only take the movie so far. Ambiguity  isn't a fatal flaw, but Backrooms begins to feel repetitive as it crawls inside our heads.

      Backrooms works like a maze. Homes and offices are creepy. Lives are empty. Something's always missing. Some will find all this intriguing. Others may just want out. 

     My reaction was mixed. I appreciated Parsons' willingness to experiment and was disappointed that the characters often play second fiddle to so many half-baked ideas that suggest more than the film is  able (or perhaps willing) to realize.

Grief and a lie in ‘Eleanor the Great’

 

June Squibb is 95 and still acting, a notable achievement in and of itself. In her first directorial outing, Scarlett  Johansson casts Squibb as the title character in Eleanor the Great, a movie about an aging Jewish woman who moves from Florida to New York when her longtime roommate (Rita Zohar) passes away. In New York, Squibb's Eleanor takes up residence with her daughter (Jessica Hecht) and grandson (Will Price). Tory Kamen's screenplay contrives to have Eleanor join a Holocaust survivor's group at a Manhattan JCC. Perhaps sensing Eleanor's isolation, a survivor invites her to participate. The twist: Eleanor isn't a Holocaust survivor. Posing as one, she tells the story of her roommate, a woman scarred by Holocaust experiences. Concocting a lie about the holocaust gives the movie a sour taste that can work against the empathy it tries to build. Though brief, Zohar's performance proves a standout, but the movie works its way toward a resolution that struggles to explain Eleanor's behavior when her lie takes on a life of its own. The plot hinges on a connection Eleanor makes with an NYU journalism student (Erin Kellyman), who's grieving the recent death of her mother. She's also trying to break through the resistance of her father (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a TV personality who won't discuss his grief. The actors do their best to convey the required sensitivity, and the movie's small moments are well-played. Still, contrivances and a strained conclusion didn't convince me that the subject matter -- the seriousness of Eleanor's ruse -- had been given enough weight.*

*I've been having difficulty with the spellcheck on this app, which insists on changing names to one's it finds more recognizable. That was the case in an early posting of this review. From now on, I will double check the postings to make sure that this hasn't happened. And thanks to those who have pointed these errors out to me. 

A Stephen King adaptation with heart

          

    Hardly a fright fest, The Life of Chuck -- a big-screen adaptation of a Stephen King novella --tells three interrelated stories in reverse order, beginning with the final chapter and working its way back to the start. 

    Life of Chuck might be classed with such big-screen King adaptations such as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. The Life of Chuck isn't as memorable as either of those, but it makes room for scenes with heart, even if it tends to wear its sentiments on its sleeve.

    The stories are connected by a character named  Chuck Krantz, a fellow who appears on TV and billboards during the first segment. "39 Great Years ! Thanks Chuck!," the ads read. Sounds important, but no one knows who Chuck Krantz is. A politician? A salesman? A banker? 

    Director Mike Flanagan, who directed King's Doctor Sleep, reveals more about Krantz as the movie progresses, but The Life of Chuck is less a mystery than a collection of small moments played against a doom-laden backdrop.

     Life of Chuck rests on a thematic cushion that includes stuffing from Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar (an encapsulation of the history of the universe in a single year) and Walt Whitman's Song of Myself.  The signature line from  Whitman's poem ("I contain multitudes") is introduced by a teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the character who anchors the film's opening chapter.

    Like everyone else, Ejiofor's Marty Anderson is puzzled by the Krantz billboards. Marty also tries to cope with an escalating variety signals that suggest a possible end to ... well ... everything: the demise of the Internet, abandoned cars lining the streets of vacated cities, and massive power outages.

    Blame a mixture of man-made issues and cosmic comeuppance for the fraught condition that threatens humanity. But causes matter less than the way characters behave in the face of impending doom.

    Ejiofor and his estranged wife (Karen Gillan) eventually share a tender scene under a vast night sky, two lonely people facing a looming finality neither can comprehend. 

    The second story features a lively dance number (no, I'm not kidding) in which Tom Hiddleston, as the title character, sheds Chuck's buttoned-up  demeanor. Contrary to what the opening suggests, we learn that Chuck is no man of mystery: An otherwise anonymous accountant, he serves as the film's everyman.

     While attending a convention, Chuck passes a street drummer (Taylor Gordon), a Juilliard dropout who lays down some infectious beats. Chuck begins to dance. Annalise Basso plays a woman who joins the dance, a stranger Chuck pulls from the small crowd of gathered spectators. She becomes his partner in what might be the crowning moment of his life.

    The movie becomes more King-like in the first chapter, really its last. We meet Krantz as a boy, played at various ages by Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak, and Jacob Tremblay. Chuck's parents died in an automobile accident, leaving him to live with his grandparents (Mia Sara and Mark Hamill). 

    Not long after arriving in Chuck's grandparents' home, the movie introduces a mystery centered on the cupola that Grandpa, otherwise genial but a bit too fond of alcohol,  keeps locked. The cupola opens the door to a bit of supernatural woo-woo.

     In keeping with the film's more grounded aspirations, Grandma teaches Chuck to dance; later, he must overcome his inhibitions to take the floor at a school dance, the kind of triumph that recalls too many other teen movies.

     I don't want to oversell the Life of Chuck. An over-explanatory narration delivered by Nick Offerman sometimes falls short of eloquence, and the movie loses steam during its coming-of-age conclusion.

     Moreover, The Life of Chuck can't quite bring off its ambitious juxtaposition of cosmic-scale extinction and personal mortality. But in the movie's best moments, Flanagan wisely encourages us to accept the inescapable while still mustering enough spirit to dance.

        

A semi-amusing helping of 'Venom'

    Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is still walking around with a creature incorporated into his body, a symbiotic alien that lives in harmony with its biological human host. By the time of the third installment of Venom: The Last Dance begins, the character of Venom has become a reliable sidekick who provides straight-man Brock with comic jabs. Venom also uses his superpowers to help Brock confront enemies. 

   So what else is up with the finale of this purported trilogy?  

    I’ll give you the short-form answer:

-- Venom: The Last Dance may be more enjoyable than its two predecessors, not a great achievement, but ...

-- Amusing scenes crop up when Brock encounters a wandering hippie family led by a guitar-playing dad (Rhys Ifans). The movie makes good use of Cat Stevens’s Wild World and even better use of David Bowie’s Space Oddity. -- Knull, the self-proclaimed "god of the void,"  introduces the story by informing us of his need for the codex, a MacGuffin that will release him from imprisonment. Any time I hear the word “codex,” my eyes glaze over. Last Dance earns no exemption.

-- At one point, Brock finds himself riding with Venom outside a jet that's bound for New York. And you thought your airline experience was bad.

-- Here's a discovery: Venom, the symbiote, likes to dance. In this case, he takes the floor with Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), a character who has appeared in all the alien movies and who this time turns up playing the slots in Las Vegas. The song: Dancing Queen.

-- Chiwetel Ejiofor again adds seriousness as General Taylor, a solider who doesn’t like symbiotes. Seriousness in a movie such as this is like water polo in the Sahara. Misplaced.

-- Juno Temple joins the cast as a scientist who’s interested in befriending and studying symbiotes. Temple doesn’t have much to do. Perhaps she’s warming up for future movies.

-- Stephen Graham, who appeared in the previous Venom movie, is now a symbiote who’s being studied at a top secret military facility.

-- Kelly Marcel makes her directorial debut. She also wrote the screenplay, as well the screenplays for two previous Venom movies.

    -- Did I mention that creatures called Xenophages turn up? Not into fine dining, they try to feast on symbiotes. 

    -- The movie eventually loads up on action and turns sentimental about the relationship between Venom and the Brock. It didn't strike much of an emotional chord with me, but then I had no great fondness for the first two movies.

   If you’ve never tapped into this corner of Marvel world, you may want to sit Dance out. If you’re a fan, you’ll probably find a reasonably amusing conclusion to the trilogy.  

 And if you’re just interested in movie culture, you may want to know that more Venom movies probably loom -- even if Hardy takes a pass.

Dr. Strange vanishes in a blur of action

  

       Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness visits many parallel universes. Few are especially interesting but some are presented with visual extravagance bordering on the surreal.

    Too bad director Sam Raimi scurries through these alternate realities too quickly for us to savor the oddities he concocts. That might have taken the sting out of what can feel like an over-crowded assemblage of half-baked ideas.

   One of them involves something called the Darkhold. What's the Darkhold? Something that, I suppose, means something to Marvel fans and which the exposition-heavy Multiverse strains to explain.

    About these alternate realities: The multiverse concept already has become shopworn thanks partly to the recent success of Everything Everywhere All at Once. It's also been used in previous Marvel efforts.

   In Raimi's telling, Benedict Cumberbatch returns as Doctor  Strange, star of the 2016 solo effort that bore his name. Flourishing his red cape and sporting a goatee, the once-brilliant surgeon travels from one universe to another, I suppose to preserve the fundamental order of things.

    That order is threatened by the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen).  The witch — a.k.a. Wanda Maximoff — wants to find the universe in which she can play mom to two boys, the generically named Billy (Julian Hilliard) and Tommy (Jett Klyne). Poor witch. All she wants is the solace of normality.

     I’ve read that those who are familiar with WandaVision, available on Disney+ and also starring Olsen, will get more out of the movie. That wouldn’t be me.

     Raimi's appointment with Doctor Strange leans heavily on bloated displays of digital invention as Strange — with occasional help from the sorcerer Wong (Benedict Wong) — tries to stop the witch’s scheme.

    Oops. I forgot to mention America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), a teenager who can leap from reality to reality. America doesn’t know how she accomplishes this astonishing bit of multiverse jumping.

     In Marvel language, that means America has yet to master her powers. Don't worry, she's sure to do so in another movie.

   Other characters pop up including Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Karl Mordo, a foe of Strange, and Rachel McAdams's Christine Palmer, the woman Strange loves. 

     There’s more. Tons more, but the movie has a repetitive feel, and watching characters hurl fiery swirls of light at one another quickly loses its charge. 

     At one point, an evil version of Strange turns up sporting a third eye, which might help him if he has to find a compelling through line in this hodgepodge of a movie.

      I hadn’t been in a theater in more than a month and I was primed for a “big” movie, particularly one from a director who did admirable work in several Spider-Man movies and who early in his career earned recognition as a bold horror maven with 1981’s The Evil Dead.

      My expectations will have to wait. Raimi offers a few amusing cameos and occasional captivating sights: a vision of New York City adorned with flowers, Strange's macabre late-movie encounters, and an imaginative bit involving animated musical notes. 

     Otherwise, this latest helping of Marvel Mania whirls, twirls, and dashes from one set piece to another, leaving little but comic-book detritus in its wake. 

     Out of such detritus, more Marvel movies likely will emerge. That's not magic; it's business-as-usual.

        

Angelina Jolie returns as Maleficent

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil: a mixed and not entirely successful offering.

Let’s start at the end. Before it’s done, Disney’s Maleficent: Mistress of Evil indulges itself in a mega-helping of Disney cuteness that’s designed to please those who love their movies served with heavy doses of syrup, the kind that leave audiences with a corn-fed glow.

In this sequel to the commercially successful first edition, Angelina Jolie returns as Maleficent, the witch who detests humans -- aside from Aurora (Elle Fanning), the human daughter she raised. Maleficent has inviting ruby red lips, but you wouldn’t want to dance cheek-to-cheek with her lest you be impaled on cheekbones that jut outward like ski slopes.
In this edition, the creatures of the moors (fairies, mushrooms, and trees that spring to life) are threatened by the human kingdom where Princess Aurora (Elle Fanning) is scheduled to marry Prince Philip (Harris Dickenson).

The early, amusing part of this second helping plays like a fairy tale version of Meet the Parents. Maleficent opposes the marriage but agrees to have dinner with the royal family: good King John (Robert Lindsey) and his not-so-good wife Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer).

With prodding from her faithful, shape-shifting companion Diaval (Sam Riley), Maleficent does her best to be civil. Jolie shines when Maleficent struggles to suppress her venomous impulses.

The original movie went big on revisionism. The sequel follows suit. Most of the time we find ourselves rooting against the humans, whose destructive ambitions reach full bloom in the person of Queen Ingrith. Pfeiffer delivers her lines with as much sarcasm as she can muster. But because the dialogue isn’t all that good, the impact of the Queen Ingrith's archness feels dulled.

En route to its happily-ever-after, the movie sets off a war. Wounded as she flees that early-picture dinner, Maleficent is rescued by another winged creature with horns. Chiwetel Ejiofor's Connal presides over a cave-dwelling civilization of creatures who look like Maleficent but don’t have her super-powers.

Some of these creatures -- notably the war-mongering Borra (Ed Skrein) -- are fed up with living in exile from treacherous humans. They want to make war on the residents of the palace. The pragmatic Conall opposes such engagement, acknowledging that humans severely outnumber the non-humans.

If a fairy tale movie threatens a great battle, it surely must deliver one. Mistress of Evil whips up a CGI-fueled spectacle in which the fairy tale creatures are attacked with a concoction made from flowers that ...

Never mind. Nothing here makes a great deal of sense, but director Joachim Ronning mounts the final assault on a large scale as the humans threaten to pull off a fairy genocide.

So, to what does all this amount?

Another mash-up. Part cartoon, part action movie, part romance, and part fairy tale, Maleficent doesn't quite stake out enough turf in any of those categories totally to succeed. But it's been tailored to please its audience and probably will.

You either can view that as an accomplishment or a capitulation or (as I do) a mixture of both.

Still, when you get right down to it there’s this: Pfeiffer’s Ingrith is no match for Jolie’s Maleficent. That means every moment Jolie's off-screen (and there are too many of them) leaves us eager for her return.

Do we really care whether Aurora and Philip are able to marry or would we rather look at Maleficent with her majestic wings, flowing horns and towering cheekbones? You know how I’m voting.

Real-looking lions, same old story

Disney's new version of The Lion King has its moments, but too often fails to thrill.

By now, The Lion King has gone far beyond being a much-loved 1994 animated movie from Disney. The celebrated King rules a brand-like realm of abundant profits -- in the form of a long-running Broadway musical, numerous touring productions and loads of international recognition.

Is there a person on the planet who hasn't uttered, either in seriousness or derision, the words "Hakuna Matata?” Who hasn't felt the manufactured awe that stems from hearing the lyrics to "The Circle of Life?"

Now comes Disney's eagerly awaited computer-animated version of The Lion King, which has been made to look as if real lions are living the story of Simba, the lion who wrestles with guilt over his father's death, flees the Pride Lands and eventually returns to assume his rightful place on the throne. (Spoilers, I suppose, but who doesn't already know the story.)

Directed by Jon Favreau, who also directed the "live-action" version of Disney's The Jungle Book (2016), Lion King 2019 seems bound for box-office glory no matter what nay-saying critics think.

Me? I had a mixed reaction to the new edition. To begin with, the movie qualifies as something of a techno-curiosity. Disney's team of specialists has created a world in which (save for being able to speak English) the lions attain a level of faux realism (yes, it's a contradiction) that's striking.

Watching the beasts of Lion King feels a bit like something you might experience at a theme park that has been designed to simulate the feeling of traveling across an African savanna. No passports or inoculations required.

But there's a downside to this approach. The animals move their mouths when they speak but their faces aren't as free to express emotion as they would have been had they been drawn.

And all of the movie's animal characters romp across landscapes that also are rendered with keen realism. It's all supposed to look like "live-action."

For the most part, Favreau and his team follow the original story, so much so that some have criticized the movie for lacking freshness. But Favreau was in a no-win situation when it came to the story: Had he provided wholesale changes, he probably would have been criticized for tampering with a classic.

In trying to contain the story within clearly recognizable boundaries, Favreau has subjected himself to the opposite charge: The movie, some say, is a grandiose act of mimicry.

Audiences, I suppose, will fall on either side of the fence or won’t care at all.

The vocal talent in this edition acquits itself well: Donald Glover, as Simba; Chiwetel Ejiofor as the evil Scar, James Earl Jones, as the fallen King, Mufasa.

Alfre Woodard provides the voice for Sarabi, Simba's mother, and Beyonce gives voice to Nala, the lioness who will become Simba's bride. John Oliver adds flavor as the voice of Zazu, King Mufasa's right-paw bird.

The film springs to its most vivid life when it’s being silly, especially when Billy Eichner (as Timon) and Seth Rogen (as Pumbaa) show up. The meerkat and warthog team provide laughs and an energy boost for a movie that can feel overly solemn, particularly when the story travels to a forbidden elephant graveyard.

Using realistic-looking animals for fights may shake smaller children, although these days I'm at a loss when it comes to understanding what level of mayhem little ones are able to tolerate. The many snarling hyenas that Scar recruits as henchmen in his plot to rule can be equally scary.

Speaking of Scar, the villain of the piece looks mangy and undernourished, a creature more in need of animal rescue than a throne that satisfies his greed, hunger, and ambition.

Some of the famous musical numbers survive but don't always make much of an impact. I guess the filmmakers thought that audiences are familiar enough with these songs immediately to grasp their significance.

And, yes, the cub Simba is cute enough to win over even the hardest of hearts.

This edition of Lion King should keep the turnstiles spinning, even if its sense of discovery stems mostly from the ways in which everything has been so sharply realized. If you wanted to push the point, you could say that the whimsy of animation has fallen prey to the sharpened incisors of technical achievement.

Still, I said my reaction was mixed and I’m not changing my mind: The story's appeal remains — even if this Lion King doesn’t always thrill.

An amusing appointment with 'Doctor Strange'

Like many of you, I've grown weary of movies derived from Marvel Comics. So when a choice presented itself last week -- see Dr. Strange, another movie from the Marvel machine, or Moonlight, a much-praised movie that lit up the fall festival circuit -- I chose Moonlight. I was, however, pleasantly surprised when, on a weekend catch-up mission, I saw Doctor Strange. Sporting an American accent, Benedict Cumberbatch plays the title character, an ultra-rational neurosurgeon who learns to submerge his ego by mastering the mystical ways of the East -- or least Marvel's idea of what such ways might be. Initially, Strange heads eastward in hopes of restoring damage done to his precious hands in a devastating automobile accident. In Kathmandu, Tilda Swinton's Ancient One gradually initiates Strange into the mysteries of her universe -- with help from her sidekick Chiwetel Ejiofor's Mordo. Cumberbatch nails Strange's arrogance and makes the doctor's transition to a superhero credible. An appealing Rachel McAdams signs on as a former colleague and love interest of Dr. Strange, and Mads Mikkelsen plays Kaecilius, the villain of the piece. The plot is mushy Marvel pap, but the fun of director Scott Derrickson's movie has less to do with story than with the special-effects show that Derrickson puts on: Inception-like inward collapses of buildings, odd intersections of reality and alternate realities, and Dr. Strange's cape, which seems to have a mind of its own. Just as important, the movie has a sense of playfulness that makes Dr. Strange feel reasonably fresh -- at least until the obligatory epilogue that comes at the conclusion of the end credits. So three cheers for Derrickson and his crew. They've defeated a ton of preposterous dialogue and a plot that could have encouraged indifference to create an enjoyable comic book movie.

Can this botanist be saved?

Ridley Scott's The Martian puts a premium on smarts.

In 1979, Ridley Scott made his first journey into to space with Alien, a landmark movie that spawned sequels and turned the universe into a source of abiding terror.

Rather than harboring wondrous possibilities for communication with alien life (see Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Alien , introduced us to acid drooling monsters that hatched inside human bodies.

In 2012's Prometheus, Scott returned to space with a competent movie, but one that failed to gather Alien's cultural steam.

The same might be said about Scott's The Martian, but it's a much better movie than Prometheus, and its view of what awaits us in space may be more realistic; i.e., nothing but hardship and emptiness.

The story centers on a mission to Mars in which an early picture twist leaves botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) abandoned on the planet's desolate surface.

Believing Watney to be dead, his companions on the Ares III mission head back toward Earth. Watney must use all his scientific knowledge and ingenuity if he's going to have a chance at survival.

Despite its stark setting, the resultant film goes against the dystopian grain that distinguishes most contemporary sci-fi. The longer The Martian goes on, the more it becomes clear that Scott is making his ode to science. Brain power not brawn gives Watney a chance.

I don't know if the science in The Martian will make scientists happy. I'm hopeful that astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson will weigh in on the subject as he did on Gravity, a movie he didn't like.

But Scott has gone to great lengths to make the movie feel scientifically plausible, and from a dramatic point of view that's more important than turning the screen into a 3D science lesson.

Based on popular novel by Andy Weir, the story also makes us aware of what's happening on Earth. The head of NASA (Jeff Daniels) tries to figure out how to keep his program viable while hatching a rescue plan.

Daniels is joined by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Kristen Wiig in his efforts to determine whether Watney can be saved.

From time to time, we also check in on the crew that's headed back to Earth under the guidance of Commander Lewis (Jessica Chastain). Also on board the spaceship that fled the Martian storm believed to have killed Watney are astronauts played by Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Sebastian Stan and Michael Pena.

Watney, who talks to himself for a long time before he discovers how to communicate with Earth, narrates some of the story. These "chats" add self-reflective humor to the proceedings and don't really intrude on the story, which addresses three important questions: How will Watney deal with problems revolving involving diminishing supplies of food, air and water?

As a piece of filmmaking, The Martian is more clear-eyed than visionary. and it's weighed down by an unnecessary epilogue that follows tense finale with enough white-knuckle potential to satisfy action junkies.

Scott makes witty use of Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive and other '70s disco music, and receives a strong assist from cinematographer Darisuz Wolski, who makes reasonable -- if not dazzling -- use of 3D.

For the most part, Scott maintains focus. He doesn't suggest that science will save us, but builds an exciting entertainment around the notion that some problems are best solved by knowledge, cooperation and courage bred of necessity.

No weapons required. I'd call that both a profession of faith and a relief.

Two from the indie side of things

Digging for Fire shouldn't work, but it does

An unusual mixture of obsession and informality give Digging for Fire, a new movie from director Joe Swanberg, its feeling of freshness. Tim and Lee (Jake Johnson and Rosemarie DeWitt) are house sitting for one of Lee's wealthy clients. She teaches yoga; he's a public school teacher. Along with their young son, Tim and Lee are set to enjoy a week of unaccustomed luxury. Signs of possible tension emerge. Lee wants to accept money from her parents (Sam Elliott and Judith Light) to send their son to an expensive pre-school. A mixture of pride and a commitment to public education keep Tim from agreeing. When Lee leaves to spend a weekend with her parents, Tim is joined by friends (Mike Birbiglia, Sam Rockwell and Chris Messina), as well as by a couple of women who tag along. Tim already has been consumed by a strange task: Having found a revolver and a human bone in the backyard of this expensive home, he decides to dig for more. Eventually, he's joined in this effort by Max (Brie Larson), one of the women who attended the impromptu party and returned the next day to find her purse. Swanberg quietly introduces the real issue: the state of Tim and Lee's marriage. While Tim's flirting with Max, Lee has her own tempting encounter with a ruggedly handsome man (Orlando Bloom) she meets in a bar. I won't say more, but I will advise you to view Tim's digging more as a metaphor than plot point. By the end you'll realize that Swanberg has taken an unusual and sometimes comic look at the fragility of marriage -- and also the feeling of safety it can provide.

Z for Zachariah: quiet tension in a post-apocalyptic world

The actors in Z for Zachariah (Chris Pine, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Margot Robbie) are all capable of keeping the movie's sexual tension close to the surface. Good thing, too, because Z for Zachariah throws them into a post-apocalyptic world in which they play the only survivors. Robbie's Ann Burden lives in an idyllic valley that has survived the nuclear holocaust that ravaged the rest of the world. Once Ejiofor's character, an engineer by trade, finds his way into the valley, director Craig Zoebel sets up a dynamic in which two characters who probably never would have met under any other circumstance are forced to work out the dynamics of their relationship. This process is disrupted when another man, Pine's Caleb turns up. Like Ann, Caleb professes to be a man of faith. Ejiofor's John focuses on practical matters with an eye on the possibly of re-starting the human race with Ann. The symbolism gets heavy when John proposes tearing down a chapel that Tracy's father built so that he can use the wood to build a waterwheel for harnessing electricity. Zoebel's naturalism keeps the proceedings from feeling overly allegorical, but the deliberately paced Z For Zachariah never quite attains the primal force the material demands.

The abject cruelty of U.S. slavery

12 Years a Slave is a powerful and necessary look at enslavement

When I was a kid, we learned that the Civil War was fought over slavery -- sort of. Though acknowledged as a cause of the war, the subject of slavery always seemed muted by more generalized issues: The industrial North vs. the agrarian South and states' rights vs. centralized federal concerns.

Fair to say that slavery didn't come alive as a shocking horror. We read little or nothing about the torments of the Middle Passage, about the cruelties of a system in which people were bought and sold without regard for family connections or about how much of the southern economy was built on the backs of people who were forced to endure humiliation and toil without either rest or recompense.

Movies haven't done much to clarify the picture. From Gone With the Wind to the recent Django Unchained, we've not had a story dedicated fully to describing what the world was like during the time of slavery -- and doing it from the point of view of someone who had been enslaved.

Now comes director Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, written by John Ridley from a book by Solomon Northrup, a free black man who in 1841 was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. and sold into slavery.

Although McQueen has altered some of Northrup's narrative, Northrup's source material gives 12 Years a Slave an authenticity few other historical movies can claim.

This first-person account of America's "peculiar institution" maintains the formality of Northrup's language, but McQueen's images spring to life with troubling urgency.

Built around a solid and moving performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor (as Northrup), 12 Years a Slave hinges on a hideous deception. An accomplished fiddler, Northrup was tricked by a couple of charlatans into traveling with them as a violinist for a circus with which they supposedly were connected.

Once Northrup left his wife and children in Saratoga, N.Y., his fate was sealed. He was drugged and held in a "slave pen" in Washington a few blocks from the Capitol. In order to survive, Northrup gradually learned to hide his literacy (he was an educated man) and to answer to the name a slave trader arbitrarily gave him. He was called "Platt."

Obviously, we're a long way from the devoted slaves of southern fantasy. Mothers and children are viciously separated; brutal whippings are common, as is the sexual abuse of black women. At one point, Northrup is lynched.

His tormentors are driven off, but he's left to hang from a tree, his toes barely touching the ground, a man dancing over his own grave until his then owner (Benedict Cumberbatch) arrives to end his ordeal.

Northrup's life was threatened when he found himself subjected to an overseer's wrath. The overseer (Paul Dano) couldn't abide Northrup's intelligence. Northrup had figured out a way to get his owner's lumber more easily to market. Dano's character -- a man called Tibeats -- deeply resented any initiative on the part of a black man.

After this horrific episode, financial difficulties forced Cumberbatch's character to sell Northrup to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), a malicious slave owner who delights in abuse and who is involved in a sexual triangle with his wife (Sarah Paulson) and a slave (Lupita Nyong'o), who also happens to be the best cotton picker on the plantation.

For all of Epps' obvious evils, we probably learn more about southern society from the parts of the movie involving Cumberbatch's "kindly" Mr. Ford. Ford treats his slaves reasonably well, but he obviously accepts the institution of slavery and has profited from it. He's troubled by cruelty, but not enough to reject the system that allows it to flourish.

At times, McQueen presents us with tableaus that might have been inspired by old photographs, perhaps as a way of establishing tension between what we regard as "history" and the urgency of a drama that appears to be taking place before our eyes. A scene in which Northrup encounters a group of Indians might be the film's most mysterious, groups of outcasts who don't know quite what to make of each other.

In 1853, Northrup finally was rescued and restored to his former life. He was able to write a book about his experiences, and evidently helped slaves escape the South via the underground railroad.

As moving as Northrup's reunion with his family is, it can't (and shouldn't) entirely be enjoyed. The story of slavery isn't really about one man's journey back to his home and family; it's about all those who died as slaves, unconsoled by a loved one's touch, distant from the mothers who bore them and regarded as property in an economy built on acceptance of people as chattel.

McQueen, who previously directed Hunger and Shame, allows room for such thoughts. It's also telling (and more than a little sad) that 150 years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a movie such as 12 Years a Slave still qualifies as a rarity.