An assassin with a strange MO

     Visually arresting and steeped in bloody chills, Possessor does something that many horror movies fail to accomplish. From the start, writer/director Brandon Cronenberg presents us with a strange, forbidding world. There's hardly a moment of Possessor that doesn't sustain its weird, unsettling  mood. Don't look for guideposts.

       (In case you haven’t already guessed, Brandon's father is David Cronenberg, no slouch when it comes to brainy horror.)

       Although Possessor deals with recognizable themes -- identity, privacy, and the link between sex and violence -- it  seldom feels anything less than an expression of high artifice. 

      Take that as a tribute to Cronenberg's skill: Steeped in disorientation, his movie surrounds us like a creepy embrace -- albeit one that's often followed by a piercing knife to the jugular.

     Of course, there's a story. Andrea Riseborough plays Tasya Vos, a woman with a difficult job. Tasya works for Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), proprietor of an odd business. Girder projects Tasya into other people's bodies so that she can carry out assassinations.

     To return from an assignment, Tasya must shoot herself. Once her host body dies, she'll wake up gasping in the room where Girder launches all this body invading.

      I know it sounds crazy, but Cronenberg plays things straight, employing arty effects to show us how these transformations look.

      The main part of the story begins when Tasya is ordered to enter the body of  Colin (Christopher Abbott), a man with an unsavory occupation. Colin spies on others, using a virtual-reality device that relies on cameras planted in places where cameras shouldn't be. 

     The company for which Colin works is run by an arrogant businessman (Sean Bean): Colin is engaged to the man's daughter (Tuppence Middleton). 

     Tasya has three days to use Colin's body to kill both father and daughter, off himself, and return home.

     Thankfully, Cronenberg doesn't overdo the gender confusion that becomes available to him when Tasya occupies a man's body. He wisely leaves it to us to wonder what she's feeling.

      Not surprisingly, things go wrong. Tasya already has shown signs of cracking under the strain of her work. She's separated from her husband (Rossif Sutherland) who has taken over custody of their young son (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot).

     No fair telling more about a plot that takes time revealing itself, sometimes opts for atmosphere over clarity. Know, too, that Cronenberg spills plenty of plasma in the movie's highly stylized displays of violence. 

     Among other things, Cronenberg seems interested in the mind-warping powers inherent in Tasya's job. Tasya must learn to act out the various roles she plays and we're always aware that when we're looking at Colin, Tasya is pulling the strings.

     That's where I'll leave it, except to say that the movie raises  an intriguing question about the perils of performance. If a self becomes too lost, can it ever be recovered?

Drugs and despair in the streets of Detroit

Director Yann Demange grounds White Boy Rick in grim realism.

Illegal gun sales, drugs, gangs, corruption, and injustice.

You can tell from this list, and I've abbreviated it, that the new movie White Boy Rick spends little time traversing feel-good turf. Based on a true story, White Boy Rick plunges into Detroit's economic decay during the free-wheeling 1980s.

White Boy Rick focuses on three tumultuous years in the life of Rick Wershe Jr. (Richie Merritt) as he moves from a being a wayward 14-year-old with a father (Matthew McConaughey) who traffics in illegal guns to a cocaine peddler to an FBI informant and, finally, to his inevitable identity: prisoner.

In telling Rick's story, director Yann Demange pushes McConaughey into more of a supporting role than you might expect. This time, McConaughey plays a dirtbag hustler with a difference. Richard Wershe Sr. lacks the charm of some of the rogues McConaughey previously has played.

Aware of his mammoth failures as a father, Richard knows he has nothing to give his son, but the tricks of an illegal trade. McConaughey's performance hints at a sad self-awareness that borders on the tragic.

As Demange tells Rick's story, the movie evokes the ragged, jittery style of the '70s, chopping its way through lives that would be utterly empty if not for trouble.

Early on, Ricky falls in with a group of black drug dealers led by Johnny Curry (a quietly scary Jonathan Majors). Johnny's younger brother Boo (RJ Cyler), Ricky's only real friend, brings Ricky into a gang in which he's the only white guy.

For a time, it's all fun and games as Ricky finds friends and family-like ties among a group of black men who have connections to City Hall. Finally, Rick belongs to something -- or thinks he does.

Meanwhile -- and White Boy Rick is a movie of many "meanwhiles" -- Rick's sister Dawn (Bel Powley) wallows in a drug-addicted life that brings her to the edge of physical ruin. Ravaged by crack, her face seems to be rotting right along with Detroit's declining industrial landscape.

Ricky also draws the attention of two FBI agents (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rory Cochrane) who want Ricky to help them bring Johnny down. Ricky's given an impossible choice: Either he informs for the FBI or the FBI will shut down his father's illegal gun business. Family ties win out.

Some of the movie's scenes are given a humorous twist -- few greater than the movie's prologue which finds father and son arriving home from a successful buy at a gun show trying to convince the drug-addicted Dawn to accompany them for frozen custard, a ludicrous and inevitably futile stab at familial normalcy.

But harsh realities overshadow humor, even when it comes from Ricky's grandparents (Bruce Dern and Piper Laurie). Grandma keeps a pistol in her oven.

Merritt, who has no previous acting experience, gives a raw, natural performance as a kid who never entirely sells out his innocence. When Rick begs his father to join him in the drug business, he's not so much acting the thug as pleading for the life of his family and the ability to sustain it the only way he knows.

White Boy Rick isn't a perfect movie, perhaps because it never entirely convinces us that there's anything major to be gained from watching these characters fall prey to their devastated environment. Still, there's something to be said for movies that insist on shining realistic light on society's margins.

White Boy Rick makes a last-minute attempt to criticize the justice system that ultimately betrays Ricky, but the feeling one draws from the movie has less to do with rage at judicial inequity than with the bone-deep despair that stems from watching so many lives swirl desperately before going down the drain.

Imaginative highs and consternation

Annihilation casts Natalie Portman as a biologist who combats a strange extraterrestrial force.

Director Alex Garland follows 2015’s brilliant Ex Machina with a movie that’s likely to provoke equal amounts of consternation and pleasure. In Annihilation, a loose adaptation of the first in a sci-fi trilogy by author Jeff VanderMeer, Garland imagines a world in which a mysterious and unwanted guest — dubbed The Shimmer — arrives on Earth. A viscous-looking force field, The Shimmer seems to be an extraterrestrial visitor that possesses staggering disruptive powers -- and it's spreading.

As a great admirer of Ex Machina, I found myself accumulating an increasingly mixed response to Annihilation, fascination and dread accompanied by a sense of disconnection as I vainly waited for the movie to gather something resembling profound force -- or at least the illusion of such force.

In what amounts to a prologue, Garland introduces us to Lena (Natalie Portman), a grieving biologist who teaches at Johns Hopkins University. Lena’s husband (Oscar Isaac), a soldier, has been missing for about a year. The two met when Lena also served in the Army.

One day, Isaac’s character mysteriously reappears. He doesn’t seem to remember where he’s been; his face has the blank look of someone who has been anesthetized. Suddenly, he begins bleeding from the mouth and must be rushed to a hospital.

At this point, Lena and her husband are spirited off to an outpost that seems strangely removed from anything resembling normal life. Lena learns that her husband is on life support and that she inadvertently has involved herself in a government effort to understand The Shimmer.

It doesn’t take long for Lena to join the latest expedition that's about to enter The Shimmer in an attempt to reach the spot where it first landed, a lighthouse.

Movies long have sent small patrols on dangerous missions, offering violent shocks along the way. Annihilation distinguishes itself by sending an all-female cast into the fray. Lena joins forces with a paramedic (Gena Rodriguez); a physicist (Tessa Thompson, and an anthropologist (Tuva Novotny). Skilled in the use of combat weapons, the women are led by a psychologist who previously selected those who would enter the Shimmer. So far, only Lena's broken husband has returned from such a mission.

It’s worth pointing out that Gena specializes in cellular-level investigations of cancer: Perhaps The Shimmer can be seen as a kind of traveling intergalactic cancer that has invaded the Earth. It has begun to mess up the DNA of both plants and animals, producing unholy combinations, interspecies creatures such as a giant albino alligator with the teeth of a shark or a bear whose bite may remind you of the creature in Alien.

The movie's attacks are graphically presented and geared to producing knots in most stomachs.

Garland’s greatest achievement involves the creation of the world inside The Shimmer, a multi-colored fungal paradise where dangers lurk and everything feels a few clicks away from normalcy. You almost can feel the dampness as the quintet of women moves deeper into The Shimmer's embrace.

The movie’s atmosphere feels strange and novel, but even as it seeps into your pores, some conventional conflicts emerge, well conveyed by the movie's players. Of these, Portman portrays the character with the most extensive backstory. Her stated reason for entering The Shimmer: To save her husband, which also means saving her marriage. I won't say more.

Garland wisely refuses to explain The Shimmer, allowing it and us to wallow in ambiguity. Is it a living thing? Does it have desires or is it simply a wanton force that indifferently spreads genetic nihilism?

It’s always precarious to try to read the mood of a preview audience, but I’d say that Annihilation came to an end without creating a widely shared response among those who had just seen it. Speculation on my part, of course, but you usually can tell when a movie has connected with an audience — even if you’re not on the receiving end of that connection.

There are reasons that audiences may be put-off. Garland tells much of the story in flashbacks as men in Hazmat suits question Lena. These intermittent interrogations stall the movie's narrative engine. It’s also possible that the movie's finale is too ambiguous to produce a collective “wow.”

Annihilation follows Lena to the end of the story; the result is creepy enough but it’s not clear that Annihilation will produce many blown minds. Maybe this is a case where laudable ambitions couldn't carry Garland far enough to make us more than interested -- if perplexed -- tourists in a weirdly conceived world. There, basic elements shatter and recombine in ways that, like the movie, startle and intrigue without ultimately cohering.

The misery of an alienated puppet

Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa makes the ordinary seem odd.

In Anomalisa, directors Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson immerse us in an environment so insistently ordinary, it almost becomes banal.

Almost everything about Anomalisa has the feel of dreary mundanity: an airplane's interior, the back seat of a taxi cab, a hotel room that's indistinguishable from thousands of other hotel rooms, and a hotel bar that's depressingly generic.

Enter Michael, an expert in customer service who has traveled from Los Angeles to Cincinnati to give a talk about how those who communicate with customers via the phone can improve their work. As the author of How May I Help You Help Them -- a bible in the field of customer relations -- Michael seems well-qualified for the job.

It doesn't take long before we realize that Michael is a spiritually exhausted British transplant. Mired in a marriage that no longer sparks his interest, Michael has a young son he'd rather not talk to when he calls home. His wife ignores his objections, and puts the boy on the phone. Rather desperately, he calls the kid "slugger."

Oops. I forgot something important. Did I mention that Michael is a puppet and that everything in Anomalisa results from stop-action animation that Kaufman and Johnson filmed with scale models? Michael (and the rest of the puppet characters) look as if they're wearing masks; visible seams make it appear as if their faces are composed of replaceable modular part.

More than half of Kaufman's achievement involves making puppets into credible characters. Puppetry gives the movie -- derived from a play that Kaufman wrote -- a strangely insulated air, as if everything we're watching has been hermetically sealed inside a diorama.

Kaufman's characters feel real and unreal at the same time, a feeling that's reinforced when the movie veers off into one of Michael's dreams.

No one should be surprised that Kaufman, who wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation and who directed Synecdoche, New York, includes touches that don't always add up, that he presents an explicit puppet sex scene (yes, it works) or that all the film's characters, aside from Michael (David Thewlis) and Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), are voiced by Tom Noonan.

There's a point to that, I suppose. For Michael, everyone speaks in the same voice; the world has become one lengthy smorgasbord of undifferentiated boredom.

After a disastrous meeting with a former girlfriend, Michael discovers Lisa. He considers Lisa an anomaly; she seems alive in a way that can't be squelched either by the hotel's airless monotony or the existential mush of Michael's life. He concocts an exotic name for her, Anomalisa, part anomaly and part Lisa. Ergo, the movie's title.

Lisa has a scarred face, and she hides the scar by drooping her hair over it. She badly needs an affirming experience, but she's not defenseless. She seems able to handle a sexual encounter with Michael, even if it doesn't go beyond a one-night stand. She'll take what she can get.

In Lisa's world of lowered expectations, Michael qualifies as a celebrity. She's flattered by Michael's attentions, particularly when he chooses her over her traveling companion, a woman who's equally eager to sleep with this customer-relations genius.

For his part, Michael says he's fascinated by Lisa's voice, the only one in the movie that doesn't sound like every other voice. At one point, Lisa sings a song for Michael, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," and the moment hovers in a limbo between poignant and pathetic.

At other times, Michael seems ridiculously out-of-touch with reality. He stops at a shop that sells sex toys, a place recommended by a taxi driver who wrongly assumed that Michael was just another businessman looking for some on-the-road thrills.

Anomalisa serves up an odd mixture of the bland and the idiosyncratic, but what to make of it? Are we supposed to identify with Michael, abhor his selfishness or take him as a representative of some generalized male malaise?

I'm not sure, but Kaufman condemns Michael to the depressing existence of a man whose life is going nowhere and who seems to have succeeded only in spreading his misery.

Kaufman is a bona fide talent, but it's up to you to decide whether you want to become the company that Michael's misery loves.

'Hateful Eight' : blood, racial conflict -- at length

Tarantino's overlong and, of course incendiary, foray into the West.

A B-movie trying to wear A-movie clothes -- and not always doing a good job of it.

That's part of what I thought about The Hateful Eight, director Quentin Tarantino's three-hour opus, a Western that was filmed in Telluride, Colorado. Like the so-called road shows of yore, Hateful Eight begins with an overture (Ennio Morricone wrote the score) and includes an intermission.

The movie can be seen in 70mm at certain locations, although the necessity of seeing it that way can be argued. The movie's "prestige" trappings struck me as overkill, a phenomenon not unknown to a director whose seven previous movies have been known to go over-the-top.

As usual, Tarantino plays with structure, but he's decided to go against the Western grain. The snow-covered landscapes of the movie's opening suggest a spacious background, but the bulk of The Hateful Eight takes place indoors.

Tarantino's screenplay revolves around a simple premise: More than a decade after the Civil War, bounty hunters take shelter in a cabin during a blizzard. It doesn't take long before these bounty hunters are interacting with strangers in a high-stakes game not all of them will survive.

Before the movie's done, its characters are given ample opportunity to prove that they've earned the movie's title. They're a hateful bunch, several of them steeped in racism stemming from North/South divisions that haven't begun to scar over.

If there's a main character here, it's probably Samuel L. Jackson's Marquis Warren, a savvy bounty hunter who led a group of black fighters during the Civil War.

Early on, a stranded Warren stops a stage coach to ask for a ride. He's transporting two dead outlaws across the snow-covered hills: His destination: the Wyoming town of Red Rock. His goal: to collect bounties.

The stage coach has been hired by John Ruth (Kurt Russell), another bounty hunter who's headed to Red Rock. Ruth is transporting a murderous woman named Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to an appointment with the hangman.

It doesn't take long before another traveler joins the group. Walton Goggins portrays Chris Mannix, a former Confederate soldier and the guy who's supposed to take over as Red Rock's new sheriff.

Once the travelers reach the stage stop -- the oddly named Minnie's Haberdashery -- they encounter more characters: an English hangman (Tim Roth), a cowboy who scribbles in a diary (Michael Madsen), an aging Confederate general (Bruce Dern) and a Mexican (Demian Bichir) who claims to be taking care of the place for Minnie, who's off visiting someone or other.

No one who's familiar with Tarantino's work will be surprised to learn that Hateful Eight includes considerable violence, profanity and racial slurs.

If you thought that Tarantino made his racial movie with Django Unchained, think again. Warren instantly is pitted against southern, racist sensibilities and once again, Tarantino gives the "n" word a workout. Its use here can be piercing, raw and maybe a bit forced: One presumes that Tarantino wants to use the movie's isolated setting to get at what he regards as the ugly, bottom-line truth of racial hatred.

Perhaps, but you'd think by now, Tarantino (who writes his own scripts) would have developed a severe case of "n" word fatigue.

Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson, who has filmed many of Tarantino's movies, don't always find ways to make the depressingly brown interiors of Minnie's Haberdashery all that interesting, and this time, they're stuck in a situation in which talk mostly trumps action -- at least in the movie's pre-intermission segments.

That shouldn't be a problem for Tarantino, whose speciality is dialogue, but there are times when you're a little too aware that the characters aren't exactly talking; they're indulging in Tarantino-speak. Put another way: You can hear the writing.

Now, there are surprises here, so there's not much point saying more about what happens in this God forsaken Wyoming outpost other than to note that Tarantino breaks the movie into five acts, each introduced by a title card.

Know, though, that Jackson seems to be playing a character who's not entirely unlike Jules, the hit man he played in Pulp Fiction; he's whip smart and nasty when he needs to be.

Russell's character specializes in what appears to be misogynistic brutally, punching Daisy when he thinks she's out of line. Leigh spends much of the movie with a bloodied face. Of course, Daisy's no angel, either.

Of all the performances Leigh's feels the freshest, reaching near-demonic proportions. An enraged Daisy is something to behold; she could be a guardian at the gates of hell.

When it comes to color palette, Hateful Eight might be the brownest movie I've ever seen. I'm not sure what that signifies, other than that it breeds a whiff of monotony, a condition not unknown to the movie, particularly as it approaches its intermission.

Intense violence explodes during the movie's protracted finale, generating enough plasma to fill a blood bank before Tarantino brings the movie to its rueful dead-end of a conclusion. These westerners know how to get medieval on one another, to borrow one of Tarantino's signature phrases.

As is often the case with Tarantino, we're not sure whether he's reading reality or commenting, expanding on and sometimes subverting pop-cultural tropes, some of them his own. Put another way, I can't say I really believed much of anything I was watching.

Besides, volatile as it is, even hate gets boring after a while.

Kirsten Wiig gets serious

Hateship Loveship proves punchless.

Hateship Loveship -- one of several recent movies that has been available on VOD prior to reaching theaters -- proves a restrained but imperfect attempt to turn an Alice Munro short story into a feature-length movie.

Hateship Loveship surrounds Kristen Wiig -- in a serious role -- with some fine supporting talent, notably Nick Nolte, Hailee Steinfeld and Guy Pearce.

Wiig plays Johanna, a woman who embarks on a new adventure after the elderly woman she has been working for dies. Isolated for much of her life, Johanna becomes a kind of housemaid and nanny to Mr. McCauley (Nolte) and his recalcitrant teen-age granddaughter Sabitha (Steinfeld).

The plot engages when one of Sabitha's friends (Sami Gayle) decides to play a prank on Johanna, setting up an affectionate e-mail correspondence between Johanna and Pearce's Ken, Sabitha's drug-addicted father. Ken's contributions to this dialogue are composed by Gayle's Edith.

Acting on what she believes to be her one chance for love, lonely Johanna travels to Chicago and moves in with Ken, who resides in a rundown motel that he makes noises about renovating.

Half spooky and half sincere, Wiig proves convincing as a woman who knows next to nothing about the world and its rules.

Gradually, Johanna takes over Ken's life: She sees hope where we see nothing but potential doom.

To worm her way into Ken's world, the emotionally underdeveloped Johanna must displace Chloe (Jennifer Jason Leigh), one of Ken's junkie pals.

Director Liza Johnson, working from a script by Mark Poirier, files off the story's rougher edges, which has the effect of making Loveship Hateship entirely too easy to shrug off.

What could have been a tender little movie seems little more than a curiosity: Wiig in a role without a comic side.

Finally, a worthy teen movie

Before The Spectacular Now, I wondered whether I'd ever want to see another film about adolescence, but director James Ponsoldt's addition to the genre qualifies as a remarkable achievement, a movie full of real feelings and real problems -- in short, a film about young people that refuses to pander.

Adapted from a novel by Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now reflects Ponsoldt's desire to find a bit of truth in a genre that doesn't always value honesty.

Ponsoldt’s cast earns some of the credit. Miles Teller) plays Sutter, an underachieving kid who's flirting with alcoholism. Sutter lives with his mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh), works part-time at a men's clothing store, parties hard and seems committed to a philosophy he calls "living in the moment."

Immersion in the present is well and good, but it's pretty clear that Sutter might be on the verge of throwing his life away. College? No. A future? Why bother? We know that Sutter’s spectacular present eventually will give way to the mediocrity that often results from squandered potential. How long will it take before the flask Sutter carries ceases to be a sign of rebellion and becomes a badge of dishonor?

Sutter is smart, amusing and glib in ways that can seem off-putting at first, as if Teller has been instructed to do a Vince Vaughn imitation. Don't give up on the kid, though; as the story progresses, he reveals depths that go beyond the surface of his clever retorts. He begins to question his views, in part because he forms relationship with Aimee (Shailene Woodley), a classmate who's not at the center of high-school party life and who’s a bit more substantial than the girl (Brie Larson) who dumps Sutter in the movie's early going, although she's no ditz, either.

Aimee and Sutter meet in an early morning scene in which Sutter awakens on Aimee's lawn. Drunk as usual, he forgot where he left his car. An exchange develops: Sutter asks Aimee to help him learn geometry; he basically schools her in how to have a better time in high school.

Lurking in the background is Sutter's father (Kyle Chandler), a heavy drinker who Sutter hasn't seen in years. His mother won't even tell Sutter where his dad lives. When he learns his father's whereabouts from his sister (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Sutter decides to visit. Dad, we soon learn, is a preview of coming attractions for what Sutter easily could become, an irresponsible jerk.

Spectacular Now provides Teller with a breakthrough role. Woodley -- familiar as George Clooney's teen-age daughter in The Descendants -- continues to impress.

Shot in Athens, Georgia -- where Ponsoldt grew up, The Spectacular Now is more than a good teen movie; it's a good movie, a look at characters we come to care about right up until the film's mildly ambiguous conclusion.