A ballet-dancing pre-teen vampire

 

   Abigail may evoke memories of an Agatha Christie mystery in which strangers trapped in a mansion are bumped off one by one. The movie also has elements of a crime caper in which the 12-year-old daughter of a wealthy man is kidnapped by aspiring felons who've been hired by a mysterious organizer. 

   Last but not least, Abigail brings a variety of horror movies to mind, the kind that use humor to ease us toward ample helpings of blood, gore, and gook.

   Having said all that, it may come as a surprise that fans of contemporary horror may find Abigail tolerable and even amusing, a slickly realized production from directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who operate under the name of Radio Silence and who previously directed a couple of Scream films. 

   The movie also arrives with an ostensible pedigree, notably a connection to the 1936 movie, Dracula's Daughter. Let's just say, the reference feels tenuous and most likely will be irrelevant to many of today's moviegoers.

   No one who has seen the trailer will be surprised to learn that Abigail, the kidnapped child, is a vampire who initially presents as a helpless pre-teen ballerina we first meet during a rehearsal of Swan Lake. Abigail evokes sympathy that would have been greater if we didn't already know the movie is out for blood.

 The motley crew of kidnappers centers on Frank (Dan Stevens) who emerges as a take-charge jerk and a young woman (Melissa Barrera) with a tragic past that includes drug addiction. 

  The rest of the bunch includes stock characters such as Kathryn Newton's Sammy (rich girl turned bad), Kevin Durand's Peter (the muscular dope), Angus Cloud's Dean (the clueless member of the group), and William Catlett's Rickles (a former marine).

  It takes a while for Abigail (a hard-working Alisha Weir) to show her true colors, which include bad teeth, a ferocious roar, a variety of physical acrobatics, and a couple of lines that underscore the movie's taste for sarcasm.

  At one point, Abigail tells us she likes to "play with her food."

  The directors are caught in a trap that encourages them to take horror tropes semi-seriously while also offering each shock as if it were a grisly party favor for audiences that are definitely in on the joke.

  When vampires are destroyed in this movie, they explode, their remains turning into pulpy showers of blood and guts. Early victims are decapitated.

   My bottom line: To me, Abigail felt longer than its one hour and 49 minutes, perhaps because the movie seems overly calculated in its attempts to shock and amuse while happily embracing its schlocky roots. 

   By current standards, Abigail can't be called awful, but I found it a little too eager to lick its own bloody lips.

  

Bob's Cinema Diary: Jan. 18, 2024: 'Freud's Last Session' and 'Apolonia Apolonia'

Freud's Last Session 

Based on an off-Broadway play, Freud's Last Session imagines the waning days of Sigmund Freud’s life, building a movie around an invented a conversation between the great psychoanalyst (Anthony Hopkins) and author C. S. Lewis (Matthew Goode) of Narnia fame. Lewis, a believing Christian, and Freud, an atheist, hash out big questions against a backdrop of war. The year: 1939. That should have been enough. But director Matthew Brown opens things up, adding, among other things, scenes depicting Lewis's horrific experiences in World War I. Hopkins's performance emphasizes the pain Freud experiences from cancer of the jaw, his consumption of pain-relieving morphine, and his dismay about having had to leave Vienna because of the rise of Hitler and Nazism. Freud's dependent relationship with his gay daughter (Liv Lisa Fries) also breaks into the solitude of Freud's study, where much of the movie is set. I could go on, but suffice it to say that the interchanges between the two primary characters often lacked urgency. In all, Freud’s Last Session struck me as a missed opportunity for intense conversation sans any distractions. 

Apolonia Apolonia

Director Lea Glob filmed painter Apolonia Sokol for 13 years, charting the painter's life as she gradually gained recognition for her portraiture. As a kid, Sokol lived a bohemian life with her father in a theater in Paris. She eventually attended the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, an institution that can serve as a launching pad for major art careers. Apolonia's graduation didn't immediately vault her into the art world's upper tiers. In the U.S., Apolonia met Stefan Simchowitz, a collector, promoter, and patron who cultivates relationships with young artists. Glob follows her own growth and confusions, as well as Apolonia's in Apolonia Apolonia, a movie that captures the chaotic life of a young artist. Apolonia Apolonia stands as an imperfect documentary about an artist's struggle. But its imperfections and narrative leaps sometimes seem well-matched to a life in which both director and her subject are trying to find their footing.

A whistleblower tries to stop the Iraq war

The filmmaking isn't flashy, but Official Secrets tells a compelling story.

In 2003, Katherine Gun did her best to stop Britain from entering the Iraq war. As a British intelligence employee with a specialty in translation, Gun violated the country's Secrets Act so that she could reveal a controversial email. The email instructed those working at Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to look for information that could be used to pressure U.N. Security Council members to vote for a resolution authorizing the war.

Although Gun's leaked email was published by The Observer, it obviously didn't stop British participation in a war that was being carefully engineered and for which the "intelligence'' books were being cooked.

Directed by Gavin Hood (Eye in the Sky) and starring Keira Knightley, Official Secrets tells Gun's story in straightforward fashion, taking us inside a whistleblower's anxiety-riddled world. Things don't go smoothly for Gun, who eventually was put on trial for violating the Official Secrets Act of 1989.

Knightley and Hood don't add much by way of over-dramatized flourish to the portrayal of Gun, a woman who lived with her Muslim husband (Adam Bakri) in London. After making her momentous decision, Gun tormented herself. Would she get caught? Had she done the right thing?

Written by Sara and Gregory Bernstein, Official Secrets boasts a strong supporting cast. Matt Smith appears as Observer reporter Martin Bright, the journalist who fights to publish the explosive email. Matthew Goode portrays one of Bright's colleagues and Rhys Ifans signs on as the Observer's wild-eyed U.S. correspondent, a reporter who works hard to confirm the authenticity of the email Gun leaked.

Conleth Hill portrays the editor who struggles about publishing a story that could derail a war effort his paper previously supported. Late in the movie, an understated (what else?) Ralph Fiennes shows up as Ben Emmerson, the barrister who defends Katharine.

Official Secrets doesn't always make for rousing cinema but it serves as an important reminder of what can happen to those who realize that secret government objectives sometimes should be subordinated to higher values, one of them being the truth.

He helped win World War II

The Imitation Game may not be the year's boldest film, but it tells a good story.

Alan Turing never put on a uniform, but his efforts went a long way toward helping the Allies win World War II. Turing, you see, was the mathematical genius who cracked the Nazi Enigma code, thereby hastening the end of the war.

If The Imitation Game -- a new movie about Turing's life -- has it right, Turing was an intensely focused man with limited social skills and no idea about how his behavior effected others. He wasn't mean. He was simply oblivious to the demands of almost any social situation.

Played with brilliant eccentricity by Benedict Cumberbatch (expect an Oscar nomination), Turing isn't exactly an inspirational figure. He often displays the kind of insistence that would drive most of us crazy.

The movie's psychology is handled in sketchy fashion. Turing, we learn in one of the movie's many flashbacks, carried a sense of abiding grief from the loss of a childhood love, an older schoolmate on whom he had a crush.

Clearly, we're meant to see Turing as an unrecognized groundbreaker whose life ultimately was destroyed by the British legal system. Turing's work went unacknowledged until the 1950s, and he suffered at the hands of cruelly archaic British laws regarding homosexuality.

Director Morten Tyldum does his most interesting work in Bletchley Park, the estate where Turing developed his so-called Universal Machine. Turing was certain that this early computer would be better at cryptography than any human, a view not shared by all his colleagues.

Turing's principal adversary turns up in the form of Commander Denniston (Charles Dance), an army officer who runs Bletchley with a spit-and-polish attitude that's ill-suited to supervising a bunch of chess-playing mathematicians.

In what the movie treats as an emotional turning point, co-worker Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode) rallies support for Turing, who's on the verge of losing his position. Until then, Alexander hadn't been much of a Turing fan.

Keira Knightley plays Joan Clarke, a math whiz recruited by Turing for his project. He proposed to her as a matter of convenience, although the movie makes it clear that Turing had real feelings for her, and she for him.

The Imitation Game has been criticized for taking a middlebrow approach to its source material, Andrew Hodges's 1983 biography about Turing. Some have criticized the movie because Turing's homosexuality is more alluded to than shown.

Fair comments, I suppose, but there are interesting ethical implications in the story.

If knowledge of the broken code had been overused, the Germans would have known that the code had been cracked. As a result, information obtained from code-breaking was employed sparingly.

Sacrifices were made so that the information obtained from the Germans could be put to maximum use.

Tyldum, mistakenly I think, sets the story against an awkwardly employed framing device in which a police inspector (Rory Kinnear) questions Turing after his arrest. The misguided detective is trying to determine whether Turing spied for the Russians.

Because of his homosexuality, Turing was found guilty of "gross indecency." He submitted to hormone therapy as an alternative to prison. He committed suicide a couple of years later. He was 41.

Those familiar with the story will know that the filmmakers have taken a variety of liberties in telling it, but the core of the yarn remains intact.*

At its best, The Imitation Game stands as a fascinating look at the singular accomplishment of a strangely obsessive man.

*If you want to know more about discrepancies between Turing's real story and the movie, this article from the New York Review of Books is a good place to start. But keep in mind that movies long have valued dramatic imperatives over historical accuracy.

Lots of menace with no place to go

A talented Korean director shows off his skills but Stoker still falters.
Generally, I have mixed feelings when directors from other countries -- particularly those with distinctive styles and edgy concerns -- travel to the U.S. for English-language productions. I root for the their success, but can't help wondering whether something vital will be lost in translation.

In his first U.S. movie, the often brilliant and always provocative South Korean director Park Chan-Wook (director of movies such as Oldboy and a trilogy of Vengeance films) completes about three-quarters of the journey to a new culture. Park's Stoker can't quite provide the rich payoff his movie promises -- but that's not to dismiss the film's early going, a virtuoso display of style in which Park creates an atmosphere chilled by impending, perhaps inevitable doom.

Working from a screenplay by Wentworth Miller, Park seems to be riffing on Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. Both movies make room for an ambiguous character named Uncle Charlie, Joseph Cotton in Hitchcock's movie and Matthew Goode in Park's version of a story about an uncle who shows up after his brother dies in a car accident.

Uncle Charlie works to establish a bond with his niece (Mia Wasikowska), a young woman he's never met before. In fact, she never knew her father (Dermott Mulroney) even had a brother until Charles turns after Dad's death.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that both mother (a convincing Nicole Kidman) and daughter (perhaps to a lesser degree) are falling under the sway of the preternaturally helpful Uncle Charlie, played with cagy confidence by Goode.

To further complicate matters, Wasikowska's India Stoker is going through the weirdness of her own sexual awakening; the gifted Wasikowska is up to conveying every bit of that weirdness. India displays the normal recalcitrance of an 18-year-old but augmented by something that seems significantly creepier.

There's little question that Park has control over the movie's imagery, its performances and its eerie soundscape, all of which heighten the sense of uneasiness he skillfully creates.
Park tries to maintain ambiguity as he builds toward what should be (but isn't) a whopping and intelligent finale.

Park and cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung find plenty of opportunities to show off their mastery, but the screenplay -- which seems rooted in India's fantasy life and dark capacities -- ultimately doesn't reward our patience.

Park's stylistic flourishes (India likes to arrange shoeboxes in horseshoe shapes) seem designed mostly to keep us off balance. They do, but the danger in this kind of approach (violent but less so than some of Park's Korean movies) is that it sets a high bar for the movie's payoff.

Without going much further, I'll just say that Park doesn't vault over the bar he sets for himself, and many will conclude that, in this case, the result is a little too frustrating, a carefully prepared meal that offers too little by way of real nourishment.