A haunted study of ambition and class

The Little Stranger proves absorbing yet the movie ultimately fails to satisfy.

In reviewing Sarah Walters' novel, The Little Stranger, the British newspaper The Guardian noted that the author "operates in the queasy borderlands between the supernatural and the psychological" and that Waters navigates this territory with "supreme ease." The same could be said of the big-screen adaptation of Waters' 2009 novel -- at least for a while.

Director Lenny Abrahamson (Room) delivers a carefully constructed, meticulously acted and deliberately paced movie that ultimately fails to sharpen any of its potentially resonant themes. Both a ghost story and a view of a crumbling British class structure after World War II, Little Stranger creates significant interest but fails to build toward a totally rewarding payoff.

Domhnall Gleeson portrays Dr. Faraday, a physician who's summoned to a dilapidated country estate to look into the illness of 14-year-old Betty (Liv Hill), a teenager who serves the once wealthy Ayres family. Turns out Faraday had been to the estate as a boy in 1902; i.e. before its glory had begun to fade.

Slowly, Faraday's fascination with the decaying estate emerges; to him, the place, though rundown, still represents ascendance into a class that he has been forced to observe only from the outside and to which he very much aspires.

As the movie develops, Faraday immerses himself in the lives of the Ayres family. Roderick Ayres (Will Poulter) has returned from the war, his body badly burned and his spirit scarred; Mrs. Ayes (Charlotte Rampling) does her best to maintain the appearances of the family's former stature; and Caroline Ayres (Ruth Wilson) attempts to run the place.

Perhaps seeing her as a gateway to this aristocratic paradise, Dr. Faraday pursues Caroline in what surely qualifies as one of the screen's least romantic love stories.

All the while, paranormal occurrences (banging, clattering and strange scrawl on walls) appear, suggesting that the house is occupied by a malevolent presence that's intent on destroying the family. As the purported rationalist in the crowd, Gleeson portrays Faraday with an expressionless, steady hand that's a trifle boring. Wilson, who knows how to create interest and ambiguity, portrays a woman with an odd, lumbering walk and a fondness for corduroy pants.

Abrahamson presents the story in a quiet way that some viewers (myself included) may find absorbing. But roughly three-quarters of the way through The Little Stranger, it's difficult not to begin hoping that a narrative kick in the pants will provide something resembling satisfaction.

Unfortunately, the movie drifts away, creating anticipation that remains mostly unfulfilled.

It's not relative: 'Kin' is a misfire

I don't know who thought it would be a good idea to make a movie about a 14-year-old kid who acquires a super-charged weapon and then takes a road trip with his ex-con brother and a stripper. I guess the ignominy rests on the shoulders of the Baker Brothers (Jonathan and Josh), siblings who have expanded their short film Bag Man into a feature that's tainted by bad judgment. Likable young Myles Truitt may have a future as an actor, but even if he were an emerging Olivier, he couldn't turn this cinematic folly into something worthwhile. Truitt plays Eli, the adopted son of a gruff Detroit widower (Dennis Quaid). When Eli's ex-convict stepbrother (Jack Reyner) shows up, the family is sucked into the orbit of a vicious low-life criminal (James Franco in full over-drive mode). Zoe Kravitz's character enters the movie when Rayner's Jimmy takes his younger brother to a strip club as part of their road adventures. The brothers are trying to get away from Franco's character, a vengeful thug who killed their father during a robbery Jimmy arranged in order to pay off a $60,000 debt. Now about that super-weapon: Early on, Eli is scavenging in an abandoned factory when he discovers a weapon that's about the size of an AR-15. The "ray gun" (as Jimmy eventually refers to it) was left by armor-clad figures who fight a battle during the movie's prologue. Are these strange combatants aliens from another world? The movie, which flirts with sci-fi, answers this question during its finale by hammering an explanation onto the already overamped action. Carrie Coon shows up in the latter going as an FBI agent, adding to a viewer's sense of disorientation. (By viewer, I mean me.) What's a fine actress doing in this misbegotten misfire? Sometimes a movie goes wrong here and there, but you pretty much understand what the filmmakers were after. Kin goes wrong almost from the start. Trying to treat a 14-year-old's visit to a strip club as a fun adventure (at least for a while) and then allowing the same kid to blast away at various foes shatters any sense of propriety the movie might have had. Shameful.

A small but intriguing 'Bookshop'

It has taken some time, but Penelope Fitzgerald's 1978 novel, The Bookshop, finally has made it to the screen. Spanish director Isabel Coixet (Learning to Drive) casts Emily Mortimer as a widower who opens a bookstore in an English shore town in 1959. The town's establishment -- led by the smiling but arch-tempered Violet (Patricia Clarkson) -- opposes the shop. Violet wants to see the house where Mortimer's Florence opens her bookstore converted into a local arts center. A reclusive resident (Bill Nighy) emerges as Florence's principal customer. In a role that mixes humor with deep sadness, Nighy creates a memorable portrait of a man whose life is steeped in regret. Mortimer handles her role with pluck and intelligence. Honor Kneafsey appears as the opinionated schoolgirl who earns after-school money as Florence's helper. Florence's support for Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita further annoys Violet, reminding us how controversial that novel was when first published. The Bookshop pays the expected homage to writing, reading and literature, but avoids the trap of becoming a celebration of one woman's dream. Instead, Coixet enfolds the story in a series of betrayals and power moves, all presented without undue melodrama. It may be slightly pejorative to call The Bookshop a little movie, but the label fits; it's small like the seaside town in which its set, but it's far from idyllic in outlook -- and that's its saving grace.

How Israeli agents captured Eichmann

Operation Finale proves a routine movie about a less-than-routine subject.

I was a teenager when the trial of Adolf Eichmann was televised in the US, I believe via videotape. I remember watching as the architect of Holocaust efficiency, looking as nondescript as a conventioneer at a gathering of insurance agents, sat inside a glass booth in a packed Israeli courtroom.

In his captivity, Eichmann no longer seemed like a fearsome member of Hitler's SS. He twisted his mouth in various directions. He took notes. He sometimes looked bored or indifferent. It was easy to see why Hanna Arendt, who wrote the landmark book Eichmann in Jerusalem, came to see Eichmann as a representative of the "banality of evil," an overused phrase that has been much disputed recently.

In his final days, the man who had arranged the deaths of millions looked like nothing more than a peculiar specimen, Nazism under glass.

Now comes Operation Finale, a movie that tells the story of how agents from the Mossad and Shin Bet discovered Eichmann in Argentina, apprehended him and brought him to Israel for a trial. Ben Kingsley portrays Eichmann and, no, I didn’t entirely buy him the role.

The gifted Kingsley is by no means terrible, but I couldn’t lose sight of the fact that I was watching him take on qualities of Eichmann that might have been glimpsed from watching YouTube videos of his trial and from reading. Kingsley shows flashes of anger and irritation, even an outburst of cruel arrogance. But it struck me that Kingsley, an actor of enormous technical precision, is interpreting Eichmann, not inhabiting him.

But that’s not all that’s wrong with Operation Finale. Director Chris Weitz (The Twilight Saga: New Moon) gives Eichmann's capture a play-by-play treatment that’s mirrored in the surprisingly unsurprising performance of Oscar Isaac, who portrays Peter Malkin, one of the agents who brought Eichmann to Israel. The mission to capture Eichmann was bold and daring, qualities Weitz's dutifully rendered account seldom matches.

Eichmann’s presence in Argentina was discovered when a young woman (Haley Lu Richardson) met Eichmann’s grown son (Joe Alwyn). Richardson's character was Jewish; her father was a Holocaust survivor. She knew what to do with information about Eichmann despite the fact she had genuine feelings for Eichmann’s son.

It turns out that Eichmann’s son, who claimed that his father was dead, was heavily involved with the numerous Nazis and their Argentine enablers who had taken refuge in Argentina after the war. Meetings of these unrepentant Nazis constitute one of the movie's more harrowing elements.

The members of the group that captures Eichmann, some of whom lost relatives during the Holocaust, must restrain their personal feelings and conquer any impulse toward vengeance. Most of them would have been happy to put a bullet in the Nazi’s head.

But the Israelis, particularly prime minister David Ben-Gurion, understood the value of putting Eichmann on trial: It would allow him to be judged by his Jewish accusers and would put Holocaust crimes on display for a world that wasn’t terribly well-informed about them.

In order to smuggle Eichmann out of Argentina, the Israelis planned to disguise him as an El Al crew member and slip him on an airplane. He’d be drugged and passed off as a crew member who had had too much to drink. For obscure reasons involving extradition law, the airline required a signature from Eichmann saying that he was willingly being brought to Israel for trial -- at least that's how the movie tells it.

Obtaining this signature becomes a central issue, shrinking the movie to play-on-film size. In a safe house in Buenos Aires, the Israelis try to persuade Eichmann to put pen to paper so that they can scurry him out of Argentina. Isaac's Malkin believes he knows how to obtain the signature and get on with the mission. Can he outfox a fox?

By the time the film reaches Israel, the screenplay suggests that Malkin, who lost a sister and her children to the Nazis, has achieved a bit of closure.

Eichmann was hanged in 1962, but his trial and punishment couldn't possibly measure up to the enormity of his crimes. Though essential, the punishment of individual perpetrators of genocide arrives without emotional release. It would take another film to bring us face-to-face with such confounding moral horror, one that didn't so often feel like a diligent re-enactment of real events.

A second helping of 'Papillon'

Gritty detail and grim realism may not be enough to justify another version of a familiar story.

The unavoidable question that haunts any viewing of the new movie Papillon falls squarely on the shoulders of the 1973 movie of the same name. That movie that told the gripping story of one man's attempts to escape the torment and terror of a penal colony located in French Guiana. Could anyone pull off a second helping?

The 1973 movie starred Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman in what then seemed like odd-couple casting.

McQueen was a movie star with a well-defined big-screen persona; Hoffman was an actor with a capital “A.” We went to McQueen's movies to watch a cool, emotionally contained hero dominate the screen; we watched Hoffman's work to see an avid actor dig his way into the characters he played.

Written by Dalton Trumbo and Lorenzo Semple Jr. and directed by Franklin Schaffner, the 1973 movie created a commercial splash.

The 2018 version of Papillon doesn’t generate the same kind of excitement and probably couldn’t. When the first movie arrived, the wave of new technologies — from VCRs to streaming — was still waiting in the wings. Movies seemed bigger, less disposable.

So why, in a time of movie abundance (at least in terms of numbers of releases), remake a movie that already did the job of introducing American audiences to Henri Charriere; a.k.a., Papillon, and Louis Dega, two French criminals who served time in a sweltering prison hell in South America?

Danish director Michael Noer answers the question by amping up the movie's grit and cruelty, probably to heighten its raw authenticity. His movie sweats and brutalizes.

Charriere, the McQueen character now played by Charlie Hunnam, gives the movie its sinew and drive. Wrongly convicted of murder in 1931, Charriere receives a life sentence. En route to the prison, he meets Dega, the Hoffman role now played by Rami Malek. A forger by trade, Dega has enough money to ease some of Guiana's pain. Prisoners could buy their way onto better work details, for example.

Understanding this, Charriere, bereft of financial resources, offers to protect the weaker Dega from the prison’s many predators. The two develop an uneasy relationship.

The authenticity of Charriere’s account has been questioned, but his story stands as a tribute to the unbreakable will of a man who refuses to be crushed. Charriere, who wrote a best-selling book about his experiences, never relinquishes his hope for escape, to free himself from the choking burdens of stupid authority.

Hunnam, last seen in James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, and Malek, of TV’s Mr. Robot, may not generate the box-office heat once sparked by McQueen and Hoffman, but both are good. They fully embrace the movie's challenges: weight loss, punishing fights and sustained reaction to a fear-drenched climate.

The movie devotes much its time to depicting the sadism that prevailed in French Guiana, delivered at the hands of both prisoners and guards. Escapes were greeted with years in solitary. Those deemed murderers were executed by guillotine while the assembled prisoners were forced to watch.

Though more harrowingly detailed than the first installment, this new Papillon still tells the same basic story as the 1973 movie and, as a result, can’t help but surrender some of its power. Put another way: An inescapable aroma of redundancy limits this credible but exhausting edition.

Puppets, profanity and a shortage of movie

Muppet-like puppets go crude in Happytime Murders.

If you've ever had a desire to see Muppet-like puppets talk dirty, you may find a few laughs in The Happytime Murders, a production of Henson Alternative and director Brian Henson (son of the late Jim Henson). The Happytime Murders quickly reveals itself as a kind of crude Judd Apatow wannabe, a comic helping of noir that's trying way too hard to wring laughs from the incongruity between puppets and profanity. Set in a fantasy version of LA, where puppets and humans live in uneasy proximity, the story centers on former LAPD puppet detective Phil Philips (Bill Barretta). Early on, Phil, now working as a private investigator, takes a case brought to him by a ludicrously oversexed blonde puppet (Dorien Davies). The movie centers on Phil's efforts to discover who's bumping off the cast of a defunct puppet TV show -- The Happytime Gang. With the show about to go into syndication, there's money at stake. Oddly, the best work in the movie comes from the human cast. As an LAPD detective who once served as Phil's partner, Melissa McCarthy brings snap to the snide insults she trades with Phil. Maya Rudolph has an equally nice turn as Bubbles, Phil's secretary. Elizabeth Banks turns up as the only human member of the Happytime Gang cast. A major sight gag involves puppet sex and prolonged ejaculation, which should give you a clue about the level of humor. What's missing? A level of sophistication that might have turned Happytime into something more worthy. As it stands, watching the cotton innards blasted out of puppet murder victims doesn't exactly serve as wry commentary on movie violence. Look, there's nothing much to say about Happytime Murders other than to tell you that there are a couple of laughs and not much else to fill a 90-minute running time. If you go, stay for the end credits, which show how the movie's puppets were integrated into a human world.

These waitresses have spunk

Support the girls ably mixes comedy and desperation

Regina Hall of Girls Trip lands a welcome leading role in Support the Girls, a comedy set in a Texas restaurant called Double Whammies. I don’t know if the two Whammies are meant to suggest boobs and butts, but the movie makes no secret of the fact that the scantily clad waitresses of Double Whammies are as much of an attraction as the burgers and brews.

Playing Lisa, the restaurant's manager, Hall functions as an exasperated mother hen who cares about the young women who work for her. Early on, Lisa organizes a car wash to pay for the defense of one of her employees, a young woman who faces legal difficulties after running over her abusive boyfriend.

A bit of sad, self-awareness underlies Hall’s performance. Older than the women who work for her, Lisa knows that she no longer can compete when it comes to turning the heads of her leering customers, a group of men that she keeps in check with a zero-tolerance policy toward harassment.

Setting the story over a single day in Lisa’s hectic life, director Andrew Bujalksi gives us plenty of atmosphere and lots of colorful characters; the spunky Maci (Haley Lu Richardson) and Danielle (Shayna McHayle) make the biggest impressions in an ensemble of cheeky (no pun intended) young actress who compose the movie's impromptu sisterhood.

If Bujalksi had been looking for an alternate title for his movie, he might have tried Lisa’s Very Bad Day. His screenplay follows Lisa through a series of catastrophes — small and large: an attempted burglary at the restaurant, an argument with her boss (James Le Gros) and an incident that suggests irreconcilable differences with her a husband (Lawrence Varnado), a guy who spends his most of his day staring at a computer screen.

Informal and sassy, Support the Girls might have looked like a pilot for a sitcom, but Bujalski obviously feels for these characters. He understands the indignities that lurk in their workplace, as well as the collegial support it takes to keep from surrendering to them.

Some of Double Whammies' customers may want to objectify the restaurant’s waitresses, but Bujalski never does. He keeps them funny without sacrificing their humanity.

Can 'gay' be prayed away?

Set in 1993, The Miseducation of Cameron Post features another solid performance by Chloe Grace Moretz, this time as a teenage lesbian who's sent to a program where she's supposed to pray away her gay. Moretz's Cameron finds herself in trouble when she's discovered in the backseat of a car with a girlfriend (Quinn Shephard). Director Desiree Akhavan adapts a young adult novel by Emily Danforth in realistic fashion, taking us inside an operation called "God's Promise." The adults who run God's Promise aren't total ogres. They seem to genuinely believe that it's possible to "cure" gayness; they believe that their work will result in better lives for their charges. Jennifer Ehle portrays the chilly Dr. Lydia Marsh, head of the program. John Gallagher Jr. plays her brother, a man who assists with the program. Gallacher's character says faith helped him overcome his own SSA; i.e., same-sex attraction. Cameron soon finds kindred spirits in this strange environment, making friends with Jane (Sasha Lane of American Honey) and Adam (Forrest Goodluck of The Revenant). The movie's trio of misfits has no interest in overcoming gayness or submitting to someone else's idea of religious piety. These kids simply want to be themselves, an aspiration the movie clearly endorses. Miseducation's young cast adds welcome authenticity to a story that doesn't feel quite as original or daring as we might have expected.

A boy and a wolf develop a strong bond

Alpha does a decent job as a prehistoric adventure with an emotional core.

Alpha tells the story of a boy and his dog . . . er ...I mean a boy and his wolf . . . er ... make that a wolf that’s morphing into a dog.

Set in Europe 20,000 years ago, Alpha introduces us to a small tribe of hunters struggling to survive at the end of the Ice Age. The tribe has a leg up on other movie residents of pre-history: These tribesmen already know how to start fires. They wear clothing made from animal hides. They speak a language that seems reasonably well developed. (Promotional material for the movie says the language was created for Alpha.)

Food remains a problem. Each year, the men of the tribe set out on a hunt for steppe bison, beasts that will help them make it through the brutally cold winters.

The hunt also provides a testing ground for the tribe's young men. Do they measure up? Will they prove themselves able to close the deal when it came to killing for food?

Directed by Albert Hughes, who with his brother made the great 1990s film, Menace II Society, Alpha focuses on young Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a young man who must make the transition from boyhood to manhood. Keda’s mother (Natassia Malthe) worries that the Keda has more heart than killer instinct, but his father (Johannes Haukur Johanneson) pushes the boy, offering him some Darwinian advice: Life is for the strong. Dad wants Keda to emerge as a leader.

Full of raw imagery and gripping action, Alpha includes a heart-pounding scene in which the men of the tribe close in on a herd of bison. In the ensuing stampede, Keda is thrown off a cliff and left for dead on a ledge from which there appears to be no escape.

I won't say more, but Keda manages to revive himself and then tries to return home. The adventurer’s journey gives Alpha a tried-and-true storyline. The hero must battle long odds to return to the place where the story began.

Along the way, Keda develops a relationship with a wolf, a wounded animal that slowly makes the transition from foe to friend. Keda names the wolf “Alpha.” Alpha learns to help Keda hunt and also provides the boy with companionship. The young man and wolf develop mutually beneficial dependencies.

Ample use of CGI helps Hughes deliver the adventure goods in a movie that doesn’t skimp on sights that might put you off your popcorn, eating maggots, for example.

Quibbles? Many. The men look a bit too clean for their historical moment and their use of language seems overly advanced. Early on, Keda’s mom talks about how much she loves her son. I couldn't help but wonder what the word "love" might mean in the Ice Age anyway?

Young Keda also complains about the odor of some of the characters, something you'd think he'd have gotten used to in this pre-deodorized age.

For all that, Hughes works to create a convincing natural environment, creating a feeling for a time when darkness really was dark and the sky brimmed with twinkling stars. He captures some of the mystery of an encounter with nature that has been lost to progress.

I wouldn’t call Alpha a classic and I can’t keep myself from sometimes chuckling at prehistoric dramas featuring men who have been groomed to look as if they’ve never seen a mirror without totally persuading us that these same men haven’t just arrived fresh from a make-up trailer.

Still, Alpha succeeds in blending a simple and affecting story with lots of action. It's a reasonable exercise of imagination -- if not an entirely convincing one -- about the time when our enduring bonds with dogs began.