Film

“So, this brings a whole new meaning to ‘23 and me,’ right?”

Go crazy

The key to M. Night Shyamalan’s recent success seems to be putting a severe limit on the amount of money he’s allowed to throw around.

After working with sizable budgets on big projects like The Last Airbender, After Earth, The Happening, Lady in the Water and The Village—all of which sucked major ass—Shyamalan almost made a good movie in 2015 with The Visit.

Now, gosh darn it, he’s finally made his first good movie since Signs (2002) with Split, a down-to-thebasics, creepy thriller propelled by excellent performances from James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy. The film reminds us that Shyamalan can be quite the capable director and writer when he isn’t getting too carried away.

Taylor-Joy, so good in last year’s horror masterpiece The Witch, plays Casey, an introverted, outcast high school student attending a birthday party for Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) only because she got a “mercy invite.” Casey’s stuck after the party, so Claire’s dad offers her and another friend, Marcia (Jessica Sula), a ride home. That ride never gets out of the parking lot because a strange, angry man (McAvoy) winds up in the driver’s seat and sprays the girls with a chemical. They wake up together in a prison cell.

It’s no big reveal to let you know that McAvoy’s character is suffering from a form of split personality disorder. In addition to the man who kidnaps them, he’s a stately, mannered woman, a 9-year-old child and, well, a few others. One of those other personalities plays a big part in taking the film into other realms beyond psychological thriller.

McAvoy is bonechillingly good here, seamlessly segueing into each personality, and giving each one an original vocal and physical spin. In ways, this plays out like a modern day Psycho, with a few more personalities thrown in and minus the shower scene. While in the Hedwig persona, McAvoy has a

memorable dance scene, a welcomed funny break in the movie. McAvoy even saves what could have been a hokey finale moment by fully committing to some Shyamalan lines that represent the screenwriter at his most obvious. McAvoy delivers his final major monologue with such ferocious and fully invested energy we just buy into it. In short, McAvoy’s work here should go into the annals of great psycho performances alongside Anthony Perkins in Psycho, Jack Nicholson in The Shining, and Kathy Bates in Misery. The last act of the movie is truly scary, and Shyamalan takes things into strange monster movie territory. No more secrets getting given away in this review. Go see the movie, and have some fun with it. Well, fun might not be the right word. It’s pretty freaking bleak. Quickly becoming a new kind Split of “scream queen,” Taylor-Joy has now anchored two masterful 12345 horror films within a year of each other. She has an amazing array of expressions, and Shyamalan Director: M. Night Shyamalan takes advantage of this. Rather Starring: James McAvoy, than shrieking her face off as Anya Taylor-Joy the terrorized often do in horror movies, Taylor-Joy is a restrained, conflicted kind of horrified. What she lacks in volume she makes up in major intensity. Following up her terrific performance in The Edge of Seventeen, a solid Richardson takes the normally vain “popular” character in horror films, and gives her a lot of depth and smarts. Betty Buckley does equally well as a therapist—basically this film’s Dr. Loomis, although less crazed—trying to help the McAvoy characters handle their afflictions. Shyamalan himself shows up for a fun cameo, and stick around for the credits, which include a pretty powerful Easter egg. So, given the current trajectory, Shyamalan could be one or two films away from giving us another masterpiece along the lines of Signs. Split is one of his best, and proof that we weren’t all crazy back in the day when we figured he could do great things behind a camera. Ω

420th Century Women Annette Bening, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig and Billy Crudup shine in Mike Mills’ ode to his unusual mother, who raised him in the late ’70s and tried to like punk music as much as she could. Bening is terrific as Dorothea, perhaps the best work of her career. She represents the late ’70s woman, still cool but perhaps slowing down a bit due to too many cigarettes and a general disillusionment with certain aspects of the changing culture. Mills uses Dorothea as a sort of narrator from the future who talks about the events of the film while observing from a perch in years ahead. It’s an interesting technique, and Bening’s performance is a career milestone. Gerwig and Fanning are great as two different women who hang around Dorothea’s apartment, both with their own interesting subplots. Cruddup chimes in capably as a local handyman who will sleep with you if you ask him to. I love the way this film uses music on its soundtrack, from Talking Heads to the Buzzcocks.

3The Founder Michael Keaton is flat-out great as Ray Kroc, the sorta-kinda founder of McDonald’s. Director John Lee Hancock’s film tells the story from when Kroc was selling milk shake mixers door-to-door up through his wife-stealing days as the head of the McDonald’s corporation. Hancock’s movie desperately wants you to like Kroc, but maybe we shouldn’t? After all, he swept in and took the name of McDonald’s from the McDonald brothers (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch), effectively cutting them out of most profits and leaving them in his dust. The film is at its best when it is in old-time, Americana mode. It’s a beautiful looking movie that captures the essence of those old timey fast food joints that replaced the traditional drive-in diners. It slows down a bit and gets a little muddled when it tries to depict Kroc as some sort of commerce hero. I suppose if they went into details about how his co-creating McDonald’s has contributed to worldwide obesity and environmental concerns, McDonald’s themselves would’ve mounted up the lawyers and put the kibosh on the whole thing. Offerman is great as the well-meaning, high-standards McDonald brother who regrets the day he met Kroc.

4Hidden Figures Katherine Johnson was part of a segregated division at NASA in the ’50s, a wing of mathematicians who did the work that computers do today. HiddenFiguresdepicts the humiliation she and two other historical African-American figures, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, went through while solving equations that helped put men safely into space. The women had to put up with a lot of racist bullshit, and the film shows their hardships, albeit in PG fashion. Taraji P. Henson plays Johnson, the “smart one” astronaut John Glenn personally demanded check the coordinates before his historical flight launched. Octavia Spencer is her usual great self as Vaughan, doing the work of a supervisor without the title and curious about that new IBM thing they just installed down the hall. Vaughan would become crucial to the implementation of computers at NASA, as well as being the agency’s first African-American supervisor. As Jackson, NASA’s first female African-American aeronautical engineer, singer Janelle Monae is so good, it’s easy to forget that this is just her second movie role. As a composite, fictional character named Al Harrison, Kevin Costner does some of his best acting in years.

5La La Land This is an all new, original musical from director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) that’s surprisingly low on melodrama while full of vibrancy, beautiful tunes, outstanding set pieces and a stunning sense of realism for a movie where the characters bust out singing. It’s the best original movie musical ever made. The story follows wannabe actress Mia (Emma Stone) and jazz composer Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) as they try to make it in crazy Los Angeles. They meet, they don’t like each other much at first, but then they fall in love, which provides Chazelle and his performers ample opportunities for musical numbers that surprise at every turn. This solidifies Gosling as one of the best actors of his generation. He can wow you with insightful indies and carry big-budget blockbusters. Now, with LaLaLand, he takes his game to a new level. He proves he can pretty much do anything when it comes to movie characters. He can sing and dance with the best of them. Stone doesn’t just make her mark with a beautiful voice and expert footwork—she embodies the character with the honest and almost tragic drive to “make it” in the business.

2Live By Night Director Ben Affleck’s latest is a period piece/costume drama that looks like a lot of work went into it but never feels like a cohesive picture. Affleck also stars as Joe Coughlin, one of those gangsters you just gotta love, fighting the gangster fight during Prohibition in sunny Florida. Joe rises to the top of the gangster field, despite being the son of a cop (Brendan Gleeson), and despite basically being an all-around good guy. The problem here is that Affleck fails to give his central character a true identity and emotional toolbox. The character feels stilted, and the movie around him feels like a costume party. It’s as if Affleck is afraid to make him the truly bad guy he should be. The fedoras and sweet suits all look good, but it’s in the service of a story that has been told before in far more powerful fashion. Sienna Miller is good as Joe’s early love, and Elle Fanning, who had a great year with The NeonDemonand 20thCenturyWomen, is also good as a disgraced actress who finds a new career in preaching.

4Rogue One: A Star Wars Story There was a quick little moment in the very first StarWars(now known as StarWarsEpisodeIV:ANewHope) where a character mentions rebels possibly obtaining vulnerability secrets regarding the Death Star. That group of people actually gets their own movie in RogueOne:AStarWarsStory, a StarWarsspinoff that’s technically another prequel. In fact, it tells a story that leads right up to where ANewHopebegins. It’s also a little different from your typical StarWarsmovie in that it doesn’t mainly deal with the Skywalker saga—although a couple of them make notable appearances—and doesn’t prominently feature the John Williams score (although that makes some appearances, as well). Director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla) goes for something a little different here, a tonal shift that reminds of the big change TheEmpireStrikesBack brought to the saga. Felicity Jones is terrific as Jyn, a woman who finds herself with strange ties to the Death Star, and becomes part of the effort to destroy it.

2Silence Martin Scorsese’s Silence, or, Howto TortureaJesuitPriestUntilHeSays, “Ah,ScrewIt!”andLooksforAnotherGig, is the auteur’s most inconsistent offering since his misguided and sloppy Casino. It’s clear that Scorsese has poured his heart into the passion project, which makes it all the more sad that it doesn’t live up to his usual standard. The movie is far too long, and repetitive to the point where it becomes laughable rather than having the desired effect of moving the viewer. Based on the Shusaku Endo book, and a project Scorsese had been trying to mount since the ’80s, it’s nothing but a colossal waste of a great director’s time. Bored to death is not what I expect to be during a Scorsese offering, but that’s what I was watching Silence. Two Jesuit priests, Rodrigues and Garrpe (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver), head to Japan in search of their mentor priest, Ferreira (Liam Neeson). Ferreira went missing during a prior mission years ago and is rumored to have gone into hiding as a civilian with a wife. The whole setup feels a bit like ApocalypseNow, minus the excitement, capable storytelling and fat Brando. There’s a lot of violence as Japanese Christians and the priests are tortured for their beliefs. There’s also a lot of snoring as the proceedings carry on way too long.