Evil Dead (2013)

If you ever wondered what the Evil Dead movies might have been like without the central wit and charisma of their star Bruce Campbell, the answer now awaits you at a theater near you. The new Evil Dead remake certainly doesn’t skimp on the gore; tons of the stuff spatter, pool, mist, spurt, bead up and roll off. Much has also been made of the majority of the effects being realized “practically” — that is, with old-school latex and Karo syrup, not computer-generated flesh and blood. Such things, I suppose, are to be honored in this era of hermetically-sealed fantasy film, when you know that most of what you see is not only fake but doesn’t exist in real space. The drenched and sticky actors in Evil Dead would no doubt tell you it all existed in real space, all right.

What’s missing, first and foremost, is the incomparable real-guy presence of Bruce Campbell, who in the original three Evil Dead films directed by Sam Raimi came close to defining himself as the Buster Keaton of splatstick. Raimi never tired of tormenting Campbell by making him do one grotesque, painful thing after another, because Raimi knew that Campbell, at least in his youthful prime, was fun to watch being bashed around — not because we disliked him but because he looked as though he could shrug it off. In the new Evil Dead, there is no Campbell analogue, no character named Ash; the closest the film comes is a frail-looking recovering addict named Mia (Jane Levy), who spends a good chunk of the movie locked in the basement of a cabin, possessed by a demon who makes her do things like split her tongue in half with a knife. Despite this, later on, after the demon has vacated her, she can speak perfectly well.

The plot is similar. Five college-age people come to a cabin in the woods. I use those last four words advisedly, because if you have seen last year’s The Cabin in the Woods, this film will seem kind of late to the party. The trip to the cabin, it seems, is a last-ditch effort of sorts to rehab Mia. Accompanying her is her brother David (Shiloh Fernandez), his girlfriend Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore), and her friends Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) and Olivia (Jessica Lucas), a registered nurse. Olivia apparently has lots of detox meds and tranquilizers to use on Mia, leading me to imagine a scene back at the hospital where a pharmacist yells “What happened to all our detox meds and tranquilizers?”

A mysterious book is discovered in the basement. Eric, being a horror-movie character and therefore staggeringly stupid, reads aloud from the book and unleashes demons, one of which promptly infests Mia, who in turn corrupts Olivia, and we’re off to the races. The movie hits the beats that Evil Dead fans will expect and perhaps be bored by. A character’s hand is possessed, requiring its removal by way of an electric carving knife. A nail gun, a shotgun and a chainsaw all get a bow on stage. What’s missing, to go further, is not only Campbell but the spirit of play and prankishness that he represented. The new director, Fede Alvarez, is no Sam Raimi, and that’s not to say he’s a bad filmmaker; he could be a fine one, given the right material. But Raimi made these films with energy and gutbucket humor, whereas Alvarez goes about his work grimly, as though the Evil Dead films were works of the utmost gravity.

Yes, yes, this is probably supposed to be a new re-imagining of Evil Dead, not slavishly following in Raimi’s footsteps. I would just as soon see Alvarez directing something fresh, and I would rather not see Raimi, Campbell and co-producer Rob Tapert lending their imprimatur to this remake as producers, thus smudging their own names and leaving a bad aftertaste on the original franchise. The main disappointment of the new Evil Dead is that it simply isn’t very fun. The original films, particularly the two sequels, were essentially comedies, and Evil Dead II achieved a level of grisly pop art. The new film seems as though it might be interesting for a while, using demonic possession as a metaphor for drug addiction (and nobody believing the hysterical and withdrawal-scourged Mia when she starts seeing the evil dead), but soon that gets buried in arterial spray and close-ups of someone pulling a hypodermic needle out of his face. To top it off, this thing is too slick. It’s beautifully lighted, and it cost $17 million and looks it. The first Evil Dead cost about $400,000, and Raimi had to invent camera rigs to get some of the insane shots he wanted. No invention here.

Frankenweenie (2012)

Imagine this: You’re working for a huge family-friendly conglomerate. You direct a half-hour film to be shown before a re-release of one of the conglomerate’s classic movies. The conglomerate hates your film — too scary for kids, they say — and fires you. Twenty-eight years later, the same conglomerate hands you $39 million to remake the same film they hated, in 3D stop-motion. They even let you make it in black and white. This, of course, is the story of Tim Burton, who made a short called Frankenweenie in 1984 for Disney, which has now thrown its full marketing weight behind the new remake. The lesson here is that if you make enough money (all told, Burton’s films have earned $1.7 billion for various studios, including Disney), your failures will be forgiven eventually. (Disney did acknowledge its short-sightedness earlier, releasing the first Frankenweenie on videotape in 1994 and then putting it on the Nightmare Before Christmas DVD as an extra.)

The 1984 Frankenweenie wasn’t a failure, though; it was a charming tribute to the monster movies Burton grew up on (and this was before his career grew a little too long on charming tributes to the monster movies he grew up on). The new one — call it Frankenweenie 2.0 — pretty much tells the whole story of the earlier version, with some padding that gets a little tiresome but does produce more monsters. Young Victor Frankenstein (voice of Charlie Tahan) obsesses over monster movies to the point of making his own, starring his beloved dog Sparky. One day, Sparky chases the wrong ball at the wrong time, and Victor loses his movie star and best friend. But not for long: Inspired by his science teacher (Martin Landau), Victor brings Sparky back to life on a dark and stormy night.

There are a couple of sad moments for dog lovers, especially those who have dug their share of tiny graves. But overall this is a comedy; Sparky doesn’t come back as a monster — he comes back as the same Sparky, except that his tail or his ear occasionally falls off (“I can fix that” is Victor’s refrain), and he needs to be “topped up” with a jolt of electricity every so often. I have to say I prefer the original version, not only because it felt fresher at the start of Burton’s career, but because it was shorter and didn’t succumb to subplots. Here, we get complications when other kids in Victor’s class find out about Sparky, and they want to learn Victor’s secret so they can win the school’s science fair. We don’t really care if they succeed or fail; it’s just a distraction from what should be the main event, in which the townspeople, horrified, corner Sparky at a windmill, just like old times.

The windmill in the original short was a small windmill at a mini-golf course. Here it’s a real windmill, and Victor has to run up endless stairs to save his neighbor Elsa (Winona Ryder) from a hybrid cat/bat as the windmill burns down around them. It reminded me of the entirely unnecessary fight at the end of Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, which felt as if Burton had internalized all the studio notes he got on Batman. You gotta have a bang-up finish, kiddo! But the tiny windmill in the original had so much more charm; you knew Burton didn’t have the budget to build and burn down a big windmill, so he improvised. In stop motion, you can do anything (and let’s have a round of applause for Trey Thomas, the animation director here), and some of the additions are inspired — I enjoyed the re-animated turtle who becomes a sort of non-flying Gamera — but some of it nudges our ribs a little too hard. Hey, remember Gremlins? How about Jurassic Park?

I suppose we should be thankful there isn’t a dancing number (no numbers at all, actually, except for some simpy end-credits song sung by Karen O). As long as it stays with the friendship of Victor and Sparky, Frankenweenie is fine. The look and tone are — say it with me now — a Charming Tribute to the Monster Movies Tim Burton Grew Up On, same as Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride and Sleepy Hollow and many others. The thing is, Disney should’ve had more faith in this premise back in 1984, when it mattered, instead of shocking it back to a bigger life now, after we’ve seen Burton return to this cobwebbed well again and again and again. It’s been said before, but Burton is almost ready for his own amusement park — Burtonworld, home of dozens of lovable misfits, land of sportively macabre imagery. Frankenweenie passes 87 minutes nicely, but apparently the 54-year-old Burton doesn’t have much more to say with this story than the 26-year-old Burton did. That’s a little dispiriting.

Total Recall (2012)

The most entertaining moment in Total Recall, the latest needless remake, is the screen logo of the film’s production company, Original Film. Ah, irony. We went down this am-I-really-me rabbit hole 22 years ago, with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a futuristic construction worker who doesn’t remember his past as a secret agent. Crudely but vigorously directed by Paul Verhoeven, the movie had its goofball charms, including cartoonishly fun effects by Rob Bottin and a literally eye-popping trip to Mars. The new Total Recall doesn’t go to Mars, and there’s no cartoonish fun (aside from an obligatory rehash of the prior film’s three-breasted prostitute). It’s a grim actioner, full of deep-bass noise and flashing lights and gunfire and bloodless PG-13 violence.

Few would argue that Colin Farrell is not a better actor than Arnold Schwarzenegger. But as Douglas Quaid, a bored worker who visits the memory-implant outfit Rekall to take a mental espionage vacation and finds himself embroiled in the real thing, Farrell doesn’t get to do anything he does best, which is to be quick and profane and sly and sexual. I don’t think he laughs once in the movie or even smiles much (except ruefully at the featureless drudge that is Quaid’s life); it’s a real waste of a vibrant performer. There’s no time for levity here anyway, hardly even time to breathe before the movie lumbers into its next endless and expensive action set-piece. There is a nice bit when Quaid, who earlier commented idly that he wished he’d learned to play piano, sits down at the ivories at his secret-agent apartment and starts tickling them expertly. It just leads to yet another info-dump (this is who you are and this is what you must do), but it’s a pleasant respite while it lasts.

Vaguely following the 1990 film’s blueprint, Total Recall tries to keep us guessing whether Quaid, in his past life, was an agent working for the repressive government or an agent who threw in with the resistance. Either way doesn’t seem like much of a party: if Quaid was a government man, he was working for Bryan Cranston (a long way from Breaking Bad, in his “I’d better do as many crappy movies as I can while the iron’s still hot” mode, last seen in Rock of Ages); if he was a rebel, he was reporting to Bill Nighy, doing his usual dour turn in his third film for director Len Wiseman (after two Underworld movies). I find, with some surprise, that I have somehow seen all four of Wiseman’s films (including Live Free or Die Hard), and I wonder if four films over a nine-year career is enough evidence to declare a director essentially worthless. Wiseman makes mildly pretty films, full of blues and grays and lens flares, but they’re the definition of bland. Certainly they never risk camp or bad taste, as Verhoeven triumphantly did.

As in the original, Quaid escapes from the government agent he thought was his wife (Kate Beckinsale) and joins up with a resistance fighter (Jessica Biel) he has tucked away in his subconscious. I had heard encouraging things about a take-no-prisoners fight between Beckinsale and Biel, but it takes place in an elevator and Wiseman, who’s hopeless when slow motion or big special effects aren’t involved, loses track of the action. The elevators themselves are interesting, whooshing vertically and horizontally, but they’re part of a massive yet impersonal production design whose best elements are cribbed shamelessly from Blade Runner. There’s even a shot where Quaid leans against his balcony and looks out on his ruined city, just like a similar shot with Harrison Ford in the 1982 classic, except this time the camera does a 180-degree spin, which wasn’t possible in 1982. The point seems not to be Quaid’s ruminations on his surroundings but rather “Look what we can do with computer effects now!”

Both versions of Total Recall are based loosely on a story by the late sci-fi mystic Philip K. Dick (as was Blade Runner). The man cooked up mind-twisting ideas that seem unfilmable without a lot of visual garlic sprinkled on. Every few years someone tries to put Philip Dick on the screen, but the paranoid questions at the heart of his work get smothered by state-of-the-art technology; even A Scanner Darkly was literally coated by rotoscope animation. At least the first Total Recall used its premise for absurdist jollies; it was a loopy chunk of Saturday-night escapism, and it looks better than it did in 1990, compared to the passionless, glum-faced adventures we get now. The new Total Recall seems fanatically dedicated to the chase scene, the shootout, the big bang, and forgets entirely about the who-am-I query at its core. Verhoeven sealed his movie with a certain ambiguity — was the whole movie just Schwarzenegger experiencing a false memory from Rekall? — but there’s no ambiguity here. I never thought I’d say that a Schwarzenegger flick was more provocative and subversive than a film made 22 years later, but here we are.

Silent House

Editing, said Stanley Kubrick, is what truly sets cinema apart. The medium borrows from other art forms — photography, music, theater — but cutting from this image to that image, imposing order on time and space, belongs to movies (and TV). So it’s not surprising that only a handful of feature-length “single-take” films — with no visible editing — have ever been made. Hitchcock’s Rope is probably the most famous example, but even there Hitch cheated, using clever camera moves to camouflage his edits. There haven’t been many such experiments since, though one of them was 2010’s La Casa Muda, a Uruguayan horror film, and another is its new American remake, Silent House.

Elizabeth Olsen is Sarah, who accompanies her dad (Adam Trese) and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens) to their dilapidated lake house. It needs a lot of fixing up; the power’s shut off, the phones are out, and it may as well have a sign on the front lawn reading “Ideal Setting for an Inexpensive Horror Film.” The uncle gets annoyed with Sarah’s dad and takes off for a while. Sarah hears noises upstairs. Her dad goes to investigate; something happens to him. There appears to be someone in the house stalking Sarah. The movie is shot using only available light, too, so half the time we sit in the dark listening to Sarah’s tortured breathing and crying.

This is the third collaboration of husband-and-wife writer-director team Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, who divided horror fans in 2004 with Open Water. Many considered that minimalist shark-fest dull and repetitive, but I admired its sense of futility in the face of uncaring nature. Silent House isn’t nearly as absorbing. The underlit milieu occasionally produces unsettling, suggestive imagery, but the technique took me out of the movie — I was always looking for “invisible edits,” the points at which the camera pans across something dark, giving the filmmakers a chance to cut. We’re meant to be stuck right there with Sarah in her uncomprehending terror, but it just feels like a gimmick; in practice, it might as well be yet another found-footage movie.

It all leads up to an absurd twist ending that, like the one in High Tension, raises many inconvenient questions. The horror seems to shift from physical to supernatural, and then to psychological. Maybe it played better when they did it in Uruguay, but the plot contortions feel like a cheat. Without spoiling things, let’s say that Elizabeth Olsen, a good actress who sustains Sarah’s panic, is not quite physically plausible as having done the things we’re to assume Sarah has done. Silent House tries to go a long way — “88 minutes of real fear captured in real time,” claim the ads — on mood and suggestion, which is noble, I guess, but I wish it worked. And, again, the film is the new Exhibit A to prove why there aren’t many single-take films. Editing, as Kubrick knew, can do anything; it can evoke joy, sorrow, fear. Hitchcock pulled his experiment off (though people forget Rope did have one visible cut for effect), and then never did it again. It’s ironic, since I usually berate filmmakers for being too edit-happy, but purposely doing without the tool that makes cinema cinema calls attention to itself more than the most rapid-fire cutting does.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2011)

A remake of a TV movie from 1973, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark feels as though it, too, were made in the ’70s. Aside from a few (not overly graphic) slashings and assorted mutilations, the scares are resolutely old-school: creaks and rustlings and whisperings in the dead of night. An architect (Guy Pearce) brings his young daughter (Bailee Madison) and his girlfriend (Katie Holmes) to stay in a Gothic mansion he’s spiffing up to be sold. The little girl, Sally, is ill at ease even before the family arrives at the mansion’s ornate door: she feels passed around between her mother, who doesn’t seem to have time for her, and her father, who is busy flipping the house. The place, which we already know is bad news from an ominous prologue, intensifies Sally’s bad vibes. Soon she and we see why. Little creatures live behind the grates, in the boarded-up basement. They want Sally; they want to play with her, and they come and find her in the darkness.

Patiently directed by Troy Nixey, from a script by Mexican horror maestro Guillermo del Toro and erstwhile Spielberg/Lucas collaborator Matthew Robbins (the pair also worked together on del Toro’s Mimic), the movie seems to aim for psychological ambiguity: the creatures may or may not be activated by Sally’s repressed rage. (She’s on meds, she’s seen shrinks, and she’s often seen drawing Vertigo-style spirals in her sketchbook.) But later on they’re explained as malefic faeries — relentless, vicious things gentled down over the centuries into the benign parental invention the tooth fairy. (You can appease them only by leaving them human teeth, which they acknowledge by leaving an old coin.)

The creatures have a certain creep factor. They scuttle like rats over the dusty banisters; they lurch, hunched over, on wiry arms and legs, looking a little like the monsters drawn by Berni Wrightson in the horror-comic classic “Nightfall.” There’s a fine, spooky moment when several pairs of hellishly glowing eyes appear under Sally’s bed, confirming everyone’s childhood fear: yes, kid, you’re right, they’re down there, and they know how to use knives. Brought to life by computers, the creatures are convincing, but there’s still that Stephen King theory about the monster behind the door: eventually you have to open the door, and more often than not the audience is relieved to see what the thing looks like, whereas before you could horrify them by working on their imagination. It doesn’t help that the trailer gave it away, either.

The muted photography, which already looks as if it’s been blown up for a drive-in screen, joins together with the loud bass-violin score to produce something amusingly retro. Sally and her father use cell phones; other than that, the movie seems consciously timeless, and most of the movie is a three-character play. This old-fashioned old-dark-house flick, rated R for “violence and terror,” is perhaps an audible unseen knife-slash or two away from a PG-13; nothing in it is as scary (the clown doll) or as gruesome (the paranormal assistant hallucinating peeling his face off in bloody chunks) as the PG-rated Poltergeist. The parents are distracted but loving; the little girl is kind of refreshingly uningratiating — if she smiles once in the film, I must’ve blinked and missed it. She’s plausibly haunted by inner as well as outer demons. The movie never quite draws a connection between the two, though; the subtext is there if you want to insist on it, but the script throws in too many details, forcing the creatures out of the shadows in more ways than one. It’s a decent spook show, and parents who’ve just moved to a new house should keep their small children the hell away from it; also, it’s not in 3D, which is fast becoming a big plus.

Fright Night (2011)

The scariest thing in the new Fright Night remake is the notion of Lisa Loeb playing a teenager’s mom. This seems outlandish to me, since I know for a fact that she was a young twentysomething indie-rock singer only about two minutes ago; but 1995 was a long time ago, it turns out, and here she is, age 43, as a teenager’s mom. Tempus sure does fugit like a mofo. The rest of Fright Night didn’t upset me nearly as much, but then the original 1985 film didn’t either. That film, which gained from a witty Roddy McDowall performance as a late-night horror-show host turned vampire hunter, was an agreeable throwback, in the midst of the slasher-flick bloodletting that dominated the genre, to old-school monster-mash thrills. Fright Night 2011 is a throwback to a throwback, only this time vampires aren’t nearly as scarce in pop culture as they were 26 years ago. If you seek their sparkly monument, look around you.

As in the original, recovering dork Charley (Anton Yelchin) becomes suspicious of the new next-door neighbor, Jerry (Colin Farrell), a charmer who works nights and sleeps days. Stepping into Chris Sarandon’s suave shoes, Farrell gives Jerry an additional rough-and-tumble, working-class sexiness that’s plausibly catnip to the (hetero) ladies and alluring to the guys he meets, too. (When a couple of cops stop by Jerry’s house to investigate a scream, a laughing Jerry puts them at ease immediately.) Jerry reads as a good guy, so when Charley starts pegging him as a vampire, it makes sense that nobody believes him. There’s some subtext involving Charley’s sexual jealousy of Jerry: Charley’s girlfriend Amy (Imogen Poots) is hot to trot, but he’s too nervous to appease her. Jerry definitely wouldn’t be too nervous.

Fright Night will not survive parking-lot logic, wherein on the way to the car you begin to trip over the plot holes, such as a house blowing up and nobody seeming to notice, or various teenagers disappearing and nobody really noticing that, either, except for geeky Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who himself disappears fairly early on and nobody really notices. Has Jerry darkly enchanted everyone’s minds? The Roddy McDowall analog here is David Tennant, unrecognizable until he peels off his Criss Angel get-up, as a cheeseball Vegas magician conversant with the supernatural. Tennant is up for a good cynical performance, until the script dumps a backstory on him that kind of kills his arc. He’s supposed to be a fake who finds out that vampires are quite real, but instead he’s a fake who knows all along that vampires are real? I couldn’t grab onto who he was supposed to be.

Still, some of the movie is reasonably amusing — there’s a nice Children of Men homage set inside a speeding car — and director Craig Gillespie, whose previous film was the quirky indie comedy-drama Lars and the Real Girl, gives some real attention to human interaction (and vampire/human interaction). I get the feeling he wanted to make a classical vampire flick about repression, and some of it resonates nicely. (There’s even a quick shot at David Tennant’s lack of staying power in bed.) Everyone in the film has a weird, frustrated angle on sex except Jerry, who represents casually, carnally taking what you want when you want it. Only a metaphorical rapist like Jerry can be truly sexually fulfilled; everyone else is too human, too awkward, to let loose and get it on.

The movie was filmed in 3D — the extra dimension wasn’t added later, as in Thor and Captain America — and, as usual, it looks best when suggesting depth. Not a lot pokes out at us, though the sparks that emanate from dying vampires float lazily and rather beautifully out into the theater, like fireflies saying hi. Some scenes, especially an early one inside a missing kid’s darkened house, will get the audience squinting to make out what’s happening (in that case, not much). Various implements of vampire-slaying do invade our space now and again, and blobs of blood and billows of fire. But for the most part, there was no compelling reason for Fright Night to require special glasses. Have fun trying to find a theater showing it in plain ol’ 2D, though.

Arthur (2011)

To those who hold up the 1981 Dudley Moore comedy Arthur as if it were a snifter of fine brandy, I have to ask: Have you seen it lately? It hasn’t aged well; aside from John Gielgud’s deservedly Oscar-winning exercise in dry wit, which remains evergreen, it’s a dreary throwback to fizzier ’30s comedies of manners, with Moore falling about and cackling tirelessly, Liza Minnelli in that stage of her career when there could only be the thinnest pretense that she was playing anyone other than Liza Minnelli, and that ghastly Christopher Cross theme song, also (far less deservedly) Oscar-winning. What may have been refreshingly retro thirty years ago is now doubly musty.

Which is not to make any bold claims for the new Arthur, with the lanky, amiably decadent Russell Brand in for Moore and the mock-forbidding Helen Mirren in for Gielgud. The idea of Mirren as the new Hobson, the disdainful but covertly loving valet of the tippling heir Arthur (Brand), looks good on paper. But Mirren, delivering some of the same dialogue Gielgud did, can’t really compete. (Sometimes the dialogue can’t compete, either: Mirren’s “Wash your winkie” versus Gielgud’s towering delivery of “Perhaps you would like me to come in there and wash your dick for you, you little shit.”) And without any wildness or complexity to reveal, Mirren seems stranded. Two other actresses come off better. In the Minnelli role of the free-spirited woman Arthur loves but isn’t supposed to, here substantially rewritten, Greta Gerwig actually is as enchanting as Minnelli’s character was supposed to be. And Jennifer Garner, as the woman Arthur is meant to marry but doesn’t love, creates a soulless businesswoman who doesn’t really love Arthur either but wants the old-money cred of his name.

The premise is archetypal: Arthur must marry this horrid woman or he’ll lose his inheritance (here upgraded to $950 million from the original’s $750 million). But we don’t want to see him disregard his fortune any more than he wants to do it. The point of both films is that Arthur the coddled man-child in his kingdom of playthings must grow up enough to be willing to give it all up for true love. I hate to say it, but Russell Brand enacted a similar bad-boy-reforms arc last year in Get Him to the Greek, and he was funnier there; that comedy, for all its sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, was the real 21st-century Arthur (as well as an unofficial remake of My Favorite Year, of course). And it had better songs; this one gives us a soundtrack of twee romantic ditties, including a Fitz & the Tantrums end-credits cover of “Arthur’s Theme,” which, like the rest of the film, is a less annoying remake but no great shakes either.

During those end credits we see Arthur and his love depicted as if in a storybook. It looks a little like the illustrations Eric Chase Anderson does for the Criterion DVD editions of his brother Wes’ films, and that made me imagine a Wes Anderson remake of Arthur. It would be exponentially drier, perhaps with Owen Wilson as Arthur and Bill Murray as his valet (or perhaps his chauffeur, a role here that wastes the comedic gifts of Luis Guzman). When a movie has ended and you’re left thinking about an alternate version of it, that movie is probably in trouble. Otherwise, Arthur peddles the comforting fiction — especially offensive these days — that love trumps money, without quite acknowledging that life is more easily negotiable for people with money but no love than for those with love but no money. As Keith Richards put it when deriding the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love”: “Yeah, try payin’ the bills with it.”

True Grit (2010)

John Wayne wasn’t much of an actor, but he had that American-eagle presence that stood him in good stead until the ’60s, when the eagle’s feathers began to molt. In 1969, with America’s indignity approaching its peak, Wayne made True Grit and played a fat, one-eyed drunk who could still get it together to be noble. The denuded eagle had been restored, at least temporarily. Cut to 2010: the eagle has not soared for quite some time, and politicians on both sides are plucking its feathers one by one. The time may indeed be right for another True Grit, another fat one-eyed drunk showing us that redemption is hard but not impossible. And this time, there’s a real actor involved.

Jeff Bridges steps into the muddy boots of Rooster Cogburn, a U.S. Marshal hired by fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross (sharp newcomer Hailie Steinfeld) to chase down the no-account thief who killed her father. Cogburn normally can’t be bothered to make his speech intelligible — most of it is disgruntled mumbling — but Bridges, a precise actor even when playing layabouts like Cogburn or the Dude, lets us hear the sentences that matter. Cogburn drinks all day and drags himself painfully out of sleep in the morning, but he snaps into cold proficiency when he has to.

True Grit has been adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen to hew closer to the tone of Charles Portis’ well-loved novel, which is told from the viewpoint of Mattie Ross. The baroquely formal language has been preserved, as has the rather eligiac epilogue: this time it’s Mattie who rides off into the sunset, not Cogburn. The obvious comparison is to the Coens’ Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men (that film’s desperate protagonist, Josh Brolin, here gets to play a slyly tongue-in-cheek Anton Chigurh figure), but I think it would make a better double feature with the Coens’ Fargo. In both, a plain-spoken female, innocent of sin but unafraid in the face of evil, pursues her quarry across grim expanses of snow. They’re both essentially comedies of persistence, weighed to the earth a little by the heaviness of violence.

The original True Grit got an M rating in 1969 (the equivalent of today’s PG-13), and the new version pushes the PG-13 envelope with chopped-off fingers, an assailant shot off his horse and pitching bloodily head-first into a big rock, and a nicely tense sequence involving a pit full of rattlesnakes. Still, the Coens have aimed for a holiday-season entertainment here, wrought with their usual fastidious style. (If cinematographer Roger Deakins, heretofore stupidly overlooked by the Academy for past gorgeous work, doesn’t win the Oscar next February for his work here, I’m sure I won’t be alone in throwing something at the TV.)

Why did the typically sardonic Coens want to make this film? A glance at the Portis novel yields a simple answer: Why wouldn’t they? It offers terrific set pieces, a great ear for dialogue, and an outsize hero, a sodden eagle burping on his horse and failing to shoot cornbread in air but firing true when it counts. It’s clear from such farces as Burn After Reading that the Coens don’t really believe in American exceptionalism. But perhaps they would like to. In the wide panoramic compositions of the filmmaking, the eagle soars again.

Let Me In

Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloë Moretz are the best reasons to see Let Me In, the new American remake of Sweden’s 2008 Let the Right One In, though they’re not the only reasons. Their performances as Owen, a bullied, scared 12-year-old, and Abby, a strange girl who’s just moved next door to him, are delicate and beautifully calibrated. The movie itself — which drops the original film’s problematic cat-attack scene — has not one discordant note in it. In some ways, Let Me In feels more like a European art-house film than the original did. You expect a Swedish film to brood quietly and disregard American mainstream attention spans. You don’t expect a horror film playing in just over 2,000 theaters nationwide to follow suit. Am I saying that Let Me In trumps its predecessor? Let’s say each film has its strengths; the American remake stands honorably on its own and, to these American eyes, boasts better acting. They’re two excellent treatments of the same story. One just happens to be in English.

Director Matt Reeves did not begin his career auspiciously. His debut was not 2008′s Cloverfield, as I’m sure he’d like you to believe, but the all-but-forgotten 1996 David Schwimmer vehicle The Pallbearer. Among other foibles, the film did not play like the Graduate riff it was pitched as; it was ineffably glum and dark. Such was the reception of The Pallbearer that Reeves did not direct again for twelve years, when longtime buddy J.J. Abrams (with whom Reeves had created TV’s Felicity) handed him the keys to Cloverfield. I can say for certain now, thinking back on The Pallbearer through the prism of Let Me In, that Reeves has not only a talent but a taste for understated gloom.

The ads have spoiled it, so I’m not afraid to: Abby is not a normal girl. She travels with a much older man (Richard Jenkins), whom everyone takes to be her father, though she most likely has a few years on him. Abby is a vampire; she hungers for blood and nothing else — she can’t even hold down a bit of candy — and her stomach growls and revolts painfully when she hasn’t fed in a while. The older man is charged with getting blood for her, which usually means subduing some teenager, hanging him upside down, and cutting his jugular. (This effect is accomplished here more subtly, and thus more convincingly, than in the original.) Owen knows nothing of this; all he knows is that he’s glad of her attention — any positive attention — and he really likes her. Like, likes her likes her.

As in the original, this romance between a human and a vampire is much darker and more complex than anything in the Twilight saga. Does Abby feel any affection for Owen? Or is she simply eyeing him as a replacement for the increasingly ineffectual older man (who, we learn from a photo, joined her at an age close to Owen’s)? Kodi Smit-McPhee effortlessly puts across Owen’s fear at school (I also have to commend Dylan Minnette, who creates a realistically intimidating bully whose sadism is rooted in being bullied by his older brother), his sadness at turning invisible during his parents’ contentious divorce, his flickers of hope and happiness whenever he sees Abby. As for Chloë Moretz, she’s having a banner year (Diary of a Wimpy Kid and especially Kick-Ass), and her work here should write her a one-way ticket to whatever she wants. She isn’t around as much as Smit-McPhee, but Moretz makes her presence felt throughout the film; indeed, in her last two scenes we don’t see her face at all. What Moretz nails more than anything is the sense that Abby would like to be optimistic about her new friendship — would like to see it become something deeper than just a new delivery system for blood — but can’t quite bring herself to hope, because she’s seen too much, suffered too much. (Also, Abby’s ambiguous nature, much talked about in the original but reportedly dropped from the remake, is still there if you know to look for it, suggesting pain that goes beyond just being a vampire.)

If you love Let the Right One In and looked askance at the idea of a remake, I shared your skepticism, but Let Me In won me over. It doesn’t replace the original, which is still right there on the shelf. It retains the original’s quiet strengths and earns its wings as the vehicle by which American subtitle-phobes will watch this story. If you haven’t seen the original, that just means you have two treats in store.

Piranha 3D

While chatting with schlock-movie magnate Roger Corman, the great drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs developed the three-B formula for B-movies: blood, breasts and beasts. Piranha 3D packs plenty of all three (it should’ve been called Piranha 3B). The gore comes in waves, the quantity of bouncing boobs (in and out of bikini tops) verges on ridiculous, and the critters — prehistoric piranha stirred up by an earthquake under a lake — attack in ferocious, water-churning swarms. I was amped for this movie — I wanted it to be a trash masterpiece, a three-B flick so gratuitous and grisly it would soar past exploitation and crash-land somewhere in the rocky borderlands of art.

Turns out, though, Piranha 3D probably plays best if met with low expectations. People have been talking about it as if it would redeem not just this dull summer but the newly burgeoning and mostly squandered subgenre of 3D movies. The film was conceived for 3D but wasn’t actually shot in 3D; as a result, much of the movie has that glazed ViewMaster look, a slick layered flatness, and that’s true of the movie’s tone, too. The original Piranha, from 1978, was also exploitation (from, ahem, the Roger Corman factory), but it’s a junk classic, with two genuine wits at the helm — director Joe Dante and writer John Sayles, who turned a Jaws rip-off into a wry send-up of aquatic-monster flicks. The new effort works hard to be over-the-top, but it seems to have no reason for being aside from congratulating itself for its own excess.

Director Alexandre Aja (High Tension, the Hills Have Eyes remake) gives us one gorgeous moment: British model Kelly Brook and porn actress Riley Steele performing a nude underwater dance. The movie stops dead for this; otherwise it’s full steam ahead into a plot that feeds thousands of horny spring-break youngsters into the gnashing choppers of the piranha. This is what we came to see, but the result — which seems intent on challenging Saving Private Ryan for the championship belt in blood-drenched beach scenes — is more ugly than fun. There is, it turns out, a clear demarcation point past which ravaged flesh and floating body parts become a bit boring, and Aja speedboats over the line and keeps on going.

There’s a spooky, dread-ridden shot in the trailer that sold many of us on the movie — a terrified Jessica Szohr, underwater, as scores of piranha advance on her slowly. That shot isn’t in the movie, but a lot else is: a hang-gliding woman eaten from the torso down; a woman whose hair gets caught in a propeller and whose face gets torn off. Lest you think Piranha 3D is misogynist rubbish reveling in exposing female flesh and then jamming it, Larry Flynt-like, into the meat grinder, there’s also the comeuppance of a smarmy character (Jerry O’Connell) clearly based on Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild infamy. This upstanding fellow loses the organ most valuable to him and his legions of video viewers, and a piranha makes off with it and then barfs it back into our faces in 3D. You don’t see that every day, nor do you get to write that sentence every day. For that, if for nothing else, as a viewer and as a critic, I suppose I should be thankful.