THE WITCH

Good horror movies make you jump. Great ones make you unable to move. And writer/director Robert Eggers’ feature-film debut The Witch may be as close to great as this decade’s horror movies have yet come – a mesmerizing, stomach-tightening descent into madness completely devoid of irony. Its trappings may portend a literal-minded take on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, but the wickedness here is in no way theoretical or the product of mass (McCarthy-influenced) hysteria. Eggers’ ballsy achievement suggests, rather, that true evil can be an entity as real as those who believe in it, a physical presence conjured through excessive pride, fear, suspicion, lust, and, most critically, lack of faith. The Witch is a haunting experience, and the more you think about it, the more haunting it gets.

ZOOLANDER 2

Probably no film genre currently flashes a bigger “get out of jail free” card than the Hollywood comedy, if for no other reason than there being so many outstanding comedians that any movie employing even a half-dozen of them is guaranteed to feature a fistful of reasons to attend. Zoolander 2, however, has the comics and still isn’t worth seeing.

THE CHOICE

Arriving just in time for women and gay men not entrenched in Super Bowl hoopla, this past weekend brought with it the debut of director Ross Katz’s The Choice, the 11th (!) adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks weepie to hit cineplexes since 1999. This one finds its rain-drenched North Carolina romantics portrayed by the Georgia-born Benjamin Walker, which is regionally close-enough, and Australian actress Teresa Palmer, which is regionally not-even-close. Oh, and British actor Tom Wilkinson plays Walker’s homily-spouting father. I’m fine with Walker’s casting. But have these things really become so noxious, and obnoxious, that we can no longer find Americans willing to play major roles in Sparks movies, forcing us to farm those assignments out to foreigners? Is Trump aware of this?!

DIRTY GRANDPA

As traditional boundaries in R-rated slapsticks continue to be pushed and filmmakers continue to seek new ways to comically shock us, if you’re going to title a movie Dirty Grandpa, you’d better make sure that grandpa is really, really dirty. Consequently, the biggest compliment I can give director Dan Mazer and screenwriter John Phillips is that the Dirty doesn’t nearly do justice to this Grandpa – I truly can’t remember the last time I was this flabbergasted by screen vulgarity, or the last time I roared at screen vulgarity quite so hard.