Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson in The Conjuring: Last Rites
THE CONJURING: LAST RITES
Now that the series' third, purportedly final sequel is upon us, am I going to miss Ed and Lorraine Warren, the blissfully married paranormal investigators who've been shepherding the Conjuring movies – and who've been warmly played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga – since the horror franchise debuted in 2013? Yes and no, I guess.
As its title implies, director Michael Chaves' The Conjuring: Last Rites is being advertised as the final installment involving the real-life, now-deceased ghostbusters from decades past, and beyond Wilson's and Farmiga's inherent likability and professionalism, I do feel a twinge of regret knowing we'll henceforth be deprived all those tacky leisure suits and seemingly handmade house dresses, to say nothing of Wilson's exceptional sideburns. I'll also miss Ed's practice, evidenced in The Conjuring 2, of momentarily sidelining Satanic threat by picking up a guitar and crooning a tender Elvis Presley ballad in its entirety. Will I otherwise miss these folks? Nah. The Warrens have done their duty, and Wilson and Farmiga have more than done theirs. And beyond their potential cameos in future Annabelle installments, Last Rites is a perfectly acceptable send-off – largely silly, aggressively schmaltzy, and only randomly scary, but satisfying enough to earn its many callbacks and leave fans with a smile. It's the genre equivalent of High School Musical 3. I mean that mostly as a compliment.
In the manner of every Fast & the Furious flick and Olive Garden commercial you've ever seen, this latest Conjuring is All About Family, and there are two of them sharing space in Chaves' primarily 1986-set chiller. One clan is the Smurls, a tribe of eight packed into a two-story row house in West Pittston, Pennsylvania. Their “true story” concerns the supernatural goings-on that occur when, as a confirmation gift for second-eldest daughter Heather (Kila Lord Cassidy), grandma and grandpa present the teen with a flea-market gift: an ornately designed full-length mirror, with unsettling cherubs at the top, boasting a sizable crack in the glass. Are these seniors the only people on God's green earth who don't recognize that as a bad-luck sign?
Anyhoo, devilish goings-on transpire for this knockoff Radio Days ensemble, and their only hope for survival lies in the polite, anti-hippie interference of Last Rites' second featured family the Warrens, Ed's and Lorraine's now-adult daughter Judy (Mia Tomlinson) having been born on the same day that her parents first encountered the Smurl mirror that's a veritable gateway to Hell. If you've been Conjuring-ed before, you know what to expect next. Shrieking apparitions. False realities. Massive, infrequently fatal bloodletting. And more than a few expressions of undying adoration between Ed and Lorraine, whose teary “love will see us through” messaging now includes silent declarations shared with their daughter. It's not just Linda Blair, in these things, who sometimes feels the need to puke.
Every so often at one of this franchise's offerings, including the films in the Annabelle and The Nun series, I'll amuse myself through the doldrums by keeping a mental checklist of legitimately, evocatively creepy moments. Usually, I'm lucky if I get to three. At Last Rites, after a half-dozen landed, I lost track of the number. Period settings and niceties have always been among this series' prime benefits – nothing kills tension faster than a character fumbling for a cell phone – and there are terrific bits here involving the world's longest landline extension cord and the impossibility, as we older generations will recall, of getting a VHS tape to stop on the exact right frame. One of the Smurls' grade-school twins also has a wind-up porcelain doll that chants “Mama!” and crawls around the room and occasionally levitates, and the uninviting, seemingly unbreakable plaything looks so harmful that when the kid hugged it, I worried that the strain of her gesture would result in a cracked rib. (Seriously: Cabbage Patch Kids were everywhere in the '80s! Much softer!)
Yet beyond the tingle of this Annablle Jr., Chaves also does well in staging a sequence of bloody projectile vomiting and a suicide that isn't, plus an admirably nervy detour involving a mirrored fitting room when Judy tries on a wedding gown. (It ain't Touch of Evil, but it's at least a touch of Touch of Evil.) Up until the finale, when the threat essentially boils down to whether a pair of middle-aged men can successfully drag a piece of furniture across an unfortified attic and down a flight of stairs, Chaves and his trio of screenwriters do a solid job of doling out the memorable set pieces every few minutes, making it seem like freaky fun is happening almost constantly. It isn't, though I do kinda admire the attempt at gaslighting, and as has become traditional with Conjuring followups, the repetitive nature of the predictable “Boo!”s and sound-effect bangs makes the experience awfully redundant. Generally speaking, my mouth was more open for yawns than gasps.
Yet part of the reason the Conjurings have been so successful is no doubt because audiences simply, and for understandable reason, like the Warrens, at least as presented in this series. (They appear far less adorable, as actual people, in the TV footage that accompanies the end credits … and a Wikipedia skim will provide most everything you did and maybe didn't want to know about the couple's checkered history.) And while the heavy-handed family-first moralizing here did make me feel a little unwell, it also yielded lovely things, chief among them the Warrens' interactions with Judy's ex-cop fiancè Tony (a thoroughly charming Ben Hardy), whose name Ed forever pretends to not recall. Every interchange between Ed and Tony is cornball beyond belief. But corn is part of the package in the Conjuring universe, and after four films, some more worthy than others, Last Rites earns the right to indulge in sentimentality – and its loyal audiences do, too. I won't say how or why, but Lili Taylor, who played the focal haunted-house victim in the first Conjuring, also makes an appearance in this one, and I momentarily got misty-eyed. What can I say? I suppose the devil made me do it.
HIGHEST 2 LOWEST
Spike Lee has made brilliant movies and solid movies and disappointing movies and even a few lousy movies, and he makes a blend of all these types in Highest 2 Lowest, which made its weekend debut on Apple+, and is the first Spike Lee joint since his smashing 2020 two-fer of Da 5 Bloods and David Byrne's American Utopia. You could perhaps blame that five-year gap for the occasional blunders of this crime-thriller salute to New York City, a work inspired by Akira Kurusawa's 1963 High & Low. Yet nothing about Lee's alternately exciting and underwhelming latest suggests rustiness or compromise; scene for scene, and even shot for shot, it feels precisely like the final cut Spike wanted. Whether it's precisely what we fans want, particularly in the first half, is another matter (and, let's face it, a largely immaterial one).
Re-teaming with Denzel Washington for the first time since 2006's Inside Man and the fifth time since 1990's Mo' Better Blues, Lee and cinematographer Matthew Libatique open Highest 2 Lowest with gleaming images and swooping aerial shots of NYC so ravishingly gorgeous that having the montage scored to Oklahoma!'s “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'” seems redundant. Eventually, the camera closes in on the high-rise balcony of Washington's David King, a legendary music mogul whose view from Dumbo affords him a nearly godlike survey of Brooklyn. (It's a nice touch that King's apartment is two stories below the penthouse – a visual metaphor implying King still feeling not quite at the top of his game.) All is initially peachy for King's wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), teenage son Trey (Aubrey Joseph), and King himself, who's pursuing a multi-million-dollar deal to regain majority ownership of Stackin' Hit Records, which he put on the map.
His plans, however, quickly take a couple of successive turns. First, King receives an anonymous phone call from someone who claims to have taken Trey hostage, and will only return him for a $17.5-million ransom. But when Trey is discovered free and unharmed, it becomes apparent that the kidnapper abducted the wrong teen, and it's actually Trey's buddy Kyle (Elijah Wright), the son of King's chauffeur and best friend Paul (Jeffrey Wright), whose life is on the line. King was more than willing to pay the $17.5 for his own son, but given that the payment will financially ruin him, will he do it for another man's?
That juicy premise, filled as it is with beat-the-clock drama, moral quandary, and the highest of stakes, should be enough to suggest why the Kurusawa is considered a classic. Unfortunately, though, it takes much of the film's 130-minute running length for Highest 2 Lowest to even get good. None of the blame lies with Washington, who's on charisma overload from the start. Yet he also kind of has to be considering what he's working against. Through all of their scenes together, the hindrances include Hadera, whose leaden performance implies that she took the concept of “trophy life” literally, delivering just slightly more facial expressions and emotional nuance than an Oscar statuette. I have to believe her affectlessness is at least partly intentional, considering the chill Pam inspires when detectives want to see up shop in the Kings' apartment: “Just move the candelabras out of the way … maybe put the flowers to the left of the fireplace … .” But such stunning shallowness isn't explored elsewhere; the lovely Hadera merely seems like a bad actor, or simply a badly miscast one. And the opening hour (and then some) is also hurt by composer Howard Drossin's awkwardly melodramatic score that employs light jazz and superhero bombast at the most ill-conceived times, and by Alan Fox's debilitatingly expository script. Washington and Joseph perform their Fences-esque face-off admirably, but did we really need an entire scene devoted to Trey explaining to his dad the evils of social media? David King may be old school, but it's not like Internet trolls were invented yesterday.
It's in its second half – right around the time a Yankees fan faces the camera and chants “Bos-ton SUCKS! Bos-ton SUCKS!” – that the movie finally becomes the thrilling, imaginative, singular Spike Lee joint we die-hards have been waiting for. (It also becomes better-acted, primarily because the ever-excellent Wright gets more to do, and because Wendell Pierce shows up opposite Washington for a three-minute master class in screen chemistry.) While the scheme requires a flabbergasting amount of coincidence and belief suspension, the extended cat-and-mouse involving an Air Jordan backpack is filmed with dynamic energy, and Washington has two one-on-ones opposite rapper A$AP Rocky in which their words pop like firecrackers; despite the inherent tension, it's impossible not to grin.
We also get a stellar foot chase through the boroughs, a vibrant concert number featuring Eddie Palmieri and his band, amusing cop banter between LaChanze and Dean Winters, an enjoyably off-kilter fantasy rap number, and Rosie Perez. Neither a masterpiece nor a bomb, Highest 2 Lowest at least demonstrates that Spike Lee is still in fighting form nearly 40 years into his film career – though in terms of what we get from the presentation, the title Lowest 2 Highest would've been considerably more accurate.
TWINLESS
It's not uncommon for the writer/directors of indie dramedies to star in their own works, usually playing some mildly veiled or aspirational version of themselves, and sometimes these things go on to win the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. That happened with Cooper Raiff's Cha Cha Real Smooth, an insufferably rigged and twee outing from 2022 that I keep hoping I'll have no reason to remember.
Yet while, at this past January's Sundance, James Sweeney's newly released Twinless also won the Audience Award, and the writer/director plays one of its two leads, I'm praying that his character Dennis is neither a veiled (mildly or not) nor remotely aspirational version of Sweeney himself. To put it bluntly, Dennis is a creep – if also a sad, frequently funny creep for whom you likely feel more empathy than you would if you met the guy in real life. It takes guts to cast yourself as what is inarguably your movie's only villain, despite that “villain” label itself being arguable, and the minor miracle of Twinless lies in how successfully Sweeney weaves a tale that's equal parts Tootsie-esque farce and Single White Female-ish thriller. Thanks principally to a never-better Dylan O'Brien, it also elicits far more tears than either.
Opening with a fatal, off-screen traffic accident, Sweeney's sophomore feature (following 2019's Straight Up) immediately takes us to the funeral of ill-fated pedestrian Rocky, whose identical twin Roman (O'Brien) looks so much like his brother that well-wishers at the gravesite break down upon meeting him. Angry, heartbroken, and lonely, Roman attempts to find solace in a support-group meeting for those who've lost twin siblings, and that's where he meets Dennis. The two are polar opposites: Dennis is slender, gay, and acerbic; Roman is muscular, straight, and slightly dim. (He's also aware of it, at one point describing himself, unironically, as “not the brightest tool in the shed.”) But in one another, Roman and Dennis find someone to spend time with, confide in, and treat as a brother – we learn that Rocky was also gay – and before long, the duo are grocery shopping together, playing video games together, and spending nearly every minute together. That's when, some 20 minutes into Twinless, the film's title finally appears on-screen, and an extended flashback provides a bit of cannily withheld information: Unbeknownst to Roman, Dennis actually knew Rocky, and quite intimately, before he died.
You'll have to take my word for it, but I just spent a quarter-hour mulling over and rewriting the last sentence of that paragraph, torn as I was about how much plot I should reveal (there's way more to come), and whether even knowing about Dennis' familiarity with Rocky constituted too much info. (Like the three-second rule involving dropped food, I'm going with the notion that nothing that happens in a movie's first 20 minutes qualifies as a spoiler ... though of course, that three-second rule is a myth … .) But Dennis not revealing his past to Rocky's twin is the movie, and both the screwball comedy and affecting drama of Twinless derive from how Dennis' subterfuge – a concealment leading to a number of whopper lies – finds the man digging a deeper and deeper hole for himself while poor Roman remains more or less happily oblivious. Figures such as Aisling Franciosi's Marcie, the most endearing of Dennis' co-workers, and Chris Perfetti's George, another Rocky acquaintance who knows he recognizes Dennis from somewhere, keep Sweeney's anti-hero in a state of perpetual anxiety. He's like a Tom Ripley with fewer self-preservation skills, and Sweeney's suggestive, slow-boil direction hints that homicidal malice may never be entirely off the table. Mostly, however, we twitch and squirm along with Dennis, wondering, with gnawing apprehension, how he'll ever resolve this impossible succession of escalating untruths. And wondering whether we want him to.
Although I hope and presume that the writer/director isn't like Dennis regarding the character's most repellent attributes, the role seems tailor-made for his performance gifts, and when he's not making us feel icky, Sweeney is a weirdly sympathetic presence and expertly sardonic comedian. (Staring with unbridled affection at Roman, he takes a perfect mini-pause after being asked what “type” Dennis is into and unconvincingly deadpans, “I don't really have a type.”) Yet this is absolutely Dylan O'Brien's movie. At the start, the actor is so persuasive as a soulful lunk who feels more than he can verbalize that it's nearly jaw-dropping when that post-title-card flashback lands and he's instantly in the skin of Rocky: witty, comfortable, flirty, brashly commanding. You may find yourself wishing for more Rocky than Sweeney's film gives us.
But the far-more significant time spent with Roman is by no means a hardship, and in addition to being almost painfully moving – his testimonial at group therapy and cathartic hotel-room convo with Dennis are honest, powerfully effective tearjerkers – O'Brien delivers consistently delightful, non-judgmental malapropisms that keep you laughing despite the pain at the material's core. The recipient of a special juried award at Sundance for his Twinless performance, the routinely underrated O'Brien deserves that accolade and any others that come his way, and steals your heart from his first minutes on-screen, when Roman tells Dennis that he's from Moscow. Given that they're both Northwesterners, Dennis understandably asks, “Moscow, Idaho?” Roman, with perfect Joey Tribbiani incredulity, shoots him a no-duh look. “You know of another one?”
