Review: The Beguiled (2017)

* * *
Director: Sofia Coppola
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning

The effect that he has is immediate. It's a change - a charge - in the air, a fear that pulsates through the house, something that at once repels and attracts. He's a volatile presence, a grenade tossed into a room, and yet everyone seems surprised when the situation finally explodes. A hothouse melodrama adapted from the novel of the same name, The Beguiled makes excellent use of Colin Farrell's capacity for soulful villainy and Nicole Kidman's for icy ferocity, but ultimately ends up being slightly less than it perhaps could have been. It's a handsomely mounted film (Philippe Le Sourd's cinematography, in particular, stands out for its atmospheric contribution) and well-acted all around, but it tends to strike symbolic poses more often than it actually uses its narrative to really say anything, resulting in a good movie that never quite reaches greatness.

Review: Midnight Special (2016)

* * * 1/2
Director: Jeff Nichols
Starring: Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Adam Driver

In just a decade and a handful of movies, writer/director Jeff Nichols has become one of the most consistently interesting and consistently good American filmmakers working today. His debut, Shotgun Stories, is an underseen but critically beloved movie about the feud that arises between two sets of half-brothers after their father dies, which he has followed up with the intense apocalyptic drama Take Shelter, and Mud, a drama about a teenage boy having his romantic illusions about what it means to be a man shattered. Now comes the supernatural thriller Midnight Special and, later this year, Loving, a drama about the landmark US Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia. If Loving is even half as good as Midnight Special, then 2016 will be an extremely good year for Nichols, indeed.

Review: Bachelorette (2012)

* * *Director: Leslye Headland
Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Lizzy Caplan, Isle Fisher, Rebel Wilson

Like a more foul-tempered cousin to Bridesmaids, Leslye Headland's Bachelorette comes out with both guns blazing. Telling the tale of three terrible people playing bridesmaid to the high school friend that they all kind of hate, Bachelorette is as acid as Bridesmaids is sweet - at least until it starts to lose its nerve and allows itself to end with hugs and dancing. Up until then, though, it's a delightfully vicious piece of work that plays against the formula of female-centered comedy and delivers plenty of (admittedly evil) laughs.