For the week of February 12th, the Criterion Collection is releasing two iconic horror films that couldn't be more dissimilar from one another: George Romero's landmark zombie classic Night of the Living Dead and Jonathan Demme's serial-killer thriller The Silence of the Lambs. Taken together, they cover both extremes of the horror-movie spectrum. Night of the Living Dead is the scrappy underdog, a no-budget chiller that Romero made in his own backyard (read: just outside of Pittsburgh), with local actors and a crew of his close friends and family. Yet the film still remains the lodestar for every indie filmmaker who wanted to make a movie, regardless of how few resources and little money they might have had. Romero directs with feverish "Let's put on a show" intensity, and he ends up innovating within his very limited financial and spatial constraints. Forget the fact that Night of the Living Dead birthed the modern zombie movie as we know it - Romero practically redesigned the home-invasion genre as we know it, given how relentlessly he puts his (living) cast through the wringer as they try to keep an army of flesh-eating monsters from invading a rapidly crumbling farmhouse. Some of the attack scenes are reminiscent of German expressionism (especially in Criterion's gorgeous new restoration), and the violence still retains a gruesome punch, despite the bloody innovations made in the years since Night's initial release. But it's Romero's social agenda that proves Night's most disquieting element. In 1968, the images of its African-American hero (Duane Jones) fending off literal white devils struck a chord with anyone watching the Civil Rights Movement unfold on television; as he would do throughout his career, Romero used ghouls and goblins to harness far more disquieting societal ills. By comparison, The Silence of the Lambs is the horror film as prestige picture. Critics often treat horror-themed content as somehow less-than, yet Jonathan Demme turned Thomas Harris' novel, about rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling (the great Jodie Foster) hunting a brutal serial killer (Ted Levine), into one of the most celebrated of all American thrillers. The film won Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Actress, Best Actor, and Best Picture: we'd have to wait until last year's Get Out to see a genre film garner this same level of acclaim. And Demme did so in a manner not at all dissimilar from Romero or Get Out's Jordan Peele. To Demme, Silence's twists act as a delivery system for a far more humanist story about the perils women face in a male-dominated world. He and his longtime DP Tak Fujimoto constantly frame Starling to emphasize her relative slightness and perceived lack of agency, or they'll use Demme's trademark looking-into-the-camera close-ups as a way of forcing us to register every leering male gaze Starling receives. As such, it isn't an accident that Starling forges her closest bond with a genuine maniac. Anthony Hopkins' incarcerated Hannibal Lecter might gleefully admit his predilection for violence and human flesh, but he also respects Starling's intelligence above all else and becomes her most effective sounding board as she tracks her quarry. Demme was always one for inserting moments of surprising comedy in his pictures, and their relationship might be his darkest joke: Hannibal might be many things, but at least he's not a sexist pig. This singular fusion of message and monsters arrives in a package as smooth and burnished as any Hollywood production I've seen (it's so confident that you almost overlook the parts of the film that aren't so progressive, like its off-putting treatment of trans individuals).
Of Night of the Living Dead, Svet Atanasov wrote that "it turns its supposed negatives into major positives. For example, the tiny budget that Romero had at his disposal made conventional special effects unaffordable, but instead of appearing vulnerable because of their omission the film actually uses the void to strengthen its claustrophobic ambience. The magic trick is this: all of the horror action is basically locked in an authentic environment, which instantly makes any over-the-top special effects redundant. The characterizations are done in a similar fashion. Notice that the acting is quite uneven and rough, and that the film makes it awfully difficult for the audience to embrace any of the major characters. Once again, however, all of this actually helps the tension grow even stronger as it makes the horror appear very authentic. The visual style blends noirish contrasts and shadow nuances with documentary simplicity and fluidity. It emerges naturally rather than being carefully crafted for optimal effect, which is why some of the shifts that occur in the final act are hard to forget. (The closing sequence alone would have been enough to ensure the film's 'classic' status).." And he noted that The Silence of the Lambs "is one of the definitive '90s films. The quality of the script seems even more impressive now. The characterizations are so carefully done and so good that their evolutions actually become a lot more attractive than the events that are chronicled in the film. There are a lot of segments where particular responses and reactions, for instance, are far more effective than the following segment where the focus of attention is on the action which begins or ends with a surprising twist. The manner in which the film builds its atmosphere is just as striking. The brilliant performances of course help tremendously, but the transitions from FBI's training academy in Quantico to Dr. Lecter's glass cage to Buffalo Bill's lair are done so effortlessly that the tension never stops growing, Remember, the film goes back and forth between multiple locations and there are different developments with a lot of important information to digest."
Far less traumatic than either Criterion entry is Stephen Chbosky's Wonder, which arrives courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment. I can't blame anyone for resisting this feel-good children's tale about young Auggie Pullman (Jacob Tremblay), whose facial deformity complicates his first year of middle school. Wonder is practically a shameless compendium of tearjerker elements, including (but not limited to) the aforementioned disability, tender first loves, traumatic new friendships, tearful parent-child reconciliations, emotional high-school-play performances, and even a sick dog, just for good measure. I don't like it when movies so clearly want to break me, and so I approached Wonder with skepticism and more than a little resentment. Yet the film is so skillful about how it slips under your defenses that it never feels as manipulative as it could. I credit Chbosky - between this and his 2012 teen dramedy The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Chbosky has demonstrated a knack for downplaying the treacle in potentially manipulative stories. We get used to Auggie's face really quickly (Arjen Tuiten's Academy Award-nominated makeup effects enhance, rather than overwhelm, the subtle emoting Tremblay does beneath them), and as such, we become more interested in that ground-level stuff everyone has to deal with at some point: starting fresh at a new school, making friends, and developing your own identity. Chbosky seems constitutionally incapable of overdoing the melodrama in these moments (there's a third-act fight that feels like an intentional feint on his part - we keep expecting some trauma that simply never occurs), preferring instead to use humor and low-key affection to bring us into Auggie's world. While Auggie might be the central character, the film spends almost as much time with his older sister Via (a terrific, affecting Izabela Vidovic), who thinks herself an outcast for far more complicated reasons. She's the child who wasn't always in distress, who didn't always need help, and she's starting to feel like her parents (Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson) have taken advantage of her relative self-sufficiency. Speaking of parents, I'm at a loss as to why critics aren't talking more about Julia Roberts here. As Auggie's mom, Roberts does so much with little screentime: Roberts conveys her boundless concern for her children wordlessly (she has a moment where she simply points at Via after her daughter performs on-stage that broke me) as well as how it's kept her from pursuing her own dreams, and she's never used that thousand-wattage smile to more devastating effect. It's one of Roberts' best performance and as good, in its own way, as Lady Bird's Laurie Metcalf. But Wonder keeps letting us into people we might ignore, whether that's Via's former best friend Miranda (Danielle Rose Russell) or Auggie's new buddy Jack (Noah Jupe, giving one of the most natural kid performances I've ever seen). Only Auggie and Via's dad comes across as a cipher (he seems to be some nebulously successful businessman, or something), but Owen Wilson's boundless charm proves invaluable in terms of fleshing out the character. All of that is to say, when Wonder does need to land its larger points about tolerance and kindness, we're willing to meet it because of our investment in these characters. By the time the film concludes with Auggie's fifth-grade graduation, I was pretty much a blubbering mess, except Wonder earns every tear, and that makes all the difference. I avoided this one in theaters last year, and I really wish I hadn't. A wonderful little surprise.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman said that the film "doesn't really break any new ground as it attempts, and frankly succeeds, in tugging rather vigorously at the heartstrings...There is at least one glaring (to me, anyway) logical lapse with regard to Miranda's subterfuge (her sudden popularity is based on a lie that seemingly all of her friends in common with Via would already know about). But all of this falls by the wayside in the immense gravitational pull of this film's heart. With eyes as expressive as Julia Roberts' are, and with so many scenes where Isabel supports her son basically with little more than a loving gaze and a fierce hug, this is a film that is all about feeling and where little elements like logic or narrative consistency tend not to matter all that much."
And then there's Sony and Dan Gilroy's legal thriller Roman J. Israel, Esq., which is a surprise of an entirely different kind. Gilroy's phenomenal 2014 satire Nightcrawler is one of the great debut features of recent years; it established him as a filmmaker of real wit and nuance, and one who delighted in examining beyond-flawed protagonists. But Roman J. Israel (I'm dropping the "Esq." from here on out, because it's awkward, like much of the film it represents) hits the absolute wrong note from the jump, as Gilroy has his title character (Denzel Washington) furiously type a legal brief on-screen. I'd heard that after the film's disastrous Toronto Film Festival premiere, Gilroy mounted a significant reedit, and this opening corroborates that fact in the worst way: we're looking at the world's fanciest exposition dump (it looks like an updated version of the All the President's Men opening/ending), explicitly designed to make sense of a broken narrative. Things only get worse after that. In theory, I can see a version of this story working. Like Nightcrawler, it's a morality play, one that takes the virtuous Israel, a brilliant lawyer and former activist (he has a huge Angela Davis poster in his apartment), and immediately tests his ethics when his practice collapses and he's forced to fend for himself. However, Nightcrawler had a huge advantage - it was often really funny, whereas Roman J. Israel finds one ploddingly sincere note (in that opening text crawl, actually, when Israel types something about removing himself from the human race) and keeps hitting it again and again. Gilroy might as well be adapting Pilgrim's Progress, so obvious is his allegorical agenda. As soon as Israel abandons his morals and starts looking out for himself, he faces quite literal death and damnation. The signifiers throughout are awful - Colin Farrell's hotshot lawyer might as well have a sign around his neck that reads "Temptation," although even that would be less subtle than making the hero's last name Israel. But Israel himself is such a tiresome character that we would struggle to sympathize with him even if Gilroy weren't so aggressively pushing us in that direction. He's one of those Movie Characters: everything about him is an affectation, from his outdated fashions to the savant-like recall he has for legal procedure (sometimes I resent Sherlock for making autism the de rigueur characteristic of all brilliant antiheroes), and the diced-up editing rhythms give us no time to understand Israel as a person before Gilroy sends him into the plot mechanics. It also helps not one bit that Washington gives what might be his worst performance, Oscar Nomination be damned. Washington seems like a rejected Kenan Thompson character from SNL, given Israel's buck teeth, huge afro, and bowlegged gait, yet Washington manages to inject way too much vanity into these shabby dimensions. It's bad enough that he puts way too much stock into the part's faux-Biblical redemption; no, he also gives this fat, shambling mess a much younger love interest (Carmen Ejogo) whose attracted to Israel's perceived moral superiority. It's that kind of movie, and one of 2017's worst.
Here's my advice. Avoid Roman J. Israel and seek out Magnolia Films' release of Blade of the Immortal. It feels a little bit funny saying that someone has mellowed at the relatively young age of fifty-seven, but that's exactly what we're seeing with Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike. In films like Audition and especially Ichi the Killer, Miike established himself as maybe the most exuberant peddler of hyperviolent screen mayhem: I doff my cap to anyone who can make it through Audition's last act (or pretty much the whole of Ichi the Killer) without peering through their fingers, so intimately realized is the violence on display. But something about directing samurai epics, oddly enough, has tempered Miike. Maybe I'm viewing 13 Assassins or Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai in direct comparison to Ichi the Killer, but Miike seems less reliant on gross-out effects or shock horror, and Blade of the Immortal very much continues that trend. Along with 13 Assassins, it might be his most accessible movie, unfolding like some shogunate-era mashup of Logan and True Grit. Our hero is Manji (the almost freakishly charismatic Takuya Kimura), an immortal samurai who has spent decades isolating himself in the Japanese countryside. Manji waits for a death that will never come, so tortured is he over his past sins, but he begins to inch towards something resembling redemption when young Rin (Hana Sugisaki) contracts him to help avenge her father's murder. What transpires unfolds pretty much exactly the way you'd expect - Rin teaches Manji how to love again, just as a late-stage plot development puts his immortality at risk - but you also won't care. Kimura and Rin make a great team, and Miike brings such formal mastery to the proceedings. His efficient, unfussy staging (there's nary a wasted shot or unnecessary cut) reminds me of Peak Clint Eastwood. In fact, Blade of the Immortal might be the best pure action movie of 2017, so visceral are its many fight sequences. If I've one complaint, it's that the first big setpiece is the best, and it lands at about the five-minute mark; Manji takes on no fewer than fifty opponents in a breathtakingly choreographed, black-and-white opener (the monochrome cinematography gave me big Yojimbo déjà vu, and in the best way possible) that also acts as the character's big origin story. Still, even if Blade of the Immortal peaks early, the rest of the film doesn't want for carnage, and I love how Miike keeps giving his characters - and that includes the villains - little idiosyncrasies even as they're hacking away at one another. Look, you'd never call what happens in the film not violent, except Miike emphasizes speed and movement over most graphic bloodshed, so we're less likely to look away and all the more sympathetic to the beleaguered Manji. An instant action classic, and one of Miike's best movies.