Fright Night

Directed by: Craig Gillespie
Written by: Marti Noxon
Full credits at IMDb

Vampire stories are usually centered on women, serving as allegories for the alluring threat of sexual desire. But in the brisk, tense and cheeky Fright Night remake, women occupy the margins. Instead, this is a story about boys and men, about growing up and struggling with different models of masculinity. As such, its central vampire, played with bemused arrogance by Colin Farrel, is less dreamy than those to which we've recently grown accustomed. "He's not brooding, lovesick, or noble," explains Christopher Mintz-Plasse in the genre's "Randy" role. "He's the fucking shark from Jaws." Take that, Buffy, Twilight, and True Blood!

Mintz-Plasse says this early on; Fright Night, written by former Buffy scribe and producer Marti Noxon, wastes little time on exposition. Instead, we're introduced to Anton Yelchin—a neurotic, pubescent geek navigating the vicissitudes of adolescence—and his seductive, charismatic neighbor, Farrel, who's the epitome of cocksure chauvinism. Oh, and he's pretty quickly outed as a vampire. (Subversively, the movie portrays an America of bad neighbors.) Yelchin has recently abandoned his childhood friends for a cooler crowd; that is, he has gravitated toward a bullying kind of masculinity that Farrel represents—he's the grown-up apotheosis of Yelchin's new, mean, good-looking, popular friends. Representing a different kind of man—the Dr. Livesey to Farrel's Long John Silver—is David Tenant, playing a hammy Vegas showman who goes from coward to would-be hero while sending up the genre's Gothiest cliches. (Speaking of Vegas, the movie exploits its Sin City setting expertly: the city's transient and nocturnal nature making it the perfect place for a vampire to settle down and make people go missing; its foreclosure crisis provides copious For Sale signs atop big fat stakes.)

Despite its male focus, as a coming of age tale Fright Night does grapple with sexuality. The vampire attacks, largely carried out against women (though not exclusively, suggesting an omnisexual immorality), intimate rape—they're penetrative, violative, and draw blood. Farrel emasculates Yelchin repeatedly, including by "turning over" a "motorcycle" that Yelchin can't "start." Also, the kid can't relax enough when his girlfriend throws herself at him; does that suggest that sex is a potentially deadly threat, or at least corrupting? I don't think so. It's just that Yelchin first has to grow up—to learn how to use his stake responsibly. Grade: B+


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Shame

Directed by: Steve McQueen
Written by: Abi Morgan & Steve McQueen
Full credits at IMDb

Steve McQueen's follow-up to the celebrated Hunger is an unintentionally campy Catholic cautionary tale about the pitifulness of a life dedicated solely to earthly pleasures. Make that fleshly pleasures. Wisely, McQueen has again teamed with Michael Fassbender, who plays a Flatiron district-dwelling orgasm addict—a serial masturbator and prowler for pussy. Most reviewers have noted that for all its sex, Shame isn't sexy. Really? Sure, there's a tragic orgy soaked in wailing, mournful string music, and the movie climaxes with history's saddest climax. But even heterosexual men melt for Fassbender. I recently saw him in person and he looked ruddy, diminutive. But the camera adores him—his anguished gazes, his prominent brow—as it has no other actor since Marilyn Monroe. The movie works best as a vicarious thrill: watching Fassbender ply his charm on the movie's women is a treat, regardless of your sexual orientation.

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Into the Abyss

Written and Directed by: Werner Herzog
Full credits at IMDb

Werner Herzog's last few documentaries have taken him to exotic locales: the south of France, Antarctica, the Alaskan wilderness. But his latest travels to perhaps the most unusual yet—rural Texas, where he explores a murder case and crafts a sober, persuasive, and serendipitously timed argument against the death penalty. (We are all Troy Davis, even Herzog.) In 2010, Michael Perry was executed for a triple murder he committed a decade earlier in the city of Conroe for the sake of stealing a Camaro. (His accomplice, Jason Burkett, received a life sentence.) Herzog investigates this messy, petty, senseless true-crime story and fills it in with lurid and poignant details, wielding his talent as a probing and insightful interviewer in conversations with the families and friends of both the victims and the killers; he tours the town, genuinely interested in its inhabitants and their colloquialisms, like "balls to the wall."

But Herzog's never condescending: he highlights our shared humanity, even Perry's—who, when the director interviews him just days before he would be executed, smiles boyishly and avers his innocence...

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Paranormal Activity 3

Directed by: Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman
Written by: Christopher B. Landon
Full credits at IMDb

Minimalism was the key to Paranormal Activity's success, so the sequels' bigger effects, greater number of cameras, and more convoluted narratives have only been detrimental. Paranormal Activity 3 continues to drag the series down; chronologically, it moves it farther back: this threequel, directed by the vain kids behind Catfish, is yet another prequel, this one set in 1988 and focused on the characters' childhood relationships with the demon who would continue to haunt and torment them into adulthood. This is one of the franchise's largest missteps: its increasing focus on backstory.

The other is its aesthetic choices. In this film, for starters, moving the setting so far back becomes problematic. It's neat, I guess, that the movie is shot on, or at least made to look like, videotape. (It'll make an interesting companion piece to Trash Humpers.) But it also poses unaddressed practical problems: like, why would someone keep the camera running as he walks slowly up a staircase if he has to pay for VHS cassettes?

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In Time

Written & Directed by: Andrew Niccol
Full credits at IMDb

The latent cultural rage that recently erupted in Occupy Wall Street protests has apparently been percolating within writer-director Andrew Niccol too. His latest sci-fi allegory is essentially one furious attack on the ruling elite and their calculated system of economic inequality—but with much higher stakes and more transparent morality than the grievances aired at Zuccotti. Here, time is currency: thanks to genetic engineering, eternal life as your 25-year-old self is possible, as long as you can afford to buy the time (and don't get in an accident or murdered). Of course, most people in In Time can't—they live literally day to day, working no-collar factory jobs in exchange for a few measly hours (moved like modern money in rapid electronic transactions), stepping over the expired bodies that litter the streets. This is an action movie, with skinny dipping, strip poker, car chases, and car crashes. But it's also as thoughtful as you'd expect from the man behind Gattaca, full of debates about income disparity, the morality of capitalism, and whether human nature would make a different system unsustainable. (The biggest problem is that the plot's gimmicky artifice, its blatant metaphor, makes its many tragedies clearly manufactured; this is a world in which insufficient bus fare literally becomes a matter of life and death!)

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The Innkeepers

Written & Directed by: Ti West
Full credits at IMDb

The first scare in The Innkeepers is a cheap jolt, done by one character to another as a practical joke. It's not because director Ti West doesn't know how to scare an audience. I mean, the few scares that he delivers during the bulk of this movie are smart, good-natured, and funny, though The Innkeepers isn't a goofy horror movie. It's just that West knows that the scariest thing you can see on screen isn't something bad happening to someone–it's something bad happening to someone you've grown to love over the last 100 minutes. He scares his characters so you'll like them more; then he scares you.

Sara Paxton stars as just about the dorkiest, most lovable heroine a horror movie has ever had. Asthmatic, ambitionless, and adorable, she's working the last weekend at a small-town hotel, a kind of modest Overlook that's possibly haunted. She and her co-worker, a Simon Peggish Pat Healy, are amateur paranormal enthusiasts, hoping for one last ghostly encounter. West broke through in 2009 with The House of the Devil, a Satanic slasher that evoked, without wink or kitsch, the horror films of the late 1970s. Here, he explores a different subgenre: the haunted house (or haunted hotel) movie, often drawing on an 80s, Spielbergian charm.

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Silver Bullets

Written & Directed by: Joe Swanberg
Full credits at IMDb

Just about every young person who has made an indie movie in the last five years shows up in Joe Swanberg's Silver Bullets, adding a fascinating extra layer of self-referentiality to this embittered exploration of artistic collaboration. As you'd expect from one of mumblecore's biggest names, this is a movie about young people suffering through romantic problems. But they're young people whose relationships double as commentaries on the filmmaking process, by which Swanberg has apparently become disgusted. Director Ti West, best known for The House of the Devil, plays himself, kind of—the director of a werewolf movie starring Kate Lyn Sheil; she also plays the girlfriend (who's unraveling like a Polanski heroine) to Swanberg, who's also playing a version of his real self, a movie director who makes Joe Swanberg-like movies: arty, improvised, and filled with nudity and sex. (Silver Bullets itself, though, feels sorta un-Swanberg: loose but deliberate, smartly structured and shot with forethought to composition, less perfunctory than much of his fine but forgettable post-Greta Gerwig output.) As these two filmmakers work on their very different movies in parallel, tensions emerge: between commerce and art—between werewolf movies and "new forms"—but more so between art and reality; the movie's interested in the ways they influence each other.

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