Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu

Bela Lugosi memorably launched the tradition of suavely elegant portrayals of Count Dracula. His approach remains the most popular. However, he was predated by Max Schreck’s depiction of the infamous Count in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, whose freakish appearance served as a physical manifestation of his moral corruption. He was also German. Lugosi and Anne Rice’s smooth-talking vamps remain more popular, but Schreck still spawned his followers, including Werner Herzog’s remake of the 1922 silent classic (with the names re-Stokerized). Now, horror auteur Robert Eggers’ presents his take on the Teutonic Dracula story in Nosferatu, which opens Christmas day in theaters.

Eggers’ screenplay returns to the names Henrik Galeen’s century-old screenplay that so transparently substituted Count Orlok, Thomas Hutter, and Prof. Sievers for Count Dracula, Jonathan Harker, and Dr. Seward, Stoker successfully sued, securing the destruction of nearly all but a few blessedly surviving prints of the film. In one of Eggers’ few departures, Prof. Van Helsing is now Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz, a brand new moniker for the familiar occultist.

Once again, newlywed Hutter journeys to Transylvania to facilitate a reclusive nobleman’s real estate transaction—and it turns out just as badly as ever. However, Orlok intentionally wanted Hutter out of the way, because he already forged a sinister connection to his new bride, Ellen (a.k.a. Mina). Since Hutter’s boss Knock (a.k.a. Renfield) also happens to be Orlok’s enthralled servant, he duly orders Hutter to the Carpathians, where the junior clerk gets somewhat delayed in the castle.

While much more monstrous than conventional tall, dark, and handsome vampires, Eggers’ Orlack is still highly sexualized, in very disturbing ways. Somehow, despite distance and circumstance, Orlack’s spirit seduced and defiled Ellen in her youth. She hoped her love for Hutter would redeem her, but the vampire will not let her go easily.

Regardless, fans know what to expect when Orlack’s trunks arrive on the decimated ship on which they sailed. However, Eggers emphasizes the rats, worthy of “Three Skeleton Key,” which disembark from the derelict vessel, spreading pestilence throughout the city. Conditions get so bad, Prof. Sievers reluctantly consults his slightly disgraced former mentor, Prof Von Franz (a.k.a. Dr. Bulwer, a.k.a. Prof. Van Helsing), who seems to secretly understand the situation more than he lets on.

By horror movie standards, Eggers’ Nosferatu is absolutely gorgeous looking. In addition to Murnau’s original, Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke achieve a dreamlike vision that suggest the shimmering fantasia visions of Guy Maddin as an unlikely source of inspiration. The film is steeped in Old World gothic atmosphere. In fact, it revisited some of Murnau’s 1922 locations.

Regardless, Bill Skarsgard is amazing and rather frightening to behold, as the demonic Orlok. By now, he could be considered the Doug Jones of leading men. His presence is ferocious, to the point of outright viciousness. Yet, there is still a seductiveness to Orlok’s grotesqueness.

Of course, the perfectly cast Willem Dafoe is jolly good fun to watch unleashing his inner Peter Cushing as the brilliant but erratic Von Franz. Honestly, Ralph Ineson has yet to get the credit he deserves as a horror all-star, but he is every bit Dafoe’s equal playing the sharp-tempered Sievers.

The Hitchhiker: Ghostwriter

Unfortunately writers are not like painters. When they die, the value of their work does not necessarily increase. Trust me, my old house lost plenty of authors and hardly saw any bump afterwards. Somehow, that happened for gothic writer Jeffrey Hunt, except he is not really dead. He faked his death to reap the anticipated benefits. In contrast, movie fans always valued the recently departed M. Emmet Walsh, who invariably brought plenty of sly attitude to every classic character performance, like Det. Underhill, who is investigating Hunt’s death. Fans know it will be dangerous to underestimate him in the “Ghostwriter” episode of The Hitchhiker.

Hunt was reasonably well-reviewed, but he just never sold. However, his slimy agent Tony Lynch never dropped him, presumably because he was sleeping with Hunt’s wife, Debby. Naturally, Debby assumes she can finally be with Lynch when her husband reportedly drove his car into the ocean, to his watery death. She is therefore quite surprised and alarmed to find Hunt back home, having witnessed their passionate embrace.  Of course, she and Lynch quickly figure out since the world thinks Hunt is already dead, they have a free hand to murder him for real.

Originally, The Hitchhiker was supposed to be HBO’s slightly naughty dark thriller anthology, but the sex and nudity seem relatively mild today. The small ensemble is also packed with talent. Naturally, the drawly insinuating Walsh is reliably entertaining. Willem Dafoe is also quite satisfyingly creepy as the bug-eyed Hunt. Frankly, we do not see enough of him playing sinister characters.

Angelopoulos’s The Dust of Time

Even for Greek Communists exiled after the Civil War, the USSR was a cold, inhospitable place to live. The mother of Greek-American filmmaker “A” was eventually sentenced to a Siberian gulag and his father was deported, yet somehow, they still managed to find each other again. Their story inspired A’s film within the film, but memory is a tricky thing and so is the narrative approach in Theo Angelopoulos’s The Dust of Time, which screens as part of the UCLA Library Film & TV Archive’s Angelopoulos retrospective, Landscape of Time.

A's latest film is based on the letters his mother Eleni wrote to his father Spyros, while she was banished to a Siberian gulag. Even though he is filming in the illustrious Cinecetta studio in Italy, he is distracted by personal problems, mostly those generated by his disturbed daughter, also named Eleni. It appears she ran away from home, but on the plus side, he finds one of his mother’s missing letters in her room.

Flashing back to early 1950s Temirtau in Kazakhstan, where the Greek exiles had set up their own Soviet style colony, A’s parents are briefly reunited. He had assumed the identity of a dead comrade to sneak her out, but they are discovered by the other Communists. Ironically, Eleni would then spend decades with their torch-carrying Jewish family-friend, Jacob, who would become a Refusenik during his long tenure in the gulag with her.

Angelopoulos’s temporal shifts can be especially confusing, because of the way he blends the time periods in the transitional scenes, with A appearing in the past, or his youthful parents seemingly walking through the present (circa Y2K New Year’s Eve), but that also gives the film a rather striking sense of un-reality. Dust of Time also features a gorgeous score composed by the late Angelopoulos’s regular collaborator, Eleni Karaindrou. The “Dance Theme,” heard performed by a full orchestra in a recording session for A’s film and as a piano solo performed by Spyros, is wonderfully melancholy and nostalgic-sounding.

Dust is a lovely film to look at and listen to, but it still manages to capture the bleakness of the Soviet Communism—rather surprisingly so, given the general ideological tenor of contemporary Greek art house cinema. With wide, wide-swept shots of the mean, Brutalist gulag buildings and the icy surrounding tundra, Angelopoulos and cinematographer Andreas Sinanos vividly evoke the loneliness of Siberian exile. The scene of Jacob translating in a storeroom full of Stalin statues and paintings, hastily withdrawn from public display in the early days of the Khrushchev thaw, is also wonderfully surreal.

The late great Bruno Ganz gave one of the best performances of his accomplished career as the tragically friend-zoned Jacob. Irene Jacob also shows tremendous range portraying both the youthful-gulag-bound and grandmotherly Eleni. Of course, Willem Dafoe broods dependably as “A”—after the fifth or sixth time you write out “Angelopoulos,” you start to appreciate the brevity of his one-initial name (never actually heard in the film itself).

Abel Ferrara’s Siberia

Siberia is not just a region of Russia. It is a whole state of mind. It is a psychotic and delusional state, as envisioned by Abel Ferrara. We will see it through the eyes of a lone American bartender, who is growing increasingly alienated from people, society, and his own sanity in Ferrara’s Siberia, which releases today on DVD.

Clint does not understand whatever Siberian Mongolic, Turkic, or Tatar dialects his occasional customers speak and for those of us who don’t either, Ferrara declines to subtitle them. That still does not stop Clint from sleeping with some of them, but sex always builds to a twisted, nightmarish climax in Ferrara’s Siberia.

After a few weird encounters, Clint lights off on a spiritual trek through the tundra, with his trusty sled dogs looking just as confused as viewers uninitiated in Ferrara’s quirks. Arguably, there is the seed of an interesting story in the journey, when Clint periodically seeks out practitioners of the dark arts, presumably in hopes of acquiring the forbidden knowledge necessary for a Faustian bargain that would ease his existential regrets. Of course, Ferrara is not about to spoon-feed us Jack Straw.

There is no sense complaining or arguing over the film’s murky narrative, because Ferrara isn’t playing by those rules. He is taking us through a rabbit hole into the darkest corners of his subconscious. If you are uncomfortable with that than so much the better. Really, this is a film for critics to watch, so they can file bits away to draw on later when Ferrara releases something more accessible. Nevertheless, cast-members like Simon McBurney and Dounia Sichov add a lot of depth and texture playing the shadowy “Magician” and Clint’s wife (seen through dreams and illusions).

Contenders: The Lighthouse

Lighthouse keeping was a heck of a profession. So-called “wickies” shared all of sailors’ common superstitions, but faced unique challenges of isolation, inclement weather, and potential madness. Recently, filmmakers have discovered how well suited these lonely outposts are to serve as the settings for horror movies and psychological thrillers. Rising genre star Robert Eggers and his co-screenwriter brother Max looked to Edgar Allan Poe’s unfinished short story and the historical “Smalls Lighthouse” incident as inspiration for The Lighthouse, which screens during MoMA’s annual Contenders series.

Ephraim Winslow assumes he will be sharing most of the lightkeeping duties with the senior keeper, Thomas Wake, but instead the crusty old timer assigns him all the menial tasks, while hoarding the hands-on light-tending for himself. He seems perversely attached to the light, even stripping himself naked in its presence.

In addition to Wake’s blowhard bullying, Winslow must also fend off a rather mean-spirited one-eyed seagull. Of course, Wake sternly warns him against harming the nasty bird, because he shares the old folk belief that seafowl carry the spirits of dead sailors. The junior lightkeeper is further unnerved by visions of a seductively sinister mermaid and a tentacle beast worthy of Lovecraftian fiction. The only thing keeping him sane is the expectation the ferry will arrive soon to take him back to the mainland—but it doesn’t.

The Eggers Brothers’ narrative is very much like that of Chris Crow’s The Lighthouse, but the two films are worlds apart stylistically. Crow’s film is a tight, tense two-hander, but it looks like the classy BBC Films production that it was. In contrast, Eggers’ Lighthouse is shot in a claustrophobically tight aspect ratio and lensed in a strikingly stark black-and-white by cinematographer Jarin Blaschke.

The resulting film is like watching a fever dream recorded on a vintage kinetoscope. In terms of tone, some of the best comparative titles might be the trippier, occult-themes films of Georges Méliès. It looks incredible, but the Eggerses really couldn’t figure out how to end it, so they just sort of stop without fully developing a number of their themes.

Mountain: Drink in the Grandeur

Some like plateaus and Hitchhiker’s Guide fans love their fjords, but for sheer geological splendor, it is hard to beat mountains. They certainly seem to capture the imagination, judging from the five documentaries, three narratives, and one DVD re-release directly related to mountaineering that have been covered here since 2009.* The words of nature writer Robert Macfarlane, the music of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and the cinematography of Renan Ozturk invite us to meditate on their primordial grandeur as well as the potentially fatal adventure they represent in Jennifer Peedom’s Mountain (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

That is Willem Dafoe’s voice, but the words are Macfarlane’s, based on his prize-winning non-fiction book, Mountains of the Mind. For Macfarlane, mountains are not just a place to shoot Mountain Dew commercials (although there is plenty mind-blowing daredevil footage in the film). They represent the last pristine vestige of forbidding wildness on Earth. They dwarf us as mere humans and maybe we need some dwarfing.

Mountain could also be considered a cousin to Peedom’s Sherpa and Jimmy Chin’s Meru. Although it is done in passing, Peedom again critiques the exploitative treatment of Sherpa guides, just as she did in her previous film. Mountain and Mera also both feature Ozturk’s remarkable cinematography and uncannily sharp-eyed viewers might even spot Chin and Conrad Anker in this film as well (but don’t count on it).

In some ways, Mount is like That’s Entertainment for mountaineering, but with the docu-essay soul of a film like Fiona Tan’s Ascent, which we did not even count in the tally above. Frankly, the narration tends a bit towards pretention (although Dafoe’s warm delivery undeniably helps). However, the real show is the awe-inspiring footage. Ozturk has some assistance from drones this time around, as well as a number of archival sources, but there are still shots that are truly stunning.

Richard Tognetti’s score is also suitably impressive, especially the themes that evoke Tibetan chanting. He also leads the Austrian Chamber Orchestra through some suitably elegant classical pieces, including Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina.

Maybe Macfarlane’s words speak to you and maybe they don’t, but Peedom’s film still looks and sounds fantastic, regardless. It is definitely worth seeing big, with the sound turned up. Recommended for fans of nature and sporting cinema, Mountain opens this Friday (5/11) in New York, at the Village East.

*Meru, An American Ascent, K2, Beyond the Edge, The Summit, The Himalayas, North Face, Climber’s High, and The Man Who Skied Down Everest

What Happened to Monday?: Multiple Noomi Rapaces on Netflix

In the medium-future, the Euro-dystopia has adopted China’s family planning policies. One-child allotments are rigorously enforced by the jackbooted Child Allocation Bureau (CAB). Extra siblings are humanely put into cryogenic sleep to await a better, more sustainable world. Yeah, sure there are. In any event, cranky inventor Terrence Settman was not about to let his orphaned septuplet granddaughters get whisked away to a bureaucratic fate worse than death. Instead, he secretly raised them to live as the tag-team Karen Settman persona. However, when the first Karen Settman of the week fails to come home, her grown twins must track her whereabouts without revealing their secret in Tommy Wirkola’s What Happened to Monday? (trailer here), a Netflix original film, which starts streaming this Friday.

Old Man Settman, seen in formative flashbacks, assigned each twin a day of the week to leave the apartment, which became their informal names among themselves. At the end of each day, the siblings would have a group review, so they could fake their way through their respective days. Since they each have their respective talents (Friday is a numbers cruncher, Thursday can drink all night with clients), they have risen up the corporate finance ladder quite quickly. However, on the day Karen Settman receives the big promotion they had been working towards, Monday disappears.

Obviously, if anyone on the outside sees two Karen Settmans, it would be curtains for at least six of them. Nevertheless, Tuesday will have to venture out to determine the fate of Monday. Despite some tiresome smoke-blowing from a work rival, it quickly becomes apparent the dastardly Nicolette Cayman is involved. Not only is she the architect of the draconian One Child policies and the director of the CAB, she is also a candidate for parliament, so she is not eager for news of septuplets surviving undiscovered well into adulthood to leak to the press.

Sometime in the 1970s, the apocalyptic left recognized Marx’s failures and adopted an 18^th Century British country curate as the guiding philosophical star. Thomas Malthus’s dire forecasts of exploding population and dwindling resources could be used to justify no end of governmental controls. Formerly a liberating force, the masses became the rapacious instrument of their own destruction. Happily, Malthusian analysis was thoroughly debunked by Julian Simon, but screenwriters Max Botkin and Kerry Williamson obviously did not get the memo. People are still little more than a drag on resources in Monday’s world. It is just a little tacky to kill them outright, like Cayman does.

Obviously, there are echoes of Orphan Black to be heard in Monday. It also bears some similarities to Ben Bova’s entertaining 1980s novel Multiple Man, in which a series of clones managed to get elected President of the United States and then somehow lose their “Monday.” Bova’s novel would probably require a lot of updating, but its political intrigue would still be more fun than Wirkola’s derivative dystopia.

Most problematically, Noomi Rapace does not distinctly delineate her various Karen Settmans, forcing us to rely on superficials, like wardrobe and hairstyle to tell them apart. Glen Close has chewed plenty of scenery as various villainesses, but she phones it in as Cayman. However, Willem Dafoe’s Grandpa Settman is appropriately intense and (justly) paranoid, while Marwan Kenzari charismatically upstages his love interest[s] as Adrian Knowles, the CAB officer who has been secretly carrying on an affair with Monday.

Dystopia is getting old. It’s time for the pendulum to swing back towards Heinleinesque and Roddenberryesque science fiction optimism. Monday is a case in point. It all just feels like familiar ground. Okay as a time-wasting stream, but instantly forgettable, What Happened to Monday? launches this Friday (8/18) on Netflix.

Dog Eat Dog: Paul Schrader Adapts Edward Bunker

Troy Cameron would not know what to make of the Indians in the World Series. He is used to Cleveland being a city of losers. Cameron knows full well he and his criminal cohorts are three of the city’s biggest bums, but they hope a big, obviously ill-conceived caper will finally put them on easy street in Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog (trailer here), which opens in Los Angeles this Friday.

You can expect things to get a little sketchy, since DED is based on a novel by real life ex-con Edward Bunker (Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs). If you doubt his street cred, keep in mind Danny Trejo was his son’s godfather. Cameron and his regular accomplices, Mad Dog and Diesel, each already have two strikes, so they are also pretty serious customers. Cameron is the last of the three to serve out his second term, but they have patiently awaited his arrival, because Cameron is the one who arranges their jobs through a shadowy underworld figure known as Grecco the Greek. Most of those gigs involve knocking over rogue criminal elements for scores in the ten-grand neighborhood. However, this one will be different.

A deadbeat gangster has fallen behind on his payments to a bigger gangster, so Cameron and company are supposed to bring back some leverage. That means kidnapping the debtor thug’s infant son. Everyone adamant agrees the baby is not to be hurt (and he isn’t), but this kind of crime involves a whole new level of risk. Of course, things go spectacularly wrong, but rest assured not with respect to the rug rat.

It is important to emphasize that point, because the film starts with Mad Dog in the throes of a drug-fueled psychotic episode that will end in bloodshed. It is sequence that would easily fit into Natural Born Killers, so it might be too much for sensitive viewers to get past. (For what its worth, that is the toughest stuff in the film.)

In fact, Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe, and Christopher Matthew Cook develop some pretty terrific lowlife buddy chemistry. It is nice to know Cage is still on the comeback trail following a nice supporting turn in Snowden and better-than-you-heard work in the underrated The Trust and Pay the Ghost (I still stand by my positive review of that one). Dafoe gleefully chews on the scenery, enjoying his ironic status as the unrestrained loon in a Nic Cage movie. However, the real discovery is Cook, who brings real gravitas and subtlety to the hulking Diesel. He also has a show-reel-worthy scene with Louisa Krause playing a young but unusually assertive prostitute. Even Schrader gets in on the fun, playing the Greek with the attitude and authority he probably wishes he could have commanded during the making of The Canyons.

DED is definitely a low-budget affair, but it is the sort of dark, tight caper film that is bound to attract an audience over time. It is probably too idiosyncratic for a nationwide opening, but it is guaranteed to make money over time. Arguably, this is exactly the sort of film Schrader and Cage should be concentrating on, rather than moody three-hour-plus character study-slash-terrorism thrillers that just beg to be cut down by the money men. Quite entertaining but not for the faint of heart, Dog Eat Dog is highly recommended for fans of amoral noir mayhem, when it opens this Friday (11/4) in Los Angeles, at the Laemmle Music Hall.

NYFF ’14: Pasolini

In 1926, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s father foiled an attempt to assassinate Benito Mussolini. Unfortunately, there would be nobody to intercede when Pasolini fils was murdered, most likely by a gay hustler, but the Italian auteur’s death has almost spawned as many conspiracy theories as the Kennedy assassination. The filmmaker’s final days are now the subject of Abel Ferrara’s speculative passion play, Pasolini (trailer here), which screens during the 52^nd New York Film Festival.

Ferrara’s affinity for Pasolini makes perfect sense, given the penchant they share for sexually and religiously charged subject matter. As Ferrara’s film opens, Pasolini is wrapping post-production on his Marquis de Sade opus, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. To this day, it remains one of the most controversial and difficult films ever produced by a prestige filmmaker. Of course, Pasolini was always an extreme figure, politically and aesthetically (holding the dubious distinction of having been expelled from the Italian Communist Party on moral grounds).

Ferrara builds an atmosphere of foreboding and paranoia, clearly inviting the audience to suspect anyone so uncompromising must be a danger to the powers that be. Yet, Pasolini recklessly indulges in the hedonistic lifestyle that will ultimately kill him. Ferrara intercuts his prowling about Rome’s seedy night spots with scenes from the outlandish allegory that would have been his next film: Porno-Teo-Kolossal, a sort of riff on the Biblical Three Wise Men, in which an old Holy fool’s pilgrimage takes him to Sodom’s traditional orgy, where the city’s gays and lesbians come together to procreate.

Truly, Pasolini reflects both the absolute worst and best of Ferrara’s instincts. It is talky, pretentious, and features more explicit gay sex than any non-homophobic straight cineaste ever needs to see. Yet, the operatic sweep of it all is rather overwhelming. Ferrara creates a pungent sense of 1970s Rome, simmering with crime and ideology. Dark and sleazy, it all radiates malevolence thanks to cinematography Stefano Falivene.

Frankly, Willem Dafoe, a frequent Ferrara co-conspirator, makes a downright spooky Pasolini stand-in. He is so gaunt and dissipated looking, the audience might throw him an intervention if he appears at a screening. Watching him play out Pasolini’s final days is like watching a ghost. For better or worse, it is his film and perhaps his career role, but it is also quite eerie to see Pasolini favorite Ninetto Davoli wayfaring through the “Maestro’s” unmade film.

Pasolini is bold auterist filmmaking and a quality period production. It is also rather a mess, but it should not be lightly dismissed. Despite or because of Ferrara’s myriad excesses, when you walk out of his Pasolini, you know you saw a film. Recommended for fans of Ferrara and Pasolini at their most Ferrara and Pasolini, Ferrara’s Pasolini screens this Thursday (10/2) at Alice Tully Hall and Friday (10/3) at the Gilman, as Main Slate selection of this year’s NYFF.

A Most Wanted Man: When Hoffman Met le Carre

Yes, intelligence gathering sometimes involves cloak-and-dagger work, but there is also a lot of bureaucracy. That has always been a side of the secretive business novelist John le Carré has been closely in touch with. For better or worse, all the hallmarks of a le Carré bestseller are to be found in Anton Corbijn’s adaptation of his A Most Wanted Man (trailer here), which opens this Thursday in New York.

Hamburg was the city where the September 11^th terrorist attacks were planned—a fact German intelligence is keenly aware of. It was not Gunther Bachmman’s territory at the time, but the spymaster is still in need of redemption. He was transferred to port city after his Beirut network was exposed. The who’s, how’s, and why’s remain murky, but there is no question regarding damage done to his career. However, the world weary scotch drinker has big game in his sights: Dr. Faisal Abdullah, an ostensive philanthropist and advocate of Muslim tolerance, whom Bachmann has reason to suspect is furtively funneling funds to terrorist organizations.

Being old school to his bones, Bachmann eschews interrogations or anything physical. He prefers to trap his prey and then turn them into assets. That is the plan with Abdullah, using the poor hapless Issa Karpov as bait. The son of a Chechen woman and a high ranking (and therefore corrupt) Soviet military officer, Karpov understandably identifies with his mother’s side of the family. Escaping his Russian torturers, Karpov has been branded an Islamist terrorist, but Bachmann is skeptical. Dieter Mohr, a more politically sensitive rival from an overlapping agency, would prefer to arrest the Chechen with great fanfare, but Bachmann sees the newly arrived asylum-seeker as an opportunity.

As it turns out, Karpov’s despised old man had an account in Hamburg—an account large enough to be a chip in Bachmann’s game. However, to play it, he will have to handle Karpov’s immigration attorney, Annabel Richter, and Tommy Brue, the banker holding his funds. Unfortunately, Bachmann is a le Carré protagonist, which means he must spend a great deal of time in boardrooms convincing dim-witted ministers to go along with his plan. For now, Martha Sullivan, the regional CIA string-puller, will give him time, but her patience and Bachmann’s trust are limited.

If you like your thrillers talky, you are already a le Carré reader and therefore thoroughly primed for Wanted. On the plus side, Corbijn’s is fully stocked with intelligent characters and meaty dialogue heavy with meaning. Conversely, le Carré’s moral equivalency between all parties is present in full force, as well as an aversion to cinematic action. Although its running time clocks in just over two hours, the ending still feels unsatisfyingly unfinished, leaving viewers to wonder if everyone would really leave things as they are.

Of course, the primary, if not only reason to see Wanted is the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who fits into the role of Bachmann like a comfortably rumpled suit. Le Carré has said Hoffman is the only American who could play his iconic George Smiley—and it is easy to see what he means. Bachmann and Smiley are clearly cut from same cloth, while Hoffman, Gary Oldman, and Alec Guinness were/are some of the smartest, most engaging actors in the business.

Hoffman’s mushy German accent also works rather well in context, but Rachel McAdams is not nearly as convincing as Richter, the slumming daughter of privilege human rights attorney. At least Willem Dafoe certainly looks at home as Brue, the self-loathing banker. Sadly, Nina Hoss does not have much to do as Bachmann’s lieutenant, Irna Frey, but she classes up the joint, nonetheless. Most of the German cast-members largely serve as window dressing, especially Rush’s Daniel Brühl, who is about as easy to spot as Tony Curtis in The List of Adrian Messenger playing one of Bachmann’s surveillance specialists. Arguably, it is Robin Wright who best hangs with Hoffman, warily sparring with his Bachmann as the suspiciously smooth Sullivan.

Wisely, Andrew Bouvell’s adapted screenplay somewhat waters down the criticism of post-9-11 American foreign policy, but anti-Americanism is baked into the fiber of le Carré’s source novel. Yet, it is the film’s brief but explicit criticisms of Putin’s Russia that feel timelier now. Corbijn has a good eye for the project, capturing the cold, cerebral world of intrigue and modernist architecture. There is much to admire about it, but aside from Hoffman’s haggard everyman performance, the film does it best to keep viewers at arm’s length, like a film that does not want to be wanted. Recommended for knowing fans of le Carré and Hoffman, A Most Wanted Man opens this Thursday night (7/24) in New York at the Landmark Sunshine.

Odd Thomas: Koontz’s Spooky Short Order Cook Finally Makes it to the Big Screen

This Dean Koontz protagonist is not shy when it comes to voice-over narration, but never exactly breaks the fourth wall, per se. He is probably entitled to his own eccentric commentary, considering he has the ability to see ghosts and bodachs, supernatural parasites that feed on fear and suffering. However, his greatest nemesis might be lawyers, given the legal wrangling that long delayed the release of Stephen Sommers’ Odd Thomas (trailer here), which finally opens in New York this Friday.

Thomas comes from crazy stock and therefore understands the need to keep his dubious gift secret. Only a handful of people know of his power, including Pico Mundo’s chief of police Wyatt Porter, who appreciates the sort of inside information Thomas can provide. His loyal girlfriend Stormy Llewellyn is also in on the truth and a few of their friends vaguely suspect he has the Shine.

Normally, he chases down workaday serial killers before they can murder again, like his former classmate Harlo Landerson from the film’s prologue. However, the alarming number of bodachs converging on Pico Mundo portends a tragedy of grander scale.  They seem particularly interested in “Fungus Bob” Robertson, so dubbed by Thomas and Llewellyn because of his unfortunate grooming habits. Robertson also has an unhealthy interest in Satanism and a couple of mystery friends. Thomas will try to sleuth out Robertson’s plans without alerting the bodachs to his uncanny powers of perception, because they do not take kindly to folks like Thomas.

Frankly, the first half of Odd Thomas feels like a ghost-hunting TV show from the 1980’s, with its quaint small town setting and Thomas’s wholesome courtship of Llewellyn. However, as the stakes and tension start to rise, the film becomes considerably darker.  Sommers (best known for The Mummy and G.I. Joe franchises) pulls off some third act sleight-of-hand surprisingly adroitly and the manner in which earthly cults intersect with paranormal malevolence is somewhat intriguing.

Still, Anton Yelchin and Addison Timlin are almost too cute and freshly scrubbed-looking as Thomas and Llewellyn. Frankly, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy was much edgier, notwithstanding the characters’ dark backstories in the Koontz source novel.  Still, Odd Thomas has the distinction of featuring Willem Dafoe as an unqualified good guy, without even the hint of moral compromise, perhaps for the first time since Triumph of the Spirit. He is actually not bad plodding along with all due decency as Chief Porter.

Arguably, the biggest issue for Odd Thomas is the lack of a strong villain. Broadway actor Shuler Hensley is game enough as Robertson, but the character is played more for yucks than scares. Likewise, the bodach effects are serviceable enough, but not especially memorable.

When watching Odd Thomas one can see how it probably works so much better as a novel. There is some pop at the end that presumably has even more kick on the page. Yet, the film as a whole has the feel of an extended pilot that it never shakes off.  Better than you might expect, but still better suited to the small screen, Odd Thomas finally opens this Friday (2/28) in New York.