Will ‘The Exorcist: Believer’ Make a Believer Out of You, or Is It a Devil of a Time? Let’s Find Out!

October 5, 2023

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Will this movie make you a true beLIEVer? (CREDIT: Universal Studios)

Starring: Leslie Odom Jr., Ann Dowd, Jennifer Nettles, Norbert Leo Butz, Lidya Jewett, Olivia Marcum, Ellen Burstyn, Okwui Okpokwasili

Director: David Gordon Green

Running Time: 111 Minutes

Rating: R for Violent Contortions and Devilish Profanity

Release Date: October 6, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Thirteen years after Victor Fielding’s (Leslie Odom Jr.) wife dies during childbirth, his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) wanders into the woods after school with her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum). They end up missing but reemerge after three days, although they have barely any memory of what happened, as they believe that just a few hours have passed. It soon becomes clear that something otherworldly has returned with them. Their doctors have no idea how to treat their sudden personality shifts, but of course we know that this is really  the latest battle in an eternal war between good and evil. The Catholic priests in this edition are mostly feckless, so instead Victor and Katherine’s parents (Jennifer Nettles and Norbert Leo Butz) turn to a trusty nurse/neighbor (Ann Dowd) and a certain someone else (Ellen Burstyn) who famously has experience in this area.

What Made an Impression?: A Healthy Dose of Skepticism: When I hear people who were alive at the time talk about the release of the original Exorcist in 1973, they often emphasize how moviegoers really believed in the presence of the devil on Earth. 2023 America, by contrast, is a more skeptical era, or at least it’s a time when much fewer people belong to organized religions. The Exorcist: Believer leans into that fact, or at least attempts to, by acknowledging the value of skepticism. The scope is further broadened by making it clear that exorcism isn’t strictly a Catholic ritual. Katherine’s family are Baptists, and there’s also a woman (Okwui Okpokwasili) assisting in the rite who appears to be practicing voodoo. It’s an intriguing hodgepodge, but one that could maybe have benefited from a little more rigor to figure out what it’s trying to say.
Here Comes the Exposition: As was the case with director David Gordon Green’s Halloween films, Believer serves as a direct sequel to the original that basically ignores all previous follow-ups. Although I kind of wish that Green instead employed the Fast & Furious technique of somehow incorporating every ridiculous plot twist into the main continuity. But in the case of The Exorcist, that concern doesn’t matter too much, since each entry mostly stands on its own. Still, the return of Burstyn as Chris MacNeil demonstrates both the potentials and the pitfalls of this fresh approach. It’s invigorating to have her impose some wisdom after her own daughter was possessed all those decades ago. But in an effort to explain what she’s been up to in the meantime, we get a huge exposition dump that also pretty much spells out all the themes of this movie. It kind of made me just want to have an Adventures of Chris MacNeil spinoff instead.
Effects vs. Special Effects: There’s something about the look and feel of movies from the past. In our era of digital cinematography and standard post-production VFX cleanup, everything just looks a little too polished. I’m fine with 2023 being 2023 and having its own visual style, but in the case of a possession flick, that means that the devil’s tricks feel like the work of a rather earthbound magician. The illusion is just too illusory.
Believing in Humanity: While a good chunk of Believer represents a missed opportunity, sometimes someone arrives to make you, well, believe. Maybe the cinematic devil isn’t quite as viscerally powerful as he used to be, but if you can’t accept religion, you can still put your faith in people. And with that in mind, thank God for Ann Dowd as the nurse who was almost a nun but might still be the secret weapon to end this possession. When she speaks, she commands the room like nobody else. And when she insists that God put her in these girls’ lives for a reason, it could sound hokey coming from anyone else, but out of her mouth, it’s the most powerful statement I’ve heard in quite some time. I don’t know if a new possession movie can ever be 1/666th the phenomenon that the original Exorcist was, but I can at least have faith that small miracles like Dowd’s performance are still possible.

The Exorcist: Believer is Recommended If: You can cut through the rust and find the devil in the details

Grade: 3 out of 5 Descents Into Hell

‘Harriet’ is at Its Best When Emphasizing How Good Harriet Tubman Was at Her Job

October 29, 2019

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

CREDIT: Glen Wilson/Focus Features

Starring: Cynthia Erivo, Leslie Odom Jr., Joe Alwyn, Janelle Monáe, Jennifer Nettles, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Clarke Peters, Zackary Momoh

Director: Kasi Lemmons

Running Time: 125 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for A Bevy of Insults and a Few Scenes of Brutal Violence

Release Date: November 1, 2019

As I began to watch Harriet Tubman biopic Harriet, the thought “Shouldn’t I be watching this in school?” passed through my mind. That is by no means an insult, but rather, it is an illustration of how my own experience (and the experience of many American schoolchildren) has primed me to feel towards a movie like this one. Tubman is an important figure in American history, so a film about her is a useful tool for history teachers to keep their students’ attention. In that sense, Harriet does not need to be a masterpiece (though bonus points if it is), it just needs to be historically accurate, or at least true to the spirit of its subject. On that count, I recommend Harriet to any teacher whose curriculum covers the era of abolition.

For everyone else who is not watching this movie in a classroom setting, you might still be excited because it has taken more than a hundred years for Tubman’s story to finally get the full-blown feature film treatment (though Ruby Dee and Cicely Tyson played her in earlier TV versions). Although, that excitement might be tempered by the difficulty of having to endure yet another movie viscerally showing the brutal treatment of the enslaved (as well as free black Americans). But I think the best way to appreciate Harriet is as a story of a person who does her job very well, i.e., the sort of character that Tom Hanks often plays. Cynthia Erivo proves that a woman and a person of color is just as capable of this role (not that any proof was necessary, given the historical record).

Tubman escapes to freedom on her own, safely travelling about a hundred miles by foot despite her illiteracy and the relentlessness of her slave master. She then goes on to help secure the freedom of hundreds of more slaves while pretty much matter-of-factly never losing any of her cargo, stunning her fellow conductors on the Underground Railroad with her success rate. But as the steady, burrowingly intense eyes on Erivo’s face tell you, this is just what she does. Slavery had to end at some point, and Harriet Tubman was as up for the job as she needed to be.

Harriet is Recommended If You Like: Glory, Sully, Bridge of Spies

Grade: 3 out of 5 Rescue Missions