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THE KILLER
*** “Forbid empathy.” The nameless assassin (Michael Fassbender) at the corroded core of David Fincher’s The Killer chants that command throughout the film, conditioning himself to be cruel. Reunited with Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, the director has made a thriller that makes you feel as if the icy blood of its protagonist is coursing through your veins, an experience that is as exhilarating as it is unnerving. When we first meet the Killer, he’s killing nothing but time, feasting on McDonald’s and listening to The Smiths as he awaits the arrival of a target in Paris. He’s methodical to a fault, but he makes a catastrophic mistake—and the woman he loves (Sophie Charlotte) pays the price. Incidentally, who is she? The Killer’s girlfriend? His wife? Revolting against the niceties of backstory, Fincher trusts the faces of his actors (including Tilda Swinton, who plays a rival assassin with haunting poise) to speak the story. His faith in Fassbender is amply rewarded—even the way the actor’s arms smoothly swing past his hips is expressive—but Fincher is the true star of the film. Adapting a French graphic novel series, he transforms a deliberately spare plot into a banquet of suspense that leaves a troubling aftertaste. It can’t be an accident that all of the Killer’s victims are women and people of color—or that the one life he spares is that of a Caucasian male. Some will interpret The Killer as an uncompromising attack on white supremacy; others will see Fincher as, at best, a white filmmaker bumbling into a conversation he can barely understand. How he responds to the audience’s reaction will determine if, unlike the Killer, he understands the difference between precision and comprehension. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Hollywood.
KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
**** Martin Scorsese’s final act is that of an American tragedian, and in Killers of the Flower Moon, the 80-year-old film icon unflinchingly dramatizes the history of white, 1920s Oklahomans wreaking intrafamily genocide on the Osage people after oil is discovered beneath the tribe’s lands. The murders are underway when Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns from World War I to work for his uncle (Robert De Niro), a cattle baron whose actual business is infiltrating the Osage community and plotting to steal their fortunes. Thus, Ernest’s personal sins will become inextricable from his work, even if DiCaprio wears a perfectly dumb underbite to suggest the character is straining not to comprehend his deeds. There’s no such underplaying of intelligence by Lily Gladstone (Certain Women), whose acting superpower is gentle directness. She plays Mollie, an Osage woman who loses family members fast when she marries Ernest. In the film’s only glaring flaw, the script leaves Mollie, its most important Osage character, wanting for moments of dynamism amid her suffering. That said, Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t about dynamism or change; like The Irishman, it commits over three hours to study crushing inevitability. The film is at once a crime epic, a spiritual exorcism, a portrait of a ne’er-do-well, a black comedy about the FBI’s birth, and a ballad for those who didn’t see modernity coming. It is also about movies, as Scorsese reminds us with a brilliant closing comment on the nature of true crime and mass media. If this is one of Scorsese’s last films, behold the bracing reflection of a murderer, a nation, and a legendary artist all asking: “What have I done?” R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Academy, Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, Cinemagic, City Center, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Lake Theater, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Twin, Studio One.
SCRAPPER
*** Georgie (Lola Campbell) gets along OK by herself. Secretly living alone after her mother’s death, the 12-year-old cleans her suburban London flat, hauls out the trash, and nicks bicycles to make the rent. It’s a sad state made nearly adorable by zippy filmmaking and Georgie’s precocious yet hard-bitten energy. In Scrapper, Campbell channels the soul of a grifter in ways not seen since teenage Kaitlyn Dever on Justified, but before neighbors and teachers detect that Georgie lives unsupervised, her long-lost father Jason (Harris Dickinson of Triangle of Sadness fame) surfaces after years of partying in Ibiza. In her dad, Georgie finds her reflection—sometimes identical, sometimes inverse. He may look like a soccer hooligan, but he shares Georgie’s industriousness and has a child’s kooky sense of humor, bringing out the dubious adult in his daughter. Scrapper director Charlotte Regan, who hails from this working-class London milieu, effortlessly captures how the community wildly crisscrosses in the shared spaces around their pastel, candy-colored flats. While sudden detours into mockumentary, magical realism, and surveillance aesthetics make it seem like she’s emptying a bag of styles in her feature debut, Regan still manages to succeed by empowering her actors—whether they’re the star of last year’s Palme d’Or winner or 12 years old. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Living Room.
WHEN EVIL LURKS
*** Ed and Lorraine Warren (of Conjuring fame) once hypothesized that demons operate in three progressive stages: infestation, oppression and possession. Alternatively, When Evil Lurks is more of a “wham, bam, demon already swelling inside 400-pound man” kind of picture. That’s the immediate inciting grotesquery of director Demián Rugna’s depiction of a demonic force—or “a rotten” as the amazing Spanish translation goes—infecting humans and beasts in the Argentine backcountry. Adult brothers Jimmy (Demián Salomón) and Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) initially hope they can mercy-kill their bedridden neighbor who’s hosting the evil, but it won’t be that easy. As the contagion’s power emerges, Rugna’s first two acts soar with constant “out of the frying pan, into the fire” logic and pacing. It’s all tumors and mouth sounds and child endangerment expressing the dire emotional state of Pedro in particular, grounding the film’s no-prisoners shock value. Granted, When Evil Lurks can’t quite sustain its impressive escalation (Jimmy and Pedro’s third-act meeting with a “rotten” expert slows the climax to something more procedural). But if your Halloween watchlist needs a sick new heart and brain breaker, try a movie that’s liberal with its entrails and where a demon hunter professes with a straight face: “Evil likes children, and children like evil.” NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Shudder.
DICKS: THE MUSICAL
** There is a moment in Dicks: The Musical when a no-bullshit corporate titan (Megan Thee Stallion) launches into a BDSM song-and-dance routine, which earns the approval of none other than God (Bowen Yang). “Bitch, that was fun,” the Almighty declares. Far be it from me to disagree with a deity, but he and I clearly have different definitions of “fun,” given that the musical number is like every scene in Dicks—tuneless, witless and so mechanically directed that you will pray to be teleported to an alternate timeline where John Waters directed this mess instead of the depressingly serviceable Larry Charles (Borat). Based on the musical Fucking Identical Twins, Dicks stars Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp (who wrote the play and the film) as manic Wall Street bros who discover they’re twins and scheme to reunite their divorced parents, Harris and Evelyn (Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally). If Charles knew how to film a musical, he might have been able to redeem the movie’s barely melodic songs, but you never feel movement of the music or the characters. And while there’s no denying the film’s wholesome intentions—a little incest aside, it’s mostly a bighearted fable about self-acceptance—Jackson and Sharp’s frantic, almost literally eye-popping performances suggest that their theater and television work failed to prepare them for the subtler demands of the big screen. Lane, however, manages to modulate his explosive energy, despite being saddled with the film’s cringiest scene: Harris chewing meat and spitting it into the mouths of inbred creatures called Sewer Boys. Needless to say, food, like humor, is a matter of taste. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Bridgeport, Cascade, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Progress Ridge, Studio One, Vancouver Mall.
PRISCILLA
** Sofia Coppola didn’t just make a masterpiece called Lost in Translation—she’s become contemporary cinema’s reigning expert on lostness. She shows us what it is to be adrift, alone, yearning—the way Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) is when she wanders through the luxuriant chambers of Graceland in Coppola’s flawed and entrancing biographical film. Elvis (a superb Jacob Elordi) spends most of the movie preoccupied with his celebrity and his infidelity, though he’s slightly more attentive to Priscilla when they meet in Germany in 1959 (when she’s 14 and he’s 24). In these scenes, the film’s best, Elvis bewitches his future bride with his manly brooding over whether he’ll have a musical career when he completes his military service. “Sure you will!” Priscilla insists, her face radiating belief. Yes, Elvis will have a career, but she won’t be a part of it. Instead, she’ll be reduced to a virginal plaything for him to gaslight, neglect and abuse (in one scene, he hurls a chair at her head). Rapturously alive with desire but unflinching in its portrait of Elvis as a predator, Priscilla shreds the mythmaking of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. It is a superior film in every respect, but once it gets to Graceland, the beautifully measured pace of the Germany prologue evaporates. Rushing through years of betrayal and bliss, the film starts to feel as if it’s checking boxes on a timeline rather than evoking Priscilla’s experience. As always, she’s lost in her own story. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Bridgeport, Cascade, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Vancouver Mall.