Evil Dead Rise: By settling on a tone that sits somewhere between the playfully over-the-top campy stylings of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II and the unrelenting gruesome brutality of Fede Alvarez's Evil Dead and moving the action from a cabin in the woods to a dingy apartment complex that's mere weeks away from being vacated and torn down, Lee Cronin (The Hole in the Ground) is able to put his own stamp on the franchise while also honoring what came before him with Evil Dead Rise. The decrepit, largely contained setting allows for a feeling of slowly-escalating unease to build with ease, Alyssa Sutherland's performance as a mother of 3 who becomes the first main character to be victimized by the demons that are unwittingly unleashed from the pages of the Necronomicon by her curious yet dopey teenage son (Morgan Davies) who discovers the cursed book in the rubble of an earthquake that levels part of their building is creepy and often very funny and Cronin brings a giddiness to the director's chair that makes the movie organically fun-especially during the moments where it's going for sadistic laughs. Raimi and Bruce Campbell have to be proud that their creation landed in Cronin's caring, talented hands and Warner Brothers would be wise to bring him back for the inevitable next installment.
Grade: B
Beau Is Afraid: Man oh man did Ari Aster swing for the fences with this one. Beau Is Afraid is a surrealist, VERY dark comedy about a paranoid, anxiety-riddled man (Joaquin Phoenix-in one of the best performances of his prolific career) living alone in an unnamed city who confronts his complicated relationship with his mother (Patti LuPone in the present, Zoe Lister-Jones in flashbacks-both are exceptionally good) as he makes the long, difficult journey home to see her. It's a purposefully unpleasant watch that becomes very tedious-particularly in the 45-minute-or-so stretch after Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan's characters exit the movie and Parker Posey and LuPone enter-at times, but when Aster's warped vision is clicking, it's a mesmerizing and uncomfortably hilarious look at how parents can leave permanent scars on their child's brains without even realizing they're hurting them. While I definitely won't be in any rush to watch it again, I'm glad that A24 was willing to give Aster the money (the budget was reportedly $35 mil, which would make it the most expensive movie they've ever produced) to make such a deeply personal movie that boasts less than zero commercial viability. .
Side note: I'll never be able to hear Mariah Carey's "Always Be My Baby" without thinking of this movie again. The letter that Aster wrote to Carey must've been incredible because it's truly unbelievable that she granted him permission to use the song in such a deeply fucked up scene.
Grade: B
Polite Society: Polite Society is a fascinating case study in just how much damage an ineffective plot twist can do to a movie. For the opening 2/3, the feature directorial debut from Nida Manzoor is a pretty solid movie centered around a believable relationship between two British-Pakistani sisters (Priya Kansara, Ritu Arya) that gets tested once Arya's character begins a relationship with a charming doctor (Akshay Kanna) that quickly becomes very serious that is given a kind of heightened reality backdrop via some Edgar Wright-esque stylistic flourishes that give both its comedy bits and wire fu-inspired martial arts sequences a nice jolt of whacky energy (Kansara's character is an aspiring stunt performer and dedicates all of her free time to attending karate classes and uploading fight choreography to her YouTube channel). When the twist comes along, the movie makes an abrupt, jarring tonal/genre shift that not only sinks the finale, but retroactively makes what preceded it feel pretty unfocused. There's enough good ideas on display here to be optimistic about the quality of Manzoor's future output, but how quickly Polite Society goes from being a pretty solid comedy/family drama with martial arts interludes to a messy misfire with a baffling identity crisis is an unpleasant shock to the senses that will be difficult to forget.
Grade: C-
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