Review: "The Other Lamb"

He counts the days. He knows our private rhythms.
                                         --The Cursed Wife

The older wives know.

Oh, they'd never say anything to the younger women. The girls, the sisters, the ones in blue. For they know their future, because it is their past. And it is one they feel they can't escape.

That's perhaps the scariest thing about "The Other Lamb." It's a drama with horror elements about a cult led by a charismatic man known only as The Shepherd. He looks a lot like Jesus. He thinks he is Jesus.

Or, at least, he wants his "dear faithful flock," as he addresses them, to think he is godlike.

But the older women, his wives who wear red -- yes, wives, plural -- are fully aware of what's going on. Some of them are the same age as Shepherd, who is not old but is not young, and remember back to a time when he had a regular name like any other man. They know he is a miscreant running a long con. He says they are his followers, when in reality they are his coerced harem.

They know what happened to the babies who were boys, for in this flock there is only one ram.

But this has been their life for so long, something they chose, and they cannot see how to untie themselves from his web of deceit.

Some of them have been part of the flock long enough to have daughters now old enough to vie for a place as wives. There is a growing discord between the generations. Indeed, a few barely into their teens have already left behind the coarse blue frocks of the younger set for the deep red denoting one of the Shepherd's wives. There are at least half a dozen wives, and about twice that many in blue.

There are whispered tales of former wives, mothers now departed from the flock.

Among these is Selah (Raffey Cassidy), who's on the cusp of ripening womanhood. Her mother was one of Shepherd's favorites, as he frequently reminds her, stroking her deep auburn hair that flows in the same way. Shepherd commands his little cult through a set of invented rules, and one of them seems to be he will not take a new wife until she is blooded.

Selah is seen as the purest of the girls in blue, though the seeds of rebellion are planted in her heart. She watches the way the Shepherd manipulates the women and sets them against each other. One of her friends becomes a wife before her, and sits across from Selah at the campfire fire stroking her swelling belly, pride and boastfulness enflamed in her stare.

Where and when does this story take place? There's a dreamy, castaway quality to it.

Occasionally cars pass by letting us know there is some level of modernity around. Shepherd warns of the "outside world" constantly threatening to intrude and destroy their heaven on earth. When police drop by with a warning, the flock sets off by foot on a journey to find a new home, carrying only a few possessions and trailed by the small herd of sheep that sustains them -- the flock following the flock.

Denise Gough plays Sarah, aka the Cursed Wife. The Shepherd calls her a "broken thing" and eschews her. She has hastily shorn hair and scars on her body, and without saying a word we know where they come from. When Selah begins menstruating and is placed in isolation with Sarah, they form a kinship, with the older woman mentoring the younger.

This is a strange, moody and hauntingly beautiful film. Director Malgorzata Szumowska and screenwriter C.S. McMullen are less concerned with pushing a plot than moments of contemplation and quiet power. Some will find it rather slow-moving, as I occasionally did.

The visuals are magnificent. In their initial home in the forest, the flock has used strings of yarn to create outdoor spaces -- a cathedral-like roof, for instance. For group meetings and prayers, they have constructed a "room" making four walls out of the perfectly parallel strings. It's an oddly gorgeous and disquieting effect.

Cassidy does a lot with a mostly reactive role, her gaze transforming from innocence to recognition to resentment. We feel the power that Shepherd has over her and the others, and also her slowly germinating resolve to oppose him.

"The Other Lamb" is a story of faith, family and blood. Not all shepherds are goodly guides, and some sheep will not be corralled.

Review: "Vox Lux"

"Vox Lux" is a movie about... something. I'm honestly not sure what. It stars Natalie Portman in the second half as a Lady Gaga-esque pop superstar struggling in her relationships with her sister, daughter and manager. In the first half the character shows how she got where she is, parlaying a horrible childhood incident into a career.

The last 20 minutes is Celeste's big comeback concert -- though don't you dare call it that -- and we're treated to an elaborate stage show of lights, pyrotechnics and exuberant dancing as Portman warbles through various techno-tweaked tunes that could have been sung by, well, anybody.

The Celeste of the first half is a sweet kid of 14 tempted by the sparkle of fame and fortune, and in the second half she's a total rhymes-with-witch who seems decades older than her 31 years, resentful of all the attention she gets while not-so-secretly feeding off it to sustain her sense of self.

All of this is accompanied by flat, emotionless narration by Willem Dafoe. It's the sort of narration that doesn't tell you anything the movie doesn't, so you wonder why it's there.

Surprisingly, it's the second half that's hard to get through. Portman plays Celeste as a shrill, nasty harpy who somehow forgot she's supposed to be the nice girl. There's no emotional match with the wide-eyed kid she was, played by Raffey Cassidy. We wonder what happened in the in-between.

I'd have liked to have seen that movie.

We follow Celeste around as she has nasty encounters with the press, with a restaurant manager who asks for a photo, with her manager (Jude Law), her sister, Ellie (Stacy Martin), her teen daughter, Albertine (Cassidy again) and well, pretty much everybody. Celeste is estranged from Ellie, who writes her songs and takes care of her kid, but gets treated like dirt for her trouble.

The first part is more interesting, when a disturbed classmate shoots up Celeste's class, wounding her seriously in the neck. She wears braces and decorative collars for the rest of the movie. After she and Ellie come up with a heartfelt song for the memorial ceremony, it becomes a national anthem. The manager (never named) is brought in to guide her, which follows a predictable path of ear-candy songs, bizarro makeup effects and squirmy dance moves.

What's the point of it all? I dunno. Writer/director Brady Corbet seems to be trying to fashion a morality tale about how even the most earnest intentions can become twisted in the caldron of the celebrity-making machine. Sounds like a terrible bargain, but not an interesting enough one to watch for two hours.

Video review: "Tomorrowland"

The most disappointing films are usually not aggressively bad, merely forgettable. Though it has been but four months since I saw “Tomorrowland,” I can barely recall the plot without reading my own summary of it.

With director Brad Bird at the helm -- a man whose previous worst film was merely “very good” -- and an intriguing premise, “Tomorrowland” seemed to have all the makings of a sci-fi fairy tale. But the movie gets bogged down in a convoluted plot, and even George Clooney seems grumpy and fuzzy about what’s going on.

The story centers on a bright young teen, Casey (Britt Robertson), who finds herself transported into an amazing future world whenever she touches a mysterious pin. It’s all an illusion, sort of, but leads her to the door of reclusive inventor Frank (Clooney), with the help of an enigmatic British girl (Raffey Cassidy).

Things go on from there, which are hard to describe without ruining the movie’s (attempted) allure. Suffice to say they end up on a Da Vinci Code-like ride, finding clues to the Tomorrowland in famous places. They eventually reach it, but of course there’s more to the futuristic fantasyland than meets the eye.

A well-meaning film loaded with stellar talent, “Tomorrowland” is the proverbial sleek rocket that never gets off the launch pad.

Bonus features are excellent, though you’ll have to spring for the blu-ray combo pack to get most of them. One of the neatest things is production diaries by Brad Bird. There are three, though the DVD edition only comes with one of them. It also has “Blast from the Past,” a fictional commercial for Tomorrowland.

With the Blu-ray combo pack, you get all the diaries, eight deleted scenes, four Easter eggs, three making-of featurettes, a fictional children’s show, “The World of Tomorrow Science Hour” with futurologist David Nix, and an animated short, “The Origins of Plus Ultra.”

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Review: "Tomorrowland"

Maybe you’ve seen the trailer for “Tomorrowland,” in which a young woman touches a pin and is instantaneously, breathtakingly transported to another place. Like me, you probably found it highly intriguing, but after watching it you didn’t really feel like you had any idea what the movie was about.

Well, I’ve seen the whole film now – and I still don’t have a clear picture of it.

It’s a weird cotton candy concoction. It wants to be fun and fluffy, but the film also has this determined air of mystery to it, like it resents sharing its secrets. And there’s some late portentous stuff that seems way too sour for what came before.

This is surely one of the most disappointing movies of the year, given expectations and the talent involved: star George Clooney, who seems to instinctively gravitate toward quality material or vice-versa; director Brad Bird, one of the top animation filmmakers (“The Incredibles”) who successfully made the jump to live action; Damon Lindelhof, co-creator of the TV show “Lost,” who wrote the script along with Bird.

I’m afraid this may also prove a disappointing review, since I feel like I can’t tell you very much about “Tomorrowland.” Its entire appeal is steeped in guarding its enigma, then slowly – too slowly – revealing itself. Even though I found the movie underwhelming, blurting out its secrets seems a disservice both to the film and its audience.

I’ll stick to things that are shown in the trailer, or you can figure out easily. Given the title and that it’s from Disney, you can guess that it has something to do with the utopian vision of the future from the ubiquitous theme parks. Touching one of these odd ceremonial pins immediately teleports you to a magical, soaring city of arches and scientific advancement -- at least for a while.

Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) is a smart and gutsy teen who comes to be in possession of one of these pins, and tenaciously follows the thread of its mystery. This includes gaining the companionship of a strange young girl, Athena (Raffey Cassidy). She in turn leads Casey to Frank (Clooney), an isolated inventor who appears to be very, very angry at the world.

Together they have all sorts of adventures involving rockets, robots, cross-dimension travel and guzzling Coca-Colas. For a while it almost seems like a science fiction version of “The Da Vinci Code,” with famous locales and figures revealing long-shrouded purposes.

The movie takes a long, long time to get rolling. It feels like a roller-coaster in which two-thirds of the ride is clickety-clacking up that first big rise. The last 45 minutes or so are pretty engaging, but some of the twists are more jerky than thrilling.

Clooney is dyspeptic and missing his usual facile charm. Robertson is buoyant and enthusiastic, though the script often has her saying or doing patently ridiculous things. Young Cassidy has terrific screen presence; somehow she speaks in a very clear British accent, yet I struggled to understand her words.

“Tomorrowland” is a story for and about dreamers, those who dare to strive for something better and never give in to the naysayers. It’s a beautiful sentiment, but the problem with that is sometimes the naysayers are right. And though I dreamed of adoring this movie, I must say: nay.