Author: David Medsker

This is the movie that I’ve been waiting for David Fincher to make since “Fight Club.” “Zodiac” has its supporters, but I was not one of them, which means it’s been almost a decade since Fincher delivered something I considered to be on par with his abilities, and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is it. Beautiful, wildly ambitious and a technical marvel, it’s what going to the movies is all about. Fans of Tim Burton’s “Big Fish” should get in line right now.

The movie begins at the story’s end, with an elderly Daisy (Cate Blanchett) dying in a New Orleans hospital bed. Her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond), in an attempt to comfort her, finds a diary that contains not her words but those of Benjamin Button, a boy who was born on the day the Great War ended but was abandoned by his father (mother died during birth) when he saw that his baby looked like an old man. Left at the doorstep of a nearby nursing home, Benjamin is raised by the home’s caretaker Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), and despite being a child, he looks just like everyone around him. When a new woman comes to stay at the home, her granddaughter Daisy (played by Elle Fanning as a child) comes to visit, and the young/old Benjamin is smitten. As Daisy gets older, Benjamin gets younger, and their lives go in different directions. Daisy becomes a dancer; Benjamin works on a tug boat and gets roped into World War II. Neither, however, forgets about the other, and Caroline can’t believe her mother kept this torrid love affair a secret.

Fincher executes some jaw-dropping sequences here – the Great War and World War II scenes are flat-out stunning, a recurring bit involving one very unlucky guest at the nursing home gets a laugh every time, and even the title cards are amazing – but the most impressive feat is how they de-age Pitt. Making him look older than his current age (45), that’s easy; when he gets older/younger, however, it’s astonishingly real. There must be some CGI involved (Robert Zemeckis’ “Polar Express” technology in the live-action realm?), because if such a makeup existed, there would be riots whenever it hit the shelves.

Pitt and Blanchett may be the movie’s leads, but there isn’t a single bum performance to be found here. Taraji P. Henson is a stitch as Queenie; Benjamin’s father Thomas (Jason Flemyng) reeks of sadness as he tries to get to know the son he abandoned; the preacher at Queenie’s church (Lance E. Nichols) has one showstopping scene, and the crew on Benjamin’s tugboat, from Captain Mike (Jared Harris) to John Grimm (Richmond Arquette) offer invaluable support to the main characters. Ironically, their roles turn out to be more nuanced than Tilda Swinton’s, who plays Benjamin’s onetime love interest Elizabeth. It’s tempting to call her appearance here stunt casting, but given the facial similarities between Blanchett and Swinton, it’s actually a genius move; Benjamin loves her because she reminds him of Daisy.

“Benjamin Button” is a welcome sight in such cynical times. Fincher pulls a stunt of James Cameron proportions, in that he’s commissioned to deliver a crowd-pleasing love story and instead delivers a crowd-pleasing work of art. Death creeps around every scene, yet the movie’s tone is optimistic, even when it addresses Benjamin and Daisy’s aging dilemma. Tragic and sad – the movie’s final ten minutes are heartbreaking – but not depressing. Shrouded in death, but not morbid and at times laugh-out-loud funny. This is one for the ages

If this movie had a plot, it would be dangerous. As it is, “The Croods” is a rough sketch of an idea, kept afloat courtesy of some well-timed gags. It has heart and a fair share of laughs, and it’s hard not to like the message that we must evolve as a species if we intend to survive, but it feels like a sitcom episode stretched out to a grueling 98 minutes. Ninety-eight-minute movies aren’t supposed to feel long. This one does.

The Croods are a family of cavepeople who have outlived their Neanderthal contemporaries by playing it very, very safe. The father Grug (Nicolas Cage) insists that everyone stay near their cave, and to never leave the cave at night, much to the chagrin of his curious daughter Eep (Emma Stone). One night, unable to sleep, Eep sees a flickering light outside the cave. She sneaks out to investigate, and meets Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a homo sapien boy who warns her that the world is coming to an end (it’s actually continental drift), and that she and her family must find better, higher ground if they wish to survive. This idea, of course, does not sit well with Grug, but it is not long before Guy is proven right, which creates, in Grug’s mind anyway, a battle for supremacy between brains and brawn.

This is the kind of movie that sweats the small stuff – the disaster sequences will make Roland Emmerich squeal, and the animals they created, especially the piranha birds, are both amusing and inspired – but for some reason, they don’t put the same effort into the story. It gets to the point where they let Cage off his leash (never a good idea) and do this bit where Grug tries to be a thinker like Guy, only Cage sounds like he’s trying to channel Jeff Bridges in “The Big Lebowski.” On the one hand, it’s kind of fun to see an animated film play it loose and experiment. On the other hand, it feels forced and out of step with everything around it.

They sure did a nice job of casting the film though, rounding out the A-list firepower with indie queen Catherine Keener, funnyman Clark Duke, who makes a very forgettable character memorable, and Cloris Leachman as Keener’s mom, though to be fair most of Leachman’s laughs come from her character’s actions rather than her words (she’s good with a stick). In spite of these nice touches, “The Croods” is too underdeveloped to pose a threat to its modern-day animated peers. Insert your own joke here about the caveman movie suffering from a lack of development.

Cowboys and aliens in the same movie should create some together-at-last levels of euphoria, and yet “Cowboys & Aliens” is shockingly dull, lacking in tension (though there were several story arcs teeming with the stuff) and crippled by the Slowly Revealing Repressed Memory story device. The subject matter had the potential to be the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of movies, but instead turned out to be Nuts & Gum.

Set sometime during the gold rush, a man (Daniel Craig) wakes up in the desert with no memory, a strange metal bracelet attached to his wrist, and surprisingly good fighting skills. He finds his way to the town of Absolution (presumably just down the road from Mercy and Redemption) and becomes a folk hero after he embarrasses Percy (Paul Dano), the bully son of local rancher and original gangsta Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford). The local sheriff discovers that this new drifter is actually wanted criminal Jake Lonergan, but before he can be carted off to jail, a group of spaceships descend upon the city and abduct nearly half the townspeople. Jake and Woodrow form a reluctant alliance to find and free the abductees, one of whom is Percy, while each hopes that Jake’s memory comes back in enough time to be of use to them.

This movie should have been flying high on nervous energy alone. Not only did Jake emasculate Dolarhyde’s son (and break one of his bones for good measure), he stole money from Dolarhyde himself. Whatever scenario puts them together as a team should have made for “3:10 to Yuma”-type levels of reluctant buddy chemistry, yet from nearly the get-go, the two act like old friends. Even when the local Apache Indian tribe gets involved, the deeply-entrenched prejudices between white man and Native American are resolved and put aside rather quickly. Granted, these are the events that should ultimately take place in a story like this, but it should never happen as quickly, or as cleanly, as it does here, especially in a movie that isn’t exactly what one would call a non-stop thrill ride.

This is, of course, a polite way of saying that “Cowboys & Aliens” is, well, boring. It’s tempting to blame it on the the lack of action sequences, but in truth, that isn’t the problem; it’s what the movie does – or more accurately, doesn’t do – during the quiet moments that do it in. The recurring theme in terms of character development is ‘man up,’ from Sam Rockwell’s milquetoast bartender to the young Indian boy lucky enough to walk away from a staredown with one of the big baddies. It’s a fitting motto for the situation, but not particularly engrossing. The movie even pushes Olivia Wilde on Daniel Craig as a love interest, despite the fact that he just lost the love of his life no more than three days earlier. The tone of the script (written by no less than five people) has a bipolar nature to it, careening between heartfelt and callous in a moment’s notice.

Talking about the acting in “Cowboys & Aliens” is kind of pointless, since it really doesn’t change anything about what works and doesn’t work in the movie itself. Paul Dano, though, deserves a mention for his wholly unconvincing performance as the chicken hawk Percy. The better question is what lured Jon Favreau into making this movie. His filmography isn’t quite on par with Christopher Nolan, but he has shown pretty shrewd instincts when it comes to directorial projects. Even “Zathura” is more enjoyable than this, so why did he agree to make this movie? One wonders if there is a darker, grittier script for “Cowboys & Aliens” on Favreau’s night stand, dog-eared and tear-stained over what might have been.

Renny Harlin should seriously consider having his name legally changed to Alan Smithee. That way, whenever some movie is released that credits the infamous pseudonym as its director, Harlin could at least say, “Nope, that wasn’t me,” and it would be plausible that he’s telling the truth. Yes, “The Covenant” is that bad. Granted, we’re talking about one of the best bad-movie directors of all time (“Cutthroat Island,” “Driven,” “Deep Blue Sea”), so no one was expecting much from him to begin with…and he still under-delivered. Harlin’s 1996 movie “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” one of the best bad movies ever made, looks like “The Godfather” compared to this.

The movie begins with a crawl that explains how four families with supernatural powers escaped to America hundreds of years ago to avoid persecution, then entered a vow of silence to maintain their safety. One of the families was ratted out and killed, while the other four stayed true to their word. The power has been passed down to the present day to first-born sons Caleb (Steven Strait), Pogue (Taylor Kitsch), Reid (Toby Hemingway) and Tyler (Chase Crawford), who all attend a ritzy boarding school. Caleb meets cute with Sarah (Laura Ramsey), while Pogue’s girlfriend Kate (Jessica Lucas) gets a little too close to new guy Chase (Sebastian Stan). The four covenant members begin to notice some strange goings-on – a disturbance in the Force, if you will – and Caleb suspects the hot-headed Reid is getting addicted to his power, which apparently will age you prematurely with excessive use. Pretty soon, though, the boys realize that the fifth family was not exterminated after all, and the surviving heir is out for revenge.

The movie is all wrong from the very first scene. The four boys pull a “Lost Boys”/”Underworld”-style drop from a cliff down to a beach party, a gross misuse of their powers (but nothing compared to what they do when chased by the police). The shot implies that the boys are corrupt narcissists when they’re not, which means that the scene only exists for the sake of doing a fancy FX shot. Even worse, from that scene on, the whole Three Musketeers credo that we assume the group maintains is thrown out the window, replaced with Caleb ruling the other three boys with an iron fist, making it less of a covenant than a dictatorship. Snotty jerk Aaron (Kyle Schmid) gets in the boys’ faces at the beach and establishes himself straight away as a villain, but he’s tossed aside about 30 minutes in and is never heard from again. (Speaking of Schmid, good luck telling the difference between him and good guy Kitsch, as they could pass for twins, which should go down on the casting director’s permanent record.) They set up Reid as a potential third dot in a love triangle with Caleb and Sarah, only to drop the thread almost as soon as they start it. Two of the characters are visited by nasty beasties called darklings, though the significance of the darklings is never explained. And I’d love to see a school anywhere in the world that has showers as fancy as the one Sarah uses here.

And let us discuss the acting, shall we? The supposedly hot-headed Hemingway has all the menace of one of those lap dogs that pees when it gets excited. (The producers surely thought they were clever when they had him say “Harry Potter can kiss my ass!”, since Hemingway is a dead ringer for Tom Felton, who plays Potter nemesis Draco Malfoy in that series.) Strait looks a little like Josh Hartnett and Keanu Reeves, but luckily can out-act both of them. Kitsch and Crawford are window dressing by the second act, especially Crawford, whose existence is barely acknowledged. Lastly, there’s Sebastian Stan, who has to be the lovechild of Scott Wolf and Sean Astin with the acting “talents” of Matthew Lillard. None of that last sentence, sadly, is an exaggeration, especially the bit about Lillard. Hoo boy, is he bad in this.

Someone at Screen Gems must have pictures of Harlin in a compromising position with some kind of farm animal. Either that or the summer house in Vienna needed some work. Those are the only reasonable explanations why he would take on a project like “The Covenant,” which is slumming even by his standards. It’s going to take him years to work this one off, assuming he ever does. In fact, this movie might be the long kiss goodnight to Harlin’s career. A bit of advice, Renny: sometimes the best moves are the ones you don’t make.

If the animators behind Tim Burton’s love letters to Ray Harryhausen put as much effort into the story they’re telling as they put into the ten-inch stick figures that tell it, they would truly be dangerous. His first stop-motion foray, 1993’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” was charming but flawed, too impressed with its technical achievement for its own good. The same affliction mars “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride” as well; it’s visually stunning, leaps and bounds beyond both “Nightmare” and 1995’s “James and the Giant Peach.” The story, however, is seriously lacking, and the tunes aren’t that good, either.

Johnny Depp stars as Victor Van Dort, the son of two new-money fishing magnates who have arranged for Victor to marry Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson), the daughter of old-money royalty whose family is in fact dead broke. Victor is smitten with her when he finally sees her, but is utterly terrified when having to rehearse his vows and screws them up repeatedly. Walking through the woods after his embarrassing ordeal, Victor is determined to get the vows right when it counts, and rehearses to the trees, even placing the ring on a branch on the ground. He soon realizes, though, that the branch is not a branch but the bony, dead finger of Emily (Helena Bonham Carter), a lovely girl who was murdered on her wedding day and swore that someday she would be a blushing bride (buried in her wedding dress and everything). Emily takes Victor “underground,” where she and all of her dead friends live, thinking they will “live” happily ever after, but is none too pleased to learn of this other living woman that’s complicating things.

Tremendous potential abounds here. There’s a living fiancé and a dead wife. You have journeys between this world and the land of the dead. You have scheming parents (Emily’s, voiced by Joanna Lumley and Albert Finney) forsaking their daughter’s happiness in exchange for money. You have the family thinking Victoria’s nuts when she sees a dead girl claiming to be Victor’s wife. You have a worm that lives in Emily’s head that looks and sounds like Peter Lorre. Lastly, you have a man who wants to experience love on his own terms, but instead has to deal with it in the most unlikely terms imaginable. They had the makings of something both deeply moving and tragic.

Had the filmmakers put as much effort into storytelling as they did in the animation, that is. The conversations suffer from the age-old joke about movie dialogue, where if any complications could easily be cleared up with one simple sentence, then for God’s sake don’t say it. Also, Victor makes a decision with regard to one of his betrothed that’s more convenient than plausible, and the manner in which they deal with a meddling suitor of Emily is mighty convenient as well. For as many concepts as they brought to the table, no one seemed terribly worried about making the concepts work together. Even Danny Elfman’s songs (there are only a few of them) are half-baked compared to his work in “Nightmare.” A shame, especially when considering that Burton assembled a staggering list of voice talent to bring it all to life, a veritable who’s who of Burtondom that includes not just Depp, Bonham Carter and Finney but Christopher Lee, Tracy Ullman, Michael Gough (Alfred from the “Batman” movies), Jane Horrocks and Richard E. Grant.

What the moviemakers working in cutting edge technology must remember is that audiences will be perfectly happy with a movie that doesn’t look spotless as long as it means something. There’s enough empty-headed nonsense out there already, and “Corpse Bride,” sadly, only contributes to the clutter. A golden opportunity, missed.

Every animated movie headed for the multiplexes this year looks like it will be tricked out with the latest in 3-D technology (“Monsters vs. Aliens,” “Up,” “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs”), and “Coraline,” the latest stop-motion adventure from director Henry Selick – he’s the mastermind behind “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “James and the Giant Peach” – is no exception. But the real question with “Coraline” is not whether to see it in 3-D (the added depth was cute, but nonessential); it’s whether to bring your kids. Yes, Focus is spending nearly all of its TV ad budget on Nickelodeon, but “Coraline” is one creepy movie, up there with “Monster House” on the bad dreams scale. (It’s definitely creepier than Tim Burton’s last stop-motion effort, “Corpse Bride.”) However, while I would advise parents to use caution in deciding whether to take their kids to see “Coraline,” I would highly recommend that any grown-up with a taste for fantasy should see the movie at once. The source material is from Neil Gaiman, after all. He knows a thing or two about that whole fantasy thing.

Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) has just moved with her parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) to a new apartment in the middle of nowhere. Her parents work from home but pay Coraline little attention. One night Coraline hears a noise and follows it to a small door in the wall. She finds the key to the door, crawls through, and finds a parallel world where her “other mother” (also voiced by Hatcher) is making a feast in the kitchen (her real mom is a lousy cook), and her other father plays piano. Coraline loves this other world, though the fact that everyone has buttons for eyes naturally disturbs her. Still, this doesn’t stop her from visiting her other mother whenever she can, though she ultimately realizes that her other mother is in fact a sinister beast that feeds off the hopes and dreams of unhappy kids, and she is now trapped in the other world.

There are parts of “Coraline” that are absolutely stunning – the other garden, the mist-covered scene, the dancing mice, the “Coraline” song – and other, smaller bits that look unfinished (nearly every shot of the cat, running water). It leads to some inconsistent visuals, but the good absolutely outweighs the bad. The same goes for the voice work. Hodgman and Robert Bailey Jr., who voices the neighbor boy Wybie, are both appropriately odd, and Fanning has the sarcastic teen thing down. Hatcher, however, is a liability. She sounds like she’s reading a different script than the rest of the cast, emphasizing all the wrong words.

These squabbles are minor, though. The story is the key (of course, I’m a writer, so I’m a tad biased about that), and this is the one thing that elevates “Coraline” above its stop-motion predecessors. There are songs, but they are brief and don’t drive the plot like they do in “Nightmare” and “Corpse Bride.” The story is always front and center, and it never fails to delight, and at times terrify, the audience.

Tim Burton had nothing to do with “Coraline,” but fans of his work should run to see this. With any luck, it will reach a wider audience than the last adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s work, the woefully underrated “Stardust.” I’m still scratching my head over why that movie bombed so badly.

Nothing about “Conviction” makes sense. For starters, how did this routine Lifetime Movie of the Week (with excessive profanity) get the green light to become a major motion picture? And once that happened, how did Fox Searchlight, the best and most tasteful live action studio working today, become its home? Lastly, how did they convince Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell, good actors both, that it was worth doing? Was it the faint whiff of Oscar bait? You’d think that Swank knows what that smells like, and this movie isn’t it.

Set in rural Massachusetts in the year 1980, Betty Anne Walters (Swank) and her hot-tempered older brother Kenny (Rockwell) have essentially survived their childhood after shuffling through foster homes. When a resident is found brutally murdered, Kenny is brought in for questioning but released. Three years later, he’s arrested for the crime, convicted and ultimately sentenced to life in prison. Betty Anne is so convinced of her brother’s innocence that she goes to law school part time in order to represent her brother and earn his freedom. Her family doesn’t share her enthusiasm, though, and her classmates and professors are unsympathetic to her familial responsibilities. But Betty Anne soldiers on, and gains a valuable ally in the process: Barry Scheck (Peter Gallagher), attorney from the Innocence Project, and together they fight the system tooth and nail.

It’s a great story, really – it’s the execution that doesn’t work. Before Betty Anne could get into law school, she had to earn her GED (remember, bad childhood), then a bachelor’s degree, then a masters, and then finally pass the bar. The movie thankfully doesn’t show us all of this, but it sure feels like they do, perhaps due to the stock characters and plot developments that populate Pamela Gray’s script. The snotty law school students, the dirty cops, the two children (one sullen, one supportive), the disapproving ex-husband-to-be, the big break, the political red tape – it s difficult to get emotionally involved, because the audience knows exactly when she’ll fly and when she’ll be tripped.

The movie’s biggest roadblock is the trial itself, which any casual “Law & Order” viewer could eviscerate on cross-examination even if they were watching the proceedings on a bar TV with the sound turned off. The prosecuting attorney makes much of the blood type found on the victim – it’s type O. Kenny has type O, therefore he must be the killer, even though over 40% of the population has the same blood type. The other evidence is almost entirely eyewitness testimony, and we never see Kenny take the stand to refute any of the claims. The lopsidedness in the presentation of Kenny’s case is so egregious that it borders on parody. Swank, Rockwell and Minnie Driver, who plays Betty Anne’s law school buddy Abra, are all perfectly good here (and Juliette Lewis steals the movie in her most white trash role to date), but the material doesn’t deserve them.

One wonders if the Oscar buzz following movies like “Conviction” is simply the ripple effect of the Academy Awards bumping the number of Best Picture nominees from five to ten. Allow us to burst that bubble; this is not an Oscar-caliber movie. It’s not even an Emmy-caliber TV movie. All concerned have done better, and will do better again. Move along, people. Nothing to see here.

After watching the riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in Cate Blanchett in drag that is “I’m Not There,” there was something refreshing about “Control,” Anton Corbijn’s look at the life and death of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis. There is no cryptic symbolism – hell, there isn’t even any color – opting for a straight-forward story of a man at war with his thoughts, his fame and even his own body.

The movie begins in the early ‘70s with Ian (Sam Riley), a Bowie-worshiping school boy poet, stealing Deborah (Samantha Morton), his best friend’s girlfriend. Their life is simple enough; they finish school, they get married, he gets a job at an employment agency, Deborah gets pregnant. When Ian’s friends Peter (Joe Anderson) and Bernard (James Anthony Pearson) tell him they’re looking for a new singer for their band, Ian tells them he’ll take the job. The band, christened Joy Division by Ian, begins to gain a loyal following, but Ian begins to suffer from violent seizures, and the meds that his doctors prescribe – they admit that they’re not sure which combination of pills will do the trick – are of little use. If the stress of managing a music career with a home life wasn’t enough, Ian falls for Belgian reporter Annik (Alexandra Maria Lara), and Debbie fights like hell to keep her husband.

One small but crucial detail that Corbijn absolutely nails is the band’s live performances. Riley has Curtis’ mannerisms down to a science, from the spastic dance moves to his tendency to swallow the microphone. Likewise, Anderson and Pearson look and play exactly like Hooky and Barney. Usually no one pays attention to anyone but the singer in these biopics, so bonus points to Corbijn for getting everything right. Corbijn also gets three gold stars for his tasteful, though disturbing, framing of Curtis’ final moments and Deborah’s discovery of him.

Pity, then, that the movie isn’t really about Joy Division. The movie uses Deborah Curtis’ book “Touching from a Distance” as source material, which is why Morton gets top billing. Ian is still the star of the movie, of course, but the movie is a 50/50 balance of home life and band life, though it feels more like 70/30. Huge aspects of the band’s evolution are glossed over (“We need a singer.” “Not anymore.” “Oh, all right. We’re called Warsaw.” “No, we’re Joy Division now.” “Oh, all right.”) in order to spend more time analyzing Ian and Deborah’s troubled home life. It’s valuable information, sure, but the movie does such a remarkable job selling Joy Division that when the focus shifts elsewhere, the movie temporarily grinds to a halt.

It’s one thing to be the anti-“I’m Not There,” but “Control” is actually too streamlined for its own good. Good for them for wanting to include as much information in as short a time as possible, but while we learn a lot about Ian Curtis, we don’t exactly get to know him. It has lots of what, but little why. Still, what is better than huh? any day of the week.

It would have been very easy for a movie like “Contagion” to push the panic button and hold it down, but it does something much smarter – it simply allows the events to unfold with little personal commentary to sully the narrative. Even better, the movie dares to take the seldom-traveled path between pre-epidemic containment (“Outbreak”) and post-apocalyptic wasteland (pick any zombie movie other than “Shaun of the Dead”). Like other movies with multiple narratives, some threads go dark for long periods of time while others disappear unexpectedly, and the fact that the movie doesn’t hit the panic button means that the third act will seem anticlimactic by comparison. Still, it’s tough to fault a movie, especially one about a deadly virus, for being too grounded.

The story begins on the second day of the outbreak, as a handful of people around the world begin experiencing deadly seizures that baffle the local medical authorities. As the cases begin pouring in, World Health Organization epidemiologist Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) travels to Hong Kong after concluding that it is the source of the virus’ origin, while Center for Disease Control spokesman Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) tries to come up with a cure for the virus while his window in which to deliver results before societal meltdown becomes increasingly smaller. To make matters worse, both the CDC and WHO have to deal with people who view the epidemic as an opportunity, and think nothing of hindering the greater good for personal gain.

If something this horrific were to actually happen, it would almost certainly go down like it does here. People would find out things about their newly deceased loved ones that they’d rather not know. The careers of good people would be needlessly ruined. The ones trying the hardest to prevent the outbreak would likely be among the first wave of casualties. (Director Steven Soderbergh does not spare the whip when it comes to offing his Oscar-caliber cast.) Eventually the public hits a breaking point, resources are stretched to the limit, all hell breaks loose, and even good people begin reexamining their morals. And yet, despite the chaos, and the cynicism of those who exploit the virus for profit, the ultimate message is a hopeful one. What a pleasant surprise.

Pity, then, that the story is woefully lacking emotional depth. Matt Damon loses two members of his family, and it is months before he sheds a tear. Most of the other characters stay well out of harm’s way, and the ones that do fall ill have the courtesy to be single and leave no spouses or children behind. This may help streamline an already busy narrative, but it also makes for one cold movie. The acting, though, is quite good, however Jude Law’s muckraking blogger Alan Krumwiede oozes too much sleaze for a freedom fighter. The one who winds up outshining all of the Oscar winners and nominees (of which there are eight, by the way) is Jennifer Ehle, who plays the tireless CDC researcher Ally Hextall. If her performance here is any indication, she is about to have a moment.

“Contagion” doesn’t rewrite the rules of virus movies, but it gets points for daring to suggest that the government consists of dedicated civil servants who are actually working in the best interests of the people. That may not be the sexiest angle – most movie governments go full-on tyrannical when the bad stuff goes down – but there’s nothing particularly sexy about the subject matter, either. It’s nice to see a movie deal with the whole sordid mess in as black and white a manner as possible.

The strange thing about horror movies of the last 10 years is that they’ve rarely been scary. They’ve been grotesque – take, please, “Evil Dead” from earlier this year – but few of them have been legitimately frightening. “The Conjuring,” on the other hand, understands that violence is not horror, and delivers a truly disturbing viewing experience. It may use a little Hollywood pixie dust to make it to the finish line, but the pre-Hollywood psychodrama is positively chilling, and the use of old-school techniques only adds to the creep factor.

It’s the fall of 1971, and Roger and Carolyn Petton (Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor), along with their five daughters, are moving into an old farm house in Rhode Island. From the very beginning, the place seems a little off (the dog won’t go in the house, the basement is boarded up), but the family puts up with all of the seemingly unrelated annoyances (cold, the occasional foul stench, youngest daughter April’s new imaginary friend) and attributes it to, well, something rational, something explainable. It is not long, though, before the “house” ramps up the offensive, and an exasperated Carolyn asks local paranormal researchers Lorraine and Ed Warren (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson) to come to the house and evaluate their problem. Lorraine, a clairvoyant, gets bad vibes from the very beginning, and after doing a little research on the former homeowners, she is fearful for the lives of the entire Perron family, Carolyn in particular.

Screenwriting twins Chad and Carey Hayes wrote the script of their lives here – though to be fair, one look at their IMDb profile and you’ll see that that is a backhanded compliment – by framing the ‘A’ story (the Perrons) and the ‘B’ story (the Warrens) side by side until such time that the families can come together organically. It’s a shrewd move, because it gives the audience the occasional, much-needed break from the terror that the Perrons are suffering, while slowly allowing the audience to get to know the Warrens and the, um, ghosts of their past that they bring with them to this case. That, plus Wan’s refusal to resort to the cheap ‘boo’ scare, gets the audience emotionally invested early, and never lets them go.

Lorraine makes several decisions of the ‘don’t you go in there’ variety, and it’s actually awesome to see, because they make sense; she’s not afraid of what she’s dealing with, so of course she would do what she does here. Likewise, Roger and Carolyn walk into a boarded basement because, hey, it’s 1971. The age of irony hasn’t happened yet, and they have no reason to suspect that they just bought a haunted house. Present-day audiences may scoff – and ours did – but they forget: the people they’re watching don’t realize they’re in a horror movie.

Director James Wan must be a big fan of “Poltergeist,” because similarities abound between the two films, right down to the shot of the static-filled TV screen. And really, if you’re going to pay homage to a scary movie, that’s as good as they get. His effects are simple and direct, with only a handful of CGI involved. There is also a minimal amount of language and blood, meaning that this movie earned its ‘R’ rating the hard way. That’s downright noble anymore.

Having said that, the final act is a bit over the top. There are children in peril, an unlikely hero, the protagonists staring into the face of evil…these are all cornerstones of thrillers and horror movies, and artistic license was surely taken with both the events and the timing of said events. Still, it’s an easy thing to forgive that late in the game, and any filmmaker will tell you not to let the truth get in the way of a good story, since the truth would almost certainly have been a lot less interesting. With any luck, “The Conjuring” will lead potential future horror filmmakers raised on a diet of torture porn and slasher films to rethink their approach. One can hope, at least.