Movie review by Greg Carlson

Based on a steady, nearly one film per year output, the term “minor Woody Allen movie” classifies a sizable number of titles in the legendary director’s canon. Although Allen currently holds the record for largest number of Academy Award nominations for screenwriting – fourteen if you are keeping track, and none of them adaptations – “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” is not likely to add his fifteenth. A fine ensemble engages in Allen’s typical roundelay of marital infidelity, but the result is an average if not unpleasant excursion – more “Melinda and Melinda” than “Husbands and Wives.”

Naomi Watts plays Sally, whose crush on her natty, art gallery owner boss Greg (Antonio Banderas) is exacerbated by the lack of warmth and affection channeled her way at home by ne’er do well husband Roy (Josh Brolin), a cranky and blocked novelist who may have only had one good book in him. Roy’s own wandering eye ogles across-the-way neighbor Dia (Freida Pinto), a vision in red who sometimes undresses without first pulling the shade. While Sally and Roy hurtle toward spousal disloyalty, Sally copes with the news that her father Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) has tossed aside mother Helena (Gemma Jones) for a garish, featherbrained slattern, Charmaine (Lucy Punch), young enough to be Alfie’s daughter.

While Allen’s game cast enlivens even the most mediocre dialogue, the scenes between Banderas and Watts are among the movie’s strongest exchanges, perhaps because the outcome of their employer-employee flirtation does not strictly adhere to expectations. The weakest of the threads circles around the later-life crisis of Hopkins’s wannabe playboy, whose clumsy overtures and wheezing exertions are meant to inspire laughter, but wither as tired sight gags. Allen has explored prostitution in a handful of previous films – most notably “Deconstructing Harry” and “Mighty Aphrodite” – with mixed results, but Punch’s uncouth call girl is merely a punch line, leading one to wonder if the outcome would have been any different had the part been played by original choice Nicole Kidman.

Helena’s ongoing relationship with an entrepreneurial psychic allows Allen to simultaneously ridicule the gullible mark and hold forth on the unfathomable beyond. Too many of the ideas in “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” are treated superficially, however, and the movie’s passing curiosity with the occult (which includes an ambiguous séance) fails to adequately examine the consequences of Helena’s dependency on fortune telling. Allen chooses to end the film abruptly, and some viewers may not appreciate the hovering cloud of uncertainties, dictated as they are by Helena’s firm belief in the advice of her crystal-gazing therapist.

Expectedly, the title of the movie functions as both memento mori and hopeful romantic expectation. By now, Allen must have a virtual playbook outlining methods for confounding the vain, naïve, and often luckless dreamers who populate so many of his tales. Even limiting comparison to Allen work made in the last ten years, “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” falls far short of the quality of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and “Match Point,” even as it shuffles through the director’s once enticing but now mostly shopworn thematic terrain.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The success of “Catfish,” a slippery curiosity described by its creators as a documentary, depends on Universal’s calculated marketing strategy, which begs critics and audience members to avoid spoilers. If you intend to see it and would like to do so without knowing its twists and turns, stop reading now. “Catfish” has been aptly described as “the other Facebook movie,” and Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost’s fable-like construction shares much in common with “The Social Network,” most notably an unsettling subtext that concerns the diffusion of interactive media from insiders/haves to outsiders/have-nots.

Presumably tech-savvy New York City photographer Yaniv “Nev” Schulman, whose faux-sweetness often smells like smug condescension, forges an online friendship with 8-year-old Abby, who paints copies of Nev’s photos and mails prints to his office from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Nev soon falls hard for Abby’s beautiful older sister Megan, exchanging text messages and cell phone calls. As the long-distance electronic romance blossoms, Nev grows suspicious that his new friends are not who they claim to be, and the filmmakers take a road trip to get to the bottom of the mystery. Eventually, they come face to face with Angela Wesselman-Pierce, a duplicitous dreamer who tricked Nev by posing as both Abby and Megan.

The revelation that awkward housewife and diabolical prevaricator Angela Wesselman-Pierce fabricated her daughter’s artistic achievements as well as the entire persona of Nev’s crush Megan will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen Amir Bar-Lev’s “My Kid Could Paint That.” Since the feeding frenzy over “Catfish” began, Wesselman-Pierce has been scarce, appearing in Jay Schadler’s fluffy “20/20” piece to corroborate the film’s content (and declare herself schizophrenic). Amy Kaufman’s “Los Angeles Times” article raises more questions about the mysterious woman, hinting that many Ishpeming, Michigan locals do not know her at all.

Kyle Buchanan, reporting from the Sundance Film Festival last January for “Movieline,” was among the first journalists to address the possibility that the Schulman brothers and Joost were presenting a story that didn’t add up. Buchanan zeroed in on the queasy way the Schulmans and Joost appear to exploit Wesselman-Pierce on camera. Other voices have made bolder accusations. It is entirely possible that some – or all – of Wesselman-Pierce’s actions were concocted expressly for the movie.

Many additional details seem too good to be true: a pulse-quickening, “Blair Witch”-esque visit to a decoy farmhouse in the middle of the night follows a scene in which Nev rummages through a stranger’s mail to conveniently discover the postcards he sent to Megan. The movie’s title is explained in a weirdly poetic and eloquent monologue shared by Angela’s marble-mouthed husband. If this guy is for real, a screenwriting agent should acquire his services immediately.

“Catfish” has been grouped with “Exit Through the Gift Shop” and “I’m Still Here” as a stunt documentary more than willing to adjust and tweak what we might desire to identify as real into a kind of cinematic decoupage, varnishing layer upon layer of “truth” until we have no way to know – or much incentive to care – whether anything that unfolds is non-fiction. Ultimately, the question of the film’s veracity doesn’t matter, since the constantly rolling cameras remind viewers that every shot has been collected and assembled to pique enough interest to make us want to buy the ticket and take the ride.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“Cloverfield” director Matt Reeves respectably re-shoots Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 “Let the Right One In,” the sharp adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s debut novel about the relationship between a bullied boy and the petite vampire who moves in next door. Despite the filmmaker’s claims to the contrary, the Americanized version, re-titled “Let Me In” at the expense of the Morrissey lyric, is slavishly faithful to the style, tone, and mood of the original Swedish article – which could be good or bad depending on one’s attitude about remakes in general and “Let the Right One In” in particular.

As Owen (formerly Oskar) and Abby (formerly Eli), actors Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloe Moretz effectively navigate the sometimes subtle and tender emotional terrain traversed by their youthful characters, even if they do not improve on the performances of Kare Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson. The invaluable Richard Jenkins, who plays the pathetic blood-hunter misidentified by neighbors as the vampire’s father, elicits a disproportionate amount of sympathy in his limited screen time, especially given the gruesome nature of his vocation and his implied pedophilia (scrubbed from the movie but explored in detail in the novel). One wishes Reeves had spent more time exploring the character, if only to allow the audience the pleasure of Jenkins’s company for a longer duration.

Lindqvist has diplomatically praised both cinematic incarnations of his book, which makes a great deal of sense given that he wrote the adaptation upon which the movies are based (despite Reeves’s dubious “written for the screen” credit on “Let Me In”). Newcomers to the story who missed “Let the Right One In” are advised to see Alfredson’s film prior to “Let Me In,” and will notice a few key differences between the movies. Reeves’s biggest departure and most interesting alteration from “Let the Right One In” is the re-imagining of Father’s bungled attack in the locker room as a tense, automotive urban legend. Reeves also intersperses clips from Ronald Reagan’s March 1983 “Evil Empire” speech and envisions Owen’s perpetually obscured mother as a devout evangelical.

Thirsty fans hoping that Reeves might return to Lindqvist’s sizable tome rather than the author’s condensed script for the 2008 film will be disappointed. None of the novel’s significant subplots that were cut the first time appear in the American edition. The multiple narrative points of view, the group of adults affected by vampire attacks, Oskar/Owen’s sympathetic ally Tommy, Eli/Abby’s feeding encounter with the medicated old woman, and Hakan/Father’s resurrection and morgue escape are almost entirely absent. Lindqvist was wise to eliminate most of these elements the first time around, and Reeves would have been hard pressed to improve on “Let the Right One In” by squeezing in more plot.

The early 1980s setting, the dreariness of the working class, and the sober and pervasive sense of doom and desperation in Owen and Abby’s world contrast sharply with the glossy depiction of the Cullen clan’s wealth in the “Twilight” series and the hyper-sexualized vampire/human couplings of “True Blood.” Abby’s missing genitalia and gender ambiguity, more explicitly addressed in “Let the Right One In” than in “Let Me In,” as well as her struggle to understand Owen’s urges to go steady, position Lindqvist’s tale as a romantic bildungsroman that uses vampirism as a lens through which to examine adolescent confusion. In this capacity, “Let the Right One In” and “Let Me In” share intriguing variations within the surging vampire genre.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin print the legend in “The Social Network,” a sleek and confident imagining of the creation of Facebook. Agile enough to withstand nearly as many readings as there are Facebook users, the film pivots around a cautionary tale of a bright entrepreneur who wagers his soul gambling for fortune and recognition. In addition to his meteoric rise to the top of a media empire, Mark Zuckerberg’s single-mindedness and mercurial persona parallel Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane, and “The Social Network” swiftly transforms into something greater than another revenge of the nerds celebration to be cheered by the Net Generation.

Protests decrying the movie’s lack of accuracy – mostly from grumpy technology writers unhappy with the absence of computing detail and Facebook insiders shouting down the raging egos and emphasis on Dionysian socializing over the drudgery and hard work of endless coding sessions – will fail to be heard over the buzz of audience excitement. Like Oliver Stone’s “JFK” once upon a time, “The Social Network” represents history according to the movies, and as many of the essays in the Mark C. Carnes-edited volume “Past Imperfect” point out, fact-based truth can never be fully reconciled with dramatized fiction.

Sorkin’s dialogue is heir to the lightning exchanges and dueling witticisms of Preston Sturges, and “The Social Network” opens with a killer scene in which future billionaire Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) pours out buckets of insecurity to exasperated soon-to-be ex-girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) over mugs of beer at the Thirsty Scholar Pub. Erica returns Mark’s insensitive insults with interest, and the dazzling duet – which reportedly required nearly one hundred takes to complete – establishes Zuckerberg’s mania for bluntness and his overwhelming desire to belong to something exclusive. Even though she only appears in a few scenes, Erica becomes emblematic of the young woman in the white dress described by Mr. Bernstein in “Citizen Kane.” She may even be Zuckerberg’s “Rosebud.”

Fincher also adopts a “Citizen Kane”-like jigsaw structure to divide the action between legal proceedings in two different lawsuits filed against Zuckerberg and the flashbacks to events described in testimony. Without any significant chronologic disorientation, Fincher and his terrific editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall mirror the sense of speed with which Facebook’s popularity exploded into a worldwide phenomenon, mapping out several dichotomies that define the film’s thematic agenda. Of these, the central struggle between unfettered artistic invention and the capitalistic urge to monetize manifests in the friendship between Zuckerberg and his business-focused, Jedediah Leland-esque best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield).

The most troubling single dimension of “The Social Network” is not the veracity of its claims of documentary honesty but the unfortunate way in which it portrays women. With the exception of Mara’s Erica, the majority of the female characters in the movie apparently exist to provide sexual favors to the male Facebook team once their efforts make them famous (and often with the added abuse of racial stereotype). Yes, Rashida Jones’s lawyer is briefly featured, but her appearance is the exception to a rule that literally shows attractive co-eds being bussed in to entertain Harvard men at a party. Surely Sorkin and Fincher are capable of exploring a point of view that includes female voices, even if the Facebook story is predominantly visualized through male eyes.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Gordon Gekko’s release from prison, thoroughly documented in the trailer of “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” takes place near the beginning of the film and provides the gag that also serves as the movie’s clearest link between past and present: the return of Gekko’s Motorola DynaTac 8000X, a bulky relic of a mobile phone long eclipsed as a state-of-the-art communication device. In an instant, director Oliver Stone conjures the brilliant visual flair that has been missing from his work for at least the last decade. And then the movie settles down, Gekko disappears for the rest of the exposition, and “Money Never Sleeps” lumbers along, not bullish but most definitely bearish – hibernation imminent.

The sequel’s enticing title suggests an exhilarating race through the high-stakes world of stocks and bonds, but Stone settles instead for a lukewarm summary of the recent global financial crisis. Set on the eve of the 2008 meltdown, “Money Never Sleeps” substitutes fictionalized emblems for the likes of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Goldman Sachs, but the broad shorthand divides good from evil with a zeal that eliminates any moral shadings that might have stirred greater audience interest.

Admittedly, Shia LaBeouf’s idealistic hotshot Jacob Moore flirts with the dark side, even keeping secrets from fiancée Winnie (Carey Mulligan), who happens to be Gekko’s estranged daughter. There is no doubt, however, that LaBeouf’s green energy-embracing trader wears the white hat: he genuinely believes in the saltwater laser fusion outfit he champions to potential investors, he buys Winnie a shimmering boulder of an engagement ring, and he cries at the death of his principled mentor. Meanwhile, devilish billionaire villain Bretton James (Josh Brolin) crows about his rare study of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” and puppeteers closed-door, dimly lit meetings of the Federal Reserve Board when he is not busy sharpening the tines of his pitchfork.

Once Gekko slithers into the center of the action, “Money Never Sleeps” briefly perks up, with Michael Douglas in full possession of the dangerous twinkle that allows his iconic inside trader/traitor to straddle the line between antagonist and anti-hero. Unfortunately, Mulligan shares few scenes with Douglas, whose character is far more comfortable “recognizing a fellow fisherman” in his future son in law. The father-daughter conflict proves no more than a convenient plot mechanism, and Mulligan pays the price. Despite her greater share of screen time, Mulligan is nearly overshadowed by nonagenarian national treasure Eli Wallach, whose whistled cuckoo trills suggest that he might be the only actor in the enterprise playfully winking at the material.

Weirdly, Stone eventually asks us to believe that the soulless, reptilian, backstabber Gekko recognizes the fragility and transience of life, and “Money Never Sleeps” ends with a howler of a feel-good birthday party, criminally scored to “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)” by the Talking Heads in a reprise of the original 1987 “Wall Street” closing credits. That song contains the line “Never for money/Always for love,” a sentiment Stone sidesteps, overlooks, or ignores for the duration of the movie that has preceded it.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Ben Affleck returns to Boston in “The Town,” a generically titled reference to armed bank robbery academy Charlestown, the gentrified neighborhood that tough Irish mobsters once called home. Based on Chuck Hogan’s 2004 novel “Prince of Thieves,” “The Town” swings hard for Fenway’s Green Monster, and its pastiche of blue-collar drama, class-divide courtship, and jittery heist thriller will appeal to viewers who enjoy the adrenaline rush of movies like Michael Mann’s “Heat,” to which “The Town” owes a sizable debt. Despite the repetition of its shootouts, Affleck the filmmaker confidently stages car chases and gun battles, even if his facility with delicate romance lacks the same flair.

As a director, Affleck fails to top the quality of his debut “Gone Baby Gone,” due in no small measure to the challenge of pulling double duty as lead actor. Affleck’s Doug MacCray is pure Hollywood fantasy: a vicious thug and thief capable of tenderness and compassion. While the other members of his gang pound whiskey, sober MacRay nurses cranberry juice and a broken heart over the long-ago disappearance of his fragile mother. It is no wonder that he falls for Rebecca Hall’s Claire Keesey, the bank manager kidnapped and terrorized by MacRay’s disguised crew during a successful stickup. Of course, Claire has no idea that her new boyfriend held her hostage at gunpoint, and the viewers wait anxiously for the other shoe to drop.

Doug’s feelings for Claire strain the bond he shares with childhood friend Jem (Jeremy Renner), a combustible sociopath on a collision course with the FBI agents closing the net on the crooks. Also complicating Doug’s life is Jem’s sister Krista (Blake Lively), a single mother and drug addict whose child may or may not have been fathered by Doug. Unfortunately, the masculine swagger of “The Town” leaves little for the two key female characters to do, and both Hall and Lively take it on the chin, although the latter shares a terrific scene in a gritty dive with John Hamm’s federal agent. No believable explanation is offered for the ease and speed with which the more sophisticated Claire falls for the jagged Doug, and the movie’s twist on Stockholm syndrome is its most problematic component.

“The Town” has already been sized up against other Boston-set movies, including “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” “The Departed,” and “Mystic River,” and the city certainly announces its presence as a colorful, major character. Shots of the Bunker Hill Monument, the Charles River, the Zakim Bridge and the dense maze of North End construction abet the filmmaker’s desire for credibility, even if locals will scoff at the range of accents displayed by the cast members. The Boston Globe’s Ty Burr helpfully points out to residents and non-residents alike that “The Town” takes place in Movie Boston, and reminds the hyper-sensitive Suffolk County skeptics who chortled during the trailer that one of author Hogan’s aims was to comment on the drawbacks of border-defined insularity. Affleck, as expected, is more interested in getting the fantasy right, and on that score, “The Town” is not half bad.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Bleak, laconic and as chilling as its title, “Winter’s Bone” shares a rarely seen snapshot of American poverty and despair in rural Missouri. Based on Daniel Woodrell’s 2006 novel, director Debra Granik’s adaptation exchanges Woodrell’s poetry – which can feel simultaneously sinewy and rawboned – with a more lived-in realism that suggests documentary as much as tragic fable. Following the backwoods Ozark Mountains odyssey of seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), who must quickly locate her missing father Jessup Dolly or lose the family property, “Winter’s Bone” earned top honors at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, where it was also recognized for its screenplay, written by Granik and Anne Rosellini.

“Winter’s Bone” operates on the surface as a quiet procedural, in which Ree risks her life by assuming a role that makes her part bounty hunter, part detective, and all tenacious daughter. Despite her youth, Ree manages a household consisting of her barely functioning mother and two younger siblings, who entirely depend on their older sister for survival. Neither Granik nor Lawrence sentimentalize the character, whose fierce dedication to her loved ones knots around a generations-spanning code of behavior that governs the actions of clan and kin, especially in the service of settling disputes internally and keeping legal authorities as far away as possible.

“Winter’s Bone” is not a perfect film, and its greatest deficiency is the way it underutilizes the indispensable and magnetic John Hawkes, who plays Ree’s uncle and reluctant ally. In “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” “Deadwood,” and an impressive number of other television and film credits, Hawkes has built a reputation as a phenomenal talent. As Jessup’s brother Haslam, who goes by the nickname Teardrop, Hawkes dances from livewire menace to haunted paranoia to dutiful resignation. He surely doesn’t want to discover his brother’s fate, as that knowledge will demand the kind of retaliation that can only end in his own murder.

One of Granik’s toughest, smartest, and most surprising choices is the almost total elision of scenes in which methamphetamine openly claims the center of the action. Instead, the drug and all of its painful, destructive ravages disperse through the movie’s atmosphere like a menacing cloud of toxicity. Ree turns down several offers to snort crank, but at no time does Granik resort to sensationalized ravings of high abusers that typically come standard in mediated interpretations of films with the illegal drug trade as subject. The audience never sees an active crystal meth lab or anyone engaged in the manufacturing process. As a character named Megan points out when Ree mentions that Jessup is known for his crank cooking, “Honey, they all do now. You don’t even need to say it out loud.”

At one point, Ree meets with a representative of the United States Army, played by non-actor and professional recruiter Russell Schalk, to find out how quickly she might be able to secure the signing bonus that would ease the pressure to make ends meet (and offer Ree the opportunity to escape the black hole of her foreseeable future). In just a few short minutes, Schalk’s character thoughtfully, even tenderly, dismantles Ree’s desperate naivete. One of the film’s most powerful scenes, it serves as a reminder of Ree’s daily hand-to-mouth struggle as well as the extent to which she is rooted to an unsustainable way of life. Along with a scene in which Ree begs her catatonic mother for help, we are only offered these briefest reminders that the film’s heroine is still a teenager.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Legendary music video director and rock photographer Anton Corbijn’s second foray into feature filmmaking presents George Clooney as “The American.” Loosely based on Martin Booth’s 1990 novel “A Very Private Gentleman,” the movie delights in subverting action, espionage, and thriller genre expectations by way of a stylistic monasticism that withholds the trappings of wall-to-wall gunplay, high-speed car chases, and the otherworldly refutation of the laws of logic and physics. The film’s deliberate pacing and contemplative silences and stillness complement Corbijn’s artful sense of spatial dynamics, which are gorgeously framed by cinematographer Martin Ruhe in frequent long shot.

Clooney plays a tight-lipped gunman known to some as Jack and to others as Edward. A formidable opponent, Jack eludes death in a Swedish snowscape, but makes a regrettable decision that casts a shadow of impending doom over his relocation to Italy, where he agrees to craft a high-powered rifle for a demanding and beautiful client. Jack is resourceful and disciplined, and moves with the economy of a person who long ago grew eyes on the back of his head. Clooney is adept at comedy and drama, and knows there is little to laugh at in the contours of this stealthy killer. At one point, a clip of Henry Fonda in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” plays on a TV in a café, reminding us that sometimes, our favorite good guys need to be bad,

“The American” has drawn comparisons to the poetics of Michelangelo Antonioni and the impossible cool of Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samourai,” and Corbijn goes out of his way to match the tailored, impeccable elegance of Alain Delon and the monochromatic palette of Francois de Lamothe’s ferociously spartan production design and set decoration. The movie also brings to mind Jim Jarmusch’s killer-for-hire films “The Limits of Control” and “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,” but Corbijn’s straighter portrait lacks most of Jarmusch’s irony and all of his absurdity.

Even though Corbijn strips away plenty of Hollywood fat, he never fully accounts for some wonderfully implausible embroidery, including the title character’s ongoing dialogue with a thoughtful priest, a senior thesis project’s worth of butterfly symbolism, and a whore with a heart of gold (a world-class beauty as played by Violante Placido, one marvels that she works out of a tiny Italian village). The “one last job” premise goes hand in glove with the inescapable occupational hazard often identified as the “you can never leave” clause, which makes one wonder how any master assassin of the movies could be so deluded to think that a safe and pleasant retirement awaits.

Deliberately, the viewer never learns key details that would shed light on Jack’s journey or personal history, and the mystery encourages an amount of anxiety that serves Corbijn’s detached agenda. Without knowing whether the protagonist works for a government or as a mercenary or as a willing hand to the highest bidder, we never get a grip on the man’s sympathies and allegiances. Certainly, Jack understands the consequences of his vocation, and at one point – since he knows better than to ask who will be on the receiving end of a bullet from the weapon he has built – he resigns himself to the likelihood that he will soon read about the result of his gunsmithing.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A much better than expected genre outing, “The Last Exorcism” trades William Peter Blatty’s Jesuits for a Louisiana evangelical, but the battlefield is still the body of a young girl, and the thrills are plentiful. Every demonic possession movie made since 1973 owes a bottomless debt to “The Exorcist,” and filmmaker Daniel Stamm pays homage to William Friedkin’s modern classic with taut direction and pacing. “The Last Exorcism” also boasts a sly sense of humor that tempers the increasingly grim events that unfold during the ritual of the title. Additionally, the film borrows heavily from Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan’s 1972 documentary “Marjoe.”

A nimble script by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland contextualizes the entire course of action inside a collection of documentary tapes, complete with shaky handheld videography, focus shifts, and numerous “Turn off the camera” moments. No more or less credible than “The Blair Witch Project” “Cloverfield,” and “REC” (as well as English-language remake “Quarantine”), the gimmick of creepy or unsettling found footage has developed into a stylistic cottage industry within the horror narrative. The technique can simulate realism where none exists, but “The Last Exorcism” errs in its liberal application of Nathan Barr’s standard-issue, emotion-manipulating musical score, an addition that invalidates the “authenticity” of the experience.

Because the bulk of the story hinges on a delicate balance between reason and the supernatural, the film’s ending might divide viewer opinion. One of the charms of the “The Last Exorcism” is the constant tease between earthly explanations for the horrors visited upon Nell Sweetzer and the possibility that something truly unaccountable is unfolding on her family’s rural farmstead. Stamm purposefully provides intimations of the former – the insinuation of sexual abuse among other ideas – without skimping on the latter. Performer Ashley Bell, who plays the unfortunate Nell, may not cross the shocking threshold established by Linda Blair, but she does deliver an intensely physical and sympathetic performance.

Some critics have claimed that “The Last Exorcism” mocks religion, or that at the very least, main character Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) ridicules the rubes to whom he preaches every Sunday. This is a facile dismissal, however, as a close viewing shows a man in full acknowledgment of the debt he owes to his family’s occupational tradition. Yes, Marcus freely admits skepticism when it comes to personal belief in bodily possession by demons (and he is more than willing to accept payment for his services), but he also shows genuine compassion for Nell as victim, regardless of the source of her misery. The preacher’s own crisis of faith is also plausibly outlined, moving him away from pure “Elmer Gantry” con artistry.

“The Last Exorcism” is not a great movie, but its refreshing transposition of setting from the well-heeled, Georgetown Roman Catholicism of “The Exorcist” to the swampy revivalism of Baton Rouge and its isolated, rural surroundings holds tight from start to finish. The location photography capitalizes on the readymade eeriness of the Sweetzer clan’s property, and the mock documentary presentation embraces the low-budget aesthetic without making the enterprise feel cheap.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Noomi Rapace returns as compelling hacker Lisbeth Salander in “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” the mostly disappointing sequel to “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” The second story in the late Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy,” “The Girl Who Played with Fire” trades the missing person mystery of the first novel for a hydra-headed yarn that weaves together homicide, sex trafficking, a former Soviet secret agent, Salander’s troubled past, and a huge cast of cops and criminals in a cat-and-mouse procedural that works much better on the page than the streamlined movie adaptation. Fans of the novel might enjoy making book-to-film comparisons, and Rapace is still fun to watch, but the movie often feels perfunctory and unpolished.

While the intimacy of Henrik Vanger’s anguish over the loss of his great-niece cast a strong spell in the inaugural episode, the more outrageous adornments of “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” particularly the backstory detailing Salander’s biography, diminish much of the heroine’s allure. Of course, Larsson mapped out his principal character’s dossier long before readers discovered her magnetism, but more knowledge about Salander means less room to project our own speculations about the things that make her tick. In “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” Salander morphs from a brilliant but still credible investigator to the linchpin in an espionage-connected government conspiracy.

This James Bond-like turn of events places the already formidable Salander in the realm of an altogether different genre, and Larsson’s reliance on a beloved soap opera staple will be no surprise to those who enjoy working out plot twists and revelations. From “The Empire Strikes Back” to “Angel Heart” to “The Boondock Saints,” movies have lavished plenty of melodramatic attention on shocking disclosures of paternity, and “The Girl Who Played with Fire” addresses themes of attempted patricide as well as revenge-fueled filicide. At best, the device allows viewers to experience the vicarious thrill of much needed payback. At worst, it smacks of lazy storytelling.

While director Niels Arden Oplev infused the big screen version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” with a glossy sophistication that skittered over the most gaping plot conveniences and coincidences, Daniel Alfredson – who takes over in the director’s chair – stages the action with blunt straightforwardness more akin to hour-long episodic television drama than bigger-budgeted theatrical fare. Alfredson also grapples with the disadvantage of realizing many of the book’s most implausible details. The terrifying giant who feels no pain, a former Sapo agent who is easily suckered by a bogus prize offer, and the freakishly disfigured monster who succumbs to the “curse of the talking villain” are chief offenders.

Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nykvist) believes steadfastly in Salander’s innocence despite evidence connecting her to a double murder (with a third added shortly thereafter). In the novel, Larsson turns the question of Salander’s possible guilt into a suspenseful stratagem that propels the simultaneously occurring chains of action. The movie takes little interest in the same tactic, a failure that deflates much of the psychological intrigue manifested in Blomkvist’s fascination with his onetime lover. Additionally, “The Girl Who Played with Fire” ends with the kind of messy uncertainty that can only be resolved by the next chapter.