When Sam Raimi made his 1981 classic The Evil Dead, he didn’t have much experience in the way of writing, directing, or producing feature films, but that didn’t stop him from creating a horror movie that is both beloved by fans and respected by critics. He’s certainly not the only inexperienced filmmaker to knock it out of the park, but that’s not exactly a recipe for success. You would think that if the powers that be think that the franchise is ripe for a reboot, they’d at least get someone experienced to handle it. Instead, they gave it to a first-time director (Fede Alvarez), a first-time writer (Rodo Sayagues), and a relatively inexperienced cast. And it feels like it.

On the surface, the new version is similar to the old: a group of friends go out into the woods to an isolated cabin, where weird and scary stuff starts to happen. This time around, it’s an intervention for Mia (played by Jane Levy) to help break a drug habit, and her detox-induced craziness is a great reason for the others to completely ignore her when she tries to tell them that something unusual is afoot. But they continue to hold onto that idea well beyond the point at which they have solid evidence that something really is going on, and they pay the price for that.

It’s really unfortunate for Evil Dead that The Cabin in the Woods came out only a year ago because comparisons between the two are unavoidable. It’s even worse luck that both of them have characters that kind of look alike – Evil Dead has Eric, played by Lou Taylor Pucci, while The Cabin in the Woods has Marty, played by Fran Kranz – but behave in completely opposite ways. Whereas Marty is consistently the voice of reason and tries to warn his cabinmates against doing stupid things like reading chants out of a weird book found in the basement, Eric is the guy who does the obviously stupid things and then adamantly denies any weirdness. In all cases where they overlap, The Cabin in the Woods is the better film, and I was acutely aware of that while watching Evil Dead.

The biggest problem you’ll notice while watching Evil Dead is that it’s completely uninspired. There’s a long period at the beginning of the movie when the characters are just standing around talking to each other, leaving the audience to wonder whether the movie seems bad because it was written that way or because it’s being acted that way. I can assure you that it’s both. The slow pacing and poor execution reappear several times throughout the film, usually accompanied by a soundtrack that frequently resembles a siren spinning up.

But Evil Dead does have one big bright spot, though: the effects. Someone at the studio clearly forgot to tell the effects people that they were working on a crappy movie because they pulled out all the stops. There is a lot of blood and violence in Evil Dead, and surprisingly much of it is practical rather than digital. It’s some of the most messy, excessive, and wonderful gore I’ve seen in quite a while. The audience at the sold-out opening night show I attended frequently punctuated the movie with that special kind of groan that signifies simultaneous pleasure and repulsion, and even when it was pretty obvious what was coming next, the movie frequently delivered something that at least met (and usually surpassed) expectations.

It may be worth seeing Evil Dead on the big screen just so you can fully appreciate just how impressive all the effects are, but that will probably just serve to emphasize just how unimpressive everything else is. Unfortunately, the movie has already earned back well more than its relatively small budget, so if you miss Evil Dead in its theatrical run, you can be confident that studios will want to pump out a lot more of the same.

In 1974, a family of cannibals was slaughtered by vigilante townspeople in response to a brutal attack on some road-tripping teenagers. While most of the cannibals were killed, a baby girl was spared by a timely alien abduction. Growing up on a spaceship traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light means that when she returned to Earth in 2012, Heather (played by Alexandra Daddario) was only about twenty while thirty-eight years had passed for the rest of us.

Of course, Heather’s anti-aging secret didn’t come without some adverse side effects. Growing up in a low-gravity environment robbed her of bone density and opportunities to develop coordination, so she tends to fall down a lot when trying to run in Earth gravity. Plus, her isolation in space prevented her from acquiring a normal set of social skills, so she now has bad taste in friends and is far too trusting of random hitchhikers and other complete strangers.

Mind you, this whole alien abduction subplot isn’t explicitly spelled out in Texas Chainsaw 3D, but it’s the only plausible explanation I can come up with for some of the otherwise glaring problems in the movie. And if her chainsaw-wielding, skin-mask-wearing older cousin Jedediah (aka Leatherface, played by Dan Yeager) had also been captured by aliens, then their advanced medical technologies could explain why he has no hint of a limp despite having almost lost his leg in a power tool mishap, and how someone who should be pushing sixty can keep up with or even outpace a bunch of much younger kids.

But like I said, we’re spared any mention of this admittedly far-fetched outer space storyline. Instead, after being subjected to footage from the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre vandalized by post-processed 3D, we’re thrust into a present-day trip to check out a house that Heather has just inherited from relatives she didn’t know she had. Unfortunately, it just happened to be the house in which the presumed-dead Leatherface had been quarantined (obviously, sometime after his return to Earth), and he would repay his unsuspecting liberator with an unpleasant death before turning his attention to the others.

As exciting as all this seems, Texas Chainsaw 3D is really not very good. None of the people in it are very likeable, so we don’t have any sense of anxiety when they’re being chased, nor any sense of loss when they’re killed. Conversely, the shortage of gore and violence will live most horror aficionados unsatisfied (but to be fair, perhaps the absence of the word “massacre” from the title might have been intended to discourage such expectations). So we’re left with a movie that isn’t very exciting and that really doesn’t benefit from giving the audience time to think about just how flawed it is.

It’s kind of unfortunate that Texas Chainsaw 3D is the first wide release of the new year because it lessens the effect of calling it the worst movie of the year. But I think that it’s bad enough that it will hopefully be able to hold onto that title for quite some time.

Whereas Tom Cruise used to do good movies, it seems he’s recently decided to make himself the butt of jokes with roles in things like Tropic Thunder, Rock of Ages, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. So it almost seems a little surprising when he takes on a serious action movie that isn’t an unnecessary Mission: Impossible sequel, and a lot surprising when that movie actually turns out to be pretty good.

But you don’t really have to take him all that seriously because they decided to make him into a kind of a comic book superhero version of a detective. He plays the title character, a man who had been a brilliant military investigator before retiring and completely dropping off the grid. He won’t be found if he doesn’t want to be, but has an uncanny ability to show up at exactly the right time. Or exactly the wrong time, depending on your perspective. And this is just such a time.

When Jack was in the military, he investigated a case in which trained sniper James Barr (played by Joseph Sikora) snapped and killed a number of fellow soldiers. Jack put together an airtight case against him, but Barr walked with just a slap on the wrist to avoid exposing some embarrassing details about the men he killed. James was discharged and sent back to America, with the promise that Jack would be watching and waiting for another opportunity to take him down. And then Barr went on a shooting spree in his local park.

The problem is that it wasn’t Barr. There’s a mountain of incontrovertible evidence proving that it was, but the only people who know that are Barr (who is conveniently unable to defend himself because he’s in a coma after a nasty bout of police brutality) and the audience. Even his lawyer Helen Rodin (played by Rosamund Pike) doesn’t have any delusion of him being innocent — she just wants to try to get him sentenced to life in prison so that her district attorney father (Richard Jenkins) doesn’t get to send another one to death row.

Jack Reacher is kind of a schizophrenic movie, but in a good way. It can’t seem to figure out whether it’s a crime drama, an action movie, or a superhero movie, so it tries to be all three at the same time. It mostly pulls this off, except that Jack seems to be just a little too good at everything he does, and the Dark Knight vibe it puts out at the end feels pretty excessive.

Seven score and seven years ago, Abraham Lincoln was elected to his second term as President of the United States, amidst a nation in chaos. Just about everyone wanted an end to the Civil War, but the fighting raged on. Lincoln, and most northerners with him, believed that a permanent constitutional amendment that officially ended slavery would take the wind out of the southern sails. But even in the 1860s, partisan politics often got in the way of progress.

Lincoln tells the story of the President’s effort to ensure that the amendment, which had already been passed by the Senate, would get the needed two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives. And while the premise may sound as interesting to some as watching C-SPAN (and in fact, a couple of scenes in which people sitting in the gallery watching the debates feel very much like a precursor to modern political commentary), the depiction of it is utterly fascinating. The film is often funny, sometimes graphic, and provides exactly the right balance between ensuring that the audience has the information needed to understand what’s going on without feeling like it’s lecturing or talking down to us.

Daniel Day-Lewis has all but guaranteed himself a best actor nomination for his portrayal of the President, who is smarter than everyone around him but always equipped with an arsenal of anecdotes to make just the right point without being preachy or condescending. The film should also be lauded for its impeccable makeup and costuming, which perfectly complement Day-Lewis’s acting to make it nearly impossible to believe that he’s underneath it all. And while those surrounding the President aren’t nearly as familiar to the general public, the seemingly endless list of actors portraying them are almost just as brilliant in their roles. Tommy Lee Jones should be particularly singled out for his part as Thaddeus Stevens (one of the key House Republicans), and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the performance earn him a supporting actor nomination.

If Sally Field doesn’t get similar acknowledgment for her Mary Todd Lincoln, it’s probably because she isn’t central to the plot of passing the amendment, and because she’s mostly a downer. Certainly the film needs to have a first lady, and Sally Field does a better job than most could have, but her constant negativity and focus on peripheral details can make the film feel longer than it needs to be, especially on a second viewing. If her scenes had been trimmed, or if she had occasionally been in a less foul mood, then the two and a half hours would have been even more effortless than they already are.

Another element contributing to the film’s length is its insistence on continuing beyond the logical ending. It’s only two scenes and only a couple of minutes, but they cover something that is neither directly related to the passage of the amendment, nor necessary to give the audience a sense of closure. Everyone already knows how the story ultimately ends for the sixteenth president, but explicitly spelling it out darkens what should have been a celebration.

Minor complaints aside, Lincoln is one of the best films of the year and is sure to be recognized as such when award season rolls around. It’s a genuinely intriguing film about what certainly could have been a very boring subject, and it manages to maintain tension even when you already know how it’s going to end. Even if you don’t like war, politics, or period pieces, this is one that you should make sure to check out.

In November of 1979, a number of Iranian citizens invaded the American embassy and took a number of its workers hostage. The Iranians were unhappy that the United States had granted asylum to their recently-deposed Shah, and very much wanted him back so they could put him on trial and then put him to death. I had just turned two years old at the time of the invasion, and was about three and a half by the time it ended so these events aren’t exactly burned into my memory, but it was nevertheless one of the more significant events in twentieth century America so over the years I have acquired at least a passing knowledge of the ordeal.

But one of the details of this event that had previously escaped my notice is that six Americans had managed to escape the embassy when it first fell under attack. This was a mixed blessing, since Americans were very hated by a lot of people in Iran, and especially those working for the government, so they weren’t going to be able to just walk out of the country, and they were even turned away at a number of other foreign embassies before they were finally taken in by the Canadian ambassador at his private residence. But while they had escaped the immediate danger at the American embassy, they actually ended up in much greater danger because while Iranian rebels were being closely watched by the rest of the world over their treatment of their embassy hostages, if these six refugees were discovered they could be dealt with in a much more quiet and much less pleasant manner. So it became a very urgent matter to get them out of the country, at a time in which the Iranian government would do almost anything in its power to prevent it.

And this is where CIA agent Tony Mendez entered the picture. He specialized in getting people out of these kinds of situations, so he was brought in to help come up with a plan to get them out. And with a complete lack of “good” options, they had to dip into the “so crazy they just might work” pile. And that’s where they found the idea to pass the six Americans off as a Canadian film crew scouting for locations for a science fiction movie with the need for alien landscapes that looked a lot like what you might find in the Middle East. Tony would pretend to be the film’s producer, and each of the six would have different roles like director, location scout, screenwriter, etc., but in order to be able to fool the Iranians, they’d also need to be able to fool the rest of the world, so it might as well be a real movie. And that’s how Argo, whose script had been rejected throughout Hollywood, got the green light.

Argo (the historical drama starring and directed by Ben Affleck, not the crappy sci-fi movie within the movie) tells an incredible story that simply has to be true because there’s no way anyone would believe it if it were fiction. While it maintains a relatively slow pacing, it somehow manages to really amp up the tension while simultaneously slipping in a decent amount of comedy and history. And while there are other big-name actors like John Goodman, Alan Arkin, and Bryan Cranston, the roles of the hostages are handed off to lesser-known character actors (albeit the kind with faces that you know you’ve seen somewhere before) and they help carry the film.

It’s an extremely entertaining film with a story that is both enjoyable and historically important, but one of the things I found most surprising is the attention to detail. They make use of actual TV footage from the real crisis, and in the closing credits we can see side-by-side pictures comparing the real players and events with the actors and settings created for the movie and the similarities are impressive. It’s clear that Affleck (who is now three-for-three as a director, with The Town and Gone Baby Gone) really did his homework and put a high premium on authenticity. Although the film could have perhaps spent a little more time getting the audience familiar with the political turmoil before jumping into the action, almost everything else works perfectly and Affleck’s Argo is one of the best films to come out of Hollywood this year.

As an election year, there’s more than enough real political humor to go around, so it seems superfluous to have a fictional comedy dealing with the topic. Nevertheless, The Campaign manages to be a pretty decent one, especially given the hit-or-miss nature of the recent films of Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis.

Ferrell plays Cam Brady, a longtime congressman from North Carolina who is running unopposed but still feels the need to go out and campaign. This may not have been the greatest decision on his part, as he’s made a number of stupid mistakes that have caused his numbers to decline. This is particularly worrisome to the Motch brothers (played by Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow), since they’re the puppetmasters who really wield the power of Brady’s office, primarily for their own financial gain. Rather than risking the chance that some unknown could come in and steal the office, the Motch brothers decide to hedge their bets by introducing their own second candidate. And their choice is the sweet, effeminate, and beefheaded Marty Huggins (Galifianakis).

The competition is immediately fierce, with each unleashing attack ads, engaging in religious pandering, and fighting over babies to kiss. Brady excels at dirty pool and right away puts Huggins on the defensive, but Marty is the clear winner when it comes to things like debating the issues. And with the help of a political strategist supplied by the Motches, Marty begins to develop his skills in the darker side of the game, making him a much more formidable opponent.

The Campaign isn’t exactly a non-stop laugh riot, but it was quite a bit better than I expected. Ferrell is well known for his George W. Bush impression, and he clearly puts elements of it to use in this movie, but his Cam Brady is actually more a composite of Bush, Clinton, and Perot. It’s often lowbrow and obvious, but still made me laugh a few times. On the other hand, the excessively stereotypical “gay” voice that Galifianakis employed struck me with instant dread, and a lame physical gag that accompanied his entrance into the competition didn’t do much to alleviate my fears. But he actually turned out to be much less annoying than I’d suspected, and even managed to become kind of endearing on a couple of occasions.

It wouldn’t be a modern Hollywood comedy if it didn’t occasionally take a joke too far or opt for broader rather than smarter humor. But The Campaign still has some surprises in store, and sometimes stupid jokes can be better than sophisticated ones. If you like comedies, you’ll probably find at least something to enjoy in this one.

2012 is the year of Matthew McConaughey. He used to be a punchline, and maybe he still deserves some of that for his participation in the mediocre yet excessively profitable Magic Mike, but after his performances in Bernie and Killer Joe, I’m really interested to see what he’s got in store for us in the upcoming Mud.

McConaughey is Killer Joe. He’s a homicide detective who also moonlights as a hitman. For the right price, he’ll off somebody and then fail to catch the killer. Chris (Emile Hirsch) has desired to hire him to kill his unpleasant and abusive mother Adele. Chris owes money to the wrong people, and his mother has a life insurance policy that will more than cover his debt and Joe’s fee. But the beneficiary of the policy is his younger sister Dottie (Juno Temple), who lives with Adele’s ex-husband Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) and his new wife Sharla (Gina Gershon), so he’s got to bring Ansel in on it. But he’d rather have a few thousand dollars than a still-living ex-wife, so it doesn’t take much to convince him.

The snag, though, is that Killer Joe doesn’t work for free, and he doesn’t work on spec. They’ll have more than enough to pay him after the job is done and they collect the insurance, but his fee is several times the amount Chris owes in the first place, so they’re in no position to pay Joe in advance. But after meeting Dottie, an excessively sweet, open, and dim-witted girl, he agrees to take the job if he can have her as collateral until the money comes in.

Killer Joe is one of the best movies so far this year, surpassed only by Beasts of the Southern Wild and maybe The Cabin in the Woods. It’s also unfortunately rated NC-17 for lots of violence and nudity, so it’s not playing in as many theaters as it deserves, but it’s well worth it if you get the chance. It’s got great characters and dialogue, but it’s the acting that really seals it. Juno Temple is an absolutely perfect Dottie, with a very layered character that reminds me a lot of Summer Glau in Firefly, and I don’t think anyone could’ve done a strong, silent type with common sense and loose morals better than Thomas Haden Church as Ansel.

McConaughey also gives a great performance, but the character of Killer Joe is so rich and interesting that it probably could have stood up well even under a weaker performance. The film’s ending is one of the single most memorable scenes in recent memory, but it’s really the cherry on top of a great role built throughout the earlier parts of the film.

I usually love the kinds of movies that Magnolia Pictures releases, and I also appreciate their strategy of often making their films available in video on demand format at the same time (or often before) they’re available in theaters. But in the case of Take This Waltz, their VoD strategy was kind of frustrating because it was available to watch online for at least a month before it came to a local theater, and it was hard for me to wait to see it in the theater with everyone raving about how good it is. But fortunately the film lives up to all the hype.

Lou and Margot (Seth Rogen and Michelle Williams) are completely in love. They can’t keep their hands off each other, and their marriage is clearly still in the honeymoon phase, despite being several years in. Both are aspiring writers, with Lou working on a cookbook of chicken recipes and Margot wanting to write a novel but taking whatever jobs she can get in the meantime. Most recently, this includes creating a new informational pamphlet for a historic village, and while she’s visiting that village she meets and starts flirting with Daniel (Luke Kirby). It’s all harmless fun since she’ll never see him again, except that when she gets on the plane to fly back home she finds herself in the seat next to his. And when they share a cab from the airport, they discover they live almost right across the street from each other.

All of a sudden, Margot’s perfect marriage starts to seem a little less perfect. Eating chicken all the time seems kind of tiresome, and Lou doesn’t always make himself immediately available at her beckon call. While she adores Lou’s niece Tony (Vanessa Coelho) and loves Tony’s mom Geraldine (Sarah Silverman), Geraldine is a recovering alcoholic with a history of unpleasantness, and the rest of Lou’s family can occasionally be grating. Meanwhile, Margot finds it nearly impossible to avoid running into Daniel, and soon those encounters are frequently not accidental.

Take This Waltz gives us another great performance from Michelle Williams, but this time it’s in a movie that is more worthy of her talents than the disappointing Shutter Island, Meek’s Cutoff, or My Week with Marilyn, and a lot less depressing than Blue Valentine. Similarly, Seth Rogen follows a great dramatic role in 50/50 with another serious film with more refined (but still funny) comedy. I haven’t seen much of Luke Kirby’s work (perhaps only Halloween: Resurrection) to use as a basis for comparison, but he does well in this role and there’s a definite chemistry between him and Williams that makes the story believable and keeps it moving.

It’s unfortunate that this received such a short theatrical run, but hopefully that means it’ll be available to rent or buy soon. It’s definitely worth checking out if you get the chance.

This isn’t the first summer of sequels in recent years, and it seems that audiences are getting tired of them. And now The Bourne Legacy seems to imply that even filmmakers are getting tired of it, because this movie is barely related to its predecessors.

The Bourne Legacy centers around an operative Aaron Cross (played by Jeremy Renner) who is inexplicably in the middle of nowhere, having been off the grid for some period of time. Cross, like many agents, is a kind of guinea pig for secretive government experiments trying to create ever-better super soldiers. One such experiment has him taking regular doses of green pills (which is supposed to improve physical characteristics like strength and speed) and blue pills (which are supposed to improve his mental faculties). His time away from civilization has depleted his supply of each, and he’s in desperate need of a resupply. Especially of the blue pills, because he was apparently a blathering idiot before he started taking them and he’s in real danger of a relapse.

One of the advantages of his being out of touch with the agency is that he’s gotten an unintentional temporary reprieve from the change in the drug regimen given to other soldiers in his unit. Apparently Bourne (who they at least mention on a couple of occasions) did something that could put some of the higher ups in hot water, and they’re trying to cover their tracks. Cross’s unit just happens to be one of the things that has to be covered, so the soldiers’ normal medication has been swapped for suicide pills and now they’re all dead. And now it’s going to be even harder for Cross to get his next fix.

The Bourne Legacy is literally a film about a junkie in search of his next high, except in this case he’s just high on mental competence. Bourne is mentioned a few times and we see his picture at least once, but that’s the extent of his presence in the movie. We do get other characters from the Bourne series, including characters played by Joan Allen, Albert Finney, and David Strathairn, but this one is almost entirely focused on Renner and a pharmaceutical chemist played by Rachel Weisz.

The film is severely lacking in intelligence and originality. It’s got a mind control subplot that might as well have been directly lifted from The Naked Gun, and none of the handful of action sequences is anywhere near as much fun as we got in earlier installments. That’s not really a knock against Renner, since he plays the part well enough, but it’s just such a stupid part in a stupid film that it’s unlikely the movie would have gotten a green light if it had been a part one instead of a part four.

When Little Miss Sunshine came out in 2006, its directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris were relatively unknown, and in the six years since they’ve sunk back into oblivion. They’re finally back with Ruby Sparks, but unfortunately this one isn’t going to do their reputation any favors.

In what is perhaps an unfortunate parallel to the careers of the film’s directors, it focuses on Calvin (played by Paul Dano) as a writer who made a name for himself with a book he wrote ten years ago but hasn’t done anything since. All his attempts to get unblocked have been unsuccessful, but he has recently been having a recurring dream about a girl. His therapist (played by Elliott Gould) suggests writing about her, even if it’s not very good, just to help get him back in the habit of writing. And it works.

Calvin starts writing a love story about this “girl of his dreams”, who he names Ruby Sparks. The more he writes, the more real she becomes and the more he begins to fall in love with his character. But then strange things start happening, and he begins to find articles of women’s clothing lying around the house. And then one day, Ruby appears (played by Zoe Kazan, who also wrote the screenplay). Calvin can’t believe it at first, but everything about her past is exactly as he wrote it. But it’s when he starts to write her present that the problems emerge.

I found Ruby Sparks to be a very difficult movie to watch. The film unfolds in exactly the way you would expect from the premise, and its easily-exasperated and overly-emotional characters kill any sense of fun that it could have provided. The “fictional character comes to life” story has been done a lot (e.g., Pleasantville and The Purple Rose of Cairo, both of which feature great Jeff Daniels performances), and Stranger than Fiction provides an even closer parallel with an author knowingly writing the life of a character that has come to life.

On top of the relatively uninteresting way of telling an uncreative story, I found a number of the supporting characters to be rather annoying. Calvin’s mother and her hippie boyfriend (Annette Bening and Antonio Banderas) seem to be there purely for comic relief, but their scenes were painful and the only relief came when they were over. Steve Coogan, Aasif Mandvi, and Alia Shawkat also have small roles in the film but their talents appear to be largely squandered. In telling her story about a struggling author, it seems that Kazan may also be exposing herself as a less-than-proficient screenwriter.