• CBS Films
• Daniel Radcliffe as "Scary" Potter

The epochs of classic creature features and splatter fests have gradually given way to a contemporary horror film genre shaped by Asian influences and, more notably, the trappings of today’s technology. Starting with Hideo Nakata’s Ringu—a convenient, affecting marriage of these two influences—popular modern scare fare is the stuff of The Blair Witch Project and such progeny as Paranormal Activity. They’re the same chills and thrills, just filtered through the grainy prism of camcorder and surveillance monitors.

From this standpoint, The Woman in Black feels more like a musty curio than a standalone frightener. This adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 novel—already the basis for a West End theater production now approaching a run of 23 years—pays homage to the Gothic Hammer Horror films, not coincidental as it is the first feature shot in England under the until-recently dormant production banner in over thirty years.

Director James Watkins imbues every scene with the typical tropes: creepy kids, evil apparitions, a vine-covered manse, overgrown cemeteries and an array of spooky toys and music boxes. Shadows flutter about and objects jump out of nowhere, usually accompanied by a musical flourish. It’s all a handsome showcase that taps your sense of nostalgia more intensely than your adrenal gland.

Set in Victorian England, Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) is a widower whose wife died four years ago while giving birth to their son (Misha Handley). Now a struggling solicitor and single dad, Kipps is dispatched to Crythin Gifford, a fictitious town on the east coast of Britain, to attend to the affairs of Mrs. Alice Drablow, a recently deceased recluse. There, Kipps finds a village of the damned as townsfolk grapple with an inexplicable epidemic of their children doing fatal harm to themselves.

• Alex Bailey. Courtesy of Pathe Productions Ltd/ The Weinstein Company
• Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher and Anthony Head as Geoffrey Howe

If ever it was possible for an opening scene to buoy an entire feature-length motion picture, The Iron Lady would be it. Having wandered away from her London home and past her caretakers, a senile, octogenarian Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep) is shopping in a small corner mart. As loud Indian music blares over the loudspeakers, a besuited businessman pushes past her while yammering into his cell phone; a young black customer in headphones faintly rolls his eyes at the doddering old woman. There’s irony when Thatcher, a grocer’s daughter, does a double-take when told that a pint of milk costs 49 pence.

No one recognizes the iconic Cold Warrior, but what’s more, it is a world she no longer recognizes. It’s a biting collage of class and culture as brilliant as anything Stephen Frears has ever filmed.

Off this lofty perch, however, falls the rest of this biopic from director Phyllida Lloyd (who directed Streep in Mamma Mia!) and screenwriter Abi Morgan (co-writer of Shame). Told in flashback rote, the narrative oscillates throughout from the present-day senescent Thatcher to her early days as an ambitious Oxford grad with an eye and gut for politics. The former Miss Roberts (portrayed by Alexandra Roach) falls for and marries Denis Thatcher (played as a young man by Harry Lloyd), but only after he agrees to abide by her political ambition.

From there, it’s off to a whirlwind of biographical touchstones: Thatcher (now played by Streep) being elected to Parliament in 1959; unseating Edward Heath as leader of the Conservative party; becoming England’s first female prime minister in 1979; her 11-year tenure, highlighted by trade union strikes, IRA terrorism and, of course, the Falkland Islands conflict; and being deposed as party head in 1990.

The film’s true iron lady is Streep. Her role is susceptible to suspicion as it contains all three ingredients of the Oscar formula: British, biographical and disability-centric (in the case of the latter-day Thatcher). However, Streep’s depiction goes well beyond mere impersonation, ably portraying Thatcher at both her most harrowing and heroic.

• Paramount Pictures

The mission at the heart of Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol could not be more trite: a race to stop a Russian megalomaniac from triggering nuclear war. However, I suspect the simplicity is by design, for it allows the audience to sit back, have fun and enjoy this action-packed ride.

The members of this Impossible Missions Force (IMF) lineup are cast from an archetypal mold. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) returns as the embattled leader; Will Brandt (Jeremy Renner) is the newcomer who may be hiding secrets; Jane Carter (Paula Patton) is the feisty but sultry female seeking revenge for a murdered partner; and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), the one other holdover from the last film’s team, is the tech-head whose loquacious comic relief is initially bothersome but quickly becomes a needed respite from the sensory cacophony.

This fourth installment in the M:I franchise is directed by animation ace Brad Bird, whose work making The Incredibles showed his firm grasp of action thriller tropes. Moreover, from Michael Giacchino’s heavy use of Lalo Schifrin’s theme song—which all but disappeared during the previous two sequels—to the intricate, cloak-and-dagger undercover operations, Bird reclaims the familiar formula that made the original television series so popular.

That said, what makes Ghost Protocol the best episode yet is the dazzling, breathtaking and, yes, clever action that hits you seconds into the movie and never lets up (the opening sequence plus roughly 30 minutes of runtime were shot using IMAX cameras). Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team don’t just break into a building—they infiltrate the Kremlin. Ethan doesn’t just climb a skyscraper—he scales the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, the tallest building in the world. There’s not just a car chase—there’s a high-speed pursuit through the middle of a sandstorm. Accompanying all of it are enough sleek cars and goofy gadgets to make James Bond jealous.

None of this is meant to imply that Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol is an action movie classic. The plot is too slight and the characters too one-note, plus there’s the noticeable absence of a charismatic villain, that most essentially of actioner elements. At the same time, Bird breaks from familiarity just enough to keep the audience guessing. Things don’t always go smoothly for this IMF team—equipment breaks down and precision planning sometimes goes awry, prompting some white-knuckle improvisation. Moreover, this is a straightforward celebration of action, not the twisty thriller some may expect. As the Dean Martin standard asks, during a Russian prison break early in the film, “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head?” —Neil Morris

• Warner Bros.

Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows is a cute comedic mystery hidden inside a bustling, overproduced blockbuster. Watson (Jude Law) is getting married but he gets swept up in Holmes’ new case, they need to track down a gypsy for some reason, Moriarty is linked to terrorist bombings, the ramifications of which keeping getting bigger and more international, and Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) has a fat brother who spends his days in the buff.

It goes on and on, full of not only tons of action sequences but slow-mo versions of action sequences played out before they are repeated in real time. Is there some taboo in Hollywood about getting a big budget thriller in under 100 minutes? The movie gets so far out of its own range that it might be funny for its grotesquerie if it weren’t so clinical. It feels like the highest priced shoot-your-own-movie booth in history, every scene seeming to take place entirely in front of a green screen, every prop and speck of dust dropped in after the actors have been shot hamming to each other in a vacuum.

Director Guy Ritchie seems tickled by the occasionally charming and undeniably smug repartee between Law and Downey, but you can hardly make out any lingering traces of wit behind all the bombast. —Nathan Gelgud

• Summit Entertainment

New ad posters for the upcoming Muppets movie picture Kermit and Co. in send-ups of the Twilight films (e.g., Miss Piggy as “Bella Swine”). And, a recent episode of the new Beavis and Butt-Head opens with the slackers watching Twilight in a movie theater: “Is Bella a zombie?” Beavis asks. “She’s always standing there with her mouth open.”

In truth, nothing about these lampoons is half as parodical as the haughtily titled The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1. I write this knowing full well that nothing in this review will affect whether or not anyone plunks down their hard-earned cash to catch the penultimate installment in what feels like a never-ending franchise. Fans of the series still squeal at any cinematic appearance by Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and the habitually shirtless Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner).

I haven't read any of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight novels, but far from making me somehow unqualified to assess their film adaptations, it actually affords me an objectivity needed to grade the movies on their own merits. And, objectively speaking, Breaking Dawn — Part 1 stinks.

This is a languid mess on virtually every account—plot, acting, script, set design, special effects and a bloated score from Carter Burwell that sounds as if it was written for another movie entirely—intruding on every scene and sometimes drowning out the dialogue. Still, it’s better than the insipid soft-rock ditties interspersed throughout that make the whole spectacle sound like something that belongs on The WB.

The film opens with the long-awaited wedding between Edward and Bella, a woodland occasion that director Bill Condon (Dreamgirls; Gods and Monsters) clearly spent most of his budget and attention designing. Jacob stops by to dance and pout before the newlyweds are whisked away for their honeymoon on a small island off the coast of Brazil.

Despite building the entire series to this moment, Condon deprives the audience of any moment of surrender. Afraid he will literally ravish Bella to death during lovemaking, Edward channels his vampire impulses into turning the four-poster marital bed into nothing but feathers and splinters while consummating their marriage. His seed isn’t so restrained, however, and Bella quickly finds herself with a bloodsucker in the oven, much to the surprise of Edward, who over his century of existence apparently missed out on sex education. It’s hard to decide what is more antiquated—Edward’s Victorian sexual repression or the fact that he still uses Yahoo as his Internet search engine.

With Bella soon barricaded inside the Cullen compound, forces align over the fate of her rapidly gestating baby. The flea-bitten Quileutes conspire to destroy the satanic spawn, while Jacob—surprise—breaks with his pack and forms another uneasy alliance with Edward for the sake of saving Bella.

Breaking Dawn — Part 1 not only completes morphing the story’s virgin-angst subtext from the metaphorical to the literal, but it takes up a radically pro-life mantle when Bella refuses to abort her baby, even though her life may depend on it. In one of many episodes of high camp, Bella starts sating her fetus’ parasitic appetite by sucking blood decanted into a Styrofoam cup.

The film continues the Twilight saga’s tedious touchstones of vapid brooding, meaningless reaction shots and blurry CG skirmishes—the werewolves speak in some garbled, digitized baritone that sounds like Michael Clarke Duncan in Planets of the Apes. What’s different is the sheer silliness of it all, as if this time around the filmmakers decided to double down on the inherent self-parody. Jacob rips his shirt off mere seconds into the prologue, Bella’s dad (Billy Burke) is even more clueless than usual and the Cullens’ white face makeup resembles Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.

And the good news is that we get to do it all again next year. A mid-credits teaser hints at the plot turn at the heart of Breaking Dawn — Part 2. No matter — you can already count me as a member of Team Tiresome.

• Sony Pictures
• Adam and Adam

At the heart of Adam Sandler’s latest comedic romp, Jack and Jill, are lessons about the extricable bonds of family and the existential duality of the human soul, encapsulated under the guise of a…oh, who the heck am I kidding?

The degree of celebrity and financial success that Sandler continues to amass as a result of films that are increasingly and resoundingly putrid is fascinating only if one day we learn that the entirety of Sandler’s career was one big lampoon of Hollywood: A marginally talented star spoon-feeds producers and moviegoers a steady diet of clichéd scripts, awful actors, lazy filmmaking and offensive material, and they keep coming back for more.

If this were somehow true, then Jack and Jill would represent Sandler’s attempt to see just how low his fans will go. The cross-dressing comedy hasn’t truly worked since Tootsie, but that doesn’t stop Sandler and the indefensible Dennis Dugan from slapping on a dress and foisting this affront to the medium. Set around the Thanksgiving and Hanukkah seasons, Los Angeles ad exec Jack Sadelstein (Sandler) ruefully awaits the annual arrival of Jill (Sandler in a wig, makeup, fat suit and grating accent), his identical twin sister.

Jill is loud, needy, embarrassing and obnoxious—frankly, a scene in which she talks loudly on her cell phone in a movie theater make her fair game for ridicule. But, she’s still preferable to Jack, who is regularly and inexplicably cruel to Jill, giddy when his adopted son punches her in the face and she crash-lands a jet ski outside his pool.

In other words, the audience isn’t given a reason to like either sibling or, for that matter, anyone else in this dumpster fire of a movie. Jack’s throwaway family includes dim bulb wife Erin (Katie Holmes, grinning mindlessly) and an adopted moppet from India who has a bizarre but pointless fetish for Scotch-taping objects, including animals, to his body.

The first fart joke comes during the opening credits, eventually metastasizing into a full-blown diarrhea gag after Jill scarfs down some chimichangas. And Sandler trots out his usual unholy triumvirate: choppy editing, useless celebrity cameos and casual racism. Famed Mexican actor Eugenio Derbez is ethnically emasculated, playing a gardener who cracks wise about crossing the border inside a car trunk and takes Jill to a gathering of la familia that features an unconscious old woman revived by shoving red chili peppers in her mouth.

Playing himself, Al Pacino becomes infatuating with Jill after spying her at a Lakers basketball game and embarks on an extended, fanatical courtship. Rehashing lines from The Godfather and donning a black suit a la Tony Montana in Scarface eventually devolves into watching the acting legend tickle-fight with the cross-dressing Sandler inside a medieval castle and perform a rap routine in a commercial for flavored coffee.

While Pacino’s presence here seemingly represents a new nadir in his career, he nevertheless manages to turn this utter rubbish into something oddly satirical. He tackles each scene with such gusto that you soon realize that while Sandler is paying slapdash homage, Pacino has something more cunning in mind. He turns the film’s inanity to his advantage, spoofing his onscreen personas as a means toward skewering the entire Hollywood system. Jill consoles Pacino after smashing his Oscar statuette by reminding him that “you must have others.” “You’d think it,” he deadpans. “But no.” Later, Pacino longingly recalls his native New York City, lamenting L.A. as a place “where all the palm trees look the same” and productions of Richard III feature Bruce Jenner as Lord Hastings.

In spite of itself, Jack and Jill will likely fetch Sandler another big payday. Still, when Pacino appears in a NYC bar at film’s end dressed as Don Quixote and starts tilting at a ceiling fan, it’s a joke that’s too smart for the room and more self-aware than a movie that’s (literally) full of shit deserves.

• Warner Bros.

Unless you’re someone who wants to find Dick Cheney’s secret lair so you can hang out and watch football with a neoconservative mastermind, it’s probably easy to guess your opinion of J. Edgar Hoover, long-time FBI chief and enemy of the civil rights movement. What you might make of Clint Eastwood’s biopic J. Edgar is less easy to predict.

Charting Hoover’s life from a repressed mama’s boy to a right wing radical trying to blackmail MLK out of the Nobel Prize, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk) forgoes proselytizing while managing to get away with lines like “Due process of law? What about the threat to our country!?” Hoover almost seems beyond politics, as he treats all of the eight presidents under whom he serves with suspicion or contempt. It’s his personal predilections that determine his approach to crime-fighting; the Hoover of J. Edgar created a fingerprint database and kept files on everybody not necessarily because he was an active assailant of civil liberties and privacy, but because he was a librarian at heart: This is a guy who takes his dates to the Library of Congress.

It’s a chilly movie, not just in its approach to Hoover but because of Eastwood’s reliably icy palette. For the most part, J. Edgar is an even-keeled, sometimes plodding journey through a life, and the only chills it provides come from the fact that it takes place in a permanent winter.

But the off-putting surface makes for a few ambiguously tense moments, especially given its treatment of Hoover’s sexuality. A convincing DiCaprio manages to make his young Hoover both a flirt and a starched square. When he proposes to his secretary, Helen (Naomi Watts), on their third date, it’s hard to be sure whether Hoover is being a career man who’s simply practical about his sex life, or if he really doesn’t know how these things work.

Helen's red lipstick can’t quite glow through movie’s cold shimmer, and no sexual energy cracks the surface. (Considering this is an exchange between DiCaprio and Watts, that’s saying something.) The blood that turns up on Hoover’s lips later, as he tussles with a would-be lover, shines a little brighter. These moments pop, and they’re not accidents. J. Edgar is a well thought out film, but it’s more fun to assess than it is to sit through, and none of the key figures on screen are having much fun.

The small army of character actors (Dermot Mulroney squawking “New Joysey”) liven things up occasionally. So, too, does the analysis of a wood expert played by Stephen Root (Office Space, Newsradio); his examination of a ladder serves as a microcosm of Hoover’s early embrace of what we now call forensics, and it’s the most enjoyable through-line in the movie.

Yes, that’s right: a movie covering the career of a repressed homosexual and alleged cross-dresser who used illegal methods to chase some of the most lurid and charismatic criminals (and presidents!) of the century finds its most exciting moments in the scenes about wood grain. There’s something laughably square and totally unique about this, which you could also say about most any Eastwood movie.

• urbanizedfilm.com
• Beijing

Gary Hustwit’s first film, Helvetica (2007), was a surprisingly engaging documentary that made font fanboys of people who didn’t know they could care about the studied minutia of typeface design. He broadened his gaze to industrial design in 2009’s Objectified, which lacked the tight focus of Helvetica, but compensated with a wealth of seductive shots of the fetishized tokens of consumer desire (fittingly, Apple design chief Jonathan Ive gets plenty of screen time).

The latest entry in what Hustwit is calling his “design trilogy” takes another step back, to look at the largest-scale—and perhaps most important—design application. Urbanized alights in the field of urban design, crisscrossing the globe to compare solutions to living densely.

Hustwit name-checks some of the specialty’s greatest hits and misses, including Robert Moses versus Jane Jacobs in mid-20th century New York; brutalist monuments of inhuman scale in Brasilia; former Bogotá mayor and pavement liberator Enrique Peñalosa; unchecked Phoenix sprawl; and the emptying of Detroit and New Orleans, with scatter-shot approaches to refilling the voids.

Hustwit also spends time with lesser-known subjects, like Chilean low-income housing designer Alejandro Aravena, whose plans combine aesthetic beauty with realistic considerations of what people can afford; innovative improvements in lighting and public spaces in Khayelitsha, a township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa, which have reduced crime and given children space to play; and a contentious battle for the heart of Stuttgart, Germany, as the construction of an upscale residential and commercial center surrounding a high-speed rail station proceeds against the wishes of a majority of the citizenry.

With as large a subject as urban planning, Urbanized can only skim the surface, flitting from one city and one morsel of an idea to the next. But it’s a good survey of important concepts and trends in urban planning, and like its predecessors, it is itself such a brilliant example of thoughtful design that it’s a pure pleasure to watch: The fastidiously composed shots look like the work of $100/hr. graphic designers, and it’s assembled with a perfect smoothness that proves that really good design is its own satisfaction.

Urbanized is being self-distributed in a limited release, so Monday’s screening at the Rialto is your best chance to catch the glorious visuals on the big screen. As an added bonus, Hustwit will be on hand for a post-film Q-and-A. Tickets are $15 ($13 for students). The show starts at 7 p.m. Visit urbanizedfilm.com/raleigh-durham-special-screening/.

The trailer is here:

• Photo by Peter Mountain

Nobody would publish the book this film was based on when it was first written. And now, nobody would make this film except for who wrote it.

Reading The Rum Diary, which Hunter S. Thompson pushed into print 38 years after he wrote it, it’s easy to see why it was initially rejected. The various, largely indistinct characters slip in and out of now-familiar Gonzo slogans (“the fat is in the fire,” “I’m getting the fear”). Chenault, the only female character, spends the entire book either wandering around naked or being abused by her boyfriend. And the central concept, of a few slack writers milking a dying paper for booze money in 1950s Puerto Rico, is never enough to hold this sleazy mess together.

But in late 2011, nearly seven years after his death by suicide, Thompson is a counterculture celebrity. His disciple, Johnny Depp, has made a serious fortune from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, leaving him in a unique position to rescue this tale from itself.

No such luck. Rather than a repeat of the fantastic film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, we’re left with a convoluted mélange more in-line with the aimless Where the Buffalo Roam. Hell, it may even be worse.