Some Movies Out This Weekend: October 3, 2014

Some Movies Out This Weekend: October 3, 2014

This weekend seems to mark the true beginning of Fall Film Season, with some prestige-y stuff from Oscar-nominated filmmakers. There's also one big one that brings to mind my mistakes of pop culture past and the first Halloween-related movie this month. This isn't everything that's coming out, but the two wide releases are at least included, plus a couple other counter-programming options.

Opening this week, October 3, 2014.

Annabelle

Director: John R. Leonetti

Writer: Gary Dauberman

Starring: Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Tony Amendola

October is also horror movie month, and the big scary release this weekend is about a creepy doll that is possessed and tries to kill a young family. It sounds like Child's Play on paper, but the atmosphere of the trailer suggests something darker and more traditionally horrifying than just a bunch of jump scares. It certainly has those, too, but the ideas of dark spirits and the darkness hiding inside people and objects is frightening indeed. Director John R. Leonetti comes from the cinematography world, with credits including highly regarded recent horrors The Conjuring and the Insidious series. That's a good sign for anyone looking for a horror movie that understands the visual aspects of the medium.

Left Behind

Director: Vic Armstrong

Writers: Paul Lalonde, John Patus

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Lea Thompson, Chad Michael Murray

The apocalyptic book series-slash-thrift store staple – seriously, if you go to 100 thrift stores, approximately 94 of them will have at least three dogeared copies of each volume – comes to theaters in a reboot of the Kirk Cameron-starring 2000 direct-to-DVD adaptation. This time, though, it stars people you might recognize a little more, like Nicolas Cage, the mom from Back to the Future, and the guy from One Tree Hill who looks like my friend Peter.

I've actually read a few of these books, my interest spurred by a Time article I read about the series in my eighth grade homeroom. I figured, “Hey, a dramatization of the wacky stuff late in the Bible sounds like a good story to me.” I was wrong.

Very little about the books stick in my brain. One is the antichrist's all-time great name, Nicolae Carpathia, whose background served as the basis for a satirical article I wrote for my college literary magazine about then-candidate Barack Obama's 2008 run, an article I regretted when I realized people around the country actually believed he was a foreign-born harbinger of the end times. Oops. The other thing is one of the primary reasons that protagonist Rayford Steele – man, they all have amazing names – didn't get chosen to join the Rapture because he had thought about committing adultery. He didn't go through with it but was tempted. That's some insane person logic that completely misses the point of free will, choice, and doing the right thing.

But whatever, go see it if you want. Based on the trailer, it looks like it drops the second two-thirds of the book – including everything about the antichrist – in favor of the action-packed stuff about people disappearing from the planet. Toss some Bible flavoring in and it could be a halfway interesting angle.

Gone Girl

Director: David Fincher

Writer: Gillian Flynn

Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry

David Fincher is perhaps the strongest pure technician working in Hollywood today. His impeccably precise films have stretched the limits of their stars' patience – dozens of takes will do that to a person – but resulted in some uncompromising statements about obsession and the evils people (mostly men) do. Now, directing novelist Gillian Flynn's bestseller Gone Girl (Flynn adapted her book for the screenplay), he seems headed down the same path.

I'm a longtime Fincher fan, dating back to my time as, like every other middle class white guy of my generation, a gigantic fan of Fight Club while in high school. I've moved on from that fandom a bit, but movies like The Social Network and his masterpiece, Zodiac, have really done it for me. What concerns me a little about Gone Girl is that it seems to be walking the same path of “look at how horrible humanity can be” that Zodiac and his previous film, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo(disclaimer: that's one of two Fincher movies I haven't seen, but I've read a fair amount of criticism on both the book and movie to at least grasp the plot and themes) did. I don't want him to spin his wheels.

That said, this is a movie that's getting a lot of good notices. Todd VanDerWerff at Vox calls it “one of the bestmovies ever made about marriage” and the A.V. Club's IgnatiyVishnevetsky says it's surprisingly funny, so there must be something else going on. This is the one film this weekend I'll be reviewing for sure, so check back.

Men, Women & Children

Director: Jason Reitman

Writers: Jason Reitman, Erin Cressida Wilson

Starring: Adam Sandler, Jennifer Garner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Judy Greer

Jason Reitman makes handsome, alternatively funny and sad movies about damaged, quirky people. Men, Women & Children seems to go the same direction of his sadder stuff, like Up in the Air, than his funnier work on, say, Thank You for Smoking and Juno.

Here are the things I can tell you about it. It involves the internet. Adam Sandler looks sad, so there's hope of a return to Punch Drunk Love-level goodness from him. People hurt each other and talk behind each other's backs.

Whether that's good, I don't know. I like Reitman, so I'll get to it soon.  

The Equalizer Review: Yikes

The Equalizer Review: Yikes

The Equalizer

Director: Antoine Fuqua

Writer: Richard Wenk

Starring: Denzel Washington, Chloe Grace Moretz, Marton Csokas

One time, my dad tried to broil a couple steaks without cleaning the broiler first. Things went okay for a couple minutes, then smoke started flowing from the oven. Things got bright. A spark ignited and everything went up in flames. My dad, thinking quickly, grabbed the enflamed pan and ran out the front door with it, dropping it on the sidewalk where we watched it continue to burn even after shooting it with the garden hose. It was a grease fire, and those things don't end until they are good and ready, no matter how badly you scald your hand or how much you plead.

This is the experience of watching The Equalizer, a never ending, astronomically bad movie.

First, the good stuff. Denzel Washington does what he can to show the two sides of this man of violence and compassion. Chloe Grace Moretz, as a teenager forced into prostitution, gives one heart wrenching look early in the movie as she walks out the door to an ill-fated night of work that is top notch acting from a young actor who is likely to win a lot of awards in her career. Director Antoine Fuqua shoots everything with a professional sheen and stages coherent action scenes that you can actually follow, unlike most modern action films.

The rest of it is willfully insulting to the audience. The first 30 minutes play out like Taxi Driver in microcosm, except with all the complexity removed. Washington is a well trained Travis Bickle with a conscience, where his acts of violence are made directly for the common good instead of serving semi-good ends in a lucky fluke of sociopathic rage. Moretz is Iris, but here she's an aspiring musician with no displayed talent – the movie makes it a point multiple times but never plays a note of her songs – and a laughable knack for telling the audience exactly why Washington's character is a good man, over and over. And several actors playing Russian mobsters take on the Sport role. This would be a fine, if overly familiar, premise if this morality play were to form the movie's plot.

But Washington punishes these people swiftly, the movie forgets all about Moretz after her part in the inciting incident, Bill Pullman shows up looking disturbingly like Mitt Romney's twin in a pointless role, and more Russian mafia higher ups try to kill Washington. For two and a half hours.

This is the type of movie that tells the audience at every turn exactly what to think. I don't mean that figuratively. Characters explain in the most literal terms who is good and who is bad many, many times. Every time there's a chance for the movie to show instead of tell, it chooses to talk down to the viewer. There is no trust that the people watching the movie will understand, for instance, the hero might have strong feelings about seeing an innocent person beaten to a pulp. It flashes back to scenes from minutes earlier to remind people of what they already witnessed. If you've ever seen Rocky IV, the king of "'memba dis?" seconds-later montages, you will have a good idea of what happens several times in The Equalizer. Moretz and Washington's hardware store coworkers are used as mouthpieces for the script to explain how sad the lonely insomniac with sad eyes is, or how kind the man who donates his time to help his coworkers achieve their goals is. Even when the movie tries to work in a non-verbal way, it bashes the viewer over the head as Washington strikes a Jesus Christ pose. In a visual medium where even the most subtle gestures are perceivable to an audience, nobody needs to these stupid overtures. But the movie misunderstands its medium to the utmost degree.

It also ends approximately 40 times. Every time you think you can leave, it tricks you into staying another several minutes. Oof. What a slog.

Some Movies Out This Weekend

Some Movies Out This Weekend

Usually my caveat of, "This is not meant to be a complete overview of every movie out this weekend," applies, but there are only two new movies opening this week in wide release.  I actually had to look up the limited releases to find something intriguing. You will be able to find the third listing at a handful of theaters around Chicago if you're so inclined.

Opening this week, September 26, 2014.

The Equalizer

Director: Antoine Fuqua

Writer: Richard Wenk

Starring: Denzel Washington, Chloe Grace Moretz, Marton Csokas

Based on the 1980s television series, The Equalizer looks to up the violence of the source material and bring some gravitas to a pulpy story – the director and star previously paired on Training Day, which won Washington an Oscar. That's all well and good, but the sting of filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn's (Bronson, Drive, OnlyGod Forgives) departure from the project remains. It's likely the skeletal structure of what drew Refn to the material still exists, but the looks we've had at this movie so far don't promise more than Denzel Washington doing the same thing he's done for a decade. He'll be solid as always, with a stiff-upper-lip resolve and sense of justice, but with the short lead time Fuqua had after taking the project off Refn's hands, it's unlikely he had the option of imbuing it with his personal vision, instead being forced into a director-for-hire gig.

Or it could be an exploration of masculinity and chivalry and how that can go wrong. It can expand on the straightforward hand-to-hand action style hinted by the trailer to become a new action touchstone. It can show Chloe Grace Moretz continue her maturation into a possible awarding winning actress – she clearly is meant to bring to mind the Jodie Foster-in-Taxi Driver role here. The ingredients are there, but it'll likely be a slick Hollywood action thriller instead of the gonzo ultraviolence Refn promised.

The Boxtrolls

Directors: Graham Annable, Anthony Stacchi

Writers: Irena Brignull, Adam Pava

Starring: Isaac Hempstead Wright, Elle Fanning, Ben Kingsley, Jared Harris, Nick Frost, Tracy Morgan

Stop-motion animation and charm go a long way with people. So do adaptations of children's literature. This is one ostensibly for kids, but from the looks of it – some good fish-out-of-water humor, a wonderfully talented voice cast, and most importantly, no instantly outdated pop culture references in the trailer – it won't be a bad experience for the parents either.

It looks like a simple hero's journey, but if it's done well, as directors Annable and Stacchi (Coraline, Paranorman) are known to do, chances are this one will be a pleasant way to spend an hour and a half.

Jimi: All Is by My Side

Director: John Ridley

Writer: John Ridley

Starring: André Benjamin, Hayley Atwell, Imogen Poots

Writer-Director John Ridley is a newly minted Oscar winner after having penned last year's 12 Years a Slave. He continues the biopic trajectory here, but with a different century surrounding the subject who is tragic for different reasons than the subject of Ridley's last film.

André Benjamin has always had a theatrical flair as one half of Outkast. He's charming and has a career's worth of knowledge on how to captivate a crowd, so his onstage work as Jimi Hendrix looks to be spot-on. We'll see about his ability to cover the range of human emotions, but he's got the performance aspects down pat.

This Weekend at the Movies: September 19, 2014

This Weekend at the Movies: September 19, 2014

The early part of the Fall Movie Season continues to look like a mixed bag in a good way, with movies of various genres opening this weekend. This isn't the comprehensive list, but within the four films previewed here, you're likely to find something that piques your interest.

Opening this weekend, September 19, 2014.

The Guest

Director: Adam Wingard

Writer: Simon Barrett

Starring: Dan Stevens, Sheila Kelley, Maika Monroe

After last year's house invasion horror You're Next, writing-directing team Wingard and Barrett look to be taking the next step to mainstream thrillerdom. In their previous collaboration, they showed an ability to create an uncannily functional movie. Everything that happens is a result of character choices and motivations, and this functionality is something that is sadly missing from most movies these days.

Joining Wingard and Barrett is Dan Stevens, formerly of Downton Abbey, as a southern veteran from one of our country's recent wars visiting the family of his fallen friend. There appears to be more going on, some lies are told, and severe violence looks to rule the day.

20,000 Days on Earth

Directors: Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard

Writers: Nick Cave, Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard

Starring: Nick Cave

“That wasn't the truth.” This is how the trailer for “documentary” 20,000 Days on Earth ends. It's not surprising that Austrailian singer-songwriter Nick Cave would say them. He's a famously slippery showman.

In this film, it appears Cave and collaborators Forsyth and Pollard want to do more than the typical question and answer documentary. There's an effort to include a vaguer sense of the truth, the kind you may be familiar with if you've ever seen a Werner Herzog documentary. Cave wants his audience to share an experience rather than simply hear his thoughts on aging, music, filmmaking, you name it. Those things will be elements, but he wants to put on a show, and he seems perfectly at home with the performative – some might say false – aspects of that impulse.

This is Where I Leave You

Director: Shawn Levy

Writer: Jonathan Tropper

Starring: Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Jane Fonda, Adam Driver, Rose Byrne

“A bunch of people known for their comedic chops join together to do something slightly more serious.” That would be my tagline and also why I wouldn't make it as a tagline writer in Hollywood. But it's true!

Bateman and Fey are two of the titans of the single-camera wave from the mid-2000s that revolutionized television comedy, making it more cinematic and arguably sharper and funnier. Driver (Girls, Frances Ha) is a major up-and-comer, rumored to be the villain of the new Star Wars trilogy – he's in it for sure, but his role has yet to be divulged. Byrne has been good in everything she's done for a decade or more. Fonda is a legend – anyone who has never seen Klute should remedy that now.

And they play a family dealing with the death of the patriarch. They stay in their childhood home for a week following the funeral and come to terms with it and their own problems. It could easily go off the rails into schmaltz, but the trailer gives some hope that the witty detachment of the leads will keep things grounded.

The Maze Runner

Director: Wes Ball

Writers: Noah Oppenheim, Grant Pierce Myers, T.S. Nowlin

Starring: Dylan O'Brien, Aml Ameen, Ki Hong Lee, Blake Cooper

Dystopian fiction tends to catch on with teens, and Hollywood has taken note. The success of The Hunger Games and Divergent series, both in print and onscreen, paved the way for more gray-tinted futurescapes in which young people die a lot for causes that aren't their own. The Maze Runner is the latest in this trend.

Holy moly that's bleak. But it also looks thrilling, with a better budget than the first Hunger Games, and some young actors looking to break out. It looks a bit Lord of the Flies, too, which connected with yours truly as a cranky 15-year-old.

The Guest: A Modern Genre Masterpiece

The Guest: A Modern Genre Masterpiece

The Guest

Director: Adam Wingard
Writer: Simon Barrett
Starring: Dan Stevens, Maika Monroe, Brendan Meyer, Sheila Kelley, Leland Orser, Lance Reddick
Rating: 4.5/5 Stars

It's been 16 years since genre master John Carpenter made a good movie – and I'm of the minority opinion on Vampires – and 28 since he made a transcendent one – Big Trouble in Little China. What's he done in that time? Some abysmal creative bellyflops, a couple episodes of a horror anthology television series, and generally joining the long list of great filmmakers who fell on harder times, creatively speaking, as they got older.

But that's not true. I don't believe it. Carpenter is not dead. I can prove it. He's on Twitter. No, I have a different theory. The man who made Halloween, The Thing, They Live, and Big Trouble didn't lose his chops and fade into obscurity. He simply took the part of himself that lives and breathes good movies and made it possess the bodies of filmmaking partners Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, whose newest collaboration, The Guest, opens this weekend. And holy crow does that bequeathment pay off handsomely.

But let's back up a second to discuss genre filmmaking. It's an amorphous term. To determine if a movie is “genre” or not, you need to ask yourself some questions.

Are you having fun? Does it make you think too much? Is it a little outlandish? Would your grandparents think it's trash? Would you call it a movie or a film (yes, there's a difference)?

Genre movies are less concerned with making grand statements about the human condition. That's not to say they're without thematic merit, but their aims are wildly different from, say, a Yasujiro Ozu film. Entertainment comes first. Like all well executed films, genre movies require a foundation of characters with discernible motivations, but they require a bit more heave-ho in the way they attack their plots. They need to religiously adhere to the Trey Parker-Matt Stone “but/therefore” rule. Every story beat should go as such: “This happens, therefore this happens, but this happens, therefore this happens.” Don't let any scene end with the words “and then.” This creates a rhythm, a sense of direction, and that direction should be forever forward. Let every scene either inform character or advance the plot – hopefully both simultaneously – and you're halfway to making a great genre picture. It's what is known as a rollicking good time at the movies.

So remember, in cases like these, causation is king. This sounds like alliteration when spoken, so hear me out.

Okay, you still with me? Great.

The Guest. It's superb. That causation thing I mentioned a couple lines up? It does it in spades. It gets going right away with some ominous electronic music playing as the camera follows a jogging David – played by Downton Abbey's inveterate Englishman Dan Stevens, who does what amounts to a restrained Matthew McConaughey vocal impression, and his performance is quasi-McConaugheyan to boot – before a classic jump scare tactic to introduce the title of the movie in retro purple lettering on a black background via a loud music cue and a smash cut.

It spends the next 30 minutes or so setting up the world of the movie. This is important, because for all the pedal-to-the-medal bluster I showed a couple paragraphs ago, you can't get to that headlong abandon without taking time to get to know the people you paid to spend 90 minutes of your time with. You don't need to root for them necessarily, but you need to find what makes them work, and therefore what makes them fascinating.

David rings the doorbell of the Peterson family, explaining he fought in the “Middle East” – the movie is careful not to say which war, for reasons we'll get into later – with their fallen son, to whom he had promised to send his dying “I love you”s to his relatives. Laura (Sheila Kelley), the family matriarch, invites him to stay because she's grieving over her son's death. Her husband, Spencer (Leland Orser), a borderline alcoholic – likely also due to his son's death – is less than thrilled about the move. Their remaining children, a “21 next month” daughter, Anna (Maika Monroe) and a bullied high schooler, Luke (Brendan Meyer) are alternatively skeptical and optimistic about their new family friend.

Things about David aren't completely right. He makes vaguely threatening conversation and sits ramrod straight on his fallen comrade's bed, staring blankly into space.

But damned if he isn't helpful! There he is, working with Luke on his homework and humbly suggesting it's Luke who's teaching him, taking the vacated big brother. He does the dishes for Laura. Over a slew of beers, he listens to Spencer talk about his anxieties about being passed over for a promotion so a 20-something with a degree could take it. And he gives Anna a glimpse of his beefy soldier man physique just out of the shower – Stevens is “doughy Matthew” no more, Downton fans.

David picks up Luke from school and notices a bruise on his cheek. He knows the drill and asks Luke to point out who gave him the shiner and follows the group of movie bullies – make no mistake, these people don't exist in this form in real life – to a bar that doesn't card “if you're on the football team.” He teaches Luke some lessons about standing up for yourself and orders some emasculating drinks for their football player targets. This doesn't go well, David gets wet, and the football jerks get punished, excessively so in the first of several neatly choreographed fight sequences in The Guest.

David clearly knows his stuff regarding violence. He's also not entirely truthful about himself. People start dying around town mysteriously, some of whose deaths lead directly to the Petersons' gain, and Anna decides to check up on her new housemate. A call to an Army information center later and the movie takes a turn toward the wacky and the ultra violent. Since hardly anyone has had a chance to see it yet, I'll walk around where the film goes from here, but it's gleefully fun, with odes to genre greats of all vintages, from the Carpenter classics above (especially Halloween) to more recent fare like 2011's Drive.

Now, I mentioned the vagueness about the nature and geography David's service. This would seem to go against what I said about clear motivations for characters. The thing is, though, where David served in the Army doesn't matter for plot, character, and thematic reasons.

By the point in the movie when he's asked, the audience already knows there's something amiss about David. This sets the expectation that we will learn more about him. We don't need everything up front, and The Guest doles out David's information methodically, piece by piece, sometimes with intentional vagueness. This is not a bad thing because it derives from an inherently mysterious character. He's an obviously withholding individual, with plenty of extra angles to work, and director Wingard lays that foundation well with camera pauses on Stevens's blank eyes and quick glances when confronted by possibly damaging information. It's a deft use of the cinematic medium to convey information without clunky exposition. It's a statement on how our country treats its soldiers, in that they are to be used for our purposes whenever we feel like and then left to fend for themselves after they are no longer useless to the country. This is some fairly heavy stuff The Guest makes light of without hitting you over the head with it.

And when Wingard and writing partner Barrett do get expository, with the use of ultimate exposition machine Lance Reddick (The Wire and Fringe), it's as bare bones as can be, because the audience doesn't need to know how David got to be the way he is, they just need to know why he's behaving this way. That is a much easier and more efficient conversation to show on film. It serves dual purposes, to put the character's actions and motivations in context and in sync, and to cut out the clunky explanation that can, and usually does, take the audience out of the movie. The specifics of David's case don't matter to the problem at hand. Wingard and Barrett know instinctively the necessity of keeping the audience with the movie's characters and in the world they have created. If the viewers don't need to know something, they can fill in the blanks themselves. All they need is to know what sets the conflict in motion and the possible ways to resolve the conflict. And through a plethora of carefully planned setups, Wingard and Barrett are able to knock them down with aplomb.

And it's fun. Much like their previous movie, last year's You're Next, the filmmakers get all kinds of mileage out of character-based humor. A confused stare after a statement like, “Cash is easy to get,” is perfectly timed. A confrontation with Luke's school principal shows the comedic possibilities of litigation threats and fibs about personal identity. Pumpkin carving with David is hilarious, develops his character, and sets up the climax. A thumb's up puts a darkly comic end to that climax. And the final shot is a terrific laugh line despite all the violence, death, and mayhem that preceded it.

Wingard and Barrett are rising stars in the mainstream consciousness, but they're already masters of their domain. If you don't see The Guest near the top of my 2014 top 10 list around the holidays, this will have been a stupefyingly great year for film. As it stands, though, we should already count ourselves lucky to have had a movie this good be released. Go see it. Ensure these marvelous talents get to continue making new genre classics.

Carpenter lives.

This Weekend at the Movies: A Preview

This Weekend at the Movies: A Preview

We live in one of the greatest decades for American cinema since moving images were first captured. Since about 2007, every year has had at least a handful of masterpieces from every genre and budget, and that pace seems to be picking up. Unfortunately, due to financial matters (re: being broke), I did not go see as many movies as I would have liked this summer. I saw three of the big blockbusters, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Godzilla, and Guardians of the Galaxy, in theaters. These films, combined with things like this Scott Tobias piece at TheDissolve, make me think this was a superb year for the movies of the “bang-zoom” variety. I will have to catch up as things like X-Men: Days of Future Past and Edge of Tomorrowhit Blu-Ray and streaming services and wish retroactively that I had been richer during the months of April through August, 2014.

However, those same budgetary concerns may soon not apply as I work on getting critics' passes to the fall films typically associated with Oscar season. I will attend the Chicago Independent Film Festival next month for this here publication, but that is only part of the cinematic coverage I hope to bring you. So, with the influx of auteur-ish films on the horizon from now through December, I will be bringing Halfstack readers a quick rundown of what to expect in theaters each weekend. It is not intended to be comprehensive, but more about the movies that personally excite me and those filmmakers and performers I think deserve more eyeballs. Again, depending on cash flow or (hopefully) free screenings, I look to have reviews of the films throughout the following week.

So here are a few movies opening this weekend, September 12, that caught my eye. A note here because September is usually a transitionary month, with some interesting art films getting released, but also a slew of things the studios didn't feel enough confidence in to release during the more lucrative summer season. It leads to some odd thrillers placed alongside costume dramas. It's a great time for counter programming.

The Drop

Director: Michael R. Roskam

Writer: Dennis Lehane (adapted from his short story “Animal Rescue”)

Starring: Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, James Gandolfini, Matthias Schoenaerts

Author Dennis Lehane has seen a large number of his novels adapted by Hollywood in the last decade plus – Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone, Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. The Drop puts Lehane's low level toughs in Brooklyn instead of Boston. Hardy and Gandolfini run a “drop bar” for all the less-than-legal money flowing through the neighborhood. Bad things happen, they get robbed, and soon desperate choices must be made.

Having a “hard-boiled”(the ins and outs of those low on the criminal totem pole) plot is generally an easy way to get me to see a movie, but a hard-boiled movie with all-world talent like Hardy (Bronson remains one of the greatest films of the last decade), Gandolfini in what is likely his final screen role after his unfortunate passing earlier this year, and Rapace, who is capable of creating otherworldly empathy (she was the highlight of Brian De Palma's otherwise dreadful Passion), then it could be a new favorite.

No Good Deed

Director: Sam Miller

Writer: Aimee Lagos

Starring: Idris Elba, Taraji P. Henson, Leslie Bibb

Idris Elba is an indispensable actor. From his early days as criminal striver Stringer Bell on HBO's The Wire to his supporting role as a god in the Thor films to “cancel[ing] the apocalypse” in last year's Pacific Rim, he's done a lot of big stuff. Missing from his resumé, though, is a trashy thriller where he gets to be a genuine malcontent baddie.

And make no mistake, No Good Deed is trash. From the trailer alone, I can tell there's a strong sense of dum-dum moralizing and some scenery chewing for Elba. But even if it's just a paycheck gig, the presence of Henson (whose kind role in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was one of the few highlights of that overly saccharine film) and Bibb (charming as the straight woman in A Good Old Fashioned Orgy and the first two Iron Man movies) may class up the joint a little. Either way, this could be a good one to half pay attention to on a lazy Saturday afternoon one day.

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them

Director: Ned Benson, making his feature debut

Writer: Ned Benson

Starring: James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Viola Davis, Bill Hader

Originally conceived as two films about the arc of a relationship, one from the female perspective (Chastain) and one from the male (McAvoy), recent edits have made them one, hence the Them subtitle. Rumor has it according to last week's Filmspotting podcast that all three versions will be released in some form in the future, but for now, filmgoers are getting the combination cut.

The trailer gives a couple hints as to how that will work, with different takes and angles to show the slipperiness of human understanding and interaction. It looks ambitious as all get out, and the two leads are possibly the best in the game right now. Chastain especially has been on an all-universe roll the last few years, with The Tree of Life and Zero Dark Thirty being particular standouts. Now they pair in what looks to be an even-handed approach to relationships, with the highs and lows receiving a lot of screen time.