Seminal novelists of the genre such as Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour had already idealized the American Frontier in hundreds of best-selling books and stories. But Williams, a University of Denver professor for 30 years, took a darker view of U.S. expansion, one that dissected the heroic myths of archetypal cowboys, ranch hands and outlaws.

Director Gabe Polsky, who fought for more than a decade to turn “Butcher’s Crossing” into a movie, said he “never really connected with the genre.”

“Never. I tried to watch (Westerns) a little bit and just kind of disconnected because it was about searching for the Indians and bank robberies and revenge and all of that.”

In 2022, Polsky’s cinematic version, which stars Nicholas Cage, debuted on the film festival circuit, and is now in theaters.

As a novel, the coming-of-age story was arguably the first Western to subvert the genre’s morally certain, decades-old formulas. Williams preceded giants of the revisionist and anti-Western such as Cormac McCarthy (“No Country for Old Men”) and Larry McMurtry (“Lonesome Dove”), although his influence is only lately appreciated by critics and readers.

Williams, who also wrote 1965’s literary masterpiece “Stoner,” invests in the emotional lives of his characters as “Butcher’s Crossing” depicts a thrilling, stomach-churning buffalo hunt. Harvard dropout — and naive Ralph Waldo Emerson devotee — William Andrews trades Boston for the Kansas frontier in an effort to expand his horizons. There he joins buffalo hunter Miller (just one name), whose epic, money-making quest involves finding and skinning a legendary herd of Colorado buffalo to secure his biggest payout yet.

Like the book, the film — which stars Fred Hechinger (“The White Lotus”) as Andrews, and a fearsome Cage as Miller — is set in the early 1870s when Colorado was still a territory riven by murderous land grabs and precious-metal rushes.

“They’re hunting buffalo, but they’re also going out on this crazy sort of ‘Moby Dick’ search,” Polsky said of the movie, which was shot in the Blackfoot Nation in Northwest Montana due to the size and availability of the tribe’s buffalo herd.

In addition to Moby Dick, reviews have likened it to “Apocalypse Now” as it traces Miller’s mental unraveling on the cursed trek to claim and offload more buffalo hides than anyone actually wanted. “It’s an American tragedy, almost like ‘Death of a Salesman’ in a way,” Polsky said.

The movie hit theaters on Oct. 20, less than a week after the release of the new Ken Burns documentary, “The American Buffalo.” They cover roughly the time period in U.S. history, when the American bison population plummeted from about 60 million in 1860 to fewer than 300 in the span of just 20 years, Polsky said. The movie doesn’t shy from the horror, eschewing special effects and showing real animal skinning on screen.

“It was shot on Blackfeet land near Glacier National Park, and we promised we’d show them the movie before it came out,” said Polsky, whose team made good on the promise. “To do it with them really made a lot of sense because of their history with the animal and how important the animal is to them. We did a lot of ceremony with them before we shot, and they gave us lessons on skinning. Everything was real.”

Blackfeet representatives “loved the movie and were profusely thankful and talked a lot about it,” added Polsky, who pointed out that there are no Indigenous people on screen. “They understood right away you don’t need Native Americans to have these clichéd scenes in there with them. It says everything you need to say with what the hunters did. The (Indigenous people) are lurking. They’re watching. These hunters are self-destructive. Nature will correct you.”

Like Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a historically based feature about the racist savagery and murder of Indigenous people (in this case, 1920s Osage people whose land contained oil), it’s part of a re-examination of the evil wrought by ambitious men.

Despite its Montana shooting location, Polsky said the film remains rooted in Colorado.

“Montana had better (production) incentives, but the story is based here and I wrote it here,” he said. “I rented an apartment and mainly wrote the film at the Basalt Library. It was the first draft, so I took the book and started page by page trying to mold it into something cinematic. The novel has so much detail.”

Securing Cage to star afforded it Hollywood appeal. Polsky and his brother/business partner Alan first met Cage while producing 2009’s wild “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” which starred Cage as an amoral police officer with severe substance use disorders.

“I don’t know many A-list people on a first-name basis, but (Cage) was the first guy I thought of,” Polsky said. “He’s got that mysterious intensity, and believe me, on set he was even more intense. No one wanted to get near him. I don’t want to say he was a dark force, but he had electricity going through him at all times and everyone was just like ‘Ah! I don’t want to get shot.’”

Cage’s version of Method acting paid off in his performance, but he was also a consummate professional whose deep knowledge of the script and creative ideas during filming helped Polsky see it in a different way.

“He actually brought that buffalo coat he’s wearing on screen,” Polsky said. “He got it online. The glasses, the shaving-his-head thing — those were his ideas, too. He understands that the drive and ambition that created this country were also very destructive. It’s not a happy story all the time, and these real-life guys were individual forces of nature themselves.”

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, In The Know, to get entertainment news sent straight to your inbox.

Seminal novelists of the genre such as Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour had already idealized the American Frontier in hundreds of best-selling books and stories. But Williams, a University of Denver professor for 30 years, took a darker view of U.S. expansion, one that dissected the heroic myths of archetypal cowboys, ranch hands and outlaws.

Director Gabe Polsky, who fought for more than a decade to turn “Butcher’s Crossing” into a movie, said he “never really connected with the genre.”

“Never. I tried to watch (Westerns) a little bit and just kind of disconnected because it was about searching for the Indians and bank robberies and revenge and all of that.”

In 2022, Polsky’s cinematic version, which stars Nicholas Cage, debuted on the film festival circuit, and is now in theaters.

As a novel, the coming-of-age story was arguably the first Western to subvert the genre’s morally certain, decades-old formulas. Williams preceded giants of the revisionist and anti-Western such as Cormac McCarthy (“No Country for Old Men”) and Larry McMurtry (“Lonesome Dove”), although his influence is only lately appreciated by critics and readers.

Williams, who also wrote 1965’s literary masterpiece “Stoner,” invests in the emotional lives of his characters as “Butcher’s Crossing” depicts a thrilling, stomach-churning buffalo hunt. Harvard dropout — and naive Ralph Waldo Emerson devotee — William Andrews trades Boston for the Kansas frontier in an effort to expand his horizons. There he joins buffalo hunter Miller (just one name), whose epic, money-making quest involves finding and skinning a legendary herd of Colorado buffalo to secure his biggest payout yet.

Like the book, the film — which stars Fred Hechinger (“The White Lotus”) as Andrews, and a fearsome Cage as Miller — is set in the early 1870s when Colorado was still a territory riven by murderous land grabs and precious-metal rushes.

“They’re hunting buffalo, but they’re also going out on this crazy sort of ‘Moby Dick’ search,” Polsky said of the movie, which was shot in the Blackfoot Nation in Northwest Montana due to the size and availability of the tribe’s buffalo herd.

In addition to Moby Dick, reviews have likened it to “Apocalypse Now” as it traces Miller’s mental unraveling on the cursed trek to claim and offload more buffalo hides than anyone actually wanted. “It’s an American tragedy, almost like ‘Death of a Salesman’ in a way,” Polsky said.

The movie hit theaters on Oct. 20, less than a week after the release of the new Ken Burns documentary, “The American Buffalo.” They cover roughly the time period in U.S. history, when the American bison population plummeted from about 60 million in 1860 to fewer than 300 in the span of just 20 years, Polsky said. The movie doesn’t shy from the horror, eschewing special effects and showing real animal skinning on screen.

“It was shot on Blackfeet land near Glacier National Park, and we promised we’d show them the movie before it came out,” said Polsky, whose team made good on the promise. “To do it with them really made a lot of sense because of their history with the animal and how important the animal is to them. We did a lot of ceremony with them before we shot, and they gave us lessons on skinning. Everything was real.”

Blackfeet representatives “loved the movie and were profusely thankful and talked a lot about it,” added Polsky, who pointed out that there are no Indigenous people on screen. “They understood right away you don’t need Native Americans to have these clichéd scenes in there with them. It says everything you need to say with what the hunters did. The (Indigenous people) are lurking. They’re watching. These hunters are self-destructive. Nature will correct you.”

Like Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a historically based feature about the racist savagery and murder of Indigenous people (in this case, 1920s Osage people whose land contained oil), it’s part of a re-examination of the evil wrought by ambitious men.

Despite its Montana shooting location, Polsky said the film remains rooted in Colorado.

“Montana had better (production) incentives, but the story is based here and I wrote it here,” he said. “I rented an apartment and mainly wrote the film at the Basalt Library. It was the first draft, so I took the book and started page by page trying to mold it into something cinematic. The novel has so much detail.”

Securing Cage to star afforded it Hollywood appeal. Polsky and his brother/business partner Alan first met Cage while producing 2009’s wild “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” which starred Cage as an amoral police officer with severe substance use disorders.

“I don’t know many A-list people on a first-name basis, but (Cage) was the first guy I thought of,” Polsky said. “He’s got that mysterious intensity, and believe me, on set he was even more intense. No one wanted to get near him. I don’t want to say he was a dark force, but he had electricity going through him at all times and everyone was just like ‘Ah! I don’t want to get shot.’”

Cage’s version of Method acting paid off in his performance, but he was also a consummate professional whose deep knowledge of the script and creative ideas during filming helped Polsky see it in a different way.

“He actually brought that buffalo coat he’s wearing on screen,” Polsky said. “He got it online. The glasses, the shaving-his-head thing — those were his ideas, too. He understands that the drive and ambition that created this country were also very destructive. It’s not a happy story all the time, and these real-life guys were individual forces of nature themselves.”

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, In The Know, to get entertainment news sent straight to your inbox.

What took so long?

“We’ve been trying,” Alamo CEO Tim League explained in a phone interview. “These things just move at a bit of a glacial pace. I think we’ve been actively looking in Boston for eight years.

“For us at least there’s a little bit of a COVID silver lining because theaters after a couple of years became available and we really fell in love with this location.”

The Drafthouse, with 10 screens, is located at 60 Seaport Blvd. All provide dine-in service brought to seats by Alamo Drafthouse’s wait staff.  All seating is assigned. Reservations may be made in person, online or a mobile app purchase. Those under 18 cannot come in alone; they must be with an adult.

What stands out about Alamo Drafthouse theaters is the full food and drink menus with all courses — appetizer, entree, dessert — and full bar options including cocktails, spirits, award-winning milkshakes and a huge local draft beer selection.

Menus are available at each seat, where guests can order.  Call buttons offer quick access to a server.

Drafthouse asks that all guests arrive 30 minutes prior to a show for a specially crafted pre-show program unique to each film, and to allow for the full service experience.

That translates as its famous and strict “No Talking/No Texting” policy. Young children are not allowed (except for special kids’ events).

With Boston the 40th Drafthouse in an expanding nationwide chain, what decides, ‘This is where our next Alamo Drafthouse goes’?

“A complicated question,” League, 53, allowed. “For this particular one, since it was an existing theater, this is where it was going to be.

“We come here and spend a good bit of time in the area to see what it feels like nights. I really liked the breweries, the restaurants and just the entertainment scene around sports and the liveliness of people that are walking around, day and night.”

The chain scoffs at the notion that people don’t want to go see movies in movie theaters anymore.

“That same argument happened with the advent of streaming and streaming content. It’s available – but that doesn’t matter if you want to get out of the house! Restaurants are doing this right”.

And, League added, with blockbusters like “Barbie” “It’s been an incredible year for people to understand again how amazing it is to sit in a theater and experience great movies.”

“Five Nights at Freddy’s” isn’t half as scary as one or two of the parent-vs.-parent brawls I witnessed a few years ago at Chuck E. Cheese’s, but that’s another story, too intense for any storytelling medium.

Let’s talk about this story. Video game creator Scott Cawthon’s Chuck E.-inspired 2014 phenomenon takes place in a decrepit Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzajoint, with the requisite ball pit, wonky electrical wiring and smell of death, with a whiff of sheet cake. Its threatening animatronic creatures — a bear, a bunny, a one-pawed fox, a face-eating robo-bird — run the place at night, and are inhabited by the disintegrating bodies and tortured souls of children who … well, spoiler there, a little late on the warning, sorry, moving on.

In the game, you take the role of night security guard Mike. You monitor the barely functional surveillance cameras and, once the robot killers come for you, you try to stay alive. There’s a labyrinth of backstory, dripped out in dribs and drabs, but Cawthon’s simple setup begot many sequels and a welter of spinoffs and subreddits and fan theories. Now it’s a movie.

And? It’s an odd one, indecisive about its tone and intentions. Full-on R-rated sadism? Half the gaming world is already mad about the movie not going in that direction. Instead, the filmmakers and screenwriters chose to squeak by with a PG-13, leaning away from five nights of steadily mounting carnage and body parts and toward a thick layer of earnest new material devoted to Mike’s horrific childhood depicted in frequent flashbacks and nightmares. These take him back, like a dream-state detective, to the Nebraska campground where Mike’s brother was abducted, never to be found.

Mike’s current life feels much the same as his dream state: stuck, bereft and looking for answers. He’s doing all he can to retain custody of his younger sister. And here we run into what the film industry has referred to for more than a century as “story problems.”

Cawthon and fellow screenwriters Seth Cuddeback and Emma Tammi (who also directed) take an earnest interest in developing the central brother-sister relationship. It works, sometimes. As Mike, Josh Hutcherson (”The Hunger Games”) draws you into a character’s sullen state of mind, persuasively, by doing very little. But there’s a ton of complication and clutter in “Five Nights at Freddy’s.”

The adaptation veers from scenes of Mike’s dream state, to the hapless crew of young thugs employed by Mike’s evil aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson, who deserves better) to discredit Mike, so she can gain custody of her niece (Piper Rubio). A kindly police officer (Elizabeth Lail) knows more about the Fazbear emporium of pain than she’s telling. And there’s the unsettling job counselor (Matthew Lillard) who sets up Mike as Fazbear’s newest night watchman.

I don’t care much about neatness with most genre exercises, but this one’s pretty sludgy. I do care about, and resist, the film’s attempt to be a cuddly version of “Saw,” with faces getting sliced open by a robo-critter’s whirring saw blades. To keep the PG-13 rating intact, the camera and editor cut away just before the splurch, nearly every time. This means millions of 8-year-olds will likely be at the multiplexes this weekend, in a funk, alongside older kids and young adults steeped in nostalgia for the hours they spent at home being Mike. Current box office estimates suggest “Five Nights at Freddy’s” should make nearly double its $25 million production budget by Monday.

Cawthon has known great love and great hate online. Two years ago his political views and donations (he’s a Trump fan, in addition to being an anti-abortion Christian Republican) provoked some controversy and online blowback from former fans. In the movie, there’s a scene where Mike longs for the traditional God-fearing family taken away from him so cruelly. Hutcherson knows exactly how hard to stress this bit: just enough for it to register. The premise, meantime, of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” is entirely about the cruelty, and very likely would’ve made more sense as a straight-up R-rated splatterfest.

Then again, would I have liked a more gratuitous take on the same material? Reader, I cannot say. This one’s shorter than the “It” movies, at least. Once a child-abduction horror premise exceeds the 2-hour mark, the EXIT sign to the left of the screen starts looking better than the screen itself.

———

‘FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S’

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for strong violent content, bloody images, and language)

Running time: 1:50

How to watch: In theaters and streaming on Peacock Thursday

———

©2023 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Based on a 2012 Wired magazine article inspired by Sergio Juarez’s barrier-breaking approach teaching a classroom of impoverished 12-year-olds, “Radical” continues the positive work of producer and star Eugenio Derbez following his turn as a music teacher in the Oscar-winning Best Picture “CODA.”

The Wired story asked if a young Mexican girl named Paloma in Juarez’s class just might be “The Next Steve Jobs.” She was an undiscovered genius.

Years later the Wired writer Joshua Davis approached Derbez’ production company about a film version.

“Immediately, I connected! These are the stories I want to tell,” Derbez, 62, said in a Zoom interview.  “I find it so powerful. The fact that this girl and this teacher who was behind her, even though they were in the worst conditions, with no resources at all, with a violent environment around them, they succeeded. I don’t want to spoil anything but they did amazing things that year.”

Both Sergio and Paloma, who attended the recent Mexican premiere of the Spanish language/English subtitled picture, were on the set as well.

“We contacted both of them. They were supervising the script and we’re supervising the movie on the set because we wanted to tell the story in an accurate way,” Derbez said. “It’s real. We’re not exaggerating anything. What you see in the movie did happen. And they were there, in a truthful way.”

But Derbez knows how different it is to play someone who is alive and going to be looking and judging.

“It was kind of scary. When the director Christopher Zalla and I were talking about the character, we knew it was a real person and thought that we should not make an impersonation of him.

“The idea was to capture his soul, his essence, his message. More than trying to make me look like him — we’re probably physically different — the idea was to focus on the way he was teaching.”

Sergio arrives at this Mexican border town school with hints to a troubled past. Derbez learned what happened.

“When he was teaching, kids at the end of the year, kids used to come say goodbye and ask for a picture. He noticed less kids were asking for a picture. Then nobody came. He was losing touch and decided to make a huge change.

“He started to research why these kids were quitting school. He knew he had to change that reality.”

“Radical” opens Friday

LOS ANGLES — The youth of America have spoken, and when it comes to sex onscreen, they say “ewwwww.”

The new UCLA “Teens and Screens” study, conducted by the Center for Scholars & Storytellers, found that across 1,500 members of Gen Z, ages 10 to 24, young people wanted to see platonic relationships between onscreen characters, and many felt sex wasn’t necessary for story plot. (Only the respondents ages 13 to 24 were asked about sexual content.)

“While it’s true that teens want less sex on TV and in movies, what the survey is really saying is that teens want more and different kinds of relationships reflected in the media they watch,” said Yalda T. Uhls, founder and director of CSS, co-author of the study and adjunct professor in UCLA’s Department of Psychology.

The survey found that adolescents want to see “lives like (their) own” depicted onscreen and crave “authenticity.” Teens, plus the 18- to 24-year-old demographic predominantly desired by advertisers, think that sex and romance are too prominent in TV shows and movies.

Among those 13-24, 44.3% felt that romance is overused in media, and 47.5% agreed that sex isn’t needed for the plots of most TV shows and movies. More than half of Gen Z wants to see more content focused on friendships and platonic relationships, with 39% saying they’re especially interested in aromantic and/or asexual characters depicted in film and television.

On a list of stereotypes that irked Gen Z, romantic tropes ranked fourth. This included a dislike of relationships being necessary for happiness, male and female leads always having to end up together romantically, and love triangles.

“We know that young people are suffering an epidemic of loneliness and they’re seeking modeling in the art they consume. While some storytellers use sex and romance as a shortcut to character connection, it’s important for Hollywood to recognize that adolescents want stories that reflect the full spectrum of relationships,” Uhls said, adding that recent studies show young people are having less sex than their parents did at the same age and more are choosing to be single.

Survey results say that Gen Z’s values and desires “reach depths beyond what society has typically explored.” It suggests teens and young adults have grown tired of “stereotypical, heteronormative storytelling that valorizes romantic and/or sexual relationships,” particularly depictions of toxic romance.

While the survey’s findings might appear cut and dried, it can’t be ignored that sex-heavy shows often outperform the rest by staggering margins. According to HBO, “Euphoria” Season 2 episodes averaged 16.3 million viewers. That’s the highest viewership for any season of an HBO series over the last 18 years aside from “Game of Thrones,” which pulled in an average of 46 million viewers across its eighth and final season in 2019.

Both shows were known for their gratuitous sex scenes, and the sexual content often played a key role in the plot. (Spoiler examples: Tyrion Lannister kills his father Tywin with a crossbow for sleeping with his girlfriend. Also, would King Joffrey Baratheon have been such a monster had he not been conceived by two siblings?)

In “Euphoria,” one of the main antagonist characters (Nate Jacobs’ dad, Cal) is a sexual deviant. Entire plot points revolve around Cal, and his sexual proclivities create problems for several of the main characters.

And “Bridgerton,” the Regency-era high-society drama filled with angst, sexual tension and an increasingly risqué honeymoon? In 2021, Deadline reported that Season 1 of “Bridgerton” was watched (partially or in its entirety) by a record 82 million households around the world and at the time quickly became Netflix’s biggest series by a wide margin.

While UCLA’s “Teens and Screens” survey might have studios considering giving Gen Z what it wants, it may be hard to ignore the success of those steamy sex scenes saturating both the big and small screen.

©2023 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

An offbeat buddy comedy set in 1970 at an all-boys Massachusetts boarding school, the title refers to Giamatti’s single, dedicated but universally hated, long-term teacher Paul Hunham who is to supervise the few students that remain at Barton Academy over Christmas vacation.

Thus a life-changing journey begins for Hunham with his troubled, if brilliant, student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa in his screen debut).

While Payne won his Oscar co-scripting “Sideways,” “Holdovers” lists him only as director.  This project didn’t begin with David Hemingson’s script because, Payne said in a post screening conversation, “There was no script.

“I got the idea for the movie from a fairly obscure 1935 French film called ‘Merlusse’ by the director Marcel Pagnol, who has other masterpieces. That’s maybe one of his more forgotten films. But I saw it at a film festival a dozen years ago and thought, That’s a good premise for a movie. I just held on to it; I didn’t do anything with it.

“I had gone to a private school in Omaha and actually ended up in a boarding school in Massachusetts. Four years ago I got a pilot script, set in a boarding school in Massachusetts, that was very well written. I called the writer and said, ‘I love your script. I don’t want to make it. But would you consider writing a feature set in that very same world?’ And he accepted – that’s how it happened.”

While it wasn’t written specifically for Giamatti, he was the only one considered.  “I’ve been dying to work with that cat again all these years,” Payne said. “This was very much written with him in mind.

“I sent him an early draft, just to check in with him. Because he’s smart, good with material and would have good instincts about it. Like we’re on the right path, both for him specifically and as a movie in general. And he was in.”

As for Angus, Payne’s casting director waded through 800 video submissions – without finding their lead.

“Finally, we activated a plan which was to call the schools where we’re actually going to shoot and say, Whom do you have there?

“And there Dominic was at Deerfield Academy. A senior, a star in the drama department, he’d never been in front of a camera. He wanted to be an actor and was applying to Carnegie Mellon (he got into Carnegie Mellon).

“It was interesting for me to observe that some people have a talent, they’re born to do it.”

“The Holdovers” opens Friday

Coppola, 52, adapted and directs Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir of her courtship, marriage and ultimate emancipation from the King of Rock n Roll.  As Priscilla, Callie Spaeny, a virtual unknown, won the best actress prize at September’s Venice Film Festival and is nominated in the same category for a Gotham Award. Australia’s Jacob Elordi, a teen dream in Netflix’s “Kissing Booth” movies and HBO’s “Euphoria,” is a very tall Elvis. Both are just 26.

Coppola was intrigued once she read Priscilla’s “Elvis and Me” because, she said, “The setting of Priscilla’s story is so unusual as she goes through the things all girls go through. A first kiss, becoming a mother. These are things I can relate to — but it’s in this unusual setting with this legendary couple.

“To me,” she continued, “it’s a human story and shows the ups and downs and her evolution as a girl in this world and leaving to find her own point of view. I looked at ‘Priscilla’ to tell both sides of the romance and the end of the illusion.”

Presley was 26, world famous and in Germany in the Army, when he met 14-year-old Priscilla whose father was also in the service. They divorced when she was 29.

At one point Coppola’s Elvis says, “Actually, love is not enough.” “My main source material was Priscilla’s book and this was a direct quote from the book,” she said. “Personally, I’m not sure the most impressive thing about the story isn’t the endurance of this love. The power of this love that to this day when you talk to Priscilla, you feel the love. It’s true, it’s undying. Love is this tether that ties two people together and I think that’s for eternity.”

Said Spaeny, “It was important to see the story from the beginning.”

Concluded Coppola, “Just being able to speak to Priscilla added so much, the details she would tell me. She described the scene in the movie theater in Germany” – an empty theater except for the two – “and Elvis saying the lines. That wasn’t in the book.  You know he wanted to be a serious actor.

“But I tried to stay in Priscilla’s view, put you in her shoes. Seeing her, I can go back to being that age and having a crush on an older guy. And that’s what I love about films, experiencing someone else’s perspective than your own.”

“Priscilla” opens Friday

The continuing conflict in the Middle East inevitably forms a backdrop to this annual Boston celebration of Jewish culture and its people.

“One thing I can say is,” said Artistic Director Lisa Gossels, “thanks to the power of Zoom, we have 36 guests in-person or on Zoom to bring the community together in conversation.”

The opening night entry is a classic, an unexpected, slightly twisted father-son story: The 20th anniversary 4K restoration of Nathaniel Kahn’s landmark documentary “My Architect” about his coming to terms as the illegitimate son of his deceased father, the celebrated Louis Kahn.

The opening night documentary is “Remembering Gene Wilder” at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. “It’s a remarkable film about his life. He was a writer, director and painter as well as actor,” Gossels said. “A lot of his co-stars are here, alongside his wife Karen Wilder whom he married after Gilda Radner’s death.  He wrote a memoir and recorded an audio book, so we hear from Gene in the film, along with Richard Pryor’s daughter and Mel Brooks.

“It goes much deeper than you expect. It’s a film that makes you smile — and that’s something you want to do in a film.  Leonard Nimoy’s daughter Julie is co-producer with her husband David Knight and Glenn Kirschbaum, the writer and co-director, is from Sharon.  We have three or four from that production with us.”

Among the festival fiction films, “No Name Restaurant” is the centerpiece. “This was 20 years in the making,” Gossels said. “It’s about this orthodox Jew from Brooklyn who goes to meet a matchmaker. He ends up traveling to Alexandria, Egypt and is rescued by a Bedouin Arab.

“An unlikely buddy movie, since they need to overcome their differences to reach their destination, it’s comedic and edge of your seat dramatic. And in Act 3 they are in a Christian monastery. So, it has three religions represented. We have both filmmakers, Stefan Sarazin and Peter Keller.”

For more information, go to https://www.bostonjfilm.org

From the moment it was announced as a major feature film, “Killers of the Flower Moon” has sparked plenty of excitement — and anxiety.

An adaptation of David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller about the murder of Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma, by white settlers plotting to acquire the rich oil deposits under Osage land, was most highly anticipated because of the elite names attached — in particular director Martin Scorsese and stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.

But the project also prompted considerable concern from the Osage nation and other Native Americans. With Scorsese at the helm instead of an Indigenous director, Osage people feared that the film would be yet another example of Hollywood’s traditionally stereotypical portrayal of Native Americans.

“I was worried we were going to get exploited again — not so much in losing resources and our land, but in the telling of the story of how we lost our resources and land,” former Osage Nation Chief Jim Gray told CNN.

The filmmakers themselves were acutely aware of the potential pitfalls, reworking the script’s early structure to center Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), his uncle, nefarious cattle rancher William Hale (De Niro) and the Osage woman, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), whose family they seek to bilk of their oil fortune. In production notes distributed to the press, DiCaprio said, “You would read the book and realize it works beautifully, but we ran the risk of telling yet another white-savior story about an FBI agent who comes in and saves the day. It could have fallen into that really easily. David Grann was always very forthright in saying, ‘Look, if you’re going to do a movie about this, it’s important to understand the Osage role in all of this.'” Scorsese also met with Osage people and hired a number of consultants to increase authenticity on the film.

Representatives for the Osage Nation have given “Killers of the Flower Moon” their blessing and said they hope audiences turn out for the film, while noting there will be varying reactions among individual tribe members.

Not everyone has been wholly satisfied, though. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter at the film’s Los Angeles premiere that went viral on social media, Christopher Cote, who worked as an Osage language consultant on the movie, said he had “complicated feelings” about “Killers of the Flower Moon,” specifically that the film’s focus should have been more firmly centered on Mollie than the white men attempting to usurp her family’s wealth.

Far harsher criticism came from Indigenous actor, writer and director Devery Jacobs, who played Elora Danan on the recently concluded FX comedy “Reservation Dogs.” In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Jacobs said she found “Killers of the Flower Moon” “painful, grueling, unrelenting and unnecessarily graphic.”

Jacobs claimed “each of the Osage characters felt painfully underwritten, while the white men were given way more courtesy and depth.”

She added: “For the Osage communities involved in creating this film, I can imagine how cathartic it is to have these stories and histories finally acknowledged, especially on such a prestigious platform like this film… But admittedly, I would prefer to see a $200 million movie from an Osage filmmaker telling this history, any day of the week.”

But as “Killers of the Flower Moon” enters its second week in theaters buoyed by rave reviews from critics and a strong $23 million opening weekend at the box office, the lion’s share of responses from Indigenous viewers, including members of the Osage Nation, has been pointedly positive. For most of the experts, scholars and others who spoke to the L.A. Times, any reservations about specific aspects of the film’s structure or treatment of its subject matter are of less import than the fact that such a high-profile Hollywood project should put Osage history in the spotlight.

“It’s not surprising with a tribe this large and strong that there would be a range of opinions and feelings,” said Robert Warrior, a member of the Osage Nation and a professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas. “This is a story that a lot of us have grown up with, and it’s important to us.”

Warrior said that while he admired many aspects of “Killers of the Flower Moon, including the performances, cinematography and score (by the late Robbie Robertson, himself Native American), he felt the film still came up short. He said a focus on the federal policies regarding Native Americans and bureaucracy that allowed the murders to happen was missing.

Warrior added that he respected Cote’s perspective: “I’m glad he said what he said. He was not trashing the film. His feeling was thoughtful and perceptive. It’s a valid opinion and one that I hope the filmmakers are able to accept.”

Producer Dawn Jackson, who is Saginaw-Chippewa, indicated that she understood that sentiment.

“In a perfect world, we would be able to tell our own stories, but we’re not there yet,” Jackson said. “Is there artistic license? Sure. But the story comes through loud and clear — the atrocities that were committed and how society looked the other way. That is the key thing.”

Joanna Hearne, a professor in the film and media studies department of the University of Oklahoma who has specialized in Indigenous images in American film history, said she felt “Killers of the Flower Moon” “is one of the only films I’ve seen that shows the damage of settler colonialism as a system.”

She added, “It’s important to honor the complexity of this story. There’s a million ways it could have been told. I wish Lily Gladstone had more screen time. But I love the screen time she has. I feel that throughout her career, her acting has been a form of activism.”

Joshua Acre, CEO of Partnership with Native Americans, said he felt the book version of “Killers of the Flower Moon” was better than the film: “It’s a complicated story and there are a lot of nuances that I think will go over movie viewers’ heads.”

But, he added, “I think it was really well done. And Lily is amazing. I’m glad it’s on the big screen.”

Leah Lemm, a citizen of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and a senior editor of Native News at MPR News, summed up the perspective of many, saying she was encouraged that “Killers of the Flower Moon” adds to the landscape of representation in American film and television. “It’s a reminder of the brutal history. And most important, it makes me want to know more about the Osage Nation.”

©2023 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Cut to sleep-deprived adult Mike (Hutcherson). He lives with his much younger sister Abby (“Stranger Things”-ready Piper Rubio), who obsessively draws pictures of her with Mike and some cartoon animals. Almost unemployable, Mike accepts a job offered by a weirdly menacing agent (Matthew Lillard) at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, an abandoned 1980’s-era pizzeria/arcade.

Like in the game, Mike’s job is to sit before an array of security camera screens at night and make sure no shenanigans occur. Mike has a habit of taking sleeping pills in order to induce a reoccurring dream in which he experiences the moment Garrett was taken while he, Garrett and his parents were on a camping trip. Ergo, Mike is the sleeping security guard. He relives the moment Garrett was taken over and over. If this sounds like the plot of a bad Stephen King story, it is. I would hazard a guess that King is the favorite writer of the creators of this film’s plot. But they in no way share King’s power to mine our collective dreams for horror gold.

The plot will further involve “ghost kids” who appear to Mike in his dreams, animatronic, giant robotic and cartoonish animals – a bear, a rabbit, a duck, a fox and more – that lurk at Fazbear’s and can track down and kill humans in hideous ways for a PG-13 movie and a strange police officer named Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail, “Once Upon a Time”), who appears to be the only police officer in town. We are reminded repeatedly that Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza was huge in the 1980s, and in some scenes the robotic animals can be seen performing The Romantics’ 1983 hit “Talking in Your Sleep” (Get it?). Mike takes Abby to work (?). She befriends the strange creatures in the shadows. How? Why? “Five Nights at Freddy’s” is only for the most gullible viewers. The rest will find their eyelids impossibly hard to hold up.

In an opening scene, a security guard at Freddy’s runs through a maze of hallways before being strapped to a chair and get his face chewed off (off camera). Someone else gets a head bitten off. One of the animatronic creatures is just a skull-like head. Somehow, this thing gets from place to place and flies through the air without appendages or explanation. Mike and Abby’s evil Aunt Jane (a scenery-chewing Mary Stuart Masterson, speaking of the ’80s) appears in a few badly-staged scenes to demand custody of Abby. If she had a mustache, she’d twirl its ends. Hutcherson does a lot of running in the film and not a lot of acting. But he is hardly to blame. The makers of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” appear to forget that you need a screenplay to make a movie, not just a collection of things that happen. The film wants awfully to be a variation on a theme of King’s “It.” It ain’t.

(“Five Nights at Freddy’s” contains gruesome imagery, violence and endangered children)

“Five Nights at Freddy’s”

Rated PG-13. At the AMC Boston Common, AMC South Bay and suburban theaters. Grade: D

The action begins in Paris. The killer is a like a monk in his cell, not praying, but waiting in extremely stoic circumstances (a breezy construction site) for his target to appear. We hear the assassin narrate the action in a monotone. He tells us that boredom is his enemy. An electric heater glows by his side. He wears black rubber gloves and quotes Popeye. He practices some form of yoga. He eats from McDonald’s, wears shades and a hat with a drawn-down band in public. In a park, a boy shoots a woman in the head with a toy gun. Is it his mother? His nanny?

Ah, the banality of gun violence. Remember when Fassbender was in everything? He’s taken a bit of a break and hasn’t had a film credit since 2019 after the dreary thing that was “Dark Phoenix.” “The Killer” is hardly a great return to form. Didn’t Fassbender already make this when it was called “Assassin’s Creed?” It wasn’t very good then either. The Paris hit does not go well. The killer, who may remind some of the much more soulful one played by Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic “Le Samurai” (1967), escapes, erasing any memory of him as he goes, helmet in the Seine.

In his use of one of many false names, he uses a credit card with the moniker Felix Unger, one-half of the 1970s TV show “Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple.” Our man is the odd single. The killer has a fatal attraction to the uniquely mewling music of the Morrissey-fronted, post-punk 1990s band The Smiths.

The killer is a man of few words. “Empathy is weakness,” is his mantra. He retreats to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. A local woman he cares about was savagely attacked. The attackers were looking for him, of course. Now, he seeks revenge (Isn’t this a form of empathy?). Next  he is in New Orleans, and he’s got a nail gun. As a lawyer trying to talk his way out of getting nailed, Charles Parnell is a breath of fresh air. The killer knows how long it takes three nine-gauge nails to the chest to kill and how much sleep-aids to mix with meat to knock out a pit bull. These are dark arts.

The film’s highlight is a fight scene (from the director of “Fight Club,” no less) between the killer and an actor credited as The Brute (Sala Baker, TV’s “The Mandalorian”). It must be five minutes long and really is something to see. But great action alone does not a great movie make.

Fassbender is not a compelling figure in the tradition of Clint Eastwood or Denzel Washington. He is an intelligent Everyman. The last victim, the killer was told, “resembles a Q-Tip.” Of course, that turns out to be second-billed Tilda Swinton, who is in the film for about 15 minutes and sports a white ‘do. Swinton and supporting cast member Arliss Howard command the screen. But the killer remains a nobody, and I never liked The Smiths. “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable,” indeed.

(“The Killer” contains extreme, graphic violence, profanity and brief sexuality)

“The Killer”

Rated R. At the Kendall Square and Coolidge Corner. Grade: B-

It quickly becomes clear that what that means in this case is the movie, though largely entertaining, is not telling a dramatized true tale set within the country’s opioid crisis.

Its characters — including those played by appealing leads Emily Blunt and Chris Evans — never feel all that authentic. And as for what transpires … let’s just say “Pain Hustlers” isn’t afraid to lay it on a little thick now and then.

That said, does this story of ambitious folks getting caught up in pushing doctors to prescribe a potentially harmful drug in the hopes of lining their pockets ring true at various points? Oh, sure.

Its genesis was screenwriter Wells Tower being sent journalist Evan Hughes’ 2018 New York Times article “The Pain Hustlers,” about the scandal surrounding the company Insys Therapeutics. Furthermore, the book Hughes would later write, eventually titled “Pain Hustlers: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup” and developed alongside the movie, serves very loosely as its basis.

However, “Pain Hustlers” — helmed by David Yates, the director of seven movies in the “Harry Potter” universe — is more interested in being engaging than it is in hitting hard.

It wants us to invest in Blunt’s Liza Blake, a scrappy if not always reliable single mom whom Evans’ Pete Brenner meets at the exotic dance club where she works.

Looking to do the best she can for teen daughter Phoebe (Chloe Coleman, “Gunpowder Milkshake”) and needing to move out of her judgemental sister’s garage, Liza takes Pete up on an offer for a sales position at Zanna, the failing Florida-based pharmaceutical company where he’s in management and works with people he despises.

She is given just one week to hook a “whale” — a doctor who will prescribe the company’s fentanyl-based drug, Lonafen, intended to relieve pain in cancer patients. With much effort, she finds that whale, Brian d’Arcy James’ Dr. Lydell, whom Chloe refers to at one point as “Doctor Sketchball.”

Soon, more prescriptions are being written by more doctors, money is flowing into Zanna and rules increasingly are being bent and broken by drug reps and docs alike.

While Liz and Pete are making the highly profitable moves, the puppetmaster is Zanna head Dr. Jack Neel (Andy Garcia). He talks of creating the drug because the idea of his wife being in pain while she died of cancer broke his heart but is obsessed with the company maintaining its incredible growth rate.

Yates and Tower want us to have someone to root for, so Emily — after buying an incredible home and paying “enhanced tuition” at her daughter’s exclusive private school — develops a conscience. She worries about what doctors agreeing to prescribe Lonafen for not-FDA-approved uses will mean for patients and wants to take steps to make Zanna less of a target for the feds. However, Jack — an increasingly paranoid germaphobe who has worked to isolate himself from the actions of his employees — isn’t interested.

Thanks to the almost always compelling Blunt (“Edge of Tomorrow,” “A Quiet Place”), it is, in fact, pretty easy to care about what happens to Liza, whose motivation for (eventually) doing the right thing includes her daughter’s need for a pricy medical procedure. She’s no angel, Blunt is so good that we forget that for big stretches of “Pain Hustlers.”

It’s a little harder to worry about what will become of Pete, a character given little dimension by Tower and Yates and who, for some reason, has been provided with a distracting Boston accent by Beantown native Evans (“Avengers: Endgame,” “Knives Out”).

We wouldn’t have minded a bit more screen time for Garcia (“Expend4bles”), who adds a little color to “Pain Hustlers” as the eccentric if ultimately loathsome Jack.

Likewise, the film doesn’t find quite enough for the talented Catherine O’Hara (“Best in Show,” “Schitt’s Creek”) to do as Jackie, Liza’s loose-cannon mother, whom she hires to be a sales representative. (What could go wrong there?)

“Pain Hustlers” doesn’t ignore the damage the drug is doing to the people taking it and their loved ones, but that isn’t where its focus lies. The movie wants to be “The Wolf of Wall Street” rather than something akin to the excellent Hulu limited series “Dopesick.” As a result, it feels a bit slight, short story writer Tower’s lack of screenwriting experience perhaps showing a bit.

On the other hand, in Yates’ hands, it’s brisk and punchy. There’s simply something to be said from any streaming offering that doesn’t stagnate.

“Pain Hustlers” shines more light on a shady and dangerous world, one in which doctors are incentivized to write prescriptions and where profit can be more important to some than quality health care. It isn’t the first work to do that, and it isn’t the best.

But at least it has Emily Blunt.

‘Pain Hustlers’

Where: Netflix.

When: Oct. 27.

Rated: R for language throughout, some sexual content, nudity and drug use.

Runtime: 2 hours, 2 minutes.

Stars (of four): 2.5.

Life is so complicated. Our heroine Leila Jamshidpour (Layla Mohammadi) gets pregnant, and in spite of her independent spirit, she decides to have the baby with the halting approval of “Hedwig.” “The Persian Version” then proceeds to examine the terrible relationship Leila, who has five or six grown-up brothers, has had with her tall, beautiful mother Shireen (Niousha Noor). Complicating Leila’s relationship with her mother is her father’s daunting medical state.

Her father, whose name is Ali Reza (Bijan Daneshmand) is a longtime physician so in need of a heart transplant that he is about to be given an organ that will probably fail in two years in order to keep him alive. Typically, matriarch Shireen proclaims that Leila, a budding filmmaker, must stay home with grandmother Mamanjoon (Bella Warda) while her father is under the knife and the rest of the family shelters at the hospital. When Leila was a child, Shireen often forced her daughter to make dinner for the entire family.

In a magical realist style name-checked by Leila, we will then experience the family’s tangled and intricate back story, including the reason why her parents fled Iran in the 1960s for Brooklyn; the early months of Shireen’s marriage to Ali Reza when they lived in the remote mountains; and the true identity of one of Leila’s brothers. We will also hear about why Iran and U.S. “got a divorce.”

Now, try to imagine all of this being related to us using Cindy Lauper’s anthem “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” as a refrain, along with both Iranian and contemporary music, including an appearance by Iranian pop star Googoosh, and both traditional Iranian dance and contemporary dance. Whew.

“The Persian Version” is both the story of an Iranian-American family, an entity that is naturally conservative due to its Muslim background, and the coming-of-age story about an Iranian-American lesbian having the child of a straight British actor dubbed “the ugly one” by her brothers, told in a free-wheeling, free-associative manner. Shireen has a guardian spirit named Iman Zaman, who appears in the nick-of-time to save her and her children. Faced with a disastrous medical bill, Shireen announces, “We don’t do bankruptcy,” and launches a brilliant career as a realtor in nearby New Jersey.

Written and directed by Maryam Keshavarz (“Circumstance”) in her sophomore outing, “The Persian Version” combines semi-autobiography, soap opera, music, dance and the kind of enthusiasm that cannot be faked. Keshavarz may think that the film is about Leila. But the truth is that it is a celebration of Shireen. And for the absolutely magnetic and fearless Noor, whose Shireen is alternately mother, evil stepmother and “strong Iranian woman,” “The Persian Version” may be her star-is-born moment.

(“The Persian Version” contains sexually suggestive material and profanity)

“The Persian Version”

Rated R. In English and Farsi with subtitles. At the Landmark Kendall Square and AMC Boston Common. Grade: A-

Directed and co-written by Justine Triet (“Sibyl”), the film is a dense, sophisticated deep dive into the complexities of a marriage after the French husband dies in a tumble from the third floor of the family’s fix-it-up, wooden chalet in Grenoble, where he, his German writer-wife and their piano-playing 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) lived.

Before her husband’s death, Huller’s Sandra Voyter is interviewed in the chalet by a young journalist. But they have to give up because Sandra’s husband Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), also a writer, although a failed one, is renovating on the third floor and blaring deafening music.

When their son Daniel, whose vision has been impaired by an accident, returns to the chalet with the blue-eyed family dog Snoop, he finds his father bleeding and mortally injured at a front of the chalet. He calls his mother. But it is too late; the man dies. How did he fall? He has an injury that suggests that he was whacked on the skull before he fell. Will the wife, the only known person to have been in the chalet, be indicted? A suspect, she is interviewed by the authorities.

One of the many things we learn about Sandra and Samuel (the characters have the same first names as the actors) is that they use real experiences and people they know as fodder for their fiction. In fact in a crucial development, the authorities learn that Samuel may have been recording a fight he got into with Sandra on the day before his death. The case becomes news. Sandra becomes the focus of national attention. Her neighbors in the glorious Alpine city of Grenoble never accepted her, and yet they pack the courtroom where her fate will be decided.

Huller is like quicksilver as the accused wife. It’s impossible to get a fix on her. While she hikes the mountainous area near the chalet, the authorities eerily reenact the accident in the distance using a dummy. At times, “Anatomy of a Fall” reminds one of Park Chan-wook’s similarly labyrinthine and darkly romantic 2022 murder mystery “Decision to Leave.” Sandra and her lawyer Vincent Renzi (vulpine-faced Swann Arlaud) appear on the verge of more than a professional relationship. In one heated exchange with her husband, Sandra says that she was forced by their marriage to leave her home in Germany and her language to live in Grenoble and speak French. In “Anatomy of a Fall,” all marriages are a mystery.

At two-and-a-half hours, “Anatomy of a Fall” can be a tough sit. But like “Sibyl,” Triet’s 2019 “Persona”-like examination of a relationship between a psychologist-writer (Virginie Efira) and an actor (Adele Exarchopoulos), the film is full of fascinating flourishes. At the tribunal, lawyers clatter up and down stairs like mice in a maze, while the “other” audience, the one in the courtroom, sits slavering for more juicy bits about Sandra’s sexual history to be revealed. The film is a sexual house of mirrors. As you try to figure out whodunnit, Vincent whips up a lunch of spaghetti, parmigiano and fresh pepper. Huller is riveting as usual, and “Anatomy of a Fall” gives us a lot to chew over.

(“Anatomy of a Fall” contains gruesome images, profanity and mature themes)

“Anatomy of a Fall”

Rated R. In English, German and French with subtitles. At the AMC Boston Common and Coolidge Corner Theater. Grade: A-

“I’m pretty much black and blue from pinching myself and you can quote me on that!” said the former Shelby Township resident, laughing. “I have a fair number of writer friends whose books have been optioned. It’s not as rare as you think, but of those whose materials have been optioned and have been made (into a movie) – whether it’s in the theaters or went straight to streaming – is small. The number who have had it made (into a movie) for a theatrical release is smaller yet. I have no idea what the numbers are, but it’s definitely pinchworthy.”

In “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” Helena Pelletier is happily married with a loving husband and two beautiful daughters. But she has a dark past she hoped would stay buried. Her father, Jacob Holbrook, alias the Marsh King, abducted her mother and she was born two years later. Helena was raised in captivity in the marshlands of the Upper Peninsula. Eventually, Helena escaped her father’s thrall and Jacob went to prison.

More than 20 years pass and Jacob escapes from prison. After murdering two guards, he’s disappeared into the marshlands. The police launch a manhunt, but Helena knows they haven’t a prayer since that is his domain. The only person who can bring down Jacob is the one person trained by him: Helena.

“Every once in a while you read a book that’s so good, you can’t look up until you finish. It’s so clear and specific and moving that you know it’s the book the author was meant to write. (The book), set in the U.P., is indelible in every way: setting, story, and character,” said Robin Agnew, former owner of Aunt Agatha’s bookstore in Ann Arbor.

Opening Friday, Nov. 3, “The Marsh King’s Daughter” stars Daisy Ridley (Rey in the 2015-19 “Star Wars” sequel trilogy) and Ben Mendelsohn (“Captain Marvel”). Adapted for the screen by Mark L. Smith (“The Revenant”), “Daughter” is directed by Neil Burger (“Divergent”).

Dionne’s involvement in the movie has been “pretty close to zero,” in her own words.

“When my literary agent sent (the ‘Daughter’) manuscript around to editors to see if anyone wanted to publish the book, he sent me an email, ‘By the way, you also have a film agent.’ Honestly, my first thought was, ‘I guess it could be a movie.’ I did not think movie for one second when I was writing the book because I was writing the book!” she explained.

Dionne praised Ridley, Mendelsohn, and Smith.

“I have zero screenwriting experience and didn’t even picture my book as a movie, whereas (Smith) is super-talented. I was more than happy to hand off the adaptation to him,” she said. “I’ve seen an early version of the movie and (Ridley) is fantastic. I had no idea she could deliver such a nuanced performance and I really think she captures Helena’s push-pull relationship with father. I’m very impressed. … (Mendelsohn) is so creepy. He’s fantastic. He epitomizes Jacob.”

A Grosse Pointe North High School alumna, Dionne attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She wrote three novels – 2008’s “Freezing Point,” 2011’s “Boiling Point,” and 2014’s “The Killing: Uncommon Denominator” – before breaking out with “The Marsh King’s Daughter” six years ago.

The book has earned many awards and accolades. It won the Barry Award for Best Novel. It’s been translated into 27 languages. Not only was it a best-seller in the United States, but also in Germany, Sweden, and Iceland. The New York Times and People Magazine gave it rave reviews.

“My first three books had modest success. (Regarding the book’s reception), I often say that you’d have to take all of my previous publishing experience, combine it, and then supersize it to equal what’s happened to me with ‘The Marsh King’s Daughter,’” Dionne said. “On my website, if you go to the ‘about’ page and click on my ‘awards’ tab, it’s crazy how many booksellers, newspapers, bloggers and authors chose it as one of their best books of the year the year it came out. There’s a long list there. Those are just some of the highlights that distinguish (‘Daughter’) from my early novels.”

Her first two novels were science-based thrillers and the third was based on the 2011-14 AMC series “The Killing.”

“What I discovered after ‘The Marsh King’s Daughter’ is psychological suspense is my forte and this is what I should’ve been writing all along,” Dionne said. “Just because an author begins their career writing a certain kind of book, it doesn’t mean that’s where their strengths lie. I’m fortunate to discover the kind of fiction I happen to be very good at. … By pushing myself to do something different, I discovered I was a better writer than I realized.”

To date, Dionne has penned five novels. “The Wicked Sister,” which also occurs in Michigan, came out in 2020. She is in the finishing stages of her sixth novel, which is set primarily in Grand Marais and has a climatic fight scene on Lake Superior in a fishing boat during a storm.

“‘The Marsh King’s Daughter’ uses the marshland as its main setting. ‘Wicked Sister’ takes place in the forest. The Great Lakes are such a huge part of Michigan, particularly in the U.P., so I wanted to use that as the main setting of the third book,” she explained.

“‘The Marsh King’s Daughter’ could be set nowhere else but the U.P., and Dionne is an amazingly evocative and vivid writer describing her setting,” Agnew said. “While I grew up in Michigan and spent my summers ‘up north,’ entering the U.P. always felt like I was going to a different country, and Dionne is (an) expert in portraying that feeling.”

Alongside New York Times best-selling author Hank Phillippi Ryan, Dionne co-hosts The Back Room, an online conversation from 7-9 p.m. Sundays. Started in 2020, it features four authors who discuss their books. Ryan and Dionne do a brief interview with the authors, who are then divided into four breakout rooms for 15 minutes, giving the audience the opportunity to have a discussion with their favorite authors.

Dionne and Ryan have hosted best-selling authors Linwood Barclay, Jeff Abbott, May Cobb, Don Bentley, Kathy Reichs, Samantha Downing, Michael Koryta, Mark Greaney, Yasmin Angoe, Brian Freeman, Gregg Hurwitz, Paula Munier and more. The Nov. 5 event will feature Tess Gerritsen. The Nov. 12 event – the last for the fall – will feature Jacquelyn Mitchard and Farmington Hills author Stephen Mack Jones.

“Karen is a treasure,” Ryan said. “She is brilliantly, amazingly, consistently generous and thoughtful, and absolutely one of the most humble and respectful people I have ever met. Karen somehow manages to be completely confident while being supremely grateful. Her joy and love for life and family is unmatched – and so is her talent for her beloved writing craft. Diligent, hard-working, and the authentic real deal. I am so thrilled with all the amazing buzz about the movie.”

Dionne has a message for those who’ve read the book and plan to see the movie.

“When fans see the movie, I hope they realize it’s (an) adaptation of my book, not a recreation,” she said. “I’d like them and sit back and enjoy (the) movie for what it is. They can go back later and compare the movie to the book.”

Visit Dionne at karen-dionne.com. For more information about The Back Room, visit the-back-room.org.

In “The Royal Hotel,” director Kitty Green’s gripping, grubby Australian Outback noir, the Royal Hotel is a comically unregal place lit by the dead glare of fluorescent lights, dotted with predatory eyes lurking in the shadows.

The eyes belong to the men working for the local mining company. At this remote, two-story dump in the middle of nowhere — part saloon, part boarding house for temporary workers — two American women arrive to make some quick money behind the bar. Sensible and wary Hanna, played by Julia Garner, and her more reckless, up-for-anything friend Liv, played by Jessica Henwick, (both superb) realize very quickly that they’ll be putting up with trash talk, harassment, uncertain pay schedules and worse.

They’re expected by the owner of the Royal, the frequently drunk Billy (Hugo Weaving, a long, shaggy way from “The Matrix”), to perform the usual female paradox while they’re there and the customers are thirsty: Shut up, take it and smile. “You’re driving ‘em all away with that attitude,” he warns the cautious Hanna. “The Royal Hotel” tightens its screws with every scene, taking the premise into ever-darker territory without losing its authentic sense of place and people.

Liv, whose financial duress leads to them taking this gig on a wing and a prayer, at first just wants to see some kangaroos. Hanna goes along for the ride. By the end of the first day and night in the pub, navigating a nasty but never caricatured variety of men, Hanna wants out. But she stays. There’s a harsh kind of beauty here, especially at night, with stars brighter than she’s ever seen. But in daylight or in moonlight, the sounds of fear and knife-edge trouble are everywhere.

Green co-wrote the taciturn screenplay with Oscar Redding; this is her second narrative feature (she’s made two feature-length documentaries as well). Her previous drama, “The Assistant” (2019), drew a remarkable performance from Garner as a film executive’s assistant caught in the crosshairs of a Harvey Weinstein-style predator. See that film if you haven’t; it’s a minimalist marvel of precision and perception.

The simple, sturdy plot of “The Royal Hotel” demands something other than minimalism, but Green’s sophomore triumph is no less precise than “The Assistant” in its staging, editing and perceptiveness about what women put up with most every day of their lives. Kasra Rassoulzadegan served as editor; Michael Latham’s cinematography is spot on, in seductive sunshine as well as the murk of the bar itself. Every supporting performance feels perfectly cast and shrewdly delivered, with standout work from Ursula Yovich’s Carol, the Aboriginal Australian cook whose life with the bar’s owner has plainly been a bleak one.

The film’s reception along the festival circuit has been respectful but the movie deserves more than that. I was with it right to the last line; Garner and Henwick are doing the kind of acting that looks easy but isn’t. It’s a film of flickering doubts and accumulating, justifiable paranoia.

Green has made two very different, extraordinarily efficient and compact movies in a row. That, too, may look easy but is anything but — unless you’re a filmmaker and writer of her particular gifts.

______

‘THE ROYAL HOTEL’

3.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language throughout, sexual content and nudity)

Running time: 1:31

How to watch: Now in theaters and streaming on Prime Video

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©2023 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

For those who remember Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on their highly rated and influential weekly show that was all about film reviews, “Opposable Thumbs” hits at the heart of the duo’s trademark Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down verdict on each film.

“Their influence is still felt today,” said Singer, 42, a film critic and film writer for decades.  “I watched the show growing up and it absolutely was the thing that really got me first interested in movies.”

But did these two Chicago film critics – Siskel reviewed for the Chicago Tribune and Ebert, the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, was at the Chicago Sun-Times — really “change movies forever”?

“You know, they had this very contentious relationship. They fought all the time. They were legitimate rivals and competitors that didn’t necessarily like each other, especially at the start,” Singer said.  “So, a lot of the show’s mythology is about those stories. Pranking each other, fighting. Yelling at each other! And absolutely, if I was going to do this book, that has to be part of it.

“But I also wanted to talk about film and film criticism — and that’s what that subtitle suggests: The impact these guys had on the world of film, film criticism on television and popular culture at large. They had an enormous impact on all of those things in terms of introducing this style of film criticism, this back and forth, which is still so prevalent in podcasts and YouTube. All these different places.

“They certainly were influential in championing filmmakers and movies that they loved, fighting for causes that they believed in, like film preservation or fighting against the colorization of black and white movies. All sorts of things.”

“Opposable Thumbs” offers a bonus surprise – an appendix of 24 obscure films both critics championed and loved.

“How that happened was in my research, I went back and rewatched as many episodes of the show as I could. Of course, there are the movies that are the classics. What surprised me was how many movies that not only had I not seen but in some cases never heard of.  Movies that kind of vanished into thin air.

“As I was watching these episodes, it made me want to go watch those films.”

So, the Appendix salutes “these important film critics that were so important to me personally,” Singer said, while also injecting film criticism into a book bursting with backstage stories.

 “Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever” releases Oct. 24 

Like the great 1959 “Anatomy of a Murder,” whose aura this “Anatomy” invokes, what co-writer and director Justine Triet aims to emphasize with her “Anatomy” is ambiguity.  In Otto Preminger’s masterpiece the question is not if a jealous husband killed the man accused of raping his wife, it’s “was it really non-consensual?”

“That movie is very important for me.  I saw that movie 10 years ago,” Triet, 45, said in a post-screening Q&A at the New York Film Festival. “It’s so modern the way they are playing in the courtroom.”

In “Anatomy of a Fall” the question is whether Sandra (Germany’s Sandra Hüller), a writer, pushed her husband, also a writer, out the window of their Grenoble chalet. Or did he jump?

His dead body is discovered in the snow by his partially blind 9-year-old son who had been out walking their dog.

This “Anatomy,” which is in French and English, begins with Sandra asking a journalist, “What do you want to know?”

But what the actress needed to know — whether Sandra was guilty or not — was something Triet refused to reveal.

“I’m a big fan of working with what is in the script,” Hüller, 45, said. “I know you don’t need more information. But that first sentence is the headline of the film and I didn’t realize that while shooting it.

“But everything I needed to know was there — it was a perfect script. All the complexity of the character was there. All the questions I had that would never be answered. These were questions Justine couldn’t and wouldn’t answer.

“I was dealing with a character who kept her secrets and I made one decision: I would always tell the truth.  The sentences I would say would be true. That was the main thing.”

“There are lots of movies like this,” Triet allowed. “So we had to find a way to make our movie.”

Unlike most courtroom dramas where it is in court that truth is discovered, in this court fictions emerge.

That’s true, Triet acknowledged.  “At the beginning it was OK that we create something. We were telling a story with doubt and I wanted to remain on the side of ambiguity and ambivalence. I like to watch things that don’t offer a resolution. And the more we know about her, the more opaque she is.

“The trial is like two fictions — and truth is in the middle. But it’s not a faithful truth. So we can’t decide.”

“Anatomy of a Fall” opens Friday

“Killers” charts the murderous rampage in 1920s Oklahoma that decimated the Osage Nation tribal members who, because of oil on their reservation, were among the richest people in America.  But the indigenous natives could not sell their stake, it could only be inherited.

That saw white men, including DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart,  marry and murder Osage women to acquire their fortune. The killer conspiracy is led by the benevolent-seeming Oklahoma entrepreneur William King Hale (De Niro). What makes Burkhart so conflicted is that he genuinely loves his Osage heiress Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone).

In a virtual global press conference earlier this week Scorsese, 80, noted, “It was very important for me as soon as I saw the book,” that he answer the question: “How truthful can we be and have truth and dignity as best we can? One way we can deal with that is by getting in touch with the culture of the Osage.

“For me I wanted to play with that (Native American) world in contrast to the white European world. We went out and talked with the Osage. They were naturally cautious.  We weren’t going to fall into the trap of the cliche of victims or the ‘drunken Indian,’ yet tell the story as straight as possible.”

That story centers on a truly twisted core, Scorsese explained. “Molly loved Ernest, it’s a love story. So the script shifted that way and Leo decided to play Ernest instead of King.

“What I wanted to capture was the nature of the cancer that creates this easy-going genocide.  That’s why we went with the story of Molly and Ernest. For me instead of coming from the outside to find who done it, it’s a story of sin by omission. Silent complicity. That afforded us the possibility to open the picture from inside out.”

It was 50 years ago that with De Niro, as star Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” announced an original, new filmmaker.  The duo would go on to score with, among many, “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas” and “Cape Fear.”

It was De Niro who suggested Scorsese take a look at his teenage costar – DiCaprio! — in “This Boy’s Life.”  “It was casual,” the filmmaker recalled. “Although he rarely gives recommendations.”

That eventually led to Scorsese-DiCaprio collaborations, from “Gangs of New York,” “The Aviator” – “That’s where we really clicked,” Scorsese said — “The Departed” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

“I started watching this as an author writing the book and trying to get material,” Leamer says on a recent call. “And after five minutes, his stuff is so fascinating I forget that and just watch it because I’m enjoying it so much.

“That’s how good he is,” he says. “That’s how he involves you. He knows just what he’s doing.”

Leamer persevered and “Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession” arrived on Tuesday, Oct. 10.

In it, Leamer explores the work of Hitchcock and eight actresses with whom he worked, from June Howard-Tripp in 1925’s “The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog” to Tippi Hedren in “The Birds” and “Marnie” in 1963 and ’64.

In between, Leamer explores Hitchcock’s work with Madeleine Carroll (“The 39 Steps,” “Secret Agent”), Ingrid Bergman (“Spellbound,” “Notorious,” “Under Capricorn”), Grace Kelly (“Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window,” “To Catch a Thief”), Kim Novak (“Vertigo”), Eva Marie Saint (“North by Northwest”), and Janet Leigh (“Psycho“).

Hitchcock’s life and career has been examined in numerous books from before and after his death at 80 in 1980. His infatuation with his leading ladies, particularly the blondes and his odd, sometimes cruel manner with them are well known.

But Leamer is the first biographer to shift the focus from Hitchcock in the foreground to zoom in on the women with whom the director achieved some of his greatest works.

“Hitchcock’s Blondes” is the second in a planned trilogy about male creative geniuses and their female friends, colleagues and confidants. Leamer, 81, is currently working on a book about artist Andy Warhol and his many muses.

The first book in his series, “Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era” arrived in 2021. Its story of writer Truman Capote and the New York City circle of women in which he moved arrives as the second chapter of producer Ryan Murphy’s FX anthology series “Feud” in 2024.

Q: Do you remember when you first became aware of Alfred Hitchcock?

A: He’s so much a part of our culture, I don’t even know. You know, if you go on Amazon Prime and plug in Hitchcock, there are over 40 of his films you can watch today. That’s the magnitude of that guy’s accomplishments.

Q: How did you arrive at the framework of the book, focusing on these eight women?

A: Well, chronology is God’s gift to a writer. You’d better have a damn good reason to do away with it. So the chronology is his life and the blondes are pretty obviously the candidates for telling it.

When I write a book, I always write the ending in my head and then I try to write the book that would justify that ending. And that’s what I did here. I wanted the ending to be that AFI tribute (in March 1979). I wanted the audience at that point, the readers, to appreciate his greatness, and also the dark part of it as well. And to appreciate the actresses as well.

Q: Three of the actresses are still living. Tippi Hedren doesn’t do interviews but you were able to talk with Eva Marie Saint from ‘North by Northwest’ and Kim Novak from ‘Vertigo.’ What was that like?

A: Eva Marie Saint was fabulous. You know, she’s 99 years old now, living by herself in her apartment. She wants to have her own life. I think that’s incredible.

Q: From her chapter in the book, she seems to be one of the most grounded of the Hitchcock actresses.

A: She was grounded, but she is calculating. And I don’t say that as a criticism, just the opposite. She knew the life she wanted early on. She had some success in television. Got a little apartment. She was lonely, she wanted to marry. She didn’t want to marry an actor. She married this producer. And they had the most wonderful marriage.

Then in her career, she loved her children. She liked to act, but when they were growing up, she’d do just one movie a year. She put her Academy Award statuette for ‘On The Waterfront’ in the closet and just forgot it. She really has immense character as far as I’m concerned.

Q: A lot of the stories of Hitchcock and the actresses are well known. I’m curious what your conversation with her provided that you didn’t already have?

A: She had some tidbits, but she’s told these stories many times. I found a few new things. It was just as much to get a real feeling of her emotionally. I think I wrote a much better chapter because I knew her in that way.

Q: Kim Novak, from your chapter on her, seems like perhaps the actress Hitchcock treated the worst. What was she like?

A: It’s inexplicable to me (how she was treated). He brings her up to luncheon and shows her his paintings, which he knows she won’t appreciate the way he appreciates them, and the vintage wine, which she doesn’t understand. Just to put her down. And the first day in the studio there’s this dead chicken attached to her mirror and Hitch and the other men standing around laughing at her.

She said she didn’t know what that was about. I don’t know what it’s about. It just didn’t make any sense to me. But it’s not a great thing to do to this vulnerable, insecure actress on the first day.

And then when she finished it, I think she deserved an Academy Award nomination because I think she’s magnificent. It’s a very difficult role. But Hitch put her down. Even when that putting down probably diminished the number of people wanting to see the movie.

Q: Was she candid and open about her treatment by him?

A: She really appreciated Hitchcock. She has nothing negative to say about it. It’s the best thing she did in her whole life, and she puts it in perspective.

Q: In recent years, there’s been a lot of discussion about how to appreciate art made by men with problematic histories. Might this book change Hitchcock’s reputation?

A: If the things about Woody Allen are true – and I don’t know if they are, but if they are, well, I wouldn’t want to watch his films, right? This stuff about Hitchcock isn’t at that magnitude, in my opinion. In the #MeToo times, people are just too easily dismissed, and I don’t think it’s fair to him.

There was a biographer of him, Donald Spoto, who just focused on the darkness, and that had a big impact on Hitchcock’s reputation. I don’t think that’s fair.

Q: Of the Hitchcock films you watched featuring these women, do you have a favorite you go back to?

A: It depends on what you want. I mean, ‘To Catch a Thief’ is just pure fun. You can’t beat that. ‘Marnie,’ the dark brilliance of that is irresistible. And ‘Psycho,’ I mean, there’s nothing like ‘Psycho,’ right?

But the goodness ends there. Cue the “Friends”-sounding opening theme music. Dobrev plays Wren Pepper, a low-achieving, thirty-ish singleton who works in a gift shop in an unidentified city and yearns for more time with her beloved friends from high school (there is no mention of college). The tall, self-centered blonde Jill (Hayley Magnus, TV’s “The Mapleworth Murders”), who is also a mother, has become some sort of girl boss. Redhead Cece (Stephanie Koenig, TV’s “The Flight Attendant”) has a new baby and is totally stressed out about it, and marathon runner Laurel (Sherry Cola, “Joy Ride”) has her training to keep her busy. In an opening scene, Cece claims to have learned how to sleep with her eyes open (I did that watching this).

Wren manages to get drunk in the morning and try to leave without paying at a local bar. She ends up in jail. When her behavior further shocks her friends, Wren blurts out the lie that she has cancer.

When asked to specify, she says that she, a heavy smoker and drinker has a “little tonsil cancer.” Yes, there will be a lot of puking, but very little in the way of mirth or humor. At The Inviting Place, the modest gift and card shop, where Wren works, the customers are few and far between. Her oddly tolerant boss Malcolm (Ray McKinnon, TV’s “Rectify”) is, like almost everyone, sympathetic when he hears Wren’s news. We hear the words “Uber,” “Postmates” and “Tinder” in quick succession as if to check them off a list of magical utterances that must be pronounced in any new movie.

Wren goes to a cancer support group, where she meets Leo (Brandon Mychal Smith), a kind and handsome young man with liver cancer, who feels like it’s OK  to use harsh language in front of other people’s kids in the pet store where he works. I didn’t know if it was a character flaw, or if writer-director Cram forgot there were kids in those scenes. “Fight Club” and “A Walk to Remember,” two films that could not be more different, are referenced.

Wren talks about having sessions with her friends during which they would fire “love missiles” at her to help her heal. Wren and her friends go out drinking at a club, where the other young women are slightly younger than they. Wren, Cece, Jill and Laurel get drunk, pole dance (of course), get into hair-pulling fights and land in jail (this is Wren’s second time). An alarm clock montage accompanies Wren’s quest to “atone.” We know Wren has reached her redemption when she finally cleans her filthy bedroom (and tries to eat a sandwich that has been in her trash). I’m sure it’s possible to make a comedy about having cancer. “50/50” was not bad. “Sick Girl,” which manages to waste the talent of Wendy McLendon-Covey as Wren’s mother, is. Bad.

(“Sick Girl” contains profanity, sexual references and drug use)

“Sick Girl”

Rated R. On Digital and VOD.. Grade: C

Slyly slipping in some archival footage, Chin and Vasarhelyi fill in the background history.

Nyad, who took her surname from the Greek word for “water nymph” at the encouragement of her father, set records swimming across Lake Ontario and around Manhattan Island and from the Bahamas to Florida (102 miles). The action begins when Nyad (Bening) tolerates a surprise 60th birthday party thrown by her best friend Bonnie Stoll (Foster).  A Boomer born in 1949, Nyad worked for 30 years for ABC News, and she hasn’t been in the water in ages. But she’s a fierce Scrabble competitor, and she doesn’t want to “succumb to mediocrity” in her old age. Like Tennyson’s Odysseus, she dreams of a crowning, final adventure, and she concocts a plan to swim from Cuba to Key West.

At the local pool, Nyad gets into the water and doesn’t get out until after dark. She’s just warming up. Speaking to a class of children, she admits that she poops in the water during marathon swims. What are the dangers? Sharks, stingrays, Portuguese man o’ wars and venomous jellyfish.

Diana and Bonnie arrange for a team of young kayakers to protect her during the swim using an electric “shield” to repel sharks. It doesn’t however work on jellyfish. After a terrible introductory meeting, Diana enlists dyspeptic charter fisherman John Bartlett (Rhys Iffans, completing an acting trifecta) as her navigator. It is inevitable that Diana, who sports a red light on her bathing cap, will vomit seawater and hallucinate during her swim. Bonnie and the team keep close to Diana in the boat, cruising at the same speed and keeping a light on the swimmer. Bonnie and John are vigilant.

During the swims, while Diana sings and counts, we see what she is thinking. We get a rather cheesy-looking version of the Taj Mahal in one of these scenes. But we also encounter her childhood, her introduction to competitive swimming, and her sexual abuse as a child by a beloved coach.

Bonnie and Diana are a gay comedy team, arguing, bantering and fighting over Diana’s willingness to risk her life. A crowd cheers Diana on her first attempt. By the fifth, Diana is older and the crowds have gone. But she and her assistants have engineered a body suit and eerie face mask that she can wear to protect her from jellyfish at night. Yes, it is exciting to see Bening, Foster, Iffans et al reenact Nyad’s relentless five attempts to make the swim. But it is the bond between Diana and Bonnie that is the film’s beating heart and its strength. In 2013, at the age of 64, Nyad sets a record for longest ocean swim without shark cage or flippers, 110 miles. She is a true legend. But the film is a celebration of two women’s friendship and of two of America’s greatest actors putting on a great show. Onward.

(“Nyad” contains scene suggesting sexual abuse, profanity and brief nudity)

“Nyad”

Rated PG-13. At the Landmark Kendall Square. Grade: A-

Upon her arrival, Virginia Otis (an excellent Emily Carey of “House of the Dragon”), whose scientist father Hiram (David Harewood) calls her “Pumpkin,” comes across a history of “Canterville Chase” text and digs in. Her father wants to install modern electricity in the old manor. Her mischievous younger brothers Louis and Kent (a delightful Jakey Schiff and Bennett Miller) seek hijinks wherever they can find it. Virginia’s mother Lucretia Otis (Meera Syal) wants very much to fit in with local society and plans a dinner party.

Portraits of terrified previous owners of Canterville Chase adorn the walls in a very Harry Potter sort of way. We hear of a prophecy concerning a massive, dead almond tree. Before long, we meet the spectral Sir Simon in chains and spooking up a storm. Unfortunately, Sir Simon, who likes to quote Shakespeare, does not scare the Otises very much. Virginia almost ignores him. The boys play football (American-style) with his head. Sir Simon, who disappears in puffs of smoke, is decked out in green tights, blue boxers, a gold tunic and a big, ruffled collar. He wants to know why Virginia wears “breeches.” She explains that they are “riding breeches” and promptly rides out to meets her rather hapless love interest Henry Fitz Humphreys, the Duke of Cheshire (a fun Freddie Highmore). Eventually, we learn that Sir Simon was suspected of murdering his beloved wife Eleanor (Elizabeth Sankey). Virginia takes on the task of lifting the curse upon Sir Simon.

Also in the film’s remarkable voice cast are Imelda Staunton as the cook and housekeeper Mrs. Umney, Toby Jones as the local vicar The Reverend Chasuble and Miranda Hart (TV’s “Call the Midwife”) as a inventive, ghost-chasing friend of the Reverend. Laurie has less to do as the voice of Death.

Directed by Kim Burdon (“Fireman Sam”) and Robert Chandler (TV’s “Boy George: One on One”), this “Canterville Ghost” is not the first animated adaptation of Wilde’s story, which has been adapted many times before (there was a 1970 Soviet animated film, believe it or not).

The role of Sir Simon has been previously played by Patrick Stewart and John Gielgud. The most famous adaptation was the 1944 American feature film, starring a wonderful Charles Laughton as Sir Simon, Robert Young as an American WWII soldier, child actor Margaret O’Brien and Una O’Connor. A 1966 ABC TV movie musical of Wilde’s story featured Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Michael Redgrave and music by “Fiddler on the Roof” songwriters Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick. This latest “Canterville Ghost” might not be the best. The computer-generated animation is not exactly inspired. The hit-and-miss screenplay boasts a “ghostbusters” joke. But like Noel Coward’s much adapted “Blithe Spirit,” “The Canterville Ghost” is always welcome.

(“The Canterville Ghost” contains mature themes and swashbuckliing)

“The Canterville Ghost”

Rated PG. At Apple Cinemas. Grade: B+

Nevertheless, director Scorsese, who co-wrote the screenplay with the great Eric Roth (“Dune”) based on the 2017 book by David Grann, has concocted a mesmerizing and dense tale of Faustian dimensions. Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio in his 6th film with Scorsese) is a not particularly bright WWI army cook. returning from the front. Di Caprio wears a strange, almost goofy expression on his face and seems to have stuffed his cheeks with cotton balls a la Brando in “The Godfather.”

Burkhart is headed to Oklahoma’s Osage country to work for his uncle “King” William Hale (a veritably sulfurous Robert De Niro in his 10th Scorsese film). A great friend of the Osage people, Hale owns a cattle ranch that does not have oil on it and speaks the Osage language and socializes with their leaders. Notably, the Osage in the film, who have made millions from the wells which dot the landscape, wear woolen blankets as outer clothing.

At first, “King” Hale plays matchmaker, encouraging Ernest to meet and court a young Osage woman named Mollie (a powerful Lily Gladstone), who is at first comically skeptical of Burkhart, whom she meets when he works as a cab driver. She makes fun of her clumsy courtier although she likes his handsome (?) face and bright blue eyes. Eventually, they marry. She has diabetes, which cannot be treated at the time and is often unwell. Mollie’s sister Minnie (Jillian Dion), who is also married to a white man, has some unidentified “wasting sickness.” Mollie’s beloved mother Lizzie (the venerable Tantoo Cardinal, “Dances with Wolves”) is old and weakening. Mollie’s sister Anna Brown (Cara Jade Myers), who is married to Ernest’s surly older brother Byron (Scott Shepherd, “Dark Phoenix”), is a hot-tempered, heavy drinker with a revolver in her purse.

Suddenly, Osage people begin to drop like proverbial flies. Their deaths are not investigated by the sheriff (Moe Hedrick), and the evidence disappears. It’s clear from the start that Hale’s plan is to eliminate anyone who stands between him and his family and the rights to the oil.

This is a story of white men murdering indigenous people for money and property. Someone breathes the word “Tulsa,” referring to the 1921 Black Wall Street massacre. Like the gangster film, “Killers of the Flower Moon” tells a fundamental American story. Di Caprio does his best to find the humanity in the spineless Ernest and succeeds in part. Gladstone is deeply sympathetic in the midst of the film’s treachery.

As you might expect. “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which reportedly cost $200 million, offers viewers the best cinema has to offer: lensing by Rodrigo Prieto (“The Wolf of Wall Street”), editing by the great Thelma Schoonmaker, “Raging Bull”), casting by Ellen Lewis (“The Departed”), production design by maestro Jack Fisk (“The Tree of Life”) and music and music design by the late Scorsese regular Robbie Robertson formerly of The Band. Robertson’s almost subliminal drums are the film’s haunting animistic refrain. Scorsese, 80, also includes a film-within-a-film, a newsreel, a radio show and an obit. Jesse Plemons finds power in a few words as a government agent. As one of Hale’s killers, real Texas cowboy Ty Mitchell (“True Grit”) is a standout. An Osage man named Henry Roan (William Belleau) also appears in the 1959 James Stuart drama “The F.B.I. Story,” which covers some of the same terrain. The masterful Scorsese gives us the whole, bloody picture. Cue drums.

(“Killers of the Flower Moon” contain graphic violence and profanity)

“Killers of the Flower Moon”

Rated R. At the AMC Boston Common, AMC South Bay and other suburban theaters. Grade: A-

It’s the Roaring Twenties and Sir Simon (voiced by Wilde aficionado Stephen Fry) has long been haunting the grand Canterville estate — until he meets his match in the brash Americans.

“One of the themes of ‘The Canterville Ghost’ is modernity versus the older, classical values and that’s a sort of sliding collision that’s always happening,” Chandler, who also co-directs, said in a Zoom interview from London.

“In our film you’ve got the Bostonian American family coming in to buy this big, old, dusty English country house and colliding head on with Simon and his 17th century culture.

“The Bostonians are bringing electricity, a motor car and modern ways of thinking. That theme of modernity and the value it has, is always a good thing.

“There’s the eldest daughter Virginia (Emily Carey of “House of the Dragon”), a very modern woman who challenges the age-old assumptions of Sir Simon and the English people she meets. She’s a woman in trousers who rides a horse the way men ride horses. A woman who keeps up with the boys when she pulls out her sword!

“Yes, it’s set in that period but the themes are pretty universal.”

Wilde’s 1887 short story has been adapted often, if always in live action. Partly because it’s an ideal vehicle for older actors — Oscar-winner Charles Laughton starred in a classic 1944 Hollywood version, “Star Trek” and X-Men veteran Patrick Stewart led a TV version.

“It’s a universal character, who has a certain set of values that are challenged. Therefore, he becomes a character you can explore in different ways,” Chandler said. “The way the film looks and feels is quite important. Our animated version lets us do something quite spectacular at the end, in the garden when Simon (Freddie Highmore) and Virginia confront the Grim Reaper (Hugh Laurie).”

Now that his dream project is here, was it worth the immense struggle to get it done?

“Yes! it’s completely worth it. I’m very happy. Making any film brings its hardships and heartache; compromises have to be made.

“And then you see things that you hadn’t expected — and they’re just wonderful. The way an artist interprets something, the way a voice brings a character to life.

“And when you see what people are responding to, the reward is worth it. I believe in cinema as a vital force of good in the world.”

“The Canterville Ghost” opens Friday

That isn’t only because of the film’s length — nearly three-and-a-half hours — although that’s certainly part of it.

An epic Western crime drama based on real and entirely stomach-turning events from roughly a century ago, the latest film from acclaimed director Martin Scorsese could be seen as so many things. Among them: a treatise on greed and exploitation and a character study of the extremely flawed man at the center of the story, Ernest Burkhart.

And while it excels at being neither of those, Scorsese’s chronicling of the so-called “Reign of Terror” experienced by the Osage nation — during which many of its members were systematically killed by those wishing to obtain the Native American group’s oil-related wealth — it nonetheless is a largely compelling and engaging cinematic experience.

In theaters this week and bound for Apple TV+ at some point down the line, “Flower Moon” moves more fluidly than Scorsese’s previous film, the sometimes tedious and barely longer 2019 affair “The Irishman.” 

This time, one of the stars of the latter, Robert De Niro, shares the screen with another Scorsese regular, Leonardo DiCaprio. It is an acting tandem that first starred opposite one another 30 years ago in “This Boy’s Life.” While the actors get plenty of screen time together here, DiCaprio is front and center Earnest, who arrives in Fairfax, Oklahoma, to work for his cattle-farming uncle, De Niro’s William “King” Hale.

After Scorsese shows us the 1894 discovery of the oil beneath the land belonging to the Osage nation — which, according to the film’s production notes, had been relocated to “Indian Territory” in Oklahoma by the American government — we see the immense wealth that follows for its people.

Ernest is one of many whites flooding into the town in the 1920s looking for a piece of the action. At first, he drives a cab for his uncle, which is how he first encounters Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a member of a wealthy Osage family. William encourages Ernest to get to know Mollie; were they to marry, he suggests, it would put Ernest on a path to a lucrative inheritance.

Mollie seems to know what Ernest is — a “coyote,” as she puts it — but she clearly is amused by him, and wed they do.

William’s scheming goes far beyond his plans for Ernest, of course, and at his direction, Osage nation members, many in their 20s and 30s, die mysteriously — and without investigation. Scorsese presents some of the murders, although he doesn’t seem as interested as he has at times in the past in portraying the violence in the most arresting manner possible.

Based on investigative journalist David Grann’s 2017 book “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” the film has been in development for years by Scorsese, who was recruited for it by DiCaprio. Early on, Scorsese was crafting a narrative centered around Tom White, an FBI investigator portrayed in the film by “Irishman” alum Jesse Plemons. However, the final screenplay — co-written by Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump,” “The Insider”) shifts the focus to Ernest and, to a lesser degree, Mollie. It was a wise decision — as Scorsese says, we’ve seen similar lawman-focused approaches many times before.

Unfortunately, though, Ernest, an admitted lover of women and money, is a bit of a frustrating figure. He’s certainly in on his uncle’s nefarious mission, but he also seems to care, at least on some level, about Mollie — despite some actions that suggest otherwise. You could argue he’s a complex character, but he never becomes all that interesting, which is surprising given the talents of DiCaprio (“The Revenant,” “Gangs of New York”).

Meanwhile, De Niro’s William, a constant manipulator, is borderline-cartoonish, which is obviously disappointing. Scorsese and De Niro now have collaborated on 10 features, and you’ll find stronger work in the previous nine, especially in 1976’s “Taxi Driver” and 1990’s “Goodfellas.”

On the other hand, Gladstone (“Certain Women,” “Fancy Dance”) — who was raised on the Blackfeet Reservation in northwestern Montana and is from the Blackfeet and Nez Perce Tribal Nations — is the standout of the film. Unfortunately, Mollie is relegated to the sidelines for a good chunk of “Flower Moon,” but, still, Gladstone’s performance lends humanity to the proceedings. If her work isn’t the film’s heart, it is its soul.

Numerous supporting players bring a little something to “Flower Moon,” including Scott Shepherd (“The Last of Us”) as Ernest’s murderous brother, Byron; John Lithgow (“Bombshell”) and Brendan Fraser (“The Whale”) as attorneys on opposite sides of a case; and several well-known musicians, including Jack White, Jason Isbell, Pete Yorn and Sturgill Simpson, the latter playing a larger role than the others.

Even as you wish for the sum of its parts to be greater, there is much to appreciate with this film, including interestingly constructed scene after interestingly constructed scene, as well as consultations with today’s Osage people, the inclusion of Osage cast members and the shooting of “Flower Moon” on location in Oklahoma on the Osage reservation.

Following Grann’s highly regarded book, the film further sheds light on a horrific chapter of history previously known to too few.

An Academy Award winner for 2006’s “The Departed,” Scorsese saves some of his best work for its coda, in which he appears and which places final punctuation on what happened and why it matters.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” isn’t ultimately among his strongest work — and, no, it need not be as lengthy as it is — but it’s still stronger than that of myriad other filmmakers.

‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

Where: Theaters.

When: Oct. 20.

Rated: R for violence, some grisly images, and language.

Runtime: three hours, 26 minutes.

Stars (of four): 3.

Oh, yeah.

Here’s our roundup.

“The Fall of the House of Usher”: It’s risky to modernize or repurpose classic literary works and try to create something unique and visionary in the process. Even Oscar-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón failed with a misguided “Great Expectations,” starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow.

But upscale horror filmmaker Mike Flanagan could write a textbook on how to do it right with his eight-part ode to legendary horror writer Edgar Allan Poe. This inspired “Usher” infuses Poe’s tales of terror with contemporary relevance and respects the source material.

Flanagan’s macabre update of Poe’s story of familial depravity and madness serves as a table setting for an “And Then There Were None” schematic in which the ones getting picked off are soulless members of a privileged, uber-wealthy family that has built its pillar of wealth by addicting Americans to painkillers.

Lording over this dynasty is a vile twosome with a rotten childhood to say the least: brother Roderick (the underrated Bruce Greenwood) and his conniving sister Madeline (the equally underrated Mary McDonnell).

Ostensibly, Roderick is the patriarch in charge but he has a hard time corralling his narcissistic adult children (inheritors), all of whom have kinky dark sides that lead them down the bloody road to a Poe-inspired fate. Flanagan wrote or co-wrote all but one episode, and the writing is as razor-blade sharp and bloody clever as with his signature works, Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” “Midnight Mass” and the underrated standalone film “Doctor Sleep.”

The creepy production values are top-notch and the scares are not only frightening but disturbing. (“Usher” is more gory and loads up on more sex than Flanagan’s past series). The cast is consistently strong and features Mark Hamill going gruff as the extra-busy Usher lawyer Arthur Pym, who attempts to mop up the family’s many messes. Another treat is seeing Flanagan regular Carla Gugino as a mysterious presence popping up throughout the lives of Roderick and Madeline. It all makes for ghoulish fun that’s well-suited for the upcoming Halloween season. Make no mistake, though, this isn’t just a bingeworthy streamer; “The Fall of the House of Usher” just so happens to be one of the best series Netflix has ever produced. Details: 4 stars out of 4; all episodes drop Oct. 13.

“Lessons in Chemistry”: Ask any book club member to choose one of their favorite novels from 2022 and chances are Bonnie Garmus’ beguiling novel featuring a quirky brainiac with one of the best names ever — Elizabeth Zott — will pop up on that list. While the misfortune was mine for not reading it beforehand, I will definitely do so after watching showrunner Lee Eisenberg’s moving eight-part adaptation for Apple TV+.

I can see why “Lessons in Chemistry” found a favored spot on bookshelves everywhere. But as fans know, divulging too much about what happens to Elizabeth (played to the eccentric hilt by Oscar winner Brie Larson) would be a recipe for hate mail. Suffice to say she stars as a brilliant chemist whose career is blotted by the patriarchy ruling the science world of the ‘50s. What can be also be said is that there is great chemistry between Larsen and Lewis Pullman as hot-shot chemist Calvin Evans who shares the same passion as she and is just as equally socially awkward. A turn of events upends their careers and leads the resilient Elizabeth on a path to a subversive cooking show. “Lessons in Chemistry” could have been tighter (trimmed to six episodes), and a subplot about Black neighbor Harriet (Aja Naomi King) fighting racial injustice could be more developed. Still, “Chemistry” comes up with a winning formula in the end. And one episode that gets told from the perspective of the family dog Six Thirty (voice of B.J. Novak) tears you up — particularly if you’re a pet owner. Details: 3 stars; two episodes drop Oct. 13, with a new episode dropping every Friday through Nov. 24.

“Foe”: What unfolded well on paper doesn’t fare so well on screen in Garth Davis’ misguided but very good-looking version of Iain Reid’s ambitious sci-fi-tinged psychological drama. Its central premise about a stranger (Aaron Pierre) making an extraordinary offer that calls into the question the relationship of an isolated couple (Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan) in a farmhouse and separates them for an extended period of time is indeed intriguing, but the unpredictable turns in the screenplay — written by Davis and Reid — wind up ringing false and unraveling into a pretentious, impenetrable mess. There are big themes explored here — including AI — but the should-be unsettling material gets way too cluttered and at times becomes laughable, disconnecting us from the plight of these two, who seem to use up a hell of a lot of water during a drought that’s killing off the planet. That is just one of the puzzling aspects of a production that unfortunately squanders the talents of Mescal and Ronan and its gorgeous production values. Just read the book. Details: 1½ stars; opens Oct. 13 in San Francisco theaters and Oct. 20 at the Piedmont Theatre in Oakland.

“Castlevania: Nocturne”: In eight briskly told animated episodes, showrunners Kevin Kolde and Clive Bradley relocate the popular vampire streaming series in the French Revolution with vampire hunter Richter Belmont (voiced by Edward Bluemel) taking on a nasty batch of aristocrats preying on poor people. The action does get bloody and features a batch of new and intriguing characters, including the gay Olrox (voice of Zahn McClarnon of “The Dark Winds” series), an Aztec bloodsucker responsible for the death of Richter’s mom. He too senses that something major and ominous is in the works, and doesn’t like it. My only beef about this intricately plotted season is that its eighth episode lacks a true ending, making us gnash our teeth for another season. Fortunately, we’ll get it since Netflix just announced “Nocturne” has been renewed. Details: 3 stars; available now on Netflix.

Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.

Yet, she’s done so in a way that is different than ever before, delivering fans a career-spanning major theatrical release that ranks as nothing less than one of the greatest concert films ever made.

The Sam Wrench-directed offering — which hit theaters this week and is expected to quickly set box office records as the top-grossing concert movie of all time — succeeds in numerous ways, magnifying the strengths of the blockbuster tour of the same name as it nicely translates the experience from cavernous football stadiums to movie houses.

That’s not easy to do, but it certainly helps when the film crew is drawing from stellar source material — and “The Eras Tour” is indeed nothing short of brilliant. Yet, there’s more to it than that, given that the tour is designed in a way that makes sense for filming.

As the tour’s name implies, the production is organized by different eras (or, more specifically, albums) in Swift’s career, with the singer performing a batch of material from one album before moving onto the next disc. Each of these segments unfold onstage like individual chapters, with the star embracing different thematic stage settings/wardrobes/special effects that correspond to the specific albums. There are nine chapters in all — well, 10, if you count the “surprise songs” segment.

On film, even more so than during the actual live show, these different chapters really break up the action into easily digestible pieces. You never have time to get tired of what you’re watching, because the next adventure awaits just around the corner.

That’s incredibly important for a film that runs right around 2 hours and 50 minutes. Granted, that run time is still a good 40 minutes less what I witnessed during the first night of the Eras Tour stop at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara back in July.

But it’s an enormous amount of time for pretty much any concert film not named “Woodstock” and is roughly twice the length of the Talking Heads’ “Stop Making Sense,” the highly acclaimed rock doc from 1984 that recently found its way back to theaters.

Yet, amazingly, “The Eras Tour” doesn’t feel overly long at all. Indeed, there will certainly be some Swifties who will complain about what was edited out of the show to get it under the 3-hour mark. And I can’t be the only one who wishes Swift would have included one more Era in the mix and spotlighted her self-titled debut. (The movie does, however, include the first album’s “Our Song” in the “Surprise” song segment.)

Swift’s greatest strength — of many — is her ability to connect with the crowd. In 30 years of writing about concerts, I’ve never seen anybody do it better. She does it with big pop production numbers, which get everybody dancing and singing along at top volume, and she does it even more convincingly with the most basic of body language, captivating crowds of 50,000-plus with the wink of an eye or a sideways glance.

Wrench focuses the film on capturing that amazing trait, never letting the special effects, dance routines or other big production elements crowd out Swift’s sheer charisma. He’s always directing us back to her megawatt smile, overwhelming sense of joy onstage and connection with fans.

Wrench also eschews such frequent concert movie staples as backstage scenes or interviews with musicians, fans etc. The film sticks to the concert performance.

That’s a very wise and decision, since it must have been tempting to let the magnitude of the occasion — the film is drawn from multiple sold-out nights at the massive SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles — really dictate the direction. Yet, this film manages to feel very intimate, even in the midst of tens of thousands of people gathered together in the second largest city in the United States to witness one of the biggest pop stars of all time.

Swift’s performances are simply magnetic, as she waltzes back through her 17-year recording career, stopping here and there to perform some of the very greatest songs of the 21st century. It’s simply can’t-miss viewing for all Swifties.

Of course, the hallmark of any great concert film is its ability to appeal to non-fans. And I think the movie definitely checks that box as well.

“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” is really for anybody who wants to not only experience but also more fully understand and appreciate an incredible artist who is accomplishing things that so few have ever done before.

Concert film setlist(“Lover”)1. “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince”2. “Cruel Summer”3. “The Man”4. “You Need to Calm Down”5. “Lover”(“Fearless”)6. “Fearless”7. “You Belong With Me”8. “Love Story”(“Evermore”)9. “Willow”10. “Marjorie”11. “Champagne Problems”12. “Tolerate It”(“Reputation”)13. “…Ready for It?”14. “Delicate”15. “Don’t Blame Me”16. “Look What You Made Me Do”(“Speak Now”)17. “Enchanted”(“Red”)18. “22″19. “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”20. “I Knew You Were Trouble”21. “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”(“Folklore”)22. “The 1”23. “Betty”24. “The Last Great American Dynasty”25. “August”26. “Illicit Affairs”27. “My Tears Ricochet”(“1989”)28. “Style”29. “Blank Space”30. “Shake It Off”31. “Wildest Dreams”32. “Bad Blood”(Surprise songs)33. “Our Song”34. “You’re on Your Own, Kid”(“Midnights”)35. “Lavender Haze”36. “Anti-Hero”37. “Midnight Rain”38. “Vigilante Shit”39. “Bejeweled”40. “Mastermind”41. “Karma”

But the surroundings are breathtaking. When the story’s protagonist Kirsty Macleod (Hermione Corfield, “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword”) discovers that her beau Murdo MacAulay (Will Fletcher, “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”) has been hiding a copy of Charles Dickens’ “The Old Curiosity Shop” inside the cover of a Bible, she whispers, “Sacrilege.” The form of Christianity practiced by her and Murdo’s people is as severe as the weather. Murdo, who has returned from the military where he worked as a typist, also admires the work of American poet Robert Frost. Kirsty and Murdo agree to marry and move to America aboard one of the steamers they see in the distance from their cliffs. But something terrible happens. The young men of the village are called up to the front, and during a “road dance” Kirsty suffers a head injury and is raped by an unidentified man.

Murdo and the other men, including the jealous and drunken Iain Ban (Tom Byrne) and Angus (Luke Nunn), the shy beau of Kirsty’s younger sister Annie (Ali Fumiko Whitney), all leave the day after the attack on Kirsty. Before long, she suffers from morning sickness and binds her swelling belly to hide her pregnancy from prying eyes of the village busybody Old Peggy (Alison Peebles). Also living in the village is a semi-recluse named Skipper (Jeff Stewart). Kirsty’s mother sends Skipper eggs.

When you aren’t mesmerized by the candlelit interiors or the waves breaking on the cliff bottoms captured by cinematographer Petra Korner (TV’s “Shadow and Bone”), you almost get swept way by the dramatics of MacKay’s novel adapted by the director Richie Adams (“Dog Man”).

“The Road Dance” has its roots in the works of Thomas Hardy and George Eliot. Its stark, rural Scottishness is what sets it apart. The mysterious loner Doctor Macrae (Mark Gatiss) helps Kirsty after her rape. But he only treats her head injury. Kirsty keeps the rape a secret. Skipper wanders in the hills, muttering lines from, of course, “Macbeth” (The hurly-burly is so not done). Old Peg has a surprisingly helpful streak. “The Road Dance” inevitably takes a turn in the land of soap opera.

But Corfield makes Kirsty such a living part of the landscape that you cannot abandon her. As her widowed mother Mairi, Morven Christie (TV’s “The Bay”) is a sly scene stealer. It is the duty of compassionate shopkeeper Peter (Sean Gilder) to deliver dreaded telegrams to local families. The stern Constable (Ian Pirie) is not likely to let a detail slip by. Minister MacIver (Forbes Masson) reminds his congregation that they are on their way to hell. It all ends with a new beginning.

(“The Road Dance” contains mature themes, a sexually suggestive scene and war violence)

“The Road Dance”

Not Rated. On AppleTV, Amazon, Google Play and more. Grade: B