‘Evil Dead Rise’
Lee Cronin (“Ghost Train”) reboots the “Evil Dead” franchise begun in the early 1980s when Sam Raimi, working with lo-fi resources, fired up the cheeky cult hit featuring the swashbuckling, shit-talking Bruce Campbell as Ash taking on ghouls form the grave. In a nod to Raimi’s 1981 cornerstone, “Rise” begins at a cabin in the woods, then rewinds to the day before at a Los Angeles tenement destined to be razed. Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) is a newly single mom (dad pretty much got bored and walked) loosely overseeing three fairly self-sufficient kids, teens Danny (Morgan Davies) and Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) and the youngest, Kassie (Nell Fisher), reminiscent of Newt in “Aliens” (1986) and a bit of a demonic soul herself, cutting the head off a doll, placing it on a spear shaft and calling it Staffanie. Showing up unannounced is Elle’s estranged sister Beth (Lily Sullivan), a rock band roadie just back from Thailand. But before family mending can take, there’s an earthquake, causing a fissure in the parking garage below that exposes a book of dark sacraments. The power goes out, phones don’t work and the stairwell has collapsed. Taking the last elevator up, Ellie unwittingly meets with the evil force unleashed accidentally by one of her progeny and, through a grim binding-torture crucifixion ritual, becomes possessed by the blood-lusting demonic force from the series’ other iterations. The genre effects, choreography and staging here are all top shelf; genre fans will rejoice and the squeamish will look through their fingers as eyeballs pop, joints contort the wrong way and Elle scatters about like Samara in “Ringu” (1998) – though clear homages to “The Shining” (1980) and “The Thing” (1982) come off as overblown and over the top. The series’ staple chainsaw and shotgun come out and Beth transforms into the Ripley version of Ash’s demon exterminator, so “Rise” checks most of the “Evil Dead” boxes; not quite there is the sardonic wit Raimi wove into his “Dead” trilogy, and nor does Sullivan’s Beth get any of the glorious gore gusto that Campbell’s Ash made such a key signature element.
‘Showing Up’
The latest from indie stalwart Kelly Reichardt (“First Cow”) reunites the director with early collaborator and recent Oscar nominee (for “The Fabelmans”), Michelle Williams (who starred in Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy” and “Meek’s Cutoff”). The focus this time is still the Pacific Northwest, where many of Reichardt’s films take place, but in the near contemporary time (“Cow” and “Cutoff” take place during the settling of the Pac-Northwest). The shaggy dog narrative is as much about family and familial dysfunction as about the art scene and its passive-aggressive competitiveness. Williams plays Lizzy, a sculptor who makes Degas-like statuettes of waifish young women. She can’t catch an art opening break and her landlord, also an artist (BU alum Hong Chau, so good in “The Menu” and Oscar-nominated for her caretaker part in “The Whale”), drags her feet in getting Lizzy’s hot water turned back on – she hasn’t has a shower in days. There’s also Lizzy’s dad, an established but eccentric artist himself (Judd Hirsch, also opposite Williams in “Fabelmans” and Oscar nominated for it) who’s got a bunch of random hippies hanging out at his cottage studio. It’s a dour yet quirky meander that revolves around the well-being of a wounded pigeon.
‘Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant’
Despite the title’s pretentious implications, this is something new from the man behind such kinetic crime capers as “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” (1998) and “The Gentlemen” (2019), to name a few. For a Guy Ritchie flick, this Afghanistan war drama is remarkably restrained and told with a depth of character that surpasses many of his previous efforts. It centers on Army Master Sgt. John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal), a platoon leader whose crew is tasked with ferreting out and destroying IED factories. They lose an interpreter to one and recruit a replacement named Ahmed (Dar Salim) who normally works as an auto mechanic. There’s an inherent mistrust of interpreters because they sometimes turn out to be Taliban plants, but “Covenant” is boosted by the bond between Kinley and Ahmed and the extremes they go through for the other when, out in the field, the team finds the mother of all bomb factories. They set to work taking it apart and rigging it for demolition, but nearby Taliban catch wind and release seemingly limitless forces against them. The riveting gunfight is a 100-to-1 struggle, and soon it’s just Ahmed and Kinley left without a vehicle, on the run and miles from base without support. While inspired by relationships and the peril that interpreters and their family’s face from Taliban retaliation, “Covenant” is not based on a single true occurrence. The Taliban hunt for the pair, well staged and well told, becomes the centerpiece of the film, but – I’m trying not to give too much away – is not the only gripping, hanging-on-the-edge sequence. “Covenant” is amazingly only two hours long, though it feels longer because of high-octane action scenes told with the same degree of military realism that “The Hurt Locker” (2008) and “Lone Survivor” (2013) took to heart.