Twilight (2008)

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in "Twilight."

After waiting seven years to watch “Twilight,” the question for the novice viewer is not what took so long, but rather, can one possibly endure the four more entries required to complete the series? The answer, much like the forbidden romance between the characters in this teen vampire saga based on books by Stephenie Meyer, is filled with expectation but tempered with hesitation and doubt.

The original actually works to a degree thanks to director Catherine Hardwicke, who does a good job establishing the ominous feel of the story through atmospheric visuals and a resolute sense of locale. She also knows something about teenage troubles, having directed the astonishing “Thirteen,” a haunting drama about a young girl’s harrowing slide towards self-destructive wildness and promiscuity.

Here, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is a morose teen from a broken home who has just moved away from her mother in Phoenix to the small town of Forks, Washington to live with her father. Removed from the sunny milieu of the desert, the eternally glum Bella seems right at home against the gray backdrop of the Pacific Northwest, with its weeping rains and interminably overcast skies, fittingly photographed by Hardwicke using dull hues and washed-out colors.

Bella’s world turns once she locks eyes with the similarly gloomy Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a mysterious, laconic classmate who just happens to be a 100-year-old vampire. They make an unusual couple. For some girls, Edward’s personality would be a deal breaker (“Your mood swings give me whiplash,” she says to him in one of the funnier lines), but no use splitting hairs when you’re already willing to overlook the fact that your new boyfriend is a product of the living dead.

If part of “Twilight” is about a fear of intimacy or teenage sex, the theme is neatly fulfilled by the trappings of the vampire story. Bella wants to get closer, but a kiss on the neck—or, ostensibly, any other exchange of bodily fluid—can easily lead to a bite, turning her into a plasma-lusting phantom. So Edward keeps his distance, sort of.

But this subtlety doesn’t last and as the film moves into its chaotic second half—away from the emotional shadings and slight nuance of the first—tired clichés and comic book action sequences take over. Hardwicke can handle emotional tension but loses a grip once the film descends into overt mayhem. The result is poorly staged and choppily edited fight scenes that look like something out of a bad video game.

As this chapter grinds to a close, a posse of sinister vampires would like nothing more than to plunge their teeth into the mortal flesh of Bella, who takes quite a beating as the rival undead clash in a violent flurry of shattered windows and flying bodies. The villains are anything but vanquished; after all, this is only the beginning.

Digging a bloodied shard of glass from her leg at one point, you wonder what exactly the willowy brunette Bella, who could do much better, sees in this morbid fugitive from a coffin. She could save herself—and us—a lot of anguish by just telling him to take his ashen face and perfectly coiffed hair for a long walk back to the cemetery.

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley
Cooper in "Silver Linings Playbook."

Pat, the main character played by Bradley Cooper, is on his way home to his parents’ house in the Philadelphia suburbs during an early scene of director David O’ Russell’s uneven, quarrelsome romantic comedy “Silver Linings Playbook.” Suffering from a form of bipolar depression that leaves him alternating between condescending narcissism and outbursts of violent rage, he's hoping eight months spent in a mental care center in Baltimore will help him cope with life.

Not likely, especially when he refuses to take any medication (he says it makes him foggy) and clings deliriously to hope that his estranged wife Nikki will eventually take him back. Currently, she has a restraining order against him after he caught her cheating in the shower with another man and Pat nearly beat the man to death. Images from that episode are supplied in a bloody flashback that seems borrowed from a Quentin Tarantino movie.

If that weren't enough, Pat now has to deal with his troubled father (Robert DeNiro), an obsessive-compulsive neurotic prone to comic fits of superstition and dangerously excessive gambling (at one point, he seems to level his entire net worth against the outcome of an Eagles game), and long-suffering mother (Dolores Solitano), whose endless struggle for order amidst chaos suggests rampant co-dependency issues. Like Pat, the whole movie seems to have been skipping on its meds.

Russell, a normally highly competent director whose sharpest and funniest films—“Spanking the Monkey,” “Flirting With Disaster,” “I Heart Huckabees”—often take on characters with significant psychological quirks, struggles to find the right tone. The movie aims for playfully offbeat but misses wildly thanks to the charmless and depressive characters. There are few laughs and little charisma.

Doing her best to lift the heavy clouds of this dreary miasma of mental illness, Jennifer Lawrence arrives somewhere around the halfway mark as Tiffany, a young woman whose husband died in a car accident on his way home from Victoria’s Secret (he was hoping to jump start their sluggish relationship with a gift). And though Lawrence brings a depth, vulnerability and intensity to her scenes (something missing elsewhere in the film), it’s not quite enough.

The impossibly warm and fuzzy ending, in which Pat and Tiffany team up in a dance competition to help DeNiro win a bet—and seemingly to decide whether they are romantically compatible—rings so thoroughly false it seems to belong in another movie. You get the feeling that Russell, who based his screenplay on a novel by Matthew Quick, lost his way trying to adapt from the book.

“Silver Linings Playbook” doesn’t need an audience so much as it needs therapy.

It Follows (2015)

Maika Monroe stars in the eerie horror film "It Follows."

David Robert Mitchell, the forty-something writer-director of “It Follows”—a strange, eerie and highly effective new indie horror film—is around the age to have grown up during the heyday of slasher films during the 1980s. Perhaps the subgenre’s most successful and longest running franchise at the time was the “Friday the 13^th” series, movies that mainly involved the brutal murdering of sexually active teenagers at a secluded summer camp.

The theme of sex as the ultimate young adult taboo gets a reboot in “It Follows,” but in Mitchell’s film, instead of getting mutilated, eviscerated, garroted and hacked to death by a masked maniac, characters inherit a sinister curse after having sex in which someone begins to follow them. This is the fate that befalls our soft-spoken heroine, Jay (Maika Monroe), a college student living in Michigan.

After having a steamily intimate experience in the back seat of a car, Jay’s seemingly nice evening with her boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary) turns ominous when he suddenly knocks her out with a mouthful of chloroform. She wakes up gagged and tied to a wheelchair in a dank, empty parking lot. It’s there where he tells her about the curse, explaining that the only way she can break it is to pass it along by having sex with another person. But don’t let the curse kill you, he warns, or it rewinds back to him, or something like that.

Indeed, the movie works surprisingly well even though the details are a little preposterous. That’s because Mitchell’s approach to the material relies more on subtle and atmospheric imagery rather than logic, building anxiety and tension with the use of stylishly creepy visuals, shadowy lighting, strange camera movements and a foreboding soundtrack.

Maybe the scariest thing about “It Follows” is the bizarre anonymity and randomness of the villain(s). Just what “it” is, is something we never quite know; but it often turns out to be a menacing, zombie-like figure—sometimes half-dressed like one of Romero’s living dead—with ghostly features, baleful eyes and a slow, stiff walk that suggests the somnambulist of the “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”

One of Jay’s initial encounters takes place at school, when she looks out the window and sees the figure of a creepy old woman—which, as per the rules of the curse, only Jay can see—walking gradually towards her. The scene has eerie echoes of Jamie Lee Curtis seeing the killer for the first time in John Carpenter’s masterful “Halloween,” another film that, like “It Follows” (produced for a mere two million), was made on a shoestring budget back in 1978.

Aside from the doomed sexual metaphors of “It Follows,” Mitchell also tosses in a glimpse at sprawling urban decay when Jay and some supporting characters journey into downtown Detroit looking for clues to the mystery. As they pass burnt, abandoned and dilapidated buildings, they get a look at another genuine horror—the crime, poverty, suffering, hopelessness and desperation stalking the shadows in many of today’s inner cities.

It’s no wonder that at one point, the main character runs away and ends up on the kiddie swing at the park, as if hoping to magically backtrack to a younger time. In the nightmare world of “It Follows,” the thought of growing up is more terrifying than ever.

Cake (2014)

Jennifer Aniston in "Cake."

When we meet Claire (Jennifer Aniston), the main character in “Cake”—a mournful, moving elegy of suffering and despair directed by Daniel Barnz and written by Patrick Tobin—she's about a year removed from a horrific car accident that claimed the life of her young son and left her with severe physical and emotional scars.

The film is set in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles, where this formerly successful and vibrant attorney now barely gets around and winces in anguish at the slightest movements. Claire has all but dismissed her husband, become misanthropic and would be living alone except for the loyal, sympathetic housekeeper, Sylvana (Adriana Barraza), who sticks around and drives her over the border to procure illicit painkillers.

Claire’s icy detachment and insensitivity get her booted from the chronic pain group she’d been attending after derisively mocking the suicide of another member. Subsequently, the former member, Nina (Anna Kendrick), begins showing up in Claire’s nightmares as a pretty but vengeful spirit, ostensibly and diabolically inching the protagonist towards the beyond.

Claire dives into Nina’s backstory and discovers that she left a husband (Sam Worthington) and young child behind. She goes to meet the husband and finds a lost and tortured soul not unlike herself. Wondering why she hasn’t left her expensive but gloomy house, he asks in one of the movie’s darkly comic lines, “Don’t you feel like you’re surrounded by ghosts?”

In a lesser movie, this kinship might be an excuse for romance to develop. But the tragic characters in Barnz’s film are too wounded to derive any pleasure from sex. Instead, they develop a peculiar friendship rooted in the sharing of painful memories. The film is like a sad dirge, funereal, haunting and morose. Claire's only other ‘friend’ isn’t even human, but rather seems to be a single opossum who exits the shadows and turns up poolside, accompanying her during late night swims—the nocturnal creature becoming an apt metaphor for her dark, lonely existence.

Anchoring “Cake,” Jennifer Aniston gives her best performance as the interminably angry, bitter and wholly unpleasant Claire. It’s a joyless character, full of hopelessness and deep reserves of pain, sadness and hate. Having had her world turned upside down, she now feels little compassion for anyone else, expressing herself through hurtful turns of frigid apathy and caustic sarcasm, as if she’s determined to return all the cruelty life has dealt her to others. “Anger feels so good,” she says unapologetically at one point.

It's a bit surprising that Aniston didn't get an Oscar nod for her work. Maybe the Academy ultimately found the character too unlikable. Still, it’s some performance—honest, uncompromising, expressive, nuanced and fearless—and the former TV sitcom star looks the part, exchanging her usual cover girl appearance for one that’s nearly lifeless, washed-out and colorless.

Fortunately, the movie wisely avoids the clichés of false redemption or a phony happy ending. The last few scenes, as Claire confronts her grief, offer only a glimmer of hope that she might be on a path to healing. What's far more authentic and believable is not that she’s getting better, but just capable enough to carry on.