The Hallow (2015)

Creature Feature: Bojana Novakovic tries to escape "The Hallow."

The gently rolling hills and lush forests of Ireland aren't as placid and picturesque as they seem in “The Hallow,” a messy and derivative but effectively grim and darkly atmospheric horror yarn that premiered at Sundance last year.

Mysterious busted windows and strange noises coming from deep in the forest force a young couple (Joseph Mawle and Bojana Novakovic) living with their infant son and a dog in a remote, decaying country house to call local authorities. But their concerns go unresolved. Out here, the policeman says, “things go bump in the night.” That line could have been read for cheap, easy laughs, but credit goes to first time director and co-screenwriter, Colin Hardy, for playing it straight and keeping the tone eerily serious.

Later, another character will talk ominously about the Hallow, a legend that has something to do with malevolent banshees and demonic fairies that live in the woods, kidnap babies, and don't like it when strangers move in. Eventually, the protagonists are stalked and terrorized by the forest creatures—hissing, shrieking, hideously deformed beings that suggest a cross between the Whomping Willow of “Harry Potter” and Gollum of “The Lord of the Rings.”

Hardy is an unapologetic fanboy of sci-fi and horror and “The Hallow” is peppered with allusions to popular films of the genre—the leathery book full of creepy illustrations evokes the flesh-bound volume from Sam Raimi’s wildly inventive “The Evil Dead”; the inky, black ooze that portends the monsters suggests “Aliens”; and the ability of the creatures to take over human hosts hints at “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

Hardy also lovingly mentions Ray Harryhausen (“made me believe in monsters”) in the closing credits. It’s hard not to think of Ymir—the stop-motion animated, outer space creature who crash lands on Earth in Harryhausen’s dazzling, enduring “20 Million Miles to Earth”—as another inspiration for “The Hallow.”

It’s far from perfect—the noisy, chaotic second half undermines the measured sense of a growing, sinister tension in the first—but “The Hallow” has enough subtle creepiness and legitimate scares to be worth a look.

The Hunting Ground (2015)

Sexual assault on college campus is the subject of the
gripping documentary, "The Hunting Ground."

“The Hunting Ground” begins with blissful scenes of young people reacting joyously to acceptance letters from colleges and universities, institutions of higher learning they no doubt dreamt about attending, meeting new friends and sharing wonderful experiences together. Shortly later, however, the idyllic mood turns decidedly darker and more solemn, when more students, mostly women, begin tearfully recounting harrowing, nightmarish accounts of being sexually assaulted or raped on campus.

When it comes to memories gathered from college, these surely are not ones meant to last a lifetime. The fact that they do—and sometimes have tragic, heartbreaking consequences—is one of the haunting themes of “The Hunting Ground,” the furious, gripping and substantial new documentary from Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, the terrific team behind “The Invisible War” (which similarly examined sexual assault in the military), and “Outrage” (about scandal and political hypocrisy on Capitol Hill).

Combining victims’ testimony and bleak statistics, the movie paints a disturbing picture of shocking neglect and systemic abuse by universities. More than 16 percent of female students, the film explains, will experience some type of sexual harassment or assault during their time in college. While many victims are too ashamed and traumatized to even report crimes, those who do encounter an icy tangle of subterfuge, misinformation and victim-blaming from school administrators eager to sweep bad press—and its negative financial impact—under the rug.

The film targets popular and notorious fraternity houses where wild parties mixed with peer pressure and alcohol often lead to violent sexual crimes against women. Many universities have every reason to dismantle these victim farms, but they recoil because millions of dollars in annual donations come from alumni with loyal fraternity ties.

Then there are the front page stories, tales of wayward athletes shielded by powerful, lucrative sports programs. One of the film’s most provocative segments—the allegations of rape against star quarterback Jameis Winston while he attended Florida State University—unfolds like a thriller and will be familiar to anyone who has followed college football over the past few years. The victim became a target of vicious hatred by fellow students and the community around FSU; she dropped out of school in disgrace.

Meanwhile, at the center of “The Hunting Ground” is the heroic story of how two brave, smart students, Andrea Pino and Annie Clark—both victims of sexual assault while attending the University of North Carolina—filed a Title IX complaint against their school with the federal government. Using networking tools like social media and blogs, the case brought other victims across the country out of hiding while shining a national spotlight on the issue.

This is an angry, important chronicle about an ugly, epidemic scourge afflicting higher education. “The Hunting Ground” should be required viewing for all current and soon-to-be college students and their parents.

Victoria (2015)

Run Laia Run: Laia Costa on the move in "Victoria"

By now, “Victoria,” the internationally acclaimed German film by director Sebastian Schipper, is more famous for its technical distinction than its functions as a movie. The film—a sprawling crime drama about a bank robbery involving three delinquent young men and a naïve woman—was shot in a single continuous take on the quiet, pre-dawn streets of central Berlin.

The movie opens, rather inauspiciously, in a crowded subterranean nightclub pounding away with thrumming techno music, gyrating bodies, and pulsating strobe lights so relentless and unwatchable that the resulting discomfort amounts to a visual flogging. Eye strain aside, this is where we meet the eponymous Victoria (Laia Costa), a new resident of Berlin by way of Madrid, Spain.

Victoria doesn’t have any friends in Germany and doesn’t speak the language, but before all is said and done, she’ll meet a disparate group of English-speaking male bandits—Boxer (Franz Rogowski), a bald hothead who used to be in prison; Blinker (Burak Yigit), a curly-haired rogue named after a turn signal; and Sonne (Frederick Lau), a sensitive fellow that Victoria falls for—and accompany them on a dizzying and dangerous adventure through the city. There’s a tense meeting with gangsters, a daring if unlikely bank robbery, and a frantic police chase and bloody shootout.

Of course, all of this is done in real time. Counting three false starts, the entire shoot of “Victoria” took two and a half hours, beginning late one night and ending just after sunrise. The script, reportedly only twelve pages long, consists of mostly improvised dialogue. It’s an ambitious piece of filmmaking that’s remarkable in that it was pulled off at all. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the story isn’t very original, the characters aren’t especially interesting, and for all of its technical bravura, the blurry and often grainy visuals captured by cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s single, jittery hand-held camera just aren’t all that fun to look at.

It doesn’t help that “Victoria” takes forever to get going, padding its thin plot with a lot of superfluous filler. The first hour or so consists of extended scenes of the characters mind-numbing peregrinations around Berlin in the wee hours—robbing a convenient store, goofing around on the street, arguing at a café where Veronica works (apparently, she never sleeps). The movie plods on for 138 minutes, even though a more thoughtfully planned 98 would have been plenty.

“Birdman” is another prominent, recent example of the single take movie. Its director, Alejandro Iñárritu, memorably defended the approach saying, “We live our lives with no editing.” True enough. But in the case of “Victoria,” while spending time with drunk, derelict twenty-somethings can be fun for a short time, a little goes a long way.