Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015)

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam, Jim Beaver, Burn Gorman, Leslie Hope, Doug Jones. Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro, Matthew Robbins. Cinematography: Dan Laustsen. Production design: Thomas E. Sanders. Film editing: Bernat Vilaplana. Music: Fernando Velázquez. 

In Crimson Peak, Guillermo del Toro takes all the elements of the Gothic romance and turns them up to 11, which is the best thing he could have done with such familiar, not to say cheesy, material. There's the dewy heroine who makes a dubious marriage, the sinister rival female, the doughty but dull spurned suitor, and of course the Old Dark House. This one makes Thornfield Hall, Manderley, and even the Castle of Otranto look like a suburban tract house: It's a great malevolent beetle of a mansion, squatting on a bleak landscape, decaying steadily and grossly while sinking into the mine above which it sits. It's inhabited by the cash-poor aristocrats Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), along with a sizable contingent of ghosts. To it, Thomas brings his bride, Edith (Mia Wasikowska), whose father has recently died (rather violently, as we have seen), leaving her the family fortune. Edith is spunky and imaginative, an aspiring writer of ghost fiction, having had her own encounters with ghosts who warned her to "beware Crimson Peak." What she doesn't know, of course, is that the place to which her husband has brought her is called Crimson Peak, for its blood-red clay, by the locals. Anyway, the truth will out, and in a variety of gruesome ways. What makes the movie work is that del Toro is willing to go over the top entertainingly, stretching credibility to (and sometimes beyond) the breaking point, without smirking about it and camping it up. So we have, for example, a duel between Edith and Lucille, with both wearing flimsy, flowing nightwear. (Kate Hawley's costume designs are splendidly excessive.) We have apparitions in various states of decay and a plethora of insect life. The ghost of Edith's mother appears in a form that looks something like a cross between a tarantula and a woman with dreadlocks. There are vats of disgusting red murk in the cellar in which things are submerged. It's all a bit much, but the actors know how to take it in their stride. Having played Loki in the Marvel movies and the vampire Adam in Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Hiddleston in particular knows how to make a character both attractive and disquieting at the same time. Del Toro isn't up to anything of great moment in this movie, but it's good to see the material handled with a distinct sensibility and an avoidance of the tried and true. 

Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013)

Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton in Only Lovers Left Alive

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Anton Yelchin, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright, Slimane Dazi. Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch, Marion Bessay. Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux. Production design: Marco Bittner Rosser. Film editing: Affonso Gonçalves. Music: Josef van Wissem.

With its focus on vital fluids, the vampire genre has always been about sex, especially since at the end of the sexually repressed Victorian era, Bram Stoker gave it one of its definitive expressions in Dracula, where the fear of sexuality gets turned into a fear of a living death. But with the fall of so many sexual taboos in the 20th and 21st century, vampirism itself no longer holds the same kind of terrors. It takes an imagination like Jim Jarmusch's to turn things around, to make the vampires afraid of the living. Only Lovers Left Alive is only partly a post-AIDS fable, in which the substance that sustains a vampire can itself prove deadly. Jarmusch's Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) are age-old predators reduced in this century to procuring only carefully screened blood, uncontaminated by the misadventures of human beings. He gets his from a hospital researcher who calls himself "Dr. Watson" (Jeffrey Wright), she from an old friend, Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), whose source we never discover. Jarmusch is casual about providing the backstories of his characters; we have to take them for who and what they are, with only tantalizing hints about their long past and even much of their present lives. We gather that this Marlowe is the historical one, who didn't really die in a tavern brawl in 1593, but lived on in exile where he ghost-wrote the plays of Shakespeare and at one point, presumably late in his life, since he is quite elderly when we see him, became a vampire and moved to Tangier. We never learn, either, why Adam and Eve have gone their separate ways after having been married at least three times in their so-called lives. She, too, lives in Morocco, but he has settled in a desolate, abandoned section of Detroit, where he spends his nights composing music and tinkering with electronics. The plot begins when she comes to visit and they are soon joined by her younger sister, Ava (Mia Wasikowska), an incorrigible troublemaker. But plot isn't much to the point in Jarmusch's film, which is a character study of two sophisticated people who have lived long enough to see the world and human beings (whom he calls "zombies") change around them. It can be said that some of the humor in the movie is a little obvious, sometimes more like a spoof of vampire pictures than the elegant setup of the film deserves. But this is, I think, one of Jarmusch's best films, simply because he has gathered a wonderful company of actors and given them a finely wrought atmosphere to perform in.

Archipelago (Joanna Hogg, 2010)

Archipelago (Joanna Hogg, 2010)

Cast: Kate Fahy, Tom Hiddleston, Lydia Leonard, Amy Lloyd, Christopher Baker, Andrew Lawson, Mike Pender. Screenplay: Joanna Hogg. Cinematography: Ed Rutherford. Production design: Stéphane Collonge. Film editing: Helle le Fevre.

Rose (Amy Lloyd), a pretty young woman who has been hired to cook and clean for the Leighton family, is explaining to Edward (Tom Hiddleston) what she thinks is the humane way to cook a lobster. Don't plunge it directly into fully boiling water but instead put it in warm water and let the temperature slowly rise. The lobster will grow comatose and die in its sleep, she says. Sometimes, however, lobsters do struggle and try to get out of the pot, even knocking off the lid. I think there are audiences who may respond to Joanna Hogg's Archipelago like the lobsters: either drift off to sleep or decide to make an exit. For my part, I think it better to stay with it and behold the artistry with which Hogg steeps us in the building tensions of the family: mother Patricia (Kate Fahy), daughter Cynthia (Lydia Leonard), and son Edward. There's a father, too, but he is absent, and although he is expected to join them, there's a good deal of doubt about whether he will. They have leased a vacation home on one of the Isles of Scilly, an archipelago off the coast of Cornwall. Rocky, isolated, sparsely populated, but picturesque, the island, which the Leightons have visited before, has been chosen for a farewell celebration. Edward is about to go off to Africa to work as a health educator in an attempt to control the spread of AIDS, but it's soon apparent that there are tensions in the family over this altruistic decision -- and about many other things. Edward bears the brunt of most of the criticism, which comes largely from his sister, a bundle of nerves who likes to be in control at all times. We sense the tension between brother and sister from almost the beginning of the film, when Cynthia, who has arrived with her mother before Edward, offers a bit grudgingly to give up to Edward the bedroom she has already spent one night in and to move into one of the more cramped servant's rooms in the attic. Edward, not wanting to contest the issue, chooses the small, angular room, but the back-and-forthing among brother, sister, and mother foreshadows more power games to come. Like the master director she admires, Yasujiro Ozu, Hogg beautifully uses the setting, particularly the house, to heighten the emotions on display, even to the way a door is hung: The door to Cynthia's bedroom opens into the room, rather than against the wall, so that anyone entering has to sidle into Cynthia's presence, almost submissively. There is no door between the dining room and the kitchen, so when the family wants to discuss Edward's desire to ask Rose to dine with them, which Cynthia thinks inappropriate, they talk in hushed, tense, and nervous tones. Edward's rapport with Rose, to whom he often escapes from family tension, brings suspicion on him, even though he has a steady girlfriend back in London. Meanwhile, Patricia and Cynthia have a rapport with Christopher, an artist staying on the island who is giving them art lessons. It's a slow, talky film, not sweetened by a background music score, but it has a way of working itself into your brain with more emotional impact than films that pull out all the stops. The title, I think, is telling: Not only does it refer to where the film is set, but it also reminds us that while the islands in an archipelago are separate and distinct, they are geologically related and connected. No member of the Leighton family is an island entire of itself, though she or he may want to be. 

Unrelated (Joanna Hogg, 2007)

Unrelated (Joanna Hogg, 2007)

Cast: Kathryn Worth, Harry Kershaw, Emma Hiddleston, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Tom Hiddleston, Mary Roscoe, Michael Hadley, David Rintoul. Screenplay: Joanna Hogg. Cinematography: Oliver Curtis. Production design: Stéphane Collonge. Film editing: Helle le Fevre.

Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi, 2017)

Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo in Thor: Ragnarok

Thor: Chris Hemsworth
Loki: Tom Hiddleston
Hela: Cate Blanchett
Heimdall: Idris Elba
Grandmaster: Jeff Goldblum
Valkyrie: Tessa Thompson
Skurge: Karl Urban
Bruce Banner / Hulk: Mark Ruffalo
Odin: Anthony Hopkins
Doctor Strange: Benedict Cumberbatch
Korg (voice): Taika Waititi
Topaz: Rachel House
Actor Thor: Luke Hemsworth
Actor Odin: Sam Neill
Actor Loki: Matt Damon

Director: Taika Waititi
Screenplay: Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle, Christopher Yost
Cinematography: Javier Aguirresarobe
Production design: Dan Hennah, Ra Vincent
Film editing: Zene Baker, Joel Negron
Music: Mark Mothersbaugh

Much fun, thanks to director Taika Waititi's irreverence toward the material he was given to bring to the screen: yet another superhero comic book adventure. But the Marvel people have learned a lot about their audience, something it seems the DC people haven't fully apprised, given the failure of some of their Superman and Batman movies to capture audiences. (The blissful exception, of course, is Patty Jenkins's Wonder Woman, which vies with Thor: Ragnarok as 2017's best comic book movie.) The trick is to take nothing too seriously and to load your films with the best performers you can find. From the start, Chris Hemsworth was an ideal Thor: a gorgeous god, to be sure, but also a bit of a goof, easily outwitted by his clever brother Loki but able to survive in the end through sheer affability. If there's a flaw to Thor: Ragnarok it's that the stakes don't really seem that high: Asgard is a nice place, but none of us is ever going to visit there, so its destruction doesn't feel so much like a threat as the ones to Earth in the other Marvel adventures. The compensation is that unlike a lot of films with prestigious actors of the caliber of Cate Blanchett, Anthony Hopkins, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Tom Hiddleston -- people who could be off doing Shakespeare somewhere -- nobody involved seems to be going through the paces just for the paycheck. Everyone seems to be having fun, thanks to Waititi and other cutups like Hemsworth and Jeff Goldblum. It's not Hamlet, to be sure, although there's a play within a play with Chris's brother Luke, Sam Neill, and Matt Damon spoofing the "real" Thor, Odin, and Loki. Marvel has gone the jokey road before with the two Guardians of the Galaxy movies (James Gunn, 2014 and 2017), but those were exposition-heavy and overburdened with effects in comparison to Waititi's lighter, larkier approach.