Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, 2024)

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, Chris Messina, Gabriel Basso, Zoey Deutch, Cedric Yarbrough, Leslie Bibb, Kiefer Sutherland, Amy Aquino, Adrienne C. Moore, Chieko Fukuyama. Screenplay: Jonathan A. Abrams. Cinematography: Yves Bélanger. Production design: Ronald R. Reiss. Film editing: David S. Cox, Joel Cox. Music: Mark Mancina. 

Clint Eastwood's Juror #2 is the kind of courtroom drama that could have been made any time in the history of American movies, including when the Production Code was most sternly in effect. Which is to say that it's a throwback to an era in which audiences were not expected to question its obvious inconsistencies and falsifications but just sit back and be entertained by the predicament into which its protagonist is cast and expect it to be resolved satisfactorily. The premise is this: A man named Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) finds himself on a jury in a murder case but gradually realizes that he may be the one who killed the victim and has in his hands the fate of the man (Gabriel Basso) accused of the crime. Meanwhile, his wife, Allison (Zoey Deutch), is in the seventh month of pregnancy, having miscarried before. And the prosecuting attorney, Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), is in the midst of a campaign for D.A., and wants to secure a conviction no matter what. Add to this the unsavory background of the accused, a group of witnesses to an altercation between the accused and the victim in a bar, and a man who claims that he witnessed the murder, things look pretty solid for the prosecutor. But Justin's conscience won't let him vote for conviction. At least not yet. It's a movie in which suspense is more important than coherence, drama more significant than actuality. Eastwood's no-nonsense filmmaking obscures the nonsense of the story, and the performances give it a specious emotional credibility. (Though I could have done without the sore-thumb obviousness of Collette's Southern accent, when no one else the cast was attempting it.)

Clockwatchers (Jill Sprecher, 1997)

Parker Posey, Toni Collette, Lisa Kudrow, and Alanna Ubach in Clockwatchers

Cast: Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, Alanna Ubach, Helen FitzGerald, Stanley DeSantis, Jamie Kennedy, David James Elliott, Debra Jo Rupp, Kevin Cooney, Bob Balaban, Paul Dooley. Screenplay: Jill Sprecher, Karen Sprecher. Cinematography: Jim Denault. Production design: Pamela Marcotte. Film editing: Stephen Mirrione. Music: Mader. 

Blessed are the meek, they say. Certainly Iris (Toni Collette) qualifies as meek when, on her first day as a temp at a credit company, she does as she's told and sits patiently for a very long time until Barbara (Debra Jo Rupp), the human resources manager, sees her and scolds her for not letting anyone know she was there. Self-effacing to a fault, Iris soon finds herself with a group of new friends, all temps who have been "temporary" for quite a while (a dodge companies use to keep from paying benefits). Each of them is more outgoing than Iris: Margaret (Parker Posey) is sassy and subversive, eager to point out to Iris ways to do as little work as possible. Paula (Lisa Kudrow) claims to be just passing time while waiting for her big break as an actress. Jane (Alanna Ubach) is engaged and can't wait until marriage frees her from office work. Iris's father (Paul Dooley), meanwhile, is urging her to get a good job in sales, something that her shyness makes her unsuitable for. This is the setup for Jill Sprecher's satire on contemporary work in the kind of office, scored to the artificial peppiness of Muzak, that anyone who ever worked for a corporation that values productivity over creativity, routine over initiative, and regimentation over individuality will recognize. In Clockwatchers, meekness wins out: Iris lasts longer in the job than her friends, even after the company makes their work lives more miserable than ever. But she's bested by an employee even meeker than she is, but who adds sneakiness to the meekness. As satire, I happen to think the film is a little too low key, and that the casting of vivid actresses like Posey and Kudrow, wonderful as they are, works against the mood of the film, but it has the ring of truth throughout.  

Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018)

Milly Shapiro, Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, and Alex Wolff in Hereditary

Cast: Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Woff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, Mallory Bechtel. Screenplay: Ari Aster. Cinematography: Pawel Pogorzelski. Production design: Grace Yun. Film editing: Lucian Johnston, Jennifer Lame. Music: Colin Stetson.

There are films that leave a depressive miasma with me for days. I'm thinking particularly of George Sluizer's The Vanishing (1988, not the 1993 American remake) and Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997, not the 2007 American remake). For a time, I thought Ari Aster's Hereditary was going to have the same effect on me, and it might have, if it hadn't devolved into a mere gory supernatural thriller with an overcomplicated backstory. It begins extraordinarily and creepily well, with a pan through the miniatures created by Annie (Toni Collette) in which one of them turns into the actual room where her son, Peter (Alex Wolff), is oversleeping on the day of his grandmother's funeral. A menacing gloom remains in the film as the family, including father Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), goes to the funeral and returns home. Even when we come home, there's a sense that something is off about the family and their obvious mixed feelings about the deceased. Ari Aster, in his feature film debut, skillfully handles the atmosphere in the somewhat sinister old house (aided by Pawel Pogorzelski's dark but not too dark cinematography and Colin Stetson's ominous score). Aster manages to gradually introduce the exposition about what's eating at Annie and her family. The performances are marvelous, especially Shapiro's obviously but enigmatically disturbed 13-year-old Charlie. I was with Aster's film all the way through the appalling accident that turns the story in a new direction. Then Ann Dowd, a fine actress whose career seems to have become defined by her performance as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid's Tale, shows up to reveal the movie's indebtedness to The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968). Unfortunately, Aster's film has neither the coherence of the former nor the wit of the latter. In the end, it has to be remembered for Collette's performance, which should have had an Oscar nomination, not just for Annie's distraught moments but also the one at the film's climax when her face turns from horror to a kind of pleased amazement.

Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)

Daniel Craig in Knives Out

Cast: Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, LaKeith Stanfield, Christopher Plummer, Katherine Langford, Jaeden Martell, Riki Lindholme, Edi Patterson, Frank Oz, Noah Segan, K Callan, M. Emmett Walsh, Marlene Forte. Screenplay: Rian Johnson. Cinematography: Steve Yedlin. Production design: David Crank. Film editing: Bob Ducsay. Music: Nathan Johnson.

Knives Out is an old-fashioned whodunit with a brilliant detective on the case, but folded into the intricacies of its plot are some sharp-edged politics. It's almost as if Agatha Christie gave us Hercule Poirot's views on Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler or Dorothy Sayers had employed Lord Peter Wimsey to confront Sir Oswald Mosley. In Rian Johnson's screenplay, the plot is given some spin by the Trumpist sympathies of some of the Thrombey family and by the plight of Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), who fears that her mother's status as an undocumented immigrant will be revealed. But the politics is largely there as a flavoring for the stew of motives and meanness. The setup is this: The wealthy thriller novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found dead, his throat cut, after the family has gathered to celebrate his 85th birthday. The verdict is suicide, but someone has hired the celebrated detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) to investigate -- even Blanc doesn't know who sent him a cash payment that put him on the case -- and demands for an investigation only get hotter after Thrombey's will is read and the eager would-be heirs learn that he has left everything to Marta, his nurse. She naturally becomes a prime suspect, but she has an amusingly improbable quirk: She can't tell a lie without vomiting. And she knows a lot more than she's willing to tell, including the fact that she thinks she's the one responsible for Thrombey's death. Various theories of the case come to light as Blanc weighs the evidence, but eventually the truth will out -- almost literally, when Marta blows chunks on the culprit. There's a lot of sly, wonderful acting in the movie, starting with Craig playing against the James Bond type as the Southern-accented sleuth. The movie was a big hit, so there's talk of more Benoit Blanc mysteries, but it will be hard to top this one.