THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER Review

On the surface it would seem this latest incarnation of a familiar property was made both only for financial gain (or so they thought) and with the old-fashioned mindset that sequels must be bigger in order to be better. What is more frightening than one possessed girl? Two, right? Fortunately, this isn't exactly the line of thought eclectic (to say the least) writer/director David Gordon Green was following when making this decision. Rather, this decision is all about choice as choice is what informs the whole of this first in an intended trilogy of new Exorcist films.

Opening with an earthquake in Haiti that forces Leslie Odom Jr.'s character to choose between the survival of his wife and the life of his daughter, the film is keen to emphasize the role of our moral agency in this life and how seriously we take responsibility for our choices is just as important as the choices themselves. The way Green and co-writers Danny McBride, Scott Teems, and largely Peter Sattler weave this weight of responsibility and the constant questioning Odom's Victor Fielding has regarding the choices he's made and is confronted with making throughout the course of the film lend the otherwise familiar template of the exorcism movie some necessary weight, especially considering the lineage of William Friedkin's original.

While that original film saw both Jason Miller's Father Karras and Ellen Burstyn's Chris MacNeil grappling with their faith in the face of this possession, Green and co. have smartly updated not only the location of the film from Washington, D.C. to Georgia, but also the role of church and faith in what I feel I can safely assume is presently a more secular America than in 1973. In doing so, we have Fielding who is or has become an absolute non-believer in the wake of his wife dying. Fielding's daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett), who is now thirteen and friends with Katherine (Olivia O'Neill) has a mother and father (Jennifer Nettles and Norbert Leo Butz) who are very much ingrained in a community church and seem genuinely convicted in their beliefs (I lowkey kind of loved Nettles' performance in this as she lends a certain credibility to the southern protestant persona that is often easy to dismiss). When the girls disappear after school one day to secretly attempt to contact Angela's dead mother, they naturally conjure the unwanted spirits/demons that then begin to possess their bodies.

STRONGER Review

On the surface, Stronger is a movie that looks as if it is trying desperately to be little more than an awards-contender. True Story? Check. Tragedy? Check. Severe disability? Check. Indie darling director? Check. Jake Gyllenhaal being intense? Check. So yeah, taking the main factors into consideration it's not hard to see why this would seemingly be anything more than an attempt at scoring Gyllenhaal an Oscar and maybe, to some degree, the hope is that might work out in the end, but it's not Stronger's main objective and it certainly isn't where the intent of the film lies as Stronger is easily one of the most genuine movies I've seen all year. Genuine in that it never cops to sensationalizing anything that would be an easy target given the subject matter. No, Stronger is a human story, a story about a relationship more than it is the Boston Marathon bombing and within that the film goes to places where it is able to cut deeper emotionally than it would had the film simply resorted to recreating the horror of that day. Director David Gordon Green, who came to prominence on the back of indies such as George Washington and All the Real Girls only to go on to helm big budget comedies like Pineapple Express and Your Highness, has, in recent years, found a kind of middle ground between these two wide-ranging genres where mid-budgeted, character driven stories featuring big names have become something of the filmmaker's forte. Green only continues to hone this kind of movie-making in Stronger. Combining his knack for naturalistic and improvised moments with that of his major studio experience in staging a recreation of the bombing as well as shooting at both Boston hockey and baseball games Green has, in many ways, culminated all of his past experiences with Stronger and the result is a film that is deceptively simple, deceptively easy to misread and/or label as one thing, but is so much more than it initially appears to be. Stronger is a movie that delves into one man coming to terms with a new way of life, a new status among his peers, and a relationship he isn't sure is destined to work out all while recovering from the most traumatic day of his life. Stronger doesn't resonate due to big, dramatic moments, but more for the ones that aren't; the quite moments where one can't verbalize why they're significant, but feel that they are. Stronger is somehow able to tap into these unspoken moments and is all the more authentic because of that.