Danny and Michael Philippou’s “Talk to Me” cleverly imagines a deadly craze that would easily sweep a generation—this horror movie’s plausibility is one of the freakiest things about it. The social media-feeding frenzy involves spiritual possession, made possible by grasping a ceramic-encased severed hand graffitied with names and symbols that suggest a long line of previous owners. Aussie teens like Mia (Sophie Wilde), Jade (Alexandra Jensen), and eventually Jade’s younger brother Riley (Joe Bird) are the latest players in such a game, which has them seeing dead people and giving them access to their tied-up bodies for 90 seconds, tops. When the spirits are “let in,” the teens suddenly shoot backward in a chair (the camera jolting back with them, the sound mix dropping out), and their pupils burst into a deep black. They shiver, choke, and asphyxiate as if they are gonna die. Meanwhile, their giddy friends surround them, filming. What a rush, as a YouTuber probably once said about eating Tide pods.  

It’s a brilliant device for a modern horror story (Daley Pearson is credited as the concept’s creator), and a franchise waiting to happen (in the case of horror, that often means a fruitful idea is intact, like when “Final Destination,” “The Purge,” and “Saw” first debuted.) “Talk to Me” could easily lead to a higher body count or a more directly spooky story in its sequels. But the game begins small here with a sincere pitch that aims for the gut—this first installment is about watching someone be possessed by horrible ideas of grief, and the damage their decisions inflict on their loved ones. 

There are rules for how this dance with death can be done “safely,” and in a snappy montage that mixes partying with possessive play, we get a great sense of what extreme fun it can be for Mia, her friends, and the hand’s current owners, Hayley (Zoe Terakes) and Joss (Chris Alosio). But everything shifts in a nifty, nasty instant when one of the spirits that overtakes young Riley turns out to be Mia’s mother who died by suicide two years previous. Or at least the spirit claims to be. A freaked-out Mia forces this one communication with the dead to go on too long, putting Riley in a coma with many self-inflicted gashes on their head, an attempt by the spirit to kill his soul and fully control his body. 

The second half of “Talk to Me” suffers from being yet another recent horror movie built on the trauma of loss, but it gets a special amount of layers from Sophie Wilde’s excellent performance. It’s not just about Mia trying to hold onto contact with her mother, but her need to not lose her new family, that of Jade, Riley, and their protective mother Sue (played with dry toughness by Miranda Otto) in the process. We ache for Mia to be OK, especially since she’s such a bright personality—her constant yellow wardrobe always pops, and she has sweet scenes with Riley, like when the Philippous hard-cut to them early on bursting out Sia’s “Chandelier” during a night-time car ride. Wilde exemplifies a feverish, youthful need to balance both the pains of the past and a jeopardized future, and by trying to hack the hand’s magic, she isolates herself from reality in the process. “Talk to Me” could have been more rote without such voluminous work, but Wilde’s tragic interpretation—her big-screen debut—is one for the horror movie history books. 

The Philippous rarely show us the TikToks or Snapchats that document these possessions, but we don’t need to see them: these freaky scenarios play out exactly as they might in real life, with writers Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman allowing teens to be teens. When everything starts to fall apart—and souls are on the line—the characters just become more stubborn, their desperation making things worse and even more dangerous. “Talk to Me” has the bare wisdom of a coming-of-age tale, and while it conjures a few excellent moments of guffawing disbelief from the audience, it never talks down to the audience it wants to reflect. The Philippous’ filmmaking comes from YouTube (known there as RackaRacka), and their eye for this psychology is more savvy than it is cynical. 

A good deal of nasty fun is scattered throughout “Talk to Me,” especially for fans of well-made blood-dribbling head wounds, sound design that makes you wince without relying on jump scares, and a tone that doesn’t play nice. Plus, the movie’s playful possession scenes get better and better (the movie’s young cast is impressive wriggling in those chairs, even if the possession make-up style looks familiar to so many other movies). But “Talk to Me” can bank too much of its quality on simply being a good pitch best fulfilled later—it’s hard not to see its gripping opening scene of terror, a one-shot through an unrelated, crowded party, as an isolated red herring not followed through by the rest of the film. The movie’s overall restraint is admirable, and best felt in the numerous moments when the camera holds on someone’s scared face, so we can build dread about what ghoul they are looking at. But “Talk to Me” risks holding back too much despite its excellent concept’s promise. 

Whether or not we get more rounds with this hand of fate, “Talk to Me” lingers as a striking and confident directorial debut from the Philippous, whose penchant for hyper-active YouTube fight and prank vids is mostly evident in this movie’s emotional carnage. With such a playful send-up on a possession story, the Philippous have successfully crossed over into feature filmmaking, but it will take a little more genre ingenuity for us to keep talking about them. 

Now playing in theaters. 

On its surface, “The Beasts,” an atmospheric Spanish true-crime thriller, seems like a bleak parable. A pair of outsiders, inspired by real-life Dutch eco-farmers Margo and Martin Verfondern, find themselves trapped in a heated dispute with their provincial Galician neighbors.

The aggrieved farmer Xan (Luis Zahera) and his skittish brother Loren (Diego Anido) resent the non-native couple, Olga and Antoine (Marina Foïs and Denis Ménochet), for preventing the sale of their land to a wind turbine company. So Olga pleads with Antoine to avoid (or at least stop covertly filming) an increasingly combative Xan. That’s easier said than done for Antoine, given both Xan and Lorenzo’s aggressive and antagonistic behavior. The resulting conflict also seems fairly straightforward: while Xan resents Antoine beyond reason, Antoine refuses to abandon his land.

Thankfully, co-writer/director Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s focus on Antoine and Xan’s emotionally charged stalemate keeps “The Beasts” from devolving into yet another quasi-artful and pseudo-moral genre movie that pits intolerant bumpkins against ignorant city-slickers.

Mood trumps morality in “The Beasts,” partly because Sorogoyen, in collaboration with director of photography Alejandro de Pablo, art director Jose Tirado, and sound designer Fabiola Ordoyo (among others), focuses on the stale air and the dead leaves that cling to the almost deceased Castilian village of Quinela de Barjas, about a 35-minute drive from the nearest inhabited city.

A half-stifling and half-enchanting air of stagnation only deepens the characters’ petulant, self-serving dialogue, not to mention their predictably fruitless and perpetually escalating tit-for-tat fighting. Many filmmakers are praised for making their location-shot settings the real stars of their movies. “The Beasts” wouldn’t be half as compelling if its creators didn’t draw so much out of their movie’s desolate and beautiful ghost town.

Sorogoyen was smart to emphasize, both in his movie and an interview in the movie’s press notes, that “The Beasts” only uses real events as a starting point. Because while the grievances that define both Antoine and Xan may be topical, neither character is much more compelling. Rather, “The Beasts” is arresting because of its creators’ stylized vision of reality. Some long takes present time in a naturalistic way, and some indoor scenes use natural-looking light to deepen our appreciation of what Quinela de Barjas looks and sounds like. These fairly standard filmmaking techniques also redirect our attention to the oppressive stillness that surrounds Antoine and Xan. Sorogoyen’s characters repeatedly bump into each other and just as often butt heads, despite tentative and often sincere-looking offers to hear each other out. By focusing on the impenetrable gloom surrounding Antoine, Xan, and their respective partners, Sorogoyen makes “The Beasts” more about the tragic inevitability of his protagonists’ dispute than whatever they say they’re fighting for.

“The Beasts” also deserves praise for its ensemble cast’s uniformly strong performances, especially since neither Ménochet nor Anido have had much experience as professional movie actors. Sorogoyen and de Pablo’s camera moves with purpose, leaving viewers with the impression that we’re either trailing after Antoine and Xan or looking up with them as they struggle to anticipate whatever’s about to happen. They retrace their steps slowly, sometimes even literally uphill, or balance and shift on their back feet, waiting for something they’re sure is coming but still can’t fully prepare for. That’s a nightmarish headspace, the kind that great horror movies thrive on.

“The Beasts” is ultimately a parable about neighbors who keep looking at each other, with anger and sadness, for an impossible miracle. They sort of get one, but it provides no relief. Sorogoyen, who co-wrote “The Beasts” with Isabel Peña, breaks his story into two uneven halves, the second of which shifts the plot’s focus away from Antoine and onto Olga and Marie (Marie Colomb), their frustrated daughter. A seemingly inevitable plot twist necessitates this narrative break, but even then, the movie is more about the sheer intensity of its characters’ emotional deadlock. “Nobody cares about the truth,” Marie says, and she’s right, of course. Olga is also right when she tells Marie, “You don’t understand,” because Marie has not lived in Quinela de Barjas for as long as she has, so she hasn’t taken in as much dead, comforting air as her mother.

Sorogoyen and Peña may ultimately lead us, alongside their characters, to a pious, anticlimactic finale, but it’s almost hard to care, given how real Antoine and Xan’s world seems. The toxic air surrounding these two characters does not clear by the movie’s end; it accretes and suffocates everyone who breathes it. Antoine and Xan’s dispute is, therefore, less about turf or hurt feelings than how the world looks when you’re waiting for the worst to happen. It does, and it’s as obvious and upsetting as it needs to be. “The Beasts” may not be realistic, but it is genuinely eerie.

Now playing in theaters. 

I’m really not trying to make a cute play on words by calling “Sympathy for the Devil” godawful.

Directed by Yuval Adler from a script by Luke Paradise and co-produced by star Nicolas Cage, who’s once again leaning hard into his “throwing garbage against the wall to see if it sticks” mode of accepting projects, this is kinda-sorta what they call in the theater a “two-hander,” one in which the beleaguered Ordinary Dude played by Joel Kinnaman runs afoul of a maniacal evildoer taking him on the opposite of a joy ride, at gunpoint, out of Las Vegas and into the unknown. 

We learn right off the bat that Kinnaman’s character, unnamed at this point—he’ll get two names later, but family members call him David—is about to be a father. He’s driving to a hospital to be with his wife after he’s dropped off his adorable tow-headed little fella. In a parking garage, though, is a guy with deep scarlet hair, a demonic goatee, and a revolver—that’s Cage (did you guess?), whose character is also unnamed. (He plays “The Passenger,” you see, and this lack-of-nomenclature gambit can work if the movie is good enough—see Walter Hill’s “The Driver”—but feels pretentious when the movie is, well, this.)

The problem we have right from the get-go is that neither of these personages gives the viewer much to care about. Sure, Kinnaman’s about to be a dad for the second time, but we know plenty of bad and indifferent folks who are fathers. As for Cage’s character, he’s not a character at all. He’s a Nic Cage mood ring designed to allow Nic Cage to do all sorts of wacky Nic Cage stuff. He sweats. He bugs out his eyes. He grins maniacally. He yells. He shrieks. He puts Alicia Bridges’ “I Love the Nightlife” on the jukebox at a diner he’s about to shoot up and dances to the song while bellowing the lyrics. At this point in the movie, about 52 minutes in, I figured I should be earning combat pay for continuing to watch.

Is there a plot? Well, yes. Cage’s character insists he knows David from long ago. Given the actions he describes—criminal bookkeeping, insanity, murder, lots of shady underworld figures—it sounds like that “long ago” was maybe the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, where lots of would-be Tarantino clones were thriving.

When the narrative isn’t tiring us, Cage talks about what his revolver will do to Kinnaman if and when he shoots him in the face or the back of the head. Does the verbal description of getting shot in the head or face make the prospective shooting victim more fearful than the mere presence of a gun pointed at those areas? So this movie believes. Although this may be more a matter of filling up time, giving Cage “provocative” things to say in this pointless exercise. Maybe during one of his drafts, screenwriter Paradise figured out he was leaning on the device pretty hard because there’s a line late in the film where the character refers to the habit. Cage also says things like, “The truth is rarely plain and never simple,” and he shows a lot of nerve when he upbraids Kinnaman’s character for his “cliched” family story.

This is not, I should clarify, strictly a two-hander. There’s a cop, guess what happens to him, and there are diner staffers and customers. Guess what happens to them. “We still have miles to go before we sleep,” Cage’s ostensible Devil says early in the movie. And indeed, it does feel endless.

Now playing in theaters. 

Sophie Kargman’s “Susie Searches” is a movie in search of its audience. The story follows Susie (Kiersey Clemons), a plucky misfit college student who runs her own largely unnoticed true crime podcast between classes and works at an on-campus burger joint. She’s got a knack for solving mysteries, or so she tells us. At first glance, this movie feels like it’s made for a younger audience. The dialogue is cute and bouncy but simplistic. The other characters are fairly silly caricatures, from Susie’s weird boss Edgar (Ken Marino), her dismissive coworker Jillian (Rachel Sennott), and the bumbling cops led by Sheriff Loggins (Jim Gaffigan). But “Susie Searches” is no “Nancy Drew” or “Harriet the Spy.” The movie has a twist that pulls it off-course, leaving more questions than answers. Is it still fun for younger audiences if the plot takes such a sharp dark turn? Is it fun for anyone? 

Co-written by Kargman and William Day Frank, “Susie Searches” starts strong but loses its way after our heroine solves her biggest case yet: the disappearance of local campus heartthrob Jesse Wilcox (Alex Wolff), a meditation YouTube star whose good looks and kind words make him a favorite of just about everyone he meets. Before the case, we see that Susie does not enjoy such adoration. She’s lonely and rejected by classmates, caring for her ailing mother by herself, working hard on a podcast practically no one listens to, and stops by the sheriff’s office to help but is mostly brushed off. 

When Susie solves the case, her world changes. She becomes famous overnight, and how people talk to her also changes. The dean of her college glowingly refers to her as his star pupil as he readies her for the cameras. She nervously smiles as reporters (all in the worst stock impersonations of how journalists behave) ask her questions about how she rescued Jesse from an unknown kidnapper. But the bubbly, feel-good underdog feelings are short-lived. This mostly happens within the first half hour of the movie’s brief runtime, leaving the rest to flounder through the idea that maybe Susie isn’t everything she seems. 

Kargman’s feature debut expands on her 2020 short “Susie Searches,” in which she played the braces-clad aspiring sleuth. However, what might have made a strong premise for a short does not translate to a foolproof feature. As a director, she plays with other thriller visuals—like freeze frames, intense close-ups, and split diopter shots—increasing their use towards the climactic end. But it feels at odds with the tone of the movie’s first third, that of a young detective solving her first big mystery. It’s as if the two parts have been Frankensteined together, and it doesn’t work. 

As Susie, Clemons does her best with the conflicting material, swinging from an all-smiles people pleaser, a determined podcaster narrating her latest theories, to a panicked-stricken observer. For the most part, the rest of the cast is one-note despite their talents. Wolff plays his character as cute and charming, leaning on Susie after his rescue and as the mystery grows more sinister. Gaffigan’s sheriff reluctantly opens up to Susie and seems incompetent until a pivotal moment. Sennott is unfortunately shortchanged in her part as Susie’s disgruntled coworker. Marino’s arc is even more inexplicable, almost like a role that would get made fun of on “Party Down.” 

Part of the novelty of “Susie Searches” lies in how it reflects the growing popularity of true crime podcasts. In June, the Pew Research Center confirmed what many listeners of true crime podcasts already knew: it’s the most popular podcast genre, and the majority of the audience are women, at a rate of almost 2-to-1. The third season of “Only Murders in the Building,” which uses a podcast in its first season to explore crimes in an apartment building in New York City, premieres next month. Numerous shows and docu-series have spun off of popular podcast series or even launched with an accompanying podcast for further listening. Although “Susie Searches” incorporates much of the language and tropes you’d hear in just about any scripted true crime podcast, it doesn’t seem to take kindly to the form itself. It takes a more cynical view of how those shows have influenced their hosts’ mind, possibly even condemning them for what happens. It’s as if the script views her passion project as a gateway to bad behavior, which adds to the feeling of disconnect from the first leg of the movie. If “Susie Searches” wanted to critique the true-crime podcast trend, it could have done so more directly. For now, we have a movie at odds with itself and its main character.

Now playing in theaters. 

In the lyrical film “War Pony”–an evocative tale of recurrent tribulation and dogged community spirit–Native strivers and hustlers roam the brutal clime of the Pine Ridge Reservation in search of a life raft to another day. To understand the plight affecting those Oglala Lakota and Sicangu Lakota citizens of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and Rosebud Sioux Tribe, one must first be aware of the broken treaties that lead to their contemporary settlement and the tribal sovereignty that now governs these areas.

Up until “Reservation Dogs” and “Wild Indian,” Chris Eyre’s “Smoke Signals” was a notable exception as a mainstream work by Indigenous creatives. On the flip side, there are also innumerable examples of white folk exploiting Indigenous culture for either economic or artistic gain. With two white filmmakers helming “War Pony,” it would appear, at first blush, that another outsider’s conception of Indigenous history is in the cards. 

Co-directors Gina Gammell and Riley Keough want to avoid such perceptions. Their film is a collaborative effort that began while Riley was filming “American Honey.” There she met two extras, the eventual co-writers of “War Pony,” Bill Reddy and Franklin Sioux Bob, who shared their Rez stories. These conversations would eventually inspire the trio and Gammell to compose their feature. The fruits of their exchange bear an immersive, albeit deeply cliched, collision between magic and neorealism. 

The electrifying first-time actor Jojo Bapteise Whiting stars as Bill, a 23-year-old swaggering striver with a baby momma, two young children, and zero career prospects. He pulls a few tricks and hustles when he learns his baby momma, presently in jail, needs $400 for bail. First, he buys a poodle from a shady character hoping to breed the dog for big money. Then he attempts to pawn his car and his PS4. But he makes his firmest bid toward upward mobility when he sees Tim (Sprague Hollander), marooned with his pickup truck at the side of a dirt road. 

Though Tim is married, he often fools around with Indigenous women. He has one in his truck. He elicits an agreement for Bill: In return for taking the woman home, he’ll give Bill the $400 he needs and a job at Tim’s turkey farm. The opportunity is a hustle that Bill hopes will grant him stability. 

Ladainian Crazy Thunder also stars as Matho, a troubled 12-year-old kid living with an abusive drug-dealing father whose life seems to be hitting all the worst potholes. Matho and Bill aren’t directly related, not on familial grounds, but they are direct foils. Their divergent arcs, occurring in two different spaces on the Rez, convey the beginning of a cycle and the result of one. As Matho shifts from temporary homes to squatting in derelict buildings, from taking beatings to dealing drugs, from one flawed parental figure to another, you get the sense these are all obstacles Bill must have hit long ago. 

Sometimes the editing between their narratives can be sporadic, leaving the impression that you’re watching two movies rather than two intertwining stories. Toward the end of the film, their eventual meeting veers toward predictability, even if I did appreciate the quiet staging and the soothing balm it provides.

“War Pony” has a cathartic transcendence when it engages with the tight bonds that form the community. A prominent instance occurs during a funeral when a convoy of cars swerves in snake-like unison as the plains landscape stretches behind them. Another happens at the end when the filmmakers combine the images of buffalo (the animal magically springs from nowhere) and turkeys for an anarchistic redistribution of resources, a kind of retribution for the appropriation that continues today. 

And yet these scenes are few and far between in a movie that solely prizes trauma. At this point, it’s become a cudgel to accuse a film of being a shallow endeavor because it litigates the stories of a people through its possible horrific reality. Some lives are inherently disturbing. And it can be superficial to ask for nice bows to be affixed to tragic stories, particularly if they’re drawing on real-life experiences. But it’s not just the inner-city milieu of “War Pony” that recalls some of the cliches common to Black gangster dramas of the 1990s. It’s also the film’s inability to convey an existence outside of unwed mothers, apathetic parents, and brutal socioeconomic disparity that leaves one wanting. 

Maybe that’s just the reality of Reddy and Sioux Bob’s community and the plethora of first-time extras and actors drawn from the area. From an outsider’s perspective, however, as poetic and otherworldly as “War Pony” can be, the reality of its people never feels real. 

Now playing in theaters. 

Though it may not be en vogue to say it, some narratives seem hardwired into our collective unconscious mind, and we have an attachment to them almost as vital as our need for water. We might not often invoke her name, but the Cinderella Narrative is at the root of much of our narrative culture. Another omnipresent story is that of David and Goliath. In fictional filmmaking, this story is inescapable, but it has a powerful hold on non-fiction film as well. 

The big difference is that in non-fiction, the outcome is not always predetermined. The stone might miss Goliath’s temple. So the focus shifts to why David decided to pick up his sling, even if his aim may, in the end, falter. 

This applies to the new documentary “Bobi Wine: The People’s President,” directed by Christopher Sharp and Moses Bwayo. Sharp is a second-generation Ugandan-born Englishman, and Bwayo, who also serves as one of the film’s cinematographers, is Ugandan. For five years, including inevitably the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, they shadowed and filmed the unlikely rise of Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu to a place of prominence in Ugandan politics. Kyagulanyi, performing under the name Bobi Wine, is a pop musician whose music (a blend of reggae, dancehall, and Ugandan kidandali) has made him a big name. However, Bobi Wine risks it all when he decides to enter politics, taking a seat in the Ugandan Parliament before deciding to run for president.

The incumbent is Yoweri Museveni, a septuagenarian war hero who took up arms against the infamous Ugandan dictator Idi Amin only to become a de facto dictator himself after losing a presidential election and launching a civil war to take power. Museveni has ruled Uganda since 1986. 

The filmmakers construct this documentary as a first-person account of Wine and his formidable wife, Barbie. Their unlikely courtship—a good girl from a middle-class family falling for a musician from the streets with no family to speak of—feels like something out of Old Hollywood. The differences between the two are the secret to this dynamic union, and Wine would probably have never transitioned from pop idol to statesman without her influence and counsel.

All dictators are, to some degree, creatures of the media, and every strongman’s worst nightmare is being challenged by a beloved entertainer. Museveni is threatened by Wine and uses his army and police to go to war with Wine’s National Unity Platform opposition party. Wine is arrested and brutalized, which temporarily forces him into exile as he tries to raise international awareness of Museveni’s abuse of power. 

The documentary balances footage from the news (both Ugandan media and from abroad) with their footage from inside Wine’s inner circle to the violent clashes between Wine’s supporters and the army. The film is in many ways a spiritual sibling to Marshall Curry’s 2005 Oscar-nominated documentary “Street Fight,” which tells the story of (now-) U.S. Senator Cory Booker’s first failed attempt to become the Mayor of Newark as his campaign is smothered by incumbent Sharpe James who ruled Newark in ways strikingly similar to Museveni. 

The differences between “Street Fight” and “Bobi Wine” are telling. Curry narrates the former doc and provides valuable insight into the history of Newark and how Sharpe James went from being part of the post-Civil Rights reformer wave to betraying all the ideals of that movement. Sharp and Bwayo let Bobi and Barbi tell their own story, which is currently one of the preferred modes of non-fiction film storytelling. Wine does convey that Museveni was once his hero, but because the documentary chooses a more participatory-observational approach, we miss a lot of important Ugandan history that provides much-needed context so that we can understand what taking Museveni on means. 

What Sharp and Bwayo do manage to capture in vivid detail is Uganda itself from the high energy of the capital city Kampala to the lush beauty of the northern country. The beauty of the land clashes dramatically with the ugliness of the presidential campaign, which Museveni turns into a civil war in all but name to retain power at any cost. Needless to say, the documentary arrives at a moment when strongman politics are ascending worldwide, even in American national politics.

It will only take a few seconds on Google to tell you how this election ends, but what only the film can do is show you how Bobi Wine evolves into a powerful spokesman for democratic values as he tries to save Uganda from autocracy. This film will undoubtedly inspire others to stand up like Bobi and Barbie, even though “Bobi Wine” is also clear about the cost of putting a stone in your sling. 

Now playing in theaters.