The Sundance 2018 thread _ NOMINEES + WINNERS

Andrea Riseborough, Ann Dowd, John Leguizamo and Steve Buscemi star in Christina Choe's film about a woman who becomes convinced she was kidnapped as a child.
A sort of depressed distant cousin to last year's Ingrid Goes West, Nancy tells a tale of female self-reinvention gone disturbingly awry. But while the earlier film was a joyride — giddy and upbeat even as it made you squirm and sweat — this feature directorial debut from Christina Choe, premiering in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance, is an unabashed downer. The movie's refusal to ingratiate is admirable, even if you end up wondering whether it was worth all the doom and gloom.

Our eponymous antiheroine (Andrea Riseborough) lives with her nagging, Parkinson's-afflicted mother (Ann Dowd, in another of her monster-lady roles) in a dingy house somewhere bleak, suburban and Northeastern. Aside from the comforts offered by her beloved cat, Nancy's life is joyless: She sleepwalks through temp shifts at a dental office, helps Mom onto and off the toilet and surfs the web. But she has aspirations, as attested by a pile of rejection letters from the fiction departments of publications like The Paris Review.

Riseborough, last seen wooing Billie Jean King over a haircut in Battle of the Sexes, is frumped-up here, her Kewpie-doll radiance dulled by a sickly pallor, bad bangs and a delivery that's deadpan verging on lethargic. She's the kind of actress that makes you lean in and pay attention, even if, in this case, the character she's playing registers more as abstraction — an embodiment of internet-age dysfunction — than flesh-and-blood human.

Though Nancy's pathological dishonesty is established when she leads a guy she picks up online (John Leguizamo) to believe she's pregnant — she stuffs a fake belly under her shirt when she goes to meet him — Choe is coy about what, precisely, ails her protagonist. Is Nancy mentally ill, severely maladjusted, a calculating impostor? The writer-director's decision to keep lines blurred and diagnoses unstated isn't a problem in itself, but our investment in Nancy is inevitably undermined when we meet the two other key characters, whose suffering is palpable in its specificity.

Those are Ellen (J. Smith-Cameron) and Leo (Steve Buscemi), a middle-aged couple Nancy first sees on TV being interviewed about their daughter, Brooke, who disappeared 30 years ago at age 5. Nancy contacts an initially dubious Ellen claiming to be that daughter, and before long she's feasting on roast chicken and sipping red wine in their roomy, rustic house. Leo, a psychologist, is hospitable if circumspect, but Ellen, a comparative literature professor, goes all in; once she meets Nancy and notes a physical resemblance to Brooke, her yearning for this strange woman to be her long-lost child turns into full-fledged conviction. Nancy, meanwhile, is quietly dazzled by Ellen and Leo's generosity and casual, comfy sophistication. This is as close to familial love — and to The Paris Review — as she's likely to get, and she savors it even as she anxiously waits for them to wise up.
Choe and DP Zoe White shoot early scenes in a boxy aspect ratio, emphasizing the stark limitations of Nancy's life; the frame widens and brightens when Nancy meets Ellen and Leo, as her world is opened up to possibilities, both emotional and economic, she has never known. It's a stylistic choice that makes sense given the expansive, effortlessly lived-in kindness and intelligence conveyed by Smith-Cameron and Buscemi.

Whereas dazed, delusional outcast Nancy is a recognizable type from various dark indie dramedies we've seen (and forgotten), Ellen and Leo, in their internalized anguish and everyday resilience, resonate as the more original characters. That's no small feat since the grieving parent is among the most tiresomely overused figures in narrative film today. But Smith-Cameron (so wonderful as Anna Paquin's stage-actress mother in Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret) exudes a tremulous maternal warmth that feels achingly real, and Buscemi has rarely, if ever, been more touching or subdued. They convey such a vivid sense of these people, their painful shared history and the hushed, haunted life they've rebuilt that you may wish Choe had focused on Ellen and Leo instead of the indecipherable Nancy.
The filmmaker never pulls us into the twists and turns of her main character's mind, and she tiptoes around, rather than tackles, her ideas about class envy, the performative nature of identity and the tension between truth and happiness. Presumably aiming for complexity, her approach ends up coming off as hesitant; the impression left is more of familiar tropes and tones carefully reassembled than of any kind of exploration or excavation.
What sticks with you are those moments when Smith-Cameron and Buscemi cut right through the movie's haze of vagueness, making this slice of American-indie miserabilism feel like something more.

Free association has rarely been freer than in the mind of Robin Williams, whose gift for improvisation made him one of the most respected comedians and dramatic actors of his generation. And in “Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind,” director Marina Zenovich (“Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired”) pops the hood and shows us some of what made this artist tick.

It’s a film that, early on, feels like a standard catch-a-rising-star celebrity hagiography, but as the story continues — and the impressive line-up of interviewees get deeper into their memories of Williams — the film achieves a balance between celebration and unfiltered recollection. His addictions to cocaine, alcohol and even the very act of getting a laugh are explored by friends and family as well as, in voice-over, by Williams himself in frank archival interviews.

Most fans know the general outline: Marin County kid goes to Juilliard, where John Houseman picks Williams and his roommate Christopher Reeve as his most promising students. Classically-trained improv actor becomes stand-up comedian who jumps from subject to subject to impersonation to outrageous physicality with lightning speed. A one-episode stint as Mork from Ork on the hit sitcom “Happy Days” leads to his own show. The movies, the nanny, the heart surgery, the Parkinson’s diagnosis, and the tragic suicide in 2014 at the age of 63.

Zenovich fills in some of the blanks: Williams grew up spending a lot of time alone, entertaining himself with characters he would create for his toy soldiers. Later, he attended an all-male college and started taking theater classes because they were the only ones that were co-ed.

And then there’s the film’s impressive array of interviews: David Letterman recalls thinking that he’d picked perhaps the worst time to move to L.A. to become a comedian after seeing Williams onstage. Elayne Boosler talks about being Williams’ girlfriend while acknowledging his need to have other women, including another girlfriend in San Francisco, Valerie Velardi, who eventually became his first wife.

Eric Idle and Billy Crystal and Steve Martin speak in awe about Williams’ gifts while acknowledging his personal demons. (Crystal recalls Williams’ dependence on audience response, noting he always needed “that one extra-special hug you can only get from a stranger.”) Pam Dawber remembers having to tell Williams that John Belushi died of an overdose not long after Williams had visited him.

Velardi reveals that her privacy kept her from correcting press reports at the time that Williams had left her for their former nanny, Marsha Garces, even though Velardi and Williams had already been separated for a year and that Garces hadn’t worked in that capacity for them in quite some time. It’s an overdue correction, but it’s also understandable that she would have wanted to avoid that media scrum at the time. (Velardi and Williams’ son Zak also shares touching memories of his dad.)

“Come Inside My Mind” offers some revealing bloopers (the Elmo/”Sesame Street” outtakes are priceless) that demonstrate Williams’ unique train of thought and how he was always reaching for some beautiful moment of truth and absurdity. You would expect him to be cutting up between takes of, say, “Patch Adams” (it’s a little heartbreaking to see the late Philip Seymour Hoffman lose his composure), but it’s jarring to see Williams shtick it up on the set of the intense “One Hour Photo” — director Mark Romanek recalls that Williams just had to get the wackiness out of his system, and the relaxed glow he got after getting a laugh fed into his dramatic focus.

Apart from one radio interview with Williams’ friend (and “World’s Greatest Dad” director) Bobcat Goldthwait, “Come Inside My Mind” doesn’t spend quite enough time explaining the connections between the Lewy body dementia (brought on by the Parkinson’s) that led to his suicide. It also would have helped if any of the stand-up or movie clips peppered throughout featured years alongside the titles to let those less acquainted with his career know where and when we are over the course of his life.

These are minor drawbacks, however, to a film that’s compassionate without being fawning, and poignant without being sentimental. It’s less a lament over his loss and more a celebration that he existed at all.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan star in Paul Dano's directorial debut, a 1960-set family drama adapted from a Richard Ford novel.
Actor Paul Dano has made a small gem in Wildlife, his first film as a director. Precise, controlled and emotionally acute, this adaptation of Richard Ford’s short fourth novel, published in 1990, examines the disintegration of a marriage from the point of view of the couple’s 14-year-old son (he was two years older in the book), and does so with gentle precision and narrative economy. Unusually restrained and unemphatic by contemporary standards, the film possesses an integrity and economy of means that earns respect, even if it will probably feel old-fashioned to contemporary adolescents in the same age bracket as the protagonist. Theatrical prospects look quite limited despite the marquee names of Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal, both in good form as the parents.

The drama is set in Great Falls, Montana, in 1960 against the backdrop of an enormous forest fire raging in the mountains forty miles away, the smoke from which is beginning to settle down on the town. Unemployed men sign up for a dollar an hour to be trucked off and help fight the blaze, even if there’s not a whole lot that can be done to thwart it.

Jerry Brinson (Gyllenhaal) looks to be doing a fair amount of brooding even before he’s fired from his job as a golf pro at the local course. Although his bosses soon realize they’ve made a mistake and invite him back, Jerry has his pride and takes to moping around the house to the consternation of his wife Jeanette (Mulligan), who at the outset tries to put on a good front as an agreeable mid-century housewife but is soon unnerved by her husband’s newfound sense of entropy.

While both parents make desultory efforts to look for work, son Joe signs on as an apprentice to a local portrait photographer, a part-time job he takes to. There’s something of an affinity between this line of work and the visual style Dano and cinematographer Diego Garcia have worked out, one that doesn’t eschew camera moves when called for but certainly favors simple, clean, forthright compositions that in the long run endow the film with a sense of emotional groundedness.

This is compounded by the sensationally fine work by young Australian actor Ed Oxenbould in the critical role of Joe. Rather nerdy-looking at first glance, he has an observational openness that is most ingratiating, although the actor does nothing to cozy up to the viewer. More than anyone, he carries the film.

The stylistic stability persists even as the emotional bonds within the family become fraught and fractured. Out of frustration and perhaps other emotional turmoil he can’t articulate, Jerry hops on a truck with destitute men to go fight the wildfires, leaving Jeanette and Joe on their own and without a clue when or even if Jerry might return.

“What kind of man leaves his wife and child in such a lonely place?,” Jeanette wonders, and almost at once she begins to look unhealthily gaunt and frazzled. She does find work, including teaching an old wealthy man, Warren Miller (Bill Camp), how to swim, but she begins speaking about her emotional problems and life complaints in a way that 14-year-olds, even this comparatively mature one, are not equipped to hear. All her life choices have now come back to haunt her and take her to the brink, which ultimately lead her to a misguided involvement with the lecherous Miller that she scarcely chooses to conceal from her appalled son.

Mulligan’s precise portrait of Jeanette’s desperation and deterioration is a disturbing thing to behold, both in and of itself and for its inevitably devastating effect on Joe. Jerry does return at a certain point, forcing decisive decisions that put the kid through the emotional wringer once again.

The story is saved from both outright melodrama and the explicitly clinical by the stylistic sense of reserve of both the writing (Dano penned the script with Zoe Kazan) and direction, which is marked by its fair-minded openness and clarity. The script dares to go deep and confront what is going on in the hearts and minds of all three family members, but it does so articulately and without hysteria.

The adults here do plenty of damage, both to their son and themselves, but the sense of human charity, if it may be called that in this context, lifts the drama out of the emotional mess the characters make and creates a positive view of the future — albeit without simplistically manufactured false hope.

Except for four days in Montana, the film was otherwise filmed in Oklahoma. In a bit of historical cinematic nitpicking, the double-bill shown to be playing at the downtown Great Falls movie theater, North to Alaska and Butterfield 8, could not have been possible in the summer or fall of 1960, as both films opened in November of that year.

Keira Knightley plays the French literary superstar in Wash Westmoreland's biopic.
An enjoyable account of how France's most famous female author came out of the closet in more ways than one, Wash Westmoreland's Colette casts Keira Knightley as the country girl whose literary gifts (with the help of salacious plotlines) outshone those of all the male writers around her, including her celebrated husband. Skeptics may grouse that a movie about the creme de la creme of Paris is cast entirely with English actors, but this is not a film for the highest of highbrows. Taken on its terms, it is an engaging literary coming-of-age story, and one embodied ably by its star.

We meet Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette as a pigtailed teen living in a corner of Burgundy. A substantially older family friend from Paris (Dominic West's Henry Gauthier-Villars, known as Willy) comes calling from time to time, spewing his views on the Parisian arts scene; only after his visits does Colette sneak off to a nearby barn to roll in the hay with him.

The two are married, and he brings her to Paris, where he's a notorious libertine and she takes some time embracing local fashions. The movie really hasn't bothered introducing Willy properly, but we come to understand that he's something of a literary impresario, hiring many ghostwriters to pen the stories and reviews he publishes under his own name. (As with Willy, his underpaid writers walk in and out of scenes as if we're supposed to know who they are already.)

Willy puts Colette to work writing his correspondence. Despite his local fame — we don't see enough of the wit for which he's famous, though West makes his gifts as a hustler evident — Willy is always on the brink of poverty. He could, of course, stop the gambling and wining-dining-whoring to save some money, but Willy has a better idea: He tells Colette she should write a novel, using stories she has told him of her youth, to bring in some cash.

She finds herself loving that work, hands the manuscript over proudly, and is crestfallen when Willy says it's lovely but unpublishable. Only years later, as he's cleaning her pages out of his desk so the repo men can take it away, does he see the potential: He sits down with Colette to play up the story's naughty-schoolgirl aspect. The resulting book, Claudine at School — published under Willy's name, not hers — is an instant, smash hit.

Colette has already tantalized Willy by admitting to being attracted to women, but as the couple's fame grows she begins to live out these fantasies with his encouragement. The film starts to come to life as she has her first rendezvous with a "wayward American debutante" (Eleanor Tomlinson); the moments before their first tryst are sexier than almost all of the slightly racy scenes to come. But Willy decides to have a parallel affair with the same woman, keeping it a secret instead of trying things out as a threesome. (The French have a name for this, don't they?) And by keeping it secret from Colette (like his other previous affairs), he wrecks the whole thing. Amusingly, the film has husband and wife resolve things not with a blow-out argument but via an editing session on Colette's third novel, which lightly fictionalizes the whole episode.

This high-profile film about a turn-of-the-century woman who insisted on independence will inevitably be written about in terms of feminism circa 2018. (Press notes prompt eye-rolls, or worse, by offering the handy hashtag "#COLETTE TOO.") But it takes a long time for Westmoreland and the script (which he co-wrote with Rebecca Lenkiewicz and his late partner Richard Glatzer) to find some real nerve in its heroine. In too many instances, Colette flatly refuses to go along with something Willy demands, only to do it in the next scene without explanation. When Willy needs to rush out a sequel to the first Claudine book, he actually locks her in a room and tells her he'll let her out after four hours. Instead of climbing out the window and leaving the louse, she waits a beat, then looks at her notebooks lustily and begins to write.

The Claudine phenomenon prompts many interesting developments for the couple. When the book is adapted for a stage show, the magnetic actress who plays her becomes part of a "Claudine Trinity" with the authors; Willy descends more deeply into sexual fantasies, taking up with women who pretend to be the girl Colette created; and Colette finds someone she can truly love: A lesbian aristocrat who wears trousers in public and is a much finer man than Willy. (Denise Gough is quietly winning in the part.)

Paving the way for Colette's inevitable divorce and the fame that will follow, the film shows how she grew interested in theater and dance. She causes a riot by kissing Missy onstage at the Moulin Rouge, then ekes out a living touring crummy show houses across the country. (She'd write a successful book about this period, called The Vagabond, and publish it under her own name.)

In a random encounter on tour, Colette learns that Willy has sold the rights to their Claudine series, and that's the last straw. Finally, she stands up for herself in the way we've been waiting for. We don't get the pleasure of seeing her take public ownership of her writing career, but hearing the last of Willy's recurrent, desperate "forgive me" speeches is a consolation.

Laura Dern stars as a woman delving into her past in documentary-maker Jennifer Fox's first narrative feature, a work drawn from her own experience of sexual abuse.
Although programmed at Sundance in the U.S. dramatic competition and described by its director, Jennifer Fox (Beirut: The Last Home Movie, An American Love Story), as her first fiction feature, The Tale is a sui generis work, a quasi-autobiographical story seen through a glass darkly. Going so far to even name the central character (played with guts and grit by Laura Dern) Jennifer Fox, this conceptually audacious drama tracks a documentary maker as she re-examines with adult eyes a sexual relationship she had as a 13-year-old ("it was the 70s," she rationalizes) with a much older man (Jason Ritter) espousing "free love" BS. Further complicating things, his other, adult lover (Elizabeth Debicki), a horse-riding instructor whom Fox worshipped at the time, was more than a little complicit in the abuse.

Straight-to-camera speeches, games of temporal disjunction and moments when the narrator/protagonist interacts directly with her younger self and people still in the past work as edgy devices that help express the fragility of memory. Social media was soon abuzz with praise after the film's premiere, with many rightly lauding the bravery of Fox's work of creative non-fiction, one that draws so directly from her own experience, even though, per the end credits, "identifiable elements of characters, places and events have been changed."

Nevertheless, there are plenty of jagged edges here that lessen the film's fluency and impact, including sometimes excessively didactic, expository dialogue that luckily the fine cast can pull off. Paradoxically, although this story springs from such a personal place, at times the execution feels oddly a little generic, a fault that might be attributable to budget restrictions. Nevertheless, the timeliness of the subject and the honesty of its presentation should ensure interest from viewers, programmers and buyers alike.

Inevitably, comparisons will be drawn with Marielle Heller's thematically similar The Diary of a Teenage Girl, itself a Sundance premiere from 2015, and like The Tale a story that draws on real events — in Diary's case things that happened to graphic novelist Phoebe Gloeckner when she was 15 years old. Although just as formally daring, Diary has smoother edges and a more jocular, playful tone that sneaks up on the viewer and then sucker punches with ugly moral truths.

That said, The Tale would have a much harder time if Fox went jocular given the age and appearance of the child being abused here. For most of the film, she's played by the remarkable Isabelle Nelisse as a 13-year-old, an actor who was actually 11 when this was filmed. (End credits reassuringly state that an adult body double performed in her place for the sex scenes.) Indeed, one of Fox's most effective sleights of hand is the way she deploys the two young actors in the same role played by Dern as an adult. At first, the adult Fox remembers herself as looking much older (and played by Jessica Sarah Flaum) than she actually was at the time. Once her mother (Ellen Burstyn) finds a photograph to show her exactly what she looked like in 1972, the film runs "replay scenes," showing the same material all over again but with Nelisse as 13-year-old Jenny instead of Flaum. The end result is to reinforce just how shocking it is that young Fox was "dating" a 40-year-old man.

It's devices like this (elsewhere, action is run in reverse) that help to underscore the slippery nature of memory and the near-impossibility of establishing a singular conclusive account of what happened back then. No doubt this is one reason Fox has chosen to tell this story with actors instead of making a documentary to delve into her own past.

Even the inciting incident that kicks things off complicates the matter of what was/is real and what was/is fiction. Opening in the present day, Dern's Fox is working on a doc project about women that looks much like the "real" Fox's own recent series Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman. She's also contentedly engaged to the supportive Martin (Common).

Out of the blue, her mother Nettie (Burstyn in the present, Laura Allen later in flashbacks) calls to discuss a "story" Jennifer wrote when she was an adolescent, the tale that gives the film its name, which is read in voiceover and gets name-checked as the screenplay's source in the end credits. Her handwritten story on buff-colored paper describes young Jenny's love for a handsome track coach named Bill (Ritter in the 70s, John Heard in the present) and a glamorous English riding teacher, Jane Graham, known to her students as Mrs. G (Debicki, then Frances Conroy, both terrific). Jenny's account rhapsodizes over their menage a trois as if it were a beautiful, convention-defying love affair, an attitude that even her schoolteacher questioned at the time — although she clearly didn't think to report it to the authorities.

Nettie is highly disturbed by the story, news to her, and wants to know what really happened. At first, Jennifer, loathe to see herself as any kind of victim, is dismissive of Nettie's concerns, brushing it off as it were all just ancient history involving her first "boyfriend." But after she starts looking through the old family photo albums and thinking back to that time, she finds herself going on a quest to reconnect with the people in her past, starting with a friend (Jodi Long as an adult, Shay Lee Abeson as a child) who also attended Mrs. G .'s riding school, as did a girl named Franny (Tina Parker and Isabella Amara). It turns out Franny is still with the now aged and booze-soaked Mrs. G, working as a kind of factotum and stable hand. A lunch with the two of them for Jennifer stirs up further memories.

One of the singular aspects of Fox's script is that it honors the messiness of real-life events, even if that means the film itself sometimes feels messy. There are strange peripheral characters that swim literally in and out of focus, digressions about Fox's chaotic home life with four siblings and distracted parents who don't really understand her devotion to riding and running. "Jews don't ride horses," notes her father (Matthew Rauch), but if letting his daughter spend weekends at Mrs. G's house makes her happy, then so be it.

But it's over these weekends that Bill gradually grooms Jenny, shown in shockingly explicit sequences, and as the adult Jennifer recalls more and more details she comes to understand how much Mrs. G was not just guilty of turning a blind eye but far more sinister and complicit.

Ultimately, where the film is truly challenging, and potentially controversial for some, is in the way it questions what exactly is victimhood, and how young women, longing to feel loved and desired, and needing to assert agency for their actions, effectively collaborate in their own abuse and its covering-up. That doesn't mean we should blame the victims or exonerate any of the adults involved, but Fox's film does illustrate how complex and nuanced these situations can be, especially when they took place in the aftermath of the counterculture's reframing of sexual norms. Just saying, "it was the 70s," doesn't let anyone off the hook, but it does contextualize a set of permissive-to-the-point-of-lax attitudes toward child sexuality.

In terms of craft, the filmmakers evoke the period with subtlety — possibly too much subtlety, so that the different time frames aren't always easily distinguishable. On the other hand, that might be entirely the point, but it's hard to tell with this slippery, thought-provoking and thoroughly compelling film.

Most people know Oscar Wilde as the preeminent source of British wit, a high-society raconteur whose plays and novels epitomize what it means to be the life of the party. That characterization recedes to the shadows in “The Happy Prince,” in which Rupert Everett directs and stars as the flamboyant literary giant at the end of his life. Anyone expecting Wildean banter will be sorely disappointed — think more of an autobiographical spin on “The Portrait of Dorian Gray” than “The Importance of Being Earnest” — but it’s Everett’s formidable investment in the role that rescues the movie from being a total letdown. Nevertheless, “The Happy Prince” largely amounts to a bland rumination on Wilde’s lesser-known decline.

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The drama mostly takes place in 1867, shortly after Wilde was released from prison for “indecency with men.” Exiled to France, he roams about town with Falstaffian prowess, even as he’s clearly a sad shell of his former self. Everett, who played a variation of this character onstage more than once with “Judas Kiss,” transforms Wilde into an absinthe-guzzling mess who wanders through back alleys and claustrophobic cabarets. At one establishment, he holds court with a rapt audience while singing an old show tune, then face-plants in a drunken heap, yielding an injury that leaves him bedridden. So far, so intriguing — but “The Happy Prince” settles into a glacial character study more content to linger in its pity party than provide deeper insights.

From there, the timeline shifts, exploring the immediate aftermath of Wilde’s release from prison with occasional flashbacks to happier times. Back in England, his estranged wife Constance (Emily Watson, her face frozen in disapproval) continues to support Wilde from afar. In lieu of her company, he’s joined by longtime lover Lord Alfred Bosie Douglas (Colin Morgan, in a heartfelt turn), literary agent Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas), and longtime pal Reggie Turner (Colin Firth, wearing an awkward mustache). This trio forms a cogent support system as Wilde repeatedly moans about his lost opportunities, writer’s block, and the occasional spiritual insight. (“I am my own Judas,” he says, contemplating the discovery of faith during his jail time.) Set across beaches and lonely cafés, the movie foregrounds Wilde’s insights about his faded stardom and disdain for the culture that exiled him. “The natural habitat of the hypocrite is England,” he sighs, recalling a world that embraced his exuberance before rejecting it for good.

There’s plenty to appreciate in Wilde’s struggle, thanks in large part to Everett’s investment in the role, but he falls short of giving the surrounding movie the same elevated intensity. Unfolding in the format of a melodrama, “The Happy Prince” suffers from murky lighting schemes and peculiar transitions, suggesting that Everett’s first time as a director found him uncertain how to apply his theatrical instincts to a different medium. The result is more “Masterpiece Theater” than movie.

Beyond that, “The Happy Prince” takes Wilde’s stature for granted, and makes hardly any reference to his best-known works. Instead, they hover around him with a phantom-like air, requiring audiences to do the extra legwork. Onstage, it’s easy to see how the melancholy air might resonate without additional context. Here, the movie falls into a grating pattern of men chatting in somber tones about old times. Diehard Wilde fans will find some intriguing observations lurking in this snapshot of the writer’s final moments — his capacity as orator, wonderfully realized by Everett, explains much about his prose — but redundancy sets in.

Of course, that’s the whole point: “The Happy Prince” is about a man trapped in limbo between the world behind him and new possibilities he can never realize. “We are lost in our own world,” he says, an astute observation for this pioneering figure of gay culture who was forced to hover on the outskirts of Victorian ideals. He’s a strikingly tragic creature, but “The Happy Prince” struggles to say much more about that conundrum, leaving one to contemplate the potential had Wilde emerged from retirement to fill in the blanks.

Grade: C+

Before it becomes an ultra-creepy haunted house movie, “Hereditary” is an almost-unbearable study of the grieving process. A family copes with traumatizing loss, screaming, crying, and growing apart as the scariest aspect of their lives becomes the actual hardships of each passing day. Then something far more terrifying happens. Despite some occasional clichéd jump scares, “Hereditary” excels at permeating a convincing environment of despair with first-rate horror.

Writer-director Ari Aster’s first feature culls from a tradition of slick, elegant genre filmmaking, making up what it lacks in originality with an impressive volume of atmospheric dread. At its center, Annie (a terrifically unhinged Toni Collette) copes with her mother’s death by throwing herself into building a series of intricate miniatures in her large, creaky home. Her distracted husband (Gabriel Byrne) mostly keeps to himself, while her teenage son Peter (Alex Wolff) sulks on the sidelines, and his spooky younger sister Charlie (Milly Shaprio, who won a Tony for “Matilda” on Broadway) lurks around saying little. Just when it seems like “Hereditary” is entering traditional creepy-kid territory with Charlie giving off serious “The Omen” vibes, the movie takes an abrupt, violent twist that further the complicates the family’s dark moment.

The house becomes an ominous focal point for their despair. As Peter’s tensions with his mother grow more extreme, he suffers from shocking nightmares and shadowy visions in the dead of night, while Annie’s tendency to sleepwalk adds another unpredictable variable to the growing impression of hidden forces overseeing their lives. Aster’s smooth camerawork drifts through the cavernous household with a Kubrickian eye for open spaces and unknown threats, with a haunting score by Colin Stetson leading to a heightened, disorienting ambiguity about the nature of the threat.

“Hereditary” takes a peculiar turn when Annie attempts to find solace in grief therapy, where she connects with a benevolent older woman named Joan (“The Handmaiden” villain Ann Dowd, who seems to have forged a career in tough maternal figures with uncertain motives). At first, Joan’s merely a sounding board for Annie’s sadness, but then she reveals a most unexpected source of catharsis — the possibility of communing with the dead. Confident and more than a touch manic about the prospects of communing with her dead family members, Annie gathers her clan for a kitchen seance that goes horribly wrong. And then, a whole lot of other things do.

The supernatural twist of “Hereditary” borders on the ridiculous, so when objects start moving on their own and abrupt jump scares take hold, the movie threatens to become a trite variation on things going bump in the night. More often, it’s an immersive variation. Collette’s paranoid, bipolar performance boldly swings for extreme emotions as the full conspiracy behind the haunting comes into view, while Wolff gives his brooding teen character a terrific blend of anger and sensitivity.

Using minimal resources to his advantage, Aster transforms the setting into a claustrophobic maze of long hallways, creaky attics, and strange figures creeping in the background. Annie’s miniature models become a wondrous allegory for the sense that the fragile human emotions in play are toys of an indifferent universe that adheres to its own agenda.

The movie occasionally falters when it veers into a few outlandish twists, and risks shrill extremes as Annie continues to freak out over new revelations. But it’s always sharply attuned to the genre traditions fueling every scene, and occasionally rises above them with sinister developments. Its closing moments arrive with a relentless pileup of macabre circumstances, announcing the arrival of a new horror filmmaker willing to accept the time-honored credo of the genre that no good deeds go unpunished, and pure evil always steals the show.

Grade: B+

Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody's third collaboration stars Charlize Theron as a desperate mother whose prayers are answered by Mackenzie Davis' nanny.

Eleven years after their breakthrough film Juno, Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman team up a third time for Tully, another sharp, funny and strange look at pregnancy and some of the less common challenges surrounding it. This time, we approach motherhood not from the perspective of a pregnant teen but of a mother of three (Charlize Theron) whose latest child might well be the end of her — if not for the arrival of the eponymous miracle nanny, played by Mackenzie Davis. Packed with more than a couple of possible feminist readings as regards the parenting/career/life question, the often very funny picture entertains while affording its characters their share of no-laughing-matter concerns.

The story's first act, in which Theron's worn-to-the-bone Marlo struggles through the last days of pregnancy only to dive into the wail/diaper/feeding routine of caring for a newborn, are a mainstream counterpart to Eraserhead's cinematic birth control: Always use protection, kids, or you might wind up living this out.

Marlo and husband Drew (Ron Livingston) already had their hands full. Their daughter is on the cusp of an awkward phase, and their son is "quirky" — a demanding special needs kid whose special needs have yet to be labeled. Marlo's brother (Mark Duplass), who has made money and is busy living a luxury-product life with his too-perfect wife (Elaine Tan), wants to give them the kind of baby present that says "you aren't up to this": He offers to hire a "night nanny," who'll keep watch over the infant while parents get some rest, only waking Mommy when it's time to breast-feed.

Drew and Marlo reject the offer, but when Marlo nearly goes postal at her son's school, she reconsiders. Enter Tully, who arrives one night full of wonder to balance Marlo's exhaustion, and conspicuous midriff to remind Marlo what has become of her own body.

Oh, the ways this could go wrong. But after a few overnights during which Tully goes far beyond the call of duty — cleaning the house, baking cute cupcakes — Marlo is so won over that she starts staying up late just to hang out, drawing energy from her wise-twentysomething advice and enjoying being treated like a sentient being.

Davis, who has excelled playing insecure or damaged women in Always Shine and Halt and Catch Fire, gets a very different part here, as a seemingly bottomless reservoir of good will and assistance. (Along with her performance in one of the better Black Mirror episodes, "San Junipero," this outing suggests someone should move her into center stage.) Tully is too good to be true, but Reitman gives no hint that this pic is headed in the psycho-nanny direction Marlo jokes about early on.

Instead, we watch as Marlo starts becoming a more picture-perfect housewife. Suddenly, there are smiles and home-cooked meals, and children who are puzzled to see Mom in makeup. Is Tully this generation's non-magical Mary Poppins? Or will she and Marlo decide they're in love and fly this nest of slumbering dependents?

The less said about the road blocks ahead, the better. But the climax gives Theron an overdue chance to vent the thwarted dreams her character has bottled up, even as Tully assures her (with the unintentional condescension of the young) that being a boring middle-aged parent is actually the manifestation of those dreams, something to be celebrated. Parenthood is rarely what people expect it to be, and it takes a robust capacity for self-delusion, or self-denial, to make it part of a happy life.

bottom line : A funny and piercing take on the self-abnegation of parenting.

One of the biggest movies at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “The Tale,” has sold to HBO Films, Variety has learned.

Laura Dern stars in “The Tale” as a professor and documentary filmmaker who is a survivor of sexual abuse, as she recalls what happened to her when she was 13. “The Tale” is based on writer-director Jennifer Fox’s own life, and it quickly became one of the most talked-about and timely films to screen at Sundance, against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement.

The movie will premiere on HBO, making it eligible for the Emmys.

“It has always been my intent to find an engaged distribution partner who deeply understands the wide reach of the project, not just as a film, but also for the impact it can have on a larger global conversation,” Fox said in a statement. “In a world in which stories like mine have often been pushed into the darkness, no one has been better at shining a light on storytelling and important social issues than HBO. I am overjoyed to be able to take ‘The Tale’ out into the world with such a vibrant and engaged team.”

The rest of the cast includes Elizabeth Debicki, Jason Ritter, Frances Conroy, Ellen Burstyn, Common and newcomer Isabelle Nelisse as young Jenny.

“The Tale” was produced by Oren Moverman, Laura Rister, Lawrence Inglee, Mynette Louie, Sol Bondy, Simone Pero, Reka Posta, Regina K. Scully and Lynda Weinman.

The deal was negotiated by ICM Partners and Rister.