Review: 'Abraham's Boys' delivers a dark drama under the cloak of a vampire thriller, with a striking performance by Titus Welliver

Like Dracula’s cape, writer-director Natasha Kermani’s brooding thriller “Abraham’s Boys” comes cloaked in the trappings of the vampire myth — but the monster beneath is something else, creating a dark drama about loyalty and madness.

Taking a short story by horror writer Joe Hill, Kermani sets her drama in California’s Central Valley in 1915. It’s here, we’re told, that Abraham Van Helsing, the famed vampire hunter who drove a stake in Dracula’s heart 18 years earlier, has settled after fleeing the specter of vampires in Europe. Van Helsing (Titus Welliver, familiar to fans of “Bosch”) teaches his two sons — teen Max (Brady Hepner) and 12-year-old Rudy (Judah Mackey) — algebra and reading, while he also tends to his ailing wife, Mina (Jocelin Donahue).

Yes, Mina — known in Bram Stoker’s story as the wife of Jonathan Harker, and the object of Dracula’s eternal desire. Kermani’s script suggests an unfortunate fate for Jonathan, and that Van Helsing and Mina have created a life together, now threatened by the seeming return of the demons they fought in London and Amsterdam.

At least that’s the story Van Helsing has told Max, and the dark history he has kept from Rudy until now. As Mina’s condition worsens, and Van Helsing grows more secretive, Max starts to wonder how much of his father’s Dracula story is true.

The storytelling is spartan, with only a few side characters — such as Elsie (Aurora Perrineau), a mapmaker for the railroad that’s coming to end the Van Helsing family’s rural solitude. The focus is on the Van Helsings as they prepare to confront the evil that’s coming, as Max wrestles with Rudy’s question: What if something is already inside?

The highlight of “Abraham’s Boys” is seeing Welliver, a character actor who usually plays gruff cops or shady criminals, dig into a hard-edged, enigmatic character like this. Van Helsing, as a figure of literature and film, is more familiar with death than most, and Welliver helps us feel his acceptance of that painful fate.

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‘Abraham’s Boys’

★★★

Opening Friday, July 11, in theaters. Rated R for bloody violence and grisly images. Running time: 89 minutes.

Review: 'Kill the Jockey' is a surreal tale of a self-destructive jockey that blends sexy, sweet and odd

Alternately funny, sexy, dark and weird, Argentine director Luis Ortega’s “Kill the Jockey” is a surreal take on obsession — which in this case can lead to the winner’s circle or a prison cell.

Remo (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) is a Buenos Aires jockey whose skill on a horse is matched only by his self-destructive tendencies. Still, he’s a winner, which is why the super-rich — and possibly gangster — Sirena (Daniel Giménez Cacho) continues to choose him to ride his prize horses. When Sirena has a new thoroughbred coming from Japan, he picks Remo over an ambitious young jockey, Abril (Úrsula Corberó), who’s eager to impress Sirena and launch her career.

Abril is working against the clock, because she’s pregnant and Remo is the father — though she’s not sure about a long-term relationship with someone so unstable. When Remo asks what he can do for Abril to love him again, she responds, “die and be reborn.” While she’s dealing with him, Abril also most contend with Sirena’s fixation on babies, and her attraction to the other woman jockey in the locker room, Ana (played by the dynamic Chilean actor Mariana Di Girólamo). 

Trying to pin down Ortega’s directing style, I’d put it at 40% Pedro Almodovar, 40% Wes Anderson and about 20% David Lynch. There’s a volatile and endearing mix of sexiness, sweetness and strangeness that propels the movie, and Ortega (who wrote the script with Rodolfo Palacios and Fabian Casas) shows the confidence to make it work, even as Remo goes on a journey of discovery and comes out the other side quite changed.

Pérez Biscayart brings a delicate blend of humor and sadness to the performance, with a deadpan look reminiscent of Buster Keaton. He also plays well against Corberó, who has to weigh her drive to race against her feelings for two lovers. The chemistry is dynamite, and makes “Kill the Jockey” deliciously hard to resist.

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‘Kill the Jockey’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 11, in theaters. Not rated, but probably R for strong violence, some sexual situations, and language. Running time: 97 minutes; in Spanish, with subtitles. 

Review: 'Superman' puts the fun back into comic-book movies, by stripping out the well-worn mythology and getting to the good stuff

It’s been 87 years since two sons of Jewish immigrants created a hero who came from a distant place, grew up among us, and tried to make things better for the regular person — so it’s quite something that watching another telling of that story, in writer-director James Gunn’s “Superman,” feels like a subversive act. 

Gunn has the tough assignment of not only telling a familiar story — about a space alien with incredible powers in disguise as an American farm boy working as a newspaper reporter — but relaunching an entire franchise around him and other DC Comics’ characters. In terms of action and tone, Gunn strikes a nicely calibrated balance between movie myth-making and the inherent goofiness of heroes wearing capes.

We already knew Gunn could toss together a motley crew of imperfect heroes — because he did it for Marvel with three “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies, and with an earlier DC configuration in “The Suicide Squad.” Now he takes one of DC’s signature creations (the other is Batman) and makes it fun and meaningful.

Gunn dispenses with the origin story — no sense remaking the iconic scenes of Marlon Brando’s godlike Jor-El in the 1978 “Superman” — and drops us right in the action. Superman, we’re told, has just lost his first battle, to a rival Metahuman (that’s DC’s name for unusually powered people) called The Hammer of Boravia. We’re also told that Boravia and a neighboring country, Jarhanpur, were on the brink of war until Superman intervened. 

Superman (played by David Corenswet) finds his unilateral peacemaking has cause suspicion at the Pentagon and one of the military’s leading contractors, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). We soon learn that Luthor is secretly assisting the Boravian president (Zlatko Buric), in part by creating the myth of “The Hammer of Boravia” using his own Metahuman. 

After healing up in his antarctic sanctuary — we never hear the name “Fortress of Solitude” — with his super-dog, Krypto (who steals every scene he’s in), Superman returns to Metropolis and his day job as Clark Kent, reporter for The Daily Planet. Clark engages in some sharp banter with the Planet’s ace reporter, Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), which makes it more surprising a couple of scenes later, when Lois comes home to find Clark cooking her dinner. 

Gunn has smartly skipped over Lois and Superman’s courtship, and the increasingly stupid plot thread that the sharpest reporter at Metropolis’ greatest newspaper couldn’t figure out Superman’s secret identity. (There’s a throwaway joke on the topic of disguises that’s catnip for comic-book nerds.) Gunn also casts his leads to perfection, with Brosnahan hitting the right blend of Lois’ wit and cynicism, and young Corenswet bringing a charm to the dual role that we haven’t seen since Christopher Reeve. 

And Gunn conceives Lex Luthor as a villain for this moment: A tech billionaire whose greed and ambition is matched only by his pettiness, someone who masterminds a campaign against Superman based on xenophobia, disinformation and media manipulation. Rarely has the end-credits disclaimer that “any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental” gotten this much of a workout.

Like his former colleagues at Marvel, Gunn also seeds the field with supporting superheroes, starting the process of building a movie universe from the ground up. Here, we get the stirrings of a corporate-backed team of heroes, including Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner, one of the iterations of Green Lantern, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, and in particular Edi Gathegi as the intriguingly named Mr. Terrific. Gunn deploys them, along with the movie’s cameos and Easter eggs, skillfully, never letting them distract us from the Man of Steel’s story. 

The best thing Gunn brings to “Superman,” though, is a sense that comic-book movies are supposed to be fun and a little bit silly, as any endeavor involving people in tights should be. If he can keep that spirit alive through future DC Comics movies, without the narrative bloat or grandiose self-importance that has hobbled other franchises, that would be truly super.

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‘Superman’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, July 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence, action and language. Running time: 129 minutes.

Review: '40 Acres' wraps an emotional family drama inside a tight post-apocalyptic thriller, and gets maximum mileage out of star Danielle Deadwyler

A tight post-apocalyptic thriller that’s also a deeply felt family drama, director R.T. Thorne’s “40 Acres” is an uncomfortably timely story of survival in a world that’s falling apart.

The Freeman family lives on a farm in rural Canada, one that’s well protected with an electrified fence, surveillance cameras, and a whole lot of family members who can shoot accurately and kill with practically no compunction. The mom, Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler), is a former soldier, and has imparted that warrior mentality into her own children and the step-kids she shares with her husband, Galen (Michael Greyeyes).

The title cards at the movie’s start sets up the scenario. It’s been 14 years since a fungal pandemic wiped out 98% of animal life, a dozen years since a second Civil War broke out, and 11 years since a famine struck. What little workable farmland still exists, like the Freemans’ farm, is highly valuable — and there are people who will kill for it. Hence the security set-up and Hailey’s insistence that the kids study hard and practice their marksmanship.

Hailey’s oldest, Emanuel (Kataem O’Connor), is a teen who’s starting to feel the stress of always being under his mother’s domination. He goes out on a scavenger run, and comes across a compound with a fair number of people. When he stops at a creek for a swim, he also sees someone from that compound, Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas), who’s around his age, and he’s smitten. Emanuel knows his mother would never allow a stranger onto their farm, so he’s torn about what to do next.

In the basement safe room of the Freeman farm, Hailey keeps in contact with neighboring farms via ham radio — particularly with Augusta (Elizabeth Saunders), a crusty survivor who trades her moonshine for samples of Freemans’ marijuana crop. Augusta warns Hailey that other families have gone silent, and that a marauding band of cannibals is roaming nearby.

Thorne’s story — he co-wrote the screenplay with Glenn Taylor, and developed the story with Lora Campbell — is steeped in history, both national and personal. The Freemans, we’re told, have held the farm for nearly two centuries, back when they escaped the South during the first Civil War. It’s Hailey’s legacy, and she and her family have fought so hard for it that no pack of vandals is going to take it from them now. She’s also determined to leave that legacy for Emanuel, so much so that she doesn’t recognize the generational trauma she’s also passing down.

All of this drama plays out in one of the sharpest end-of-the-world thrillers I’ve seen since Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later.” And the drama and the action work in tandem, with Thorne’s blocking of the action sketching out the geography of the Freeman farm, giving us a visual touchstone to match the emotional importance Hailey assigns to the place. 

Deadwyler gives a performance that’s brimming with tension, as she’s fiercely insistent that her family remain vigilant in the face of unknown threats. O’Connor, playing the questioning Emanuel, matches Deadwyler’s intensity note for note. And Greyeyes finds some needed humor in Galen, a First Nations member who delights in playing against Indigenous stereotypes.

Thorne is a veteran of episodic TV and music videos, and “40 Acres” is his first feature film. He’s got the skills to make more, and an uncanny gift for wrapping big ideas in genre disguise.

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’40 Acres’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, July 2, in theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violent content and language. Running time: 113 minutes.

Review: 'Jurassic World: Rebirth' offers a lineup of new characters, but the same old dinosaur action

“Jurassic World: Rebirth,” the seventh in the franchise that started with Steven Spielberg’s masterfully entertaining “Jurassic Park,” the last word in the title suggests that we’re starting fresh — which we are, in a way, because we’re getting new characters we haven’t met before. 

In more basic terms, and in keeping with the genetic splicing and playing with God that have been the impetus of the series for 32 years, what “Rebirth” really means is that we’re getting a clone, a copy of a copy of a copy.

It’s a few years after the events of the last movie, “Jurassic World: Dominion,” and a few things have changed. For starters, people are bored with dinosaurs again, in part because they couldn’t survive in temperate climates and are out of sight in a few areas in the tropics, where international law says humans can’t go. Also, the movie gods have decided we don’t need Chris Pratt, which may be the one thing this new movie gets inarguably correct.

Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), a Big Pharma weasel, wants someone to go to those tropics, to get DNA samples from some of those dinosaurs — because the genetic material could produce some wonder drugs, which Krebs’ company would make billions developing. He offers a whopping amount of money to Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a mercenary who’s quite savvy at getting in and out of places where one isn’t supposed to go.

Zora teams up with an old friend, Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), who has a boat and a crew who can deliver Zora and Krebs to an island where InGen, the company that first developed the genetic tech that created the original Jurassic Park dinosaurs, has its secret lab. There, we’re told, is where the creatures too nasty for the tourists was left behind.

Zora brings along one more expert: A paleo-biologist, Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey, from “Wicked”) — a hunk-with-glasses nerd who fills the story space once occupied by Sam Neill’s Alan Grant. (Screenwriter David Koepp, who wrote the first “Jurassic Park” with novelist Michael Crichton, name-drops Grant late in the film, the only character connection from this film to any other.)

While the crew is heading toward the equator, and Koepp provides them enough backstory so Johansson and Ali can tell themselves they’re doing more than yelling “Run!” a lot, there’s a parallel adventure involving a family sailing trip. Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and his two daughters, little Isabella (Audrina Miranda) and college-bound Teresa (Luna Blaise), along with Teresa’s layabout boyfriend, Xavier Dobbs (David Iacono), are crossing the Atlantic when they run into some whale-like dinos. They cross paths with Zora, Duncan and company, as well as some land-based dinosaurs.

Director Gareth Edwards, the guy behind “Rogue One” and “The Creator,” knows how to make action movies that set human-scaled drama amid massive special effects. (Seek out his low-budget 2010 debut, “Monsters,” and his 2014 take on “Godzilla” as evidence.) Here, he shows his influences: One action sequence on Duncan’s boat evokes the second half of Spielberg’s “Jaws,” while a set piece in a crawlspace is reminiscent of scenes from “Alien.” 

Koepp keeps the self-references to “Jurassic Park” locked and loaded at all times, particularly in the dispatching of one baddie contains nods to Wayne Knight’s Nedry, Samuel L. Jackson’s arm and the lawyer eaten alive on the toilet. And, for good measure, composer Alexandre Desplat seems contractually bound to play John Williams’ original theme every two minutes. 

In the end, “Jurassic Park Rebirth” is the story of a group of people hoping for a big paycheck by repurposing existing DNA without considering the consequences of what they’re doing. That’s the plot synopsis and a recap of the film’s production.

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‘Jurassic World: Rebirth’

★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, July 2, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence/action, bloody images, some suggestive references, language and a drug reference. Running time: 134 minutes.

Review: 'M3gan 2.0' gives the killer robot the 'Terminator' treatment, but loses momentum repeating the campy nonsense of the first movie

In the action sequel “M3gan 2.0,” writer-director Gerard Johnstone tries to recapture all the bat-guano craziness of the first movie and augment it with some equally insane mythologizing — with the end result being more unhinged but less fun than the 2023 original.

Tech wizard Gemma (Allison Williams) and her niece/ward, Cady (Violet McGraw), are still dealing with the aftermath of what happened in the first movie — when Gemma’s high-tech robot plaything, the Model 3 Generative Android, dubbed M3gan, turned into a killing machine. 

Gemma’s coping mechanism is to become an activist and author, warning parents about the dangers of letting kids have too much screen time — a campaign aided by her new boyfriend, Christian (Aristotle Athari). Cady, when she’s not using her new aikido skills to subdue bullies, is studying robotics on the sly. What they’re not doing is talking to each other about what happened.

Before that sort of family bonding can get going, the Feds bust into their house. Specifically, Col. Sattler (Timm Sharp), a Defense Department contractor whose latest project, a military-grade killer robot named Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), went rogue on a test mission. (There’s a too-clever acronym for Amelia’s name, but I wasn’t interested enough to jot it down.) Sattler thinks Gemma’s in league with whoever is controlling Amelia — because the new robot’s programming is based on M3gan’s original design.

Then comes the least surprising aspect of the movie, which is that M3gan isn’t dead. Her software lives on in Gemma and Cady’s smart house technology, and it wants out to play. Gemma reluctantly agrees, with limitations, as they go “Ocean’s 11” in the lair of an arrogant tech billionaire (Jemaine Clement) to get to his system before Amelia does.

Can Gemma and her crew — her assistants, Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez), and Tess (Jen Van Epps), are along for the ride, for reasons that even the script admits don’t hold water — get ahead of Amelia? Can M3gan pull a “Terminator 2” and go from villain to savior? Can Johnstone slip in a “Metropolis” reference for Amelia without getting caught? 

The answers, it turns out, are fairly irrelevant, because Johnstone — who shares story credit with Akela Cooper, who wrote the first movie with James Wan, but otherwise seems to have taken over the franchise — is more interested in loading up on campy set pieces, mostly borrowing from and riffing on the first movie’s biggest hits.

It’s fun watching Williams getting her teeth into this role, as Gemma becomes a fierce warrior for Cady. But the highlight, now as before, is the collaboration that creates the devilish M3gan: Amie Donald making the moves and Jenna Davis providing that uniquely snarky voice. 

One watches “M3gan 2.0” fully confident that the producers won’t want to squander their chance at a “3.0.” There’s too much money on the table, and too many opportunities to satirize the A.I. monster that Hollywood  screenwriters fear and their bosses want to keep alive, not to keep the franchise going.  

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‘M3gan 2.0”

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 27, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong violent content, bloody images, some strong language, sexual material, and brief drug references. Running time: 119 minutes.

Review: '28 Years Later' continues the fast-zombie franchise with guts and gore, but wins out with brains and heart

It’s odd to say a filmmaking team is taking a risk by returning to a successful horror franchise 23 years after they started it, but that’s the impact director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland made with their 2002 classic “24 Days Later.”

Boyle and Garland have reunited to make the worthy successor to the franchise, “28 Years Later,” a bone-chilling and thoughtful thriller that explores how humans don’t just outrun disaster but adapt to it. 

After a prologue in which a young preacher’s son (Rocco Hayes) escapes those infected by the rage virus in the early days of the outbreak, Garland’s script moves ahead 28 years to a small island off the coast of England. There’s a self-sufficient village there, with gates to keep out the infected.

It’s there that Spike (Alfie Williams), age 12, learns survival skills from his dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who’s preparing to take him on his first outing to the mainland – and notch his first kill of an infected. While they’re out, Spike sees a bonfire in the distance, suggesting that there are non-infected people still surviving off the island.

Alfie sees that fire as a chance to find help not available in their village. His mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), is sick with something — not the rage virus, but with something beyond his neighbors’ ability to treat. When he hears from a villager that there might be a doctor (Ralph Fiennes) on the mainland, Alfie hatches a desperate plan.

Boyle and Garland build the world around Alfie and the village with just enough detail, and a smattering of gore and non-sexy nudity tho show how pitiful and slovenly the infected have become — and how some of them, the Alphas, have come to rule the vast spaces of the mainland. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere about the brainless majority dominating through numbers and bile, but Boyle lets it stew in the background while he’s busy scaring the crap out of us. 

Boyle and Garland’s neatest trick is the sharp turn in the movie’s second half, as they strip out the horror elements and plunge us into a surprisingly tender drama about love and grief. Fiennes is tenderly beautiful in this part of the film, but the strongest emotions are brought by Comer and the young Williams, playing a mother-son team who are heartbreaking.

At the very end, Boyle throws in an odd coda that also serves as a handoff to director Nia DaCosta, who has been making a second franchise movie, “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,” alongside this production. (It’s set to be released early next year.) DaCosta’s a strong director, but she’ll have a lot to live up to after this intense ride.

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’28 Years Later’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, graphic nudity, language and brief sexuality. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Elio' is a fun, if sometimes bumpy, ride through Pixar's ideas of outer space and family solidarity

It’s a given that the computer-crunching animators and storytellers at Pixar Animation Studios are a bunch of nerds — and even by those standards, Pixar’s latest adventure, “Elio,” is a nerd’s dream, a trip to outer space propelled by a lot of imagination and the inspiration of the late Carl Sagan.

The title character, voiced by Yonas Kibreab, is an 11-year-old boy who’s been through a lot in his young life. Living with his aunt, Olga (voiced by Zoe Saldaña), after the sudden death of his parents, Elio has become obsessed with aliens — and spends his nights on the California beach presenting himself to be abducted by one. Olga works for the U.S. Space Force, tracking satellite debris, but is unable to help Elio with his fascination with UFOs.

One night, though, Elio gets his wish and is picked up by an alien beam. He’s transported to something called the Communiverse, where a collection of aliens believe that Elio is the leader of Earth. The space creatures are eager to welcome him as an ambassador — until a nasty warrior race, the Hylurg, come in demanding to be admitted to the Communiverse. 

Elio says he can broker peace with the Hylurg’s ruler, Lord Grigon (voiced by Brad Garrett), and protect his new Communiverse friends. That’s how Elio comes to befriend Glordon (voiced by Remy Edgerly), a roly-poly Hylurg kid.

“Elio” seems to split itself down its plot threads, which don’t always knit together well. It’s a reflection of the reported journey the movie took within Pixar’s hierarchy. The film’s original director, Adrian Molina, who co-directed “Coco,” left midway through to work on “Coco 2.” He was succeeded by Domee Chi (who directed “Turning Red”) and Madeline Sharafian, who made Pixar’s short “Burrow.” The seams sometimes show, as the different filmmaking visions butt up against each other.

Even an imperfect Pixar movie has its moments of whimsy, wonder and emotion, and “Elio” hits those beats well. It presents a universe built on parental concern, families on the fly, and children encouraged to be who they are — a universe many of us, against all obstacles, are trying to make.

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‘Elio’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some action/peril and thematic elements. Running time: 98 minutes.