Joe

 Joe is a rambling, nasty but beautiful southern gothic with a never-better Nicholas Cage in the titular role - a grizzled, no-bullshit ex-con who manages a team of tree poisoners somewhere out in rural Texas. He's a bit of an ogre, but fair to the people who earn his trust - a circle that, shortly into the movie, extends to teenager Gary (Ty Sheridan), a kid who joins the crew and makes a good impression.

 Gary's been dealt a bad hand; His father Wade (Gary Poulter) is an alcoholic whose main income is brutally stealing Gary's earnings, and whose shenanigans got his family run out from their old town. The kid deals with it as best he can, but is trapped in a horrible home situation with his sister and his mom. Working on Joe's crew makes things a little better - not the least because he develops a sincere friendship with Joe.

 For his part, Joe tries to distance himself from Gary's home life, correctly sensing that if he steps in things will take a very nasty turn. It's not just that he's on a very thin line with the police, who hate him for a run-in which landed him a few years in jail; the guy has some very real anger issues. But a feud with a local thug (Ronnie Gene Blevins) escalates things until he can no longer stand by the sidelines.

 For all its bleakness - and it gets incredibly bleak - director David Gordon Green leavens it with plenty of his signature lyricism and oddball humour. His camera rests for long stretches on his cast of non-professional actors, leading to long, authentic-sounding conversations and character moments. The plot is almost in the background for a lot of the movie, surfacing every now and then to strengthen the film's themes and tighten the screws; These moments - which include a ruthlessly violent, evil incident that startingly recontextualizes the menace of one of the film's villains - are expertly paced by scriptwriter Gary Hawkins amidst the film's almost two-hour runtime.

 It's a beautiful-looking neo-noir, too, with cinematographer Tim Orr (who worked with Green on all of his movies up to this one) managing some gorgeous lighting on both daytime and nighttime scenes. The acting is strong from both professionals and non-actors, with Cage in particular giving what's probably his career best turn. Sheridan is very good as well, but the biggest impression besides Cage is made by Poulter, who looks like a frail-looking old man but manages to tread the line between pathetic and pure fucking evil in a way that almost made me queasy several times. An all-time villain played by a local homeless man, who sadly died while the movie was in post.

 Other than the shitty Amazon AI subtitles (which were sorely needed to make some headway into the southern drawl) I can't really thing of anything that doesn't work here. There's some animal cruelty, for those of you for whom that's a deal breaker, and some truly vile mundane evil, but it's all woven into the film's strengths. Maybe one development right near the end didn't make a whole lot of sense to me? Or a fairly contrived coincidence to set up the escalation of the plot? Or the fact that it seems... unlikely that Joe would have survived his frequent run-ins with the law, let alone managed to stay out of prison.
 No matter. For my money, this is one of David Gordon Green's very best films, possibly the best alongside George Washington. I don't say this lightly, as I consider most of his early stuff unimpeachable. Hugely recommended.

Nutcrackers

 David Gordon Green is truly eclectic - in the two decades and a half that he's been making movies, he's dabbled in lyrical indie dramas, stoner comedies, low-key action films, and a series of high-profile horror reboots. I tend to like his stuff, though he's produced his share of shitty films (here's looking at you, Your Highness!).

 Nutcrackers is his take on the highly formulaic family dramedy. Stop me if you've heard this one before: Mike (Ben Stiller), a big-city hot-shot executive, has to drive to a small rural town for a family emergency...
 Yeah, it's that sort of movie, and despite Gordon Green's best efforts and a great cast... well, it's still very much that sort of movie. The family emergency is that his sister and her husband have just died, and someone needs to look after their four rambunctious children (real-life siblings Homer, Ulysses, Arlo and Atlas Janson) while they're shuffled out into foster homes. Will the four almost feral but sweet kids melt their new guardian's stuck-up heart, and will his newly gained humanity find a real connection with the good-hearted social worker (Linda Cardellini) who's trying to find them a new home?
 Will there be a big dramatic gesture towards the end to give the movie some shape? Will Mike say something nasty about the kids while they're within earshot leading to conflict?

 Yes, yes, yes and yes; Add some truly terrible, beyond on-the-nose lines ("Mom always said you were incapable of love" or "haven't you learned anything?" when the protagonist makes it clear he hasn't learned anything) and by this point I'd normally be tapping the fuck out. The plot beats are downright ossified, to the point where the only thing missing is that Mike does not miss their recital because he had to go to a big meeting. So it's a testament to everyone involved that the movie isn't actually bad.

 I have no idea what the story is behind the production, but the feeling I'm left with is of tension between a hoary script (by Leland Douglas) that could easily belong to a straight to TV Disney movie from the 80s, and the weird hippie weirdness injected by David Gordon Green and the collaborators he's brought along (which includes the kids, who are family friends.) There are fart and poop jokes - Stiller's character is introduced stepping on poop with his fancy city slicker shoes - and a lot of the gags seem to be improvised by (very young, very enthusiastic) kids, but on the main the film eschews humour to tell a more ramshackle, messy story that sometimes manages to overpower the clichés baked into its events. It made me laugh more when it's being willfully weird, as in our introduction to the kids, where one of them dresses up like one of the baddies in the videogame Hotline Miami (see above) to creep Mike out.

 "Sometimes rising above a morass of clichés" isn't exactly glowing praise, but it is true that the film does find its own groove after a while, even if it's still shaken out of it by some trashy plot development or another. There are some good scenes, it settles onto a very cute finale, and the acting is excellent throughout - Stiller and Cardellini do wonders with characters that are basically stock material, and the kids are wholly believable as bereaved kids - ornery and raw - and the film laudably does not really do a huge amount of work to put you on their side (no such subtlety is extended to any of the other characters).

 Would I recommend it? Eh, maybe. If it sounds like your sort of thing, it might be your sort of thing. But even then I'd go for David Gordon Green's utterly excellent George Washington over this, which also shows off his remarkably light touch with kid actors while completely avoiding all this Hollywood bullshit. Or Riddle of Fire, which lets the kids have the sort of movie they truly deserve. They're not Christmas movies, though, so there is that.

Halloween Ends

 The new Halloweeen trilogy has definitely been a ride. It began by doing away with all the previous installments except for the first one and delivering a very satisfying, mostly traditional slasher sequel. Then for its own sequel it took a hard left, featuring some strange choices (which I thought were exciting) and some of the goriest, most upsetting kills in slasher-dom.

 Halloween Ends again takes an unexpected turn. It's a much more traditional slasher than Kills ever tried to be, but it also keeps willfully subverting expectations, sometimes at its own expense.

 Director David Gordon Green accrued some serious cred with his early movies, mostly with the brilliant George Washington, which earned him frequent comparisons with Terence Malik (back when everyone spoke of Malik in hushed reverential tones.) He's done plenty of good movies since, but before he became the Halloween guy, he also made a couple of stoner comedies (one of them quite good, one of them very, very bad.)

 It's this stoner period that I keep coming back to when thinking of Halloween Ends. It's completely unfair, but I can't help it but to imagine David Gordon Green and his buddy Danny McBride (who shares writing duties) getting well and truly baked before mapping out these movies. The wild swings and reversals and inconsistencies and dropped themes and threads make a lot more sense to me that way, as do the ponderous, overwrought meditations on Evil.

  

Yeah, I get that it's based on Loomis's rants on the original Halloween. Still, though.

 After a nasty short prelude that introduces a new main character, this latest installment picks up four years after the events of Halloween Kills. Michael Myers, while still at large, has seemingly vanished, and Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) has turned over a new leaf and decided to move out of Murdertrap Deathhouse and rejoin polite society with her granddaughter (Andi Matichak).

 New character Cody is also trying to rebuild his life after accidentally killing a kid in the pre-title scene. He's been acquitted of murder, but the residents of Haddonfield at large remain as shallow, short-sighted and judgemental as ever; Cody and Laurie meet as he's being mercilessly bullied by a group of marching band nerds, of all things. Laurie rescues him and decides to play the matchmaker and introduce Cody to her granddaughter Allison.

 Allison and Cody hit it off, to say the least. For some reason Allison latches onto Cody with a psychotic intensity; Unfortunately, while both of the actors are OK there's no chemistry there and their courtship is very poorly written. Except for a scene with Sebadoh and Dead Kennedys songs... man, I wish the parties I've gone to played Sebadoh and Dead Kennedys. Anyhow, and it's SPOILERS from now on, the circumstances pile on poor Cody so that he eventually snaps and starts stabbing people to death - at first involuntarily, but slowly getting a taste for it. And Michael Myers might be playing tutor.

 It's not that weird a setup for a slasher movie - yes, Friday the 13th did something similar - but having to shoehorn Myers in, and trying to play it like there's no supernatural elements... it doesn't ruin it exactly, but he's a big spanner in the works.

 The carnage is great, as always. Who would have thought the director of All the Real Girls would move on to be a respectable purveyor of gore? The kills aren't quite as gruesome or upsetting as in, um, Kills, but there are some show-stoppers here (there's a particularly nasty one with a blowtorch, and a record-skipping scene that is a definite keeper). There's a bit too much emphasis on knives, so it gets a little repetitive, but hey.

 While the movie is a bit on the slow side, it does carry momentum and, fueled by its unpredictability, quite a bit of energy. Things escalate until (of course) it's Laurie vs. Myers again; like so many other things in this new trilogy, the logistics and underpinnings are clumsy and half-baked, but it brings everything to a satisfying conclusion that, yes, seems very final. Halloween ENDS, as the end credits helpfully point out.

 I didn't find it as appealingly weird as its predecessor (for my money, the best of this new bunch) but I enjoyed it, warts and all. It's as part of this new trilogy, and especially as a sequel to Kills, that this last installment fails the hardest, since while it keeps the characters and some plot threads (sometimes very minor) and gives them a satisfying resolution, it ignores everything the other movies seemed to be setting up.
 It's not a huge problem if you consider it as a stand-alone film, though. I'll go to bat for it.