Quick pics

That may be what Marvel Studios is feeling these days, when their side ventures without the old Avengers team tend to dip at the box office; it took a side character making snarky cracks at Marvel’s expense for two-plus hours (hello, Deadpool!) to really perk up last season’s screen draw.

So what’s next? President Ross (Harrison Ford) declaring America needs the Avengers again, I suppose. The script feels like it was written for 14-year-olds, and the biggest audience reactions were to cameos from Sebastian Stan and Liv Tyler, and the Ross-becomes-Hulk subplot felt tentative, like they couldn’t get the color of a rage-aholic president quite right (he’s red here, instead of orange like in real life).

The setup for our New Avengers comes with a teaser for Marvel’s Thunderbolts, reintroducing Yelena (Florence Pugh), sister of Natasha/Black Widow (ScarJo), and the Winter Soldier himself (Stan). But Brave New World often feels like MCU déjà vu, and we hope there’s enough compelling regroupings to make a new Avengers reunion palatable.

The opening, though, has enough Black energy to take me back to the Kendrick Lamar halftime show, as though a certain strain of Marvel is still open to tapping into Wakanda nationalism when necessary. Which, come to think of it, was what made Kendrick’s performance stand out from the Super Bowl as well.

Anthony Mackie sports the shield—and the wings in Captain America: Brave New World.

Down for the count

There is something chilling about Lily-Rose Depp’s complete surrender to a dark visitor at her bedside window, drifting inexorably towards him as though her will has been sucked into the air; but then you see what an unattractive specimen Bill Skarsgard’s Count Orlok is, and you kind of wonder how she got honeytrapped.

As carefully crafted as any of Robert Eggers’ dark fantasies, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror revisits the look of German Expressionism in every frame.

Eggers’ version sticks closely to the 1979 Werner Herzeg take with Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani amidst a German city (here called Wisburg) consumed by plague-spreading rats and males who seem unwilling to protect women in general or understand what’s going on with the central heroine. In that, the original Nosferatu (1927) bears an eerie connection to the source material it was ripped off from, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which itself stole elements from a lesbian vampire serial fiction called Carmilla that predated them all.

One can’t help but mentally overlay all the cinematic versions of this tale while watching Eggers’ version, including Hollywood’s Lugosi-starring Dracula (1931) and Francis Ford Coppola’s mad 1992 take on the Stoker novel. What elevates Nosferatu is a creepy fixation on surrender, and the metaphor of vampirism as a disease, which knocks Wisburg on its ass through illness, making it easier for the Count to pick off victims. But more importantly, Eggers has a way with central female characters (watch, c.f., The Witch), and his version retains the steely sacrifice of Depp’s Ellen Hutter. It’s up to Ellen to withstand Orlok’s, er, eternal charms, and even then, she ends up doing all the heavy lifting and what would have then been called women’s work.

Lily Rose-Depp tries to resist Bill Skarsgard’s charms in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.

The room where it happened

Pedro Almodóvar brings us an English-language US-set vehicle for once, but it still retains all the trademark quirks and curated fixations of the Spanish director in The Room Next Door. Two old friends and colleagues—writer Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and war correspondent Martha (Tilda Swinton)—reunite unexpectedly in New York. Martha is fighting cervical cancer, and Ingrid tries to come to grip with her friend’s sudden, odd request. They share a common lover from the past (John Turturro), a doom-prophesying social critic, and the two friends hie off for a fortnight stay in a Woodstock house. It’s strange at first, not having to read subtitles for an Almodóvar film. At first, the pacing and dialogue of The Room Next Door feels a little stilted, not delivered in Spanish, but the two seasoned actors settle into their roles and unveil a signature tale by the director sprinkled with some melodrama, a hint of Hitchcockian menace and rapture (the score by Alberto Iglesias helps) and the usual handpicked artistic flourishes (a painting by Edward Hopper plays a key role, as does the final paragraph from James Joyce’s short story “The Dead”). Settle back, enjoy the dialogue-heavy rumination on friendship, life, aging and a dying planet and let Almodóvar do his thing.

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The Room Next Door shows exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas Feb. 19. Seasoned Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore score in Almodovar’s The Room Next Door.