MIRACLES FROM HEAVEN

If you’ve seen its previews, which appear to give away every nanosecond of its plot, you’d be right in guessing that the inspirational drama Miracles from Heaven is not for those who like surprises. (Although you won’t realize it until you see the film, even the narrative’s climactic shot is given away in the preview.) But as wholly surprise-free outings go, director Patricia Riggen’s adaptation of Christy Beam’s memoir is an earnest and effective tearjerker, and sometimes even more than that. On at least three separate occasions, my stomach muscles were aching from withholding those trying-not-to-audibly-sob sobs that can make movie-viewing indistinguishable from a lower-ab workout.

WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT

Two of my favorite repeat-viewing movies, for wildly different reasons, are Broadcast News and The Hurt Locker. But as much as I love them, I would never have dreamed they’d wind up loving each other, getting married, and having a baby – which is kind of what we have in the new Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. On the surface, it would seem an uneasy, if not unholy, blend: James L. Brooks’ snappy workplace comedy meets Kathryn Bigelow’s intense war thriller. In the hands of directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, however, what results is a humane and thoughtful entertainment that, blessedly, doesn’t sentimentalize or cheapen the subject of Middle Eastern conflict. It’s the film last fall’s Rock the Kasbah could have been if it had a brain in its head.

THE WITCH

Good horror movies make you jump. Great ones make you unable to move. And writer/director Robert Eggers’ feature-film debut The Witch may be as close to great as this decade’s horror movies have yet come – a mesmerizing, stomach-tightening descent into madness completely devoid of irony. Its trappings may portend a literal-minded take on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, but the wickedness here is in no way theoretical or the product of mass (McCarthy-influenced) hysteria. Eggers’ ballsy achievement suggests, rather, that true evil can be an entity as real as those who believe in it, a physical presence conjured through excessive pride, fear, suspicion, lust, and, most critically, lack of faith. The Witch is a haunting experience, and the more you think about it, the more haunting it gets.

ZOOLANDER 2

Probably no film genre currently flashes a bigger “get out of jail free” card than the Hollywood comedy, if for no other reason than there being so many outstanding comedians that any movie employing even a half-dozen of them is guaranteed to feature a fistful of reasons to attend. Zoolander 2, however, has the comics and still isn’t worth seeing.