Movie Nation

Leave it to a German to blitzkrieg the Immortal Bard and the Virgin Queen in one sitting.

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“Gattaca” director Andrew Niccol’s sense of the zeitgeist is as on the money as ever with “In Time,” a sci-fi parable that plays like “Occupy Wall Street: The Movie.”

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In days of old, they might have thought Curtis a prophet of doom, or possessed by the Devil.

But since he’s a modern working class Joe, drilling test holes for a contracting firm, these dreams Curtis is having provoke a modern response. Is he seeing the future, birds swarming before a nightmarish rain of oil, a tornado? Or is he coming unglued? Should he protect his family by preparing them for disaster, or check himself into a hospital, protecting them from him?

That’s the provocative conflict at the heart of “Take Shelter,” the second film to team rising star filmmaker Jeff Nichols and the great character actor Michael Shannon. As Curtis, Shannon brings his usual mix of menace and vulnerability, adding confusion and acute paranoia to the brew inside of this guy’s head.

Curtis has a lovely, resourceful wife, played by the marvelously earthy and omnipresent Jessica Chastain (“The Help,” “The Debt”). He has an adorable daughter, a nice rural Ohio home and a loyal dog. But he’s seen the dog bite him in his nightmares. The dog goes outside.

His pal at work (Shea Whigham, terrific) runs the gigantic drill, and on a break, sizes him up.

“You’ve got a good life, Curtis. I think that’s the best compliment you can give a man.”

But the dreams won’t stop. Curtis wets the bed, seeks medical help and yet hedges his bets. There’s an old storm shelter in the yard. He’s going to fix it up to withstand anything.

Shannon wonderfully modulates Nichols’ portrait of a man whose mind and life seem to unravel before our eyes. Nichols surrounds him with great character players such as Chastain and Whigham, with Kathy Baker playing his mother and Ray McKinnon (“The Blind Side”) well-cast as the concerned brother who shows up to see what’s up.

Nichols walks a tightrope between giving us a dark, Gothic tale of misunderstood prophecy and a sobering lesson on the state of mental health care in rural America.  And Shannon, piling up the accolades with every film (“Reservation Road,” “The Runaways”) adds the troubled and troubling Curtis to a growing resume of vivid and utterly real off-center characters.

MPAA Rating: R for some language.

Cast: Michael Shannon, Jessica Chastain, Shea Whigham, Kathy Baker, Ray McKinnon

Credits: Written and director by Jeff Nichols. A Sony Pictures Classics release. Running time: 2 hours

It’s about what you’d expect from a Harold & Kumar movie, this “Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.”

There’s a baby blitzed on cocaine, Neil Patrick Harris “pretending” to be gay, every manner of bodily fluid, naked nuns, Claymation,  attempted date rape, a Radio City style Christmas spectacular, a Santa shooting and a bit of comically graphic Santa surgery.

And it’s got 3D clay animation penises, not to mention clouds of 3D smoke rings wafting off the screen pretty much constantly.

Seriously, someday you guys are going to sober up, catch this on video and wonder what gave you the giggles all those White Castle runs ago.

The charm has aged right out of this silly stoner franchise, the movie series that got Kal Penn a short term job at the White House, John Cho a shot at playing Mr. Sulu and brought Neil Patrick Harris back from the dead. A few laughs peel off their latest round of transgressions  — coked up kids, racist references to Latinos, Koreans and Jews, pedophile priest gags and a graduation from that funny “gateway drug” once known as Mary Jane and into coke and Ex.

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The call comes out of the blue, by pay phone, the prodigal younger sister calling her estranged older sibling.

“Where are you? Where have you been?”

“Upstate, I think,” is all the confused young woman can manage. Or is that simply all she’s willing to reveal?

And after big sister (Sarah Paulson) picks Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) up, the mystery deepens. Is Martha on the run from the law? Pregnant? On drugs? Her vacant stare gives away little, but we figure out, pretty quickly, that she’s paranoid, especially about concealing her whereabouts.

“How far are we?”

“From what?”

“From yesterday.”

As she settles into the uneasy lake home of her sister and brother-in-law (Hugh Dancy), the furtive Martha gives them — and us — the creeps.

Writer-director Sean Durkin maintains the mystery about her even as flashbacks start to tell her story, the farm she used to live on, the charismatic guy (John Hawkes of “Winter’s Bone”) who took her in, the daily life in the cult where she was given a new name. Durkin’s film, opening Friday at ]The Enzian, is challenging and smart, a textbook case study of the sort of person drawn to a cult and the methods employed to keep her there.

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Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” is a lumbering miscalculation, a slow and clumsy re-think of the late F.B.I. founder J. Edgar Hoover’s life and career that views him through the lens of his alleged homosexuality.

While the screenwriter of “Milk” didn’t  script a “gay fantasia” on Hoover’s successes and monomaniacal excesses, he has written a film that provokes more inappropriate laughter than any mainstream period piece since Oliver Stone’s “Alexander.”

It’s fascinating to interpret Hoover’s career through his twin obsessions — his experiences battling Bolshevik bomb throwers in the “Red Scare” of 1919-1020 that made him fears Reds more than mobsters, and the conflicted, “my big secret” that was his personal life, which made him a fussy hypocritical moralist.

But if you’re not snickering at the sight of Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his longtime “close associate” Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer of “The Social Network”) in bathrobes, reading Hoover’s “secret files” on the sex lives of the powerful and giggling like a couple of gossipy queens, you’re going to be in the minority.

Eastwood’s film skips back and forth between a present, where Hoover is dictating his memoirs to a succession of “loyal” F.B.I. agent-typists, and the past, in which the young card catalog organizer of the Library of Congress brings his data collecting skills to the Bureau that was built around him. We see the night of anarchist bombings that almost killed his boss, Mitchell Palmer (Geoff Pierson), the sloppy, ineffective way that case was handled and Hoover’s determination to bring forensic science and a clearinghouse of fingerprints and other data
to his new Bureau so that crimes like this didn’t go unpunished.

We get a taste of his zeal — for Hoover was nothing if not a lifelong zealot — and his early willingness to trample the Constitution, with mass arrests and beatings of labor organizers and mass deportations of “foreign born radicals” during that incendiary era. From those early excesses, we see the corrupting influence of power. Hoover’s discovery of the utility of  blackmail and intimidation when it came to political foes becomes a running thread  as he visits president after president, and later Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan), and lets slip what he “has on them” as a way of keeping his organization funded and himself in power.

DiCaprio is, of course, all wrong for the part — entirely too tall, for starters. The makeup that ages him into a jowly older man gives him an eerie resemblance to Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.” We wonder, since he is nicknamed him “Speed” because he talks too darned fast, why DiCaprio isn’t talking that fast at all. Then, in press conference recreations, Hoover’s rapid staccato kicks in and we forget he’s Leo. It’s an impressive, if far from definitive, impersonation.

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