The Divergent Series:
Allegiant (12A)
Directed by Robert Schwentke
5/5
IT’S possible that there are two different films in this third and penultimate outing in the profitable series based on Veronica Roth’s best-selling novels.
One — offering everything devotees of the science fiction action series could ask for — charts the adventures of sassy heroine Tris (Shailene Woodley) and four fellow fighters after they escape from the futuristic walled city of Chicago.
The other is a vivid melee of fast moving serial-style science fiction action and suspense. For nonaddicts like me, and series virgins, it’s hard to follow.
Their nerve-jangling breakout from Chicago lands Tris and co in The Fringe’s radioactive wasteland and then in the futuristic Bureau of Genetic Welfare, where strange mastermind David (Jeff Daniels) informs Woodley that she is genetically pure and asks her to help him “save the world.”
Adequate special effects add valuable visual dimension to a bleak post-apocalyptic world and director Robert Schwentke works hard to put dramatic flesh on a somewhat starved storyline, the result of four screenwriters having to adapt the final book in the trilogy.
Fans will be happy. Newbies and nonbelievers should simply settle for action, thrills and suspense and let the story flow by.
Review by Alan Frank

Anomalisa (15)
Directed by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson
3/5
AFTER a seven-year hiatus, Charlie Kaufman returns with a fascinating yet creepy introspective stop-motion animation about a motivational speaker in the midst of a mid-life crisis.
Author and customer services guru Michael Stone (David Thewlis) arrives on a business trip in Cincinnati where he meets the anomaly that is Lisa Hesselman (Jennifer Jason Leigh).
Finding her extraordinary — her voice is “magic” — he falls for her.
But the twist is that everyone else, including his wife and son, sound exactly the same (all voiced by Tom Noonan).
The clue to this weirdness is that The Fregoli, the hotel he checks into, is also the name of a rare delusional disorder in which a person believes that everyone around them is the same person who has the power to change the way they look.
That intriguing premise underpins the film’s narrative, in which the life-like animated characters are truly unnerving, particularly when they have sex.
Bizarre and thought-provoking animation, but you wouldn’t expect anything less from Kaufman.
Review by Maria Duarte

The Witch (15)
Directed by Robert Eggers
3/5
WRITER-DIRECTOR Robert Eggers showed irreplaceable judgment in choosing cinematographer Jarin Blaschke for his feature film debut.
Blaschke’s atmospheric, near-monochrome imagery infuses this sometimes overstrained small-scale shocker with matchless dramatic depth.
Threatened by church banishment in 1630 New England, English farmer William (Ralph Ineson) —“I cannot be judged by false Christians” — takes his wife and five children to live in a remote farm by a bleak forest.
There they face escalating supernatural terror. Crop failure is followed by unexpectedly malevolent farm animals, a baby vanishes in broad daylight and, unsurprisingly, worse is to come.
Eggers, who won the dramatic directing award at the Sundance festival in 2015, draws better-than-their-material performances from his adult actors and builds enough suspense and chills to satisfy horror buffs.
Maybe I’ve seen too many such films because, while I admire what Eggers does with so little, I don’t find The Witch the genre masterpiece it’s being claimed to be.
Review by Alan Frank