Two times while watching Immaculate I was sure it was going to cut away from an act of disturbing violence and it didn’t. This proved effective on the suspense of the movie’s final beat, proposed as something of an alternative ending to Rosemary’s Baby -to be taken as both brutally just and unspeakably horrifying (in my screening there were those who evidently only had the latter response). This tension between the explicit and implicit is one of the few tacts of this movie that was genuinely smart and successful. Hearing that Immaculate was quite boldly sacrilegious, I was largely disappointed by how plain it is. Granted, there are a few flourishes from director Michael Mohan, some considered visual choices, especially at the end and in dream sequences. But if the premise hasn’t been exactly done before, it still feels fairly derivative: a sequestered convent in Italy where a young nun is preyed upon by the cultish sisterhood. That young nun is Sister Cecilia, played by Sydney Swe
“I never want to see another Ghostbusters movie” was the final note of my review of Ghostbusters: Afterlife , by a not inconsiderable margin the worst movie of the Ghostbusters franchise. The success of that movie though wouldn’t let me get away with that. The series putters on and as a critic I feel a responsibility to continue to assess it and what it says/means for contemporary popular culture. So here I am again, commenting on a new entry in a forty year old series birthed out of a goofy comedy premise. Ghostbusters has evolved in drastic ways over the years, from a silly, heavily Reaganite take on supernatural pest control to a reverent legacy property with drawn-out lore that takes itself very seriously more often than not. Directed by Gil Kenan, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is probably the furthest into this new identity the series has yet leaned, largely unconcerned with being consistently funny while diving deep into establishing and emphasizing a consequential mythology.