LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL TBC

Fright entertainment…

‘You look like you could do with some exorcise’

★★★★★ OUT 22 MARCH CINEMAS

On Halloween 1977, as an anxious America looks on, TV host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) puts on a special edition of his chat show, Night Owls. After losing his wife to cancer and slipping down the ratings, it’s his chance to claw back some viewers. But his choice of guests – from an on-the-make medium (Fayssal Bazzi) to a cynical conjurer (Ian Bliss), a parapsychologist (Laura Gordon) and her possessed young patient (Ingrid Torelli) – proves unwise when things start happening on camera…

Written, directed and edited by Australian brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes (2012’s 100 Bloody Acres), shot in Melbourne and featuring an excellent, largely homegrown acting cast, it’s an impeccable recreation of 1970s TV.

As we cut from the live feed to black-and-white behind-the scenes moments, we learn more about what we’re seeing...

Dastmalchian shines as Delroy, mugging to the studio audience as things spiral out of control, while secretly rubbing his hands that he’s created the TV event of the decade, and there are some nasty surprises along the way. But there’s subtext as well as scares. Throwing elements of Watergate, the Manson family and The Exorcist into the mix, the Cairnes suggest an America so used to being manipulated that it has no idea who to trust any more.

THE VERDICT Blending satire and shocks, this is like Ghostwatch for the post-truth generation.

SHOWING UP 12

Seize the clay…

★★★★★ OUT NOW DVD, BD, DIGITAL

Lizzy (Michelle Williams) wears a perma-frown. A sculptor in Portland, she has a show in a week’s time, but life won’t let her focus on the twisted figures her fingers painstakingly craft. For starters, she has no hot water - and her landlady Jo (Hong Chau), who happens to be a more successful artist with a happier disposition, keeps putting off fixing it. And then Lizzy’s cat brings in a wounded pigeon that needs to be cared for…

Will healing the bird prove a salve for Lizzy’s sourness? Can we expect a frenzy of inspiration to ensure the show’s a success? And will Lizzy’s dysfunctional family – Judd Hirsch and Maryann Plunkett as her divorced parents, John Magaro as a brother with mental-health issues – support Lizzy’s big day?

Don’t expect any big, showy answers. Director Kelly Reichardt, who previously collaborated with Williams on Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff and Certain Women, is a sculptor of intimate stories shorn of crude theatrics. Showing Up is typically subdued and subtle, chiselling delicately away to discover what it is that shapes people. There are tiny triumphs, minor setbacks; and although Reichardt naturally satirises the art world, she does so softly, while also recognising the hard graft that’s required of most artists. No quirky geniuses here; just a focus on the quotidian that is, in its own way, extraordinary.

THE VERDICT Indie auteur Kelly Reichardt and her muse Michelle Williams fashion a quiet drama that’s worth showing up for.