A rambling Rorschach Test of psychological perceptions takes the spotlight as characters experience the twisty limits of Method Acting in the peculiar new Todd Haynes dark comedy May December (A-). Natalie Portman plays an actress visiting Savannah, Georgia on an indie film research mission to study a real-life woman played by Julianne Moore and her much younger husband portrayed by Charles Melton the details of their notorious tabloid romance which started when he was underage. The movie presents an escalating series of off-kilter sequences, bombastic music and brazenly theatrical conceits ranging from melodramatic monologues to acting in front of mirrors to speaking about technique to acting classes. Portman’s character finds herself going deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of intrigue and investigation, with increasingly thorny and unnerving results. She gets an iconic moment when she describes what filming an intimate scene in a movie is like and loses herself in the notion that sometimes it’s highly technical and sometimes you don’t want to admit you felt a little chemistry. All three primary actors are fabulous with the women trading secrets and lies and an increasingly similar appearance and relative newcomer Melton providing an object of unusual sympathy. Moore plumbs great depths of her sex offender character loosely based on the true story of Mary Kay Letourneau the audience may think it knows. Haynes has built a career on opulent domestic stories often with subtext of social persecution, and his latest is a brilliant remix of some of his most austere and audacious themes. This won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but it will undoubtedly keep viewers guessing where one person’s scandal starts and another’s art fills in the gaps.

Plan to redeem your game tokens and exchange your skee-ball tickets for weak jump scares and inert performances as the resident animatronic mascot bear and his bandmates at an abandoned fictional family entertainment emporium are prone to murder in Emma Tammi’s horror film Five Nights at Freddy’s (D+). As if the high concept based on cult hit video game lore weren’t enough to fill the film’s running time, the night security guard (Josh Hutcherson), who sometimes brings little sister (Piper Rubio) to work, also uses dream therapy in an attempt to recall the identity of the man who kidnapped his younger brother years ago (hint to the mystery arrives in the form of there being fewer than a half dozen men in the cast). The morose story about multi-generational trauma hardly seems the stuff of an action film aimed at teenagers, but the plot doesn’t seem to be the main attraction here. Few in the ensemble seem adequately phased by the sinister supernatural activities afoot as minor themes about hero complexes and child custody seep into the fright flick’s consciousness. Most notable in the mayhem is the sturdy practical effects work of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop to craft the creepy-cute denizens of the plundered pizza palace, but even these vivacious vigilantes aren’t given much to do. Mr. Cupcake, a yeasty beast and patron saint of bygone birthdays, is a particularly spry killer. The plot is rather routine with a PG-13 rating likely to reward starter sets of horror movie fans. Hutcherson makes little impression as the underwritten protagonist, and Tammi never fully leverages the macabre humor of the setting nor the potential terror embodied in the mechanical animals to get much under the surface. For all the imaginative possibilities, the end result of the movie’s prolonged gestation period is a work largely devoid of scares or personality, a gateway horror movie that opens the door to a franchise with potentially more creative possibilities.