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Legend has it that “The Exorcist” filmmakers also suffered from an on-set curse that caused numerous accidents and even a death to occur during the filming process. This weekend, a new film called “The Rite” is hitting theaters with its own dark tale of a young priest-in-training named Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue in a star-making film debut) whose personal crisis of faith is tested by a creepy veteran exorcist named Father Lucas, played to chilly perfection by the modern master of cinematic evil, Anthony Hopkins (“Silence of the Lambs”).

While “The Rite” offers plenty of jaw-dropping horrific moments, the key difference between it and “The Exorcist” is the fact that it’s rooted in a nonfiction book on the subject called The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist, by journalist Matt Baglio. As a result of the presence of Baglio and the book’s subject, an American exorcist named Father Gary Thomas, the film relies less on gallons of pea soup and grotesque effects and more on a subtle, reflective – yet still thrilling – approach to its subject.

The film follows Kovak as he decides to enter a seminary for priestly training after being given an ultimatum by his father (Rutger Hauer) to enter either the family mortuary business or become a priest. Kovak‘s mother passed away when he was a young boy. After finishing his four years of pre-vow studies, he tries to resign from the seminary and get off the hook with a free education but no commitment to the priesthood.

But after he’s witness to a bizarre, split-second accident that kills a bicyclist and he fulfills her dying wish for an absolution of her sins, Kovak is given an ultimatum by the head of the seminary: either confront his doubts by going for exorcist training at the Vatican, or risk having the church reclassify his $100,000 education as a student loan rather than a scholarship. Kovak heads for Rome, and soon is forced to team up with Father Lucas as punishment for his snarky expression of doubts about the devil during his other teachers’ lectures.

Together, Kovak and Father Lucas form an intriguing father-son style team that expertly mixes dark wit, powerful emotions, and nail-biting suspense to make this exploration of faith and doubt richly entertaining. Writer Michael Petroni and director Mikael Hafstrom (“1408”) treat their subject with appropriate gravity without becoming heavy-handed, and pull out Hopkins’ best performance since “Hannibal” a full decade ago.

But the story rests on O’Donoghue’s richly varied performance, as he expertly serves as a surrogate for viewers’ doubts while effectively taking them along on his at times terrifying quest for the truth. His mix of leading-man looks and dashing combination of humor, emotion, and terror bodes well for a long career.

Rooted in solid real-life experience and consultations as well as a surprisingly strong respect for faith and a portrayal of priests as heroes, “The Rite” scores points not only as entertainment but as a refreshing portrait of faith.  And in giving viewers an intelligent yet fun exploration of life, death, and the existence of evil, “The Rite” should prove ready for a long run at the multiplex.

The Library of Congress announced the selections early Tuesday. The goal of the registry, which began in 1989, isn’t to identify the best movies ever made, but to preserve films with artistic, cultural or historical significance.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has chosen each of the films in the registry, culling them from suggestions by the National Film Preservation Board and the public. More than 2,100 films were nominated by the public in 2010.

Original copies of films picked for the registry are kept safe and available for viewing by future generations. The library acquires copies to preserve in its cold-storage vaults among millions of other recordings at the Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Virginia.

Film can rapidly deteriorate if improperly stored. About half the films produced before 1950 and 90 per cent of those made before 1920 have been lost, Billington said.

This year’s selections also include “Saturday Night Fever,” John Badham’s 1977 disco musical starring Travolta as Tony Manero, the working-class youth known for his impressive moves on the dance floor at a Brooklyn nightclub.

It’s one of five selections from the 1970s. The others are Robert Altman’s revisionist Western “McCabe & Mrs. Miller;” William Friedkin’s horror classic “The Exorcist;” ”All the President’s Men,” Alan J. Pakula’s adaptation of the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and “Grey Gardens,” a documentary about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ eccentric relatives.

Full list here.

“Angels & Demons” upset me.

But not for the reason you may think.

The new movie, based on the Dan Brown book of the same title, is, of course, full of nonsense. But most of it I expected.

The boots, I didn’t.

I know that the Vatican didn’t grant Ron Howard and his team all of the access they wanted. But after seeing the movie, I wonder if anyone having to do with the film even went to Rome. Or, more specifically, if any women associated with the movie went to Rome.

I was in Rome last year with a group of women. Our group was lead by a priest you’d love to walk you through life. But there was one issue he couldn’t fully appreciate: Shoes.

When we got latched onto a real expert on this front, we asked the important question: How do you do it? These streets are not made for walking in heels.

“You don’t wear heels,” she replied.

This is unheard of for the 5′4” among us.

And so the most ridiculous aspect of the new movie “Angels & Demons” for any woman who has tried looking taller on the streets of is watching actress Ayelet Zurer walking and running through the streets of the Eternal City wearing stiletto boots. In reality, the heels on those boots would be destroyed before she could hit her second church, and that’s saying something in a city full of them.

I’m no expert, but I have tried and failed. Heck, I wrecked shoes in Georgetown this weekend and running the “Exorcist” stairs to the cobblestone on M Street is no comparison to the damage Rome will do to Jimmy Choos – well, or Nine West.

But the best horror unfolds slowly. This is what made the first half of the original so watchable (the second half is even better). We knew the 1972 gang was dangerous only through radio reports, but when we meet them they’re obviously twisted but also rather buffoonish. Even the girls don’t take them seriously when they’re first kidnapped. Because we haven’t seen with our own eyes what the kidnappers are truly capable of, until the final, awful moments we hold on to the idea that the girls might be let go or even outwit their captors. Unlike the remake, the visceral is emotional, not visual. The horror comes from the death of hope and the slow realization that this depraved nightmare isn’t going to end.

When it comes to horror, there’s good dread and there’s bad dread. The former is the fun version when you put your hands over your eyes dreading what’s coming next. The latter is when you just want the punishment to end so you can go home, which unfortunately defines the redo of “Last House on the Left.”

Dad (Tony Goldwyn), Mom (Monica Potter), and daughter Mari (Sara Paxton) head out to their beautiful but secluded lakeside home. Mari can’t wait to get away. Mom’s not too sure, but Dad gives her the car keys and some spending money so she can hang out with her local friend Paige (Martha Maclsaac).  Paige is a little wilder than Mari, who’s given up some earlier bad habits to concentrate on swimming, but when Justin (Spencer Treat Clark - Bruce Willis’ son in “Unbreakable”), a shy, troubled boy their age, overhears Paige wish she had a little weed, he offers to hook them up.  

He takes them to a local motel and they get high and just start to bond when the Manson Family walks in. Seems Justin is Krug’s son. On the run and with their pictures on the front page of every newspaper, the girls can’t be set free. The original idea is to take them along as hostages, but things happen that I won’t spoil and the nightmare begins.

The central and most controversial is scene is a horrific and relentless rape that’s both exploitative and gratuitous. After all, we can’t hate these people any more than we did in the opening sequence and so there’s no dramatic purpose to serve. In the original, this scene is much uglier, still gratuitous but actually serves a couple dramatic purposes (it’s also the second rape, the first happens earlier off camera). The competence of the staging and shooting of the moment also works against the remake. Instead of the documentary feel of the cheapie original that only heightened the you-are-there horror, this feels slick – like someone’s doing it because they can, not to move the story or deepen the drama.

**Spoilers coming**

Things improve somewhat when the killers, without knowing it, look for shelter from the storm in the home of Mom and Dad. You don’t need me to tell you this makes for some tense moments. But after a promising beginning this sequence eventually falters and falls prey to the tropes of the genre: Dark house, stormy night, electricity out, phones not working — and to heighten the horror, Mom and Dad doing a lot of dumb things like splitting up when they shouldn’t but of course returning just in time to save the day with a potted plant or some such thing.

The best scene is a prolonged killing where every gruesome household item you can imagine (and a few you can’t) comes into play. The taking of this life is long, bloody brutal, mostly silent and probably inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s “Torn Curtain” (1966) where the master decided to show audiences how difficult it is to kill a man with a protracted sequence involving Paul Newman that ends (if memory serves) with Wolfgang Kieling’s head in a gas oven.

Ultimately, for this kind of film to pay off – meaning, for all the nastiness we’ve been forced to watch to be worth it – the revenge scenes must make it worthwhile. We have to feel for the parents and also feel the sweet release of watching bad guys get what they got coming. But this never happens. There’s one moment where Dad girds Mom for battle and you think it’s finally on, but it’s a feint. What I wanted was to see was the parents plan, plot, scheme, grab control, turn the tables, and then without a hint of mercy take those bastards down one by one for what they did to those girls. Instead we get the standard dark, scary house – cat and mouse nonsense, you can see most every night on the Lifetime Network.

The usual-usuals are predictably up in arms over the film’s violence as though “Last House” achieves some sort of new low when in reality there’s nothing  more graphic here than watching a 13 year-old Linda Blair masturbate with a crucifix in “The Exorcist“ (1973). In fact, the murder/rape scene in the original is much harsher, involving the worst kind humiliation before the rape, which is even more sadistic. The problem isn’t what’s shown or done on screen, the problem is that the film is such a dramatic failure that the brutality feels as though it’s there for the sake of brutality. Piously railing against violence is missing the point. A better approach might be to advocate for better movies.