The most frightening screen villains often don’t raise their voice above a whisper, like the cult leader at the very dark heart of “Martha Marcy May Marlene.”

Oscar-nominee John Hawkes (“Winter’s Bone”) gives the film’s charismatic Patrick a rattling intensity, enhancing writer/director Sean Durkin’s assured screen debut.

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“Martha” will get plenty of award season love in the weeks to come, but we may look back at it as our first full-throttled glimpse of Elizabeth Olsen’s raw power. Yes, she’s an Olsen – the younger sister of Mary Kate and Ashley – but a few frames into “Martha” and you’ll instantly divorce her from any tabloid headlines.

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Apart from having one of the most easily forgotten titles in recent recall, ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’ is a movie without a point. As a demonstration of the sinister nature of hippie commune-cults, the picture conveys a lesson that was already learned-to-death, literally, in the 1960s. It’s all empty foreboding and shuttered import, and you walk out of it shrugging.

And yet the movie gets under your skin; while it’s up on the screen, it casts a dark spell. The writer-director, Sean Durkin, crafting his first feature, weaves together two clashing worlds—the scrubby rural commune and a luxe Connecticut lake house—with an intricacy of tone that’s striking.

Most impressive, though, is Elizabeth Olsen, who plays the film’s haunted protagonist and gives a breakthrough performance of the sort that launched Jennifer Lawrence in last year’s Winter’s Bone.

Olsen—the younger sister of mini-moguls Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, something you’d never, ever guess—plays Martha, an obscurely troubled young woman who dropped off the face of the earth following the death of her mother two years earlier and fetched up in a Catskills commune run by a bony, inscrutable older man named Patrick (John Hawkes, another memorable presence in Winter’s Bone). The commune is a collection of young lost souls, and Patrick rigorously trains them in the ways of the new paradise he’s creating.

Read the full review at Reason.com

Although America is suffering through its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, there is no recession in the movie business. Led by the Warner Bros reboot of Friday the Thirteenth and a couple of surprisingly strong chick flicks, Hollywood’s top twelve grossing movies may grab a combined $201.5M over the long President’s Day weekend holiday, which marks an all-time best for the annual 4-day movie-going bonanza.

TOP GROSSING PRESIDENT’S WEEKENDS FOR HOLLYWOOD
- combined gross of top 12 films -
1. 2009 – $201.5M (estimated)
2. 2007 – $167.8M
3. 2008 – $141.1M
4. 2003 – $141M
5. 2005 – $137.1M

Director Marcus Nispel (2003’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake) and the Platinum Dunes production company have gotten the all-new Friday the Thirteenth off to a spectacular $19.3M opening day. That could translate to a well-above-expectations $47M by Tuesday morning. The new Jason restart quickly follows the Platinum Dunes success of The Unborn, released on January 9 to a $19.8M 3-day take. That David D. Goyer written and directed genre pic was made for just $16M, and The Unborn has generated an estimated $42M in the US.

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