I’ll say this about “Red Lights,” the Cillian Murphy- and Robert De Niro-starring thriller that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday night (January 20): I don’t think I’ve talked as much with people about a movie after seeing it since “Inception.”

Which is not to suggest writer/director Rodrigo Cortés’ feature (his follow-up to 2010 fest fav “Buried”) is anywhere near as perfectly conceived and executed as Christopher Nolan’s escapade within the dream world. In fact, “Red Lights” is honestly not a very good movie, though it’s difficult to say why without giving away all the twists, turns and what-the-eff moments.

While there is plenty to admire and scare during the film’s 119-minute running time (and much more to debate afterwards), there remain a handful of unintentionally hilarious moments that left the audience awkwardly laughing in the presence of the film’s talent, plus some head-smacking plot turns and a final montage that manages to be both pretentious and utterly vacuous — not an easy feat.

“Red Lights” begins with a compelling premise and cast of characters. Murphy and Sigourney Weaver play academics specializing in debunking paranormal activity. After a mysterious 30-year absence, De Niro’s world-famous blind psychic emerges back on the scene, drawing Murphy and Weaver into…well, we really should just leave it there. Because “there” is tense, uncomfortable and occasionally jump-out-of-your-seat scary — and it’s best to know as little about the plot specifics as possible.

You might not know much about the plot afterwards either. There are a few twists that make not a lick of sense. There are long stretches of monologue that, when subjected to any sort of Lit-101 scrutiny, crumble under their own substance-free inanity. There are plot strands that are picked up and dropped, especially at the end, seemingly less out of a sense of maintaining mystery than of purely shoddy storytelling.

Murphy, predictably, plays the obsessed investigator with aplomb. Weaver, after all these years, has the sci-gal thing down. De Niro, it seems, will take on any project so long as he gets to deliver a fiery monologue at some point. And Elizabeth Olsen, who was a breakout star at Sundance last year, is given nothing to do and almost less to say as the investigators’ research assistant.

It’s not the performances you’ll be talking about afterwards. It’s the odd choices in supporting cast. It’s the plot twists. It’s the plot holes. It’s the ending. Like it or loathe it, you’ll be talking afterwards. There’s not much more you can ask of a film than that.

The 2012 Sundance Film Festival is officially underway, and the MTV Movies team is on the ground reporting on the hottest stars and the movies everyone will be talking about in the year to come. Keep it locked to MTV Movies for everything there is to know about Sundance.

Filed under: Reviews, New Releases, Cinematical

There’s an entire genre of films that can be neatly summed up by the following three words: high school sucks. Because it usually does, but as common wisdom goes, we grow up and get over it, for better or worse. In the movies, this means acne clears up, glasses are traded for contacts, weight is lost or redistributed in a more socially acceptable manner, and awesome careers are the rewards for all those hours spent in the library.

‘You Again’s heroine Marni is supposed to be proof of this. As high school Marni, Kristen Bell is decorated with fake acne, stringy hair, glasses, terrible coordination, and braces. Fast forward eight years or so, and she’s a glowing publicist, an ironic job for someone who should have learned long ago that image isn’t everything. Unfortunately, all that success and experience accrued go out the window when she finds out her perfect older brother Will (Jimmy Wolk) is marrying the cheerleader who made Marni’s life hell in high school. Everyone in her family, including the dog, adores Joanna (Odette Yustman), who pretends not to remember Marni. Marni’s mom Gail (Jamie Lee Curtis) is full of empty platitudes about forgiving and forgetting, until Joanna’s Aunt Ramona (Sigourney Weaver) shows up on the scene. See, part of Joanna’s rebirth as a saintly nurse who volunteers for a suicide hotline, etc., is that her parents died, and Ramona has stepped in to fill their shoes. Except Ramona was once Gail’s nemesis, and so these two grown women also regress to their most base high school instincts.

Filed under: Cinematical

The most important thing to know when interviewing Sigourney Weaver is that she’s much, much smarter than you are. She knows what you’re asking before you’re even done asking it, and she has at the ready a completely spontaneous and yet polite and graceful answer. That she chalked up her unfamiliarity with yours truly to her stupidity only made her seem that much smarter, even as she demonstrated the disarming authority her character wields like a switchblade in her new film, ‘You Again.’ Thankfully, however, her kindness is sincere, which is why you find yourself hating to love her in the movie rather than the other way around, even when she’s putting her on screen adversary (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) through her paces – and then some.

Cinematical spoke to Weaver via telephone during the recent Los Angeles press day for ‘You Again.’ In addition to talking about finding the real emotion behind her character’s animosity for Jamie Lee Curtis, Weaver talked about the collaboration the two actresses shared during shooting, and reflected on the opportunities (and limitations) of being a performer who, simply by virtue of talent and timing, changed the notion of what was possible for actresses to play on screen. (Plus, she talks briefly about the long-gestating ‘Ghostbusters 3,’ and her eagerness to reunite with the first two films’ unforgettable ensembles.