Dark is as mysterious as it is horrific, making it refreshingly eerie compared to the current wave of lackluster horror films. Dark's protagonist, Ada (Maria Bello), a heroically sly mother who aims to bring her allegedly dead daughter back to life, further clarifies director John Fawcett's affinity for femme fatales, best exemplified in his juicy feminist werewolf film, Ginger Snaps. This time mining the indestructible psychic mother-daughter bond for material, Fawcett tells the story of Ada, who brings daughter, Sarah, to Wales for a visit with husband and father, James (Sean Bean), an artist relocated to a remote seaside haunt. After Sarah becomes obsessed by a monolith carved with cryptic text about Annwyn, the pagan Welsh equivalent of purgatory, Ada predicts her daughter's fall off a cliff in a nearby pasture. Search parties fail to locate the girl's body, so Ada heads to the local library for research, discovering that the house they live in is inhabited by the ghost of Sarah's doppelganger, Ebrill, who seeks rebirth after a similar drowning accident. Ada makes the ultimate sacrifice to rescue her daughter while Sarah's father stands idly by. Dark's plot directly relates to the classic psychological thriller, Don't Look Now, but lacks the same subtle visual beauty, instead opting for a modern primitive look. But with Welsh mythology mixed in, not to mention subplots involving a psychotic shepherd into trepanation, and a local sheep population afflicted with a suicide-inducing virus, Dark contains appealing medieval imagery, and its contemporary take on pagan self-sacrifice is sick and cultish rather than sexy and natural, as in The Wicker Man. Dark can at least be applauded for entering some intriguingly creepy territory. --Trinie Dalton
I think Maria Bello and Sean Bean worked wonderful in The Dark. The great supporting cast includes Maria Bello, Sean Bean, Maurice Roves, Sophie Stuckey, Abigail Stone.
Ghosts of Mississippi - My Favorite Movies Journal
Rob Reiner, who used to be more interested in personal style as a filmmaker, continues to duck behind bland movies about important ideas with this based-on-fact film about the embattled white prosecutor (Alec Baldwin) who brought racist killer Byron De La Beckwith (James Woods) to justice after 30 years of failed attempts. Charged with the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, Beckwith slimes up the film pretty well via Woods's somewhat showy performance, while Baldwin generously assumes the usual clichs surrounding reluctant heroes. Whoopi Goldberg is at her most stately as Evers's widow. The whole self-important production is dogged by the obvious thought that it might have played better (and to far more people than it did in theaters) on television. --Tom Keogh
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Ghosts of Mississippi was an incredible movie! Both Alec Baldwin and James Woods were amazing! The great cast includes Alec Baldwin, James Woods, Virginia Madsen, Whoopi Goldberg, Susanna Thompson.