"Boorman and the Devil"

☆☆☆☆☆

Among the many seemingly impossible tasks accomplished by the remarkable documentary Boorman and the Devil is its refusal to turn 1977's Exorcist II: The Heretic into a good film that has been unfairly maligned. Instead, it examines how intelligent, talented, dedicated people created a disaster. If you watch Exorcist II after seeing this film, you'll still watch an incomprehensible mess. But you won't watch it the same way.

Boorman and the Devil is enticing to movie fans because it promises to deconstruct one of the most notorious flops in movie history, a movie so reviled by audiences that riots broke out at some movie theaters where it played. In the 49 years since its release, some people — Martin Scorsese among them —have tried to reassess it as a masterpiece.

Director John Boorman isn't one of them. The director of Excalibur and Deliverance and Hope and Glory, among others, spends a great deal of time on screen in Boorman and the Devil, and he knows the film was a catastrophe. He also remains proud of its accomplishments. Exorcist II: The Heretic has become for him something deeper and more profound than a failure: it is a wound that has never healed. It is the mistake of a lifetime.

Many of the people involved in the film view it that way, or at least as something far deeper, far richer, far more meaningful than simply a bad movie. It was an arduous, impressive effort. Everyone did the best work they could on it, from the actors to the technicians to the administrative crew. A number of them are interviewed in Boorman and the Devil. What they say about the film is revealing and sometimes actually heartbreaking: they knew there was a high risk of failure, but they are proud of what they did.

Boorman and the Devil is a work of passion and care from director David Kittredge, who seems almost painfully aware of how close Exorcist II: The Heretic is to camp, and wants to retain reverence while acknowledging the truth of the matter. Walking that fine line turns Boorman and the Devil into an uncommonly entertaining movie. It's funny, zany, wildly engaging, and endlessly fascinating.

Filled with clips not just from The Heretic but from dozens of other films that illustrate not just Boorman's history but the history of the time (summer 1977 turned out to be a momentous summer, as most movie fans will remember, but not because of the Exorcist sequel), it's a cinephile's dream. This is what you always hope movies about movies will be like, but too rarely are. It's ambitious, generous, and revelatory.

Yet Boorman and the Devil achieves something so much more than being a great documentary; it really is one of the very best films of 2026, of any kind (and this has been an uncommonly good year for movies) because of the rich, complicated, painful humanity at its core. Exorcist II: The Heretic wasn't a work of hubris. If it had been, the documentary would have become a sly, winking cautionary tale. Exorcist II: The Heretic was the work of deeply passionate people who were committed to creating something great ... and didn't. They all understand why, but none can quite explain it.

Actress Louise Fletcher, interviewed before her death in 2022, comes closest. Smiling through difficult memories, she professes a deep and believable lack of regret, but acknowledges the fundamental pain. She finds a metaphor in a great spaghetti dinner, in which all the good stuff and all the bad stuff is so tangled together the only thing to do is enjoy it all.

Hers is the best explanation, but Boorman is left with the deepest imponderable. The film bears his name. He made the decisions. He stands by them, wishing that he didn't have to. Boorman's genuinely remarkable interview, like this unmissable film itself, turns making a bad movie into a dissection of pain, regret, pride and self-awareness that will move everyone watching, artist or not, true believer or heretic.

Viewed August 18, 2026 — American Cinematheque / Aero Theater

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"The End of Oak Street"

 ☆☆½

The End of Oak Street tries so hard to be an Amblin/Steven Spielberg film from the 1980s that it's almost lovable in its earnestness. It wants so very, very badly to be a movie like the kind Spielberg directed and produced, a movie where unbelievable and sometimes terrible things happen to a family that lives on a happy, peaceful street in a happy, peaceful suburb somewhere in the United States.

But there's something that doesn't work quite right about The End of Oak Street, in which that happy, peaceful street in that happy, peaceful suburb is invaded not by extraterrestrials or poltergeists or Bigfoot or gremlins or treasure-hunting pirates but by ... dinosaurs.

Now, it's both unfair and a little lazy these days to criticize something by saying it feels like AI could have written it. And yet ... the screenplay to this film feels more than a little like it could have been generated with a prompt: "Write a movie that blends mid-1980s Amblin films with Jurassic Park — a suburban family has to fight off man-eating dinosaurs."

The movie is set in 1982, because it would never do to have an Amblin movie be about a 21st century family — otherwise, you'd never be able to have a poster of the J. Geils Band on a kid's wall (um, did kids actually become J. Geils groupies?); a moment where a character listens to Steve Winwood sing "Valerie" (um, did teenagers listen to Steve Winwood?); a period-authentic Froot Loops box; and, of course, kids on bicycles. Here's a note to filmmakers too young to have really lived through the time: bicycles weren't as ubiquitous as today's '80s-set entertainment makes them out to be.

There are short shorts for girls and for boys, a velour shirt for Dad (Ewan McGregor), a manual typewriter for furtive author Mom (Anne Hathaway) and, of course, hushed arguments about the worst thing anyone could imagine in the 1980s: divorce.

That is, at least, the worst thing that anyone could imagine in an Amblin film. There's also a family dog, Starbuck (no, not the coffee shop, the Battlestar Galactica character ... it's 1982!), who in a most un-Spielbergian touch is tied up and left outside at night. The moment I saw that, I lost a lot of my worry about whether the family would live or die. It's the most terrifying thing on screen.

So, this oddly imperfect simulacrum of 1982 is rocked one night by strange lightning storms, following an ominous radio news report about some kind of "ripples" happening in space, or something like that, and suddenly the whole of the neighborhood is overrun with dinosaurs.

Thank goodness plucky Mom is a crack shot with a shotgun! While the rest of the neighborhood gets squished and squashed and eaten and frequently decapitated by the dinosaurs, Mom and Dad and the kids have to outrun them. All the time. And no one has any idea why Oak Street suddenly dead ends at the Mesozoic era.

That includes the screenwriters. It's a strange thing to say, but it appears nobody really cared enough to explain why any of this happens. While I don't want to drop spoilers, though in this case it's not spoiling very much, it all has something to do with Carl Sagan and wormholes. I guess. Nobody seems to know, and frankly by the end of the movie there are hardly any residents of Oak Street left alive to care.

There's a lot of gore in The End of Oak Street, which is rated PG-13 but is probably too scary and intense for most of today's pre-teens. And one particularly gory and nasty scene gives the film a true moment of shock and surprise — which it undoes with a silly, perfunctory Back to the Future-style ending in which the characters we've been watching turn out to be ... well, never mind. If you're inclined to see it, you don't want to know; if you're not, you wouldn't believe it, anyway.

Everything in The End of Oak Street just sort of ... happens. There are some genuinely tense moments, and the film is neither poorly made nor poorly acted; in many ways, what Hathaway is required to do here is infinitely more difficult than what she did in The Odyssey, and she makes it credible. She's the best part of the movie, and the only one that doesn't feel like it's trying far too hard to be from the 1980s.

The biggest trouble with The End of Oak Street is that if it had been made in the 1980s, it would have failed. It doesn't have the heart, the awe or, especially, the wonder of those more innocent films. It's lean, hard and sometimes mean, even when it's trying to be just like those movies of yesteryear. The movies of yesteryear were a lot better.

Viewed August 17, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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