1 of 5 | Lily-Rose Depp falls under the spell of “Nosferatu.” Photo courtesy of Focus Features LLC

Orlock even takes a boat to Germany and crashes it onto the shore, like the Demeter. The Hutters’ friends, Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Anna Harding (Emma Corrin), consult Professor Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) for his expertise in dealing with cases like Orlock’s.

There has never been an adaptation of Nosferatu or Dracula in Eggers’ gritty period style, so that is the justification for this incarnation. Even Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Dracula was glamorized and stylized.

So, the world of 1838 Germany is as authentic as Eggers ‘colonial horror, The Vvitch, his 19th-century American drama, The Lighthouse, or Norse era The Northman. Eggers builds atmosphere with Thomas’ gradual approach to Orlock in evocative settings like woodsy crossroads and a snowy courtyard.

The language is just period enough to sound historic, but not so dense that it’s challenging to understand. Prof. Von Franz says, “I have hither come to help you” and “I entreat you to excuse me,” and the words “hither” and “entreat” sound historical.

Orlock still has sharp features, but is not a caricature like the silent film. He is animalistic, but does not do an exaggerated silent movie walk.

This vampire bites his victims in the chest, not the neck, which is an arbitrary difference. He is not seductive like Stoker’s Count, rather aggressively taunting Ellen that she will be his eventually.

Depp is tasked with a physical performance like a character in an Exorcist movie with convulsions that must be hard on the body once, let alone in multiple takes. Eggers also accurately conveys nightmare logic with sudden changes in characters’ perceptions.

This Nosferatu is sexual, which certainly wasn’t allowed in the silent era, but nightmare visions still interrupt the act. This is not romantic; it is 100% horror.

Nosferatu does have an ending different from Dracula, so some twists occur to surprise scholars of the source material. Ultimately, the film delivers a period-authentic vampire tale faithful to both sources.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.

2016’s “Moana” is probably my favorite animated Disney movie of the modern era. I have plenty of nice things to say about “Frozen,” “Zootopia,” “Encanto,” and several others, but “Moana,” with its timelessly-relatable main character, sharp physical comedy, and multiple memorable songs, puts it just a coir above the competition. When an evidently-rushed sequel was announced earlier this year, I became nervous. What if the new film was so disappointing that it affected my opinion of the original? Now that I’ve seen the film, I’m happy to report that my enjoyment of the original is not tarnished by this underwhelming sequel.

The film takes place three years after the original, with Moana (Auli’i Cravalho) now her island’s premier wayfinder, or boat navigator. The community is thriving, and she’s gradually finding clues that will hopefully lead her to discover more islands with communities that can be joined. But she receives a vision that if she doesn’t find far-off island Motufetu very soon, everything she holds dear will be lost. She throws together a mission with a ragtag crew that includes overeager builder Loto (Rose Matafeo), grumpy farmer Kele (David Fane), oafish historian Moni (Hualālai Chung), pet pig Pua, and chicken Heihei, and sets off on an adventure with more self-doubt than she’s ever had in her life.

Along the way, she meets up with an old enemy: the tribe of sentient coconuts known as Kakamora. The two sides battle until they discover that they both need somebody to find Motufetu, at which point one of the Kakamora joins the quest as an enforcer. Not long after, the crew find themselves swallowed by a giant clam, which is home base for new villain Matangi (Awhimai Fraser), who has abducted Moana’s former ally, the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson). It turns out that Matangi needs Moana to find Motufetu as well, though her motivations probably aren’t as pure as the Kakumora just wanting to find their way home. With Maui now officially on the crew, it’s a race to reach Motufetu before unhappy god Nalo (Tofiga Fepulea’i) can stop them with his storm-conjuring powers.

Slowly but surely, the downgrades from the first movie come to light. New songwriters Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear try valiantly to give Moana an anthem as powerful as “How Far I’ll Go,” but “Beyond” falls just a bit short. “Get Lost” from Matangi isn’t quite as memorable a villain song as “Shiny.” And as far as Maui goes, “Can I Get A Chee Hoo?” is a fall off a cliff from “You’re Welcome” that matches Johnson’s own falling star power. His tired, somehow-mugging-for-the-camera-even-in-animation schtick is probably the worst thing about this movie, other than an inexplicable overreliance on gags that involve creatures excreting from various orifices.

The movie still gets a recommendation from me. Cravalho is great as always, the new characters are compelling enough, the jokes hit at an acceptable ratio, and there’s an overall agreeable tone for an animated adventure. There’s nothing here that makes me want to turn against the “Moana” brand, which is good because we’re going to be getting a lot more of it in the future. Supposedly this movie was supposed to be the first few installments of a television miniseries, and harsher critics will say that it should have been stuck on television. I don’t agree with that assessment, I think theaters are lucky to have “Moana 2,” even if it’s a step down from the original. But Moana’s journey is clearly far from over, and however it continues, I hope it doesn’t lose any more magic than it already has.

Grade: B-

“Moana 2” is rated PG for action/peril. Its running time is 100 minutes.

Contact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

For British director Steve McQueen, the past isn’t worth dramatizing unless it can illuminate the present, so when he makes films steeped in history — whether it’s “12 Years a Slave” or his World War II epic “Blitz” — he’s asking audiences to judge where we are now in relation to what’s happened before.

“You measure yourself on where we’ve been, where we are and how far we need to go,” says McQueen. “It’s also, for me, who’s left out of these stories, and who has the upper hand to tell these stories.”

It’s why “Blitz,” set in London during Nazi Germany’s cataclysmic bombing of the city, centers on the perspective of a munitions factory worker (Saoirse Ronan) and her mixed-race son (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), rather than a man on the front lines or in the corridors of power. While conducting research for “Small Axe,” his 2020 anthology of films about resilience in the city’s West Indian community, McQueen had come across a photograph of a Black boy on a train station platform awaiting evacuation during the Blitz.

“I thought, ‘That’s an in,’” he recalls. The picture inspired the tale about young George Hanway’s journey home after jumping the train, encountering aspects of British society — positive and negative — along the way. “We confront things through his eyes,” he says. “It’s not ‘Oliver Twist.’”

George’s single mom makes bombs and tries to do best by her bullied son and her father (Paul Weller), who lives with them. McQueen wanted to show who women really were then, outside of the classic representations of loved ones waiting and crying. The research bore that story out too. “You’ve never seen these images before, where women are the physical and emotional backbone of the war effort,” he says. “They were supplying ammunition, looking after elderly parents, evacuating their kids.”

McQueen saw “Blitz” as a story of love, with the bond between mother and child central to the tale. “Their chemistry was real,” he says of the rapport between Ronan and Heffernan, noting that the former child actor took the first-timer under her wing. “They loved playing together.” Add rock musician Weller, acting for the first time at 66, and the trio forged a formidable onscreen family and off-camera bond. “They wouldn’t stop having fun. I was thinking, ‘Goodness, I wish that was my family.’ There was no hierarchy. It was beautiful.”

When did he know Heffernan, discovered after a widely cast net for the role, was the ideal George? “Day 1, his stillness,” McQueen says. “It was a silent movie star quality. You look at him, and you want to know more. He holds your gaze.” Working with the youngster, he says, fostered a way of filming that was attuned to what Heffernan might do as much as what McQueen might want. “You have to be sensitive, because he has that energy of, ‘What is he looking at? How is he reacting?’ Sometimes, as a director, you’ve got to get out of your own way. You feel it, smell it, allow it to happen.”

Diligent research went into every aspect of “Blitz,” from the actual song being performed at the swanky Café de Paris when it was bombed to the harrowing flooding of a subway station, to a scene in a shelter depicting a protest against bigotry that stemmed from a real incident. But the movie reflects elements of McQueen’s life too. The original song “Winter’s Coat,” sung by Ronan’s Rita at her factory for a radio broadcast, is a nod to his late father.

“When he died 18 years ago, he left me his winter coat,” says McQueen, who wrote the song with Nicholas Britell and Taura Stinson. “I wanted the idea of absence and presence, where putting on the coat is like an embrace, where you’re feeling the warmth of that person’s body.”

Nothing was more personal, however, than George’s decision to jump from a moving train bound for an unknown destination. “His narrative was laid out for him, but he defied it, and it changes his life, and that’s what happened to me,” says McQueen, who as a schoolboy experienced the kind of institutional racism that could have marked his life for failure if he’d let it. “Everything is, in some ways, finding your way home, self-determination.”

McQueen remembers being taught about the Blitz in school, and its importance to Britain’s sense of self. He hopes “Blitz” honors that history by widening the picture to be more truthful about who populated the nation. “A lot of our identity is based on that, it being our ‘finest hour,’” the director says. “What was our finest hour? Well, a lot of people contributed to that who have been erased from that history. They’re ghosts, and I need to illuminate them. I need to give them a platform. How could I not? The multiculturalism of London at that time, there’s an amazing complexity to that landscape, so rich, so textured and visually dynamic.

“For a filmmaker, it’s gold.”