A still from ‘The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’
| Photo Credit: Warner Bros

There’s always been a curious magnetism to Middle Earth’s rich mythology of untold tales — the whispered legends tucked into appendices, or the histories that get only a fleeting nod in Tolkien’s pages. The War of the Rohirrim, the latest foray into this hallowed realm, takes up the challenge of unearthing one such story: the origin of Helm’s Deep, the fortress whose name alone conjures echoes of Peter Jackson’s grandiose battle sequence. 

There’s also a peculiar kind of pressure that comes with adapting Tolkien. You’re tending to the sacred flame of geekdom, stewarding a world whose fan base makes the Uruk’s look tame. Kenji Kamiyama’s anime feature is not so much a gallant charge into this rarely-charted territory as it is a cautious trot down a well-worn path, with just enough novelty to justify its existence and plenty of fodder for those who find Middle Earth’s cinematic ubiquity exhausting.

Set two centuries before the Fellowship’s arduous quest, The War of the Rohirrim focuses on Héra (voiced by Gaia Wise), the spirited daughter of Rohan’s king Helm Hammerhand (voiced with gravelly gravitas by Brian Cox). Héra is a proto-Éowyn — a horse-riding, sword-swinging shieldmaiden who dreams of defying patriarchal expectations. She is everything Tolkien’s women were often not: a warrior with a strong arc, albeit one that doesn’t quite escape the pull of predictability.

A still from ‘The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’
| Photo Credit:
Warner Bros

Crafted by a fellowship of writers including Philippa Boyens (a veteran of Jackson’s trilogy), the screenplay tries valiantly to inject her with a sense of agency, yet she remains curiously adrift, and more of a narrative device to tie together a tale of revenge and ruin.

Revenge, in fact, is the film’s driving force. The plot kicks off when Helm accidentally one-punches a rival lord to the afterlife during some testosterone-charged negotiations. The man’s son, Wulf, swears vengeance. He is your standard-issue villain  — brooding, snarling, and single-mindedly set on destruction. 

Wulf’s siege on Helm’s Deep — the iconic fortress not yet mythologized by Gandalf’s epic third-act cavalry charge in The Two Towers — forms the better part of the story. It spans a bitter winter with an extended set piece that Kamiyama renders with a painterly menace: snow-swept battlements, dwindling supplies, and a creeping sense of doom that evokes a slow-burning dread. It’s grim, atmospheric, and at times hauntingly beautiful. 

But then the characters start talking, and the spell breaks. Over the second act, the quality of the dialogue takes a plunge off the deep end and veers into clunky exposition, robbing the quieter moments of their power, sort of like watching the Battle of the Pelennor Fields with an LOTR nerd pausing every five minutes to explain why their favourite character is an inanimate siege weapon (guilty).

Visually, The War of the Rohirrim is an intriguing paradox. Its multi-dimensional animation recalls the tactile wonders of Jackson’s films, with sweeping vistas and intricate details that pay homage to Middle Earth’s grandeur. Kamiyama’s Rohan also shares an unmistakable kinship with Ghibli. The windswept plains, dotted with lone riders against an endless horizon, feel like they’ve galloped straight out of Nausicaä. Héra’s rebellion against her father’s ironclad ideals echoes the fierce, untamed spirit of Mononoke’s San, while Helm’s descent into myth could easily pass for the sort of sombre tragedy Miyazaki might weave into his more melancholic works. 

A still from ‘The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’
| Photo Credit:
Warner Bros

But where Ghibli tempers its bloodshed with quiet, meditative beauty — a moment to watch the wind ripple through the grass or the sun dip below the horizon — Rohirrim charges headlong into battle, its sense of wonder often lost beneath the clamor of swords and overly scripted dialogue.

What ultimately hampers The War of the Rohirrim is its own sense of obligation — to Tolkien, to Jackson, to the legions of fans who demand reverence for Middle Earth’s lore. In its best moments, the film embraces the arresting surrealism of anime or the introspective wonder of Miyazaki, but largely settles for something safer: a forgettable myth-making exercise. For a story steeped in Tolkien’s love of deliberate world-building, the rushed denouement also feels rather sacrilegious.

Still, there are treasures here for those willing to dig, and for Tolkien devotees, there is enough here to merit a watch. There’s of course a certain satisfaction in seeing Middle Earth’s cinematic universe expand, even if its endless appendices are starting to feel more and more like spinoff bait than the main quest.

Ultimately, The War of the Rohirrim is a curious beast — evoking neither the awe-struck majesty of Jackson’s epic trilogy, nor the offbeat whimsy of the Rankin/Bass animations, nor even the fever-dream charm of Bakshi’s rotoscoped oddity. It feels stranded somewhere in the middle, torn between paying solemn homage to Tolkien’s sprawling legendarium and daring to carve its own path.

‘The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’ is currently running in theatres

When the manager of the transportation security officers at LAX greets his bleary-eyed employees with a chipper “good morning” at the beginning of Carry-On, Jaume Collet-Serra’s low-key gripping thriller, his voice drips with sarcasm.

It is Christmas Eve at the bustling airport, which means it is decidedly not a good morning. The stakes are high for the hundreds of agents responsible for shepherding anxious and impatient travelers through security checkpoints. The bag scans, the body searches and the changing instructions around shoes and laptops are triggering for a citizenry worn down by the post-9/11 security apparatus. So truthfully, it’s a bad morning — and, at least for Ethan Kopek (an excellent Taron Egerton), it’s about to get worse. 

Carry-On, which premieres on Netflix this Friday, Dec. 13, follows the slacker TSA agent through what might be his most challenging day on the job. It begins on fairly normal grounds, with Ethan and his girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson) reveling in the news of an unexpected but welcomed pregnancy. The prospect of a child activates Ethan’s anxiety about adulthood (“I thought I would be further along before this happened,” he says) and prompts Nora’s encouraging speech about following dreams. She just got promoted to a managerial position at the airport and urges Ethan to reconsider taking the police academy exam so he can fulfill that classic American dream of becoming a cop. 

But Ethan, still scarred by his first failure to get in, wants to focus on making more money. That day at work, he asks his boss for a promotion, or a chance to prove himself. Phil (Dean Norris), with some convincing from Ethan’s buddy Jason (Sinqua Walls), puts Ethan on bag scans.

Unbeknownst to Ethan and his fellow security agents, a shadowy figure needs a dangerous package to get through LAX checkpoints. This mysterious man (Jason Bateman) and his associates (one played by Theo Rossi) planned for Jason to be in that seat. When they realize Ethan is their new pawn, the crew deftly adjusts to blackmail him instead. 

Working from an assured screenplay by T.J. Fixman (Ratchet & Clank), Collet-Serra (Black Adam, The Shallows) crafts a satisfying surveillance thriller reminiscent of Eagle Eye (2008) and Phone Booth (2002). Like Shia LaBeouf’s Jerry, Michelle Monaghan’s Rachel and Colin Farrell’s Stuart, Egerton’s Ethan finds himself under the control of an anonymous extortioner. (The instructions come to Ethan through a tiny earpiece dropped off by a random traveler.) And similar to these other films, Carry-On builds its suspense on the frightening reality of the state’s expanded surveillance power and the erosion of individual privacy in the name of national security. It might not spawn any advanced theories about these latter themes, but it does serve as a reminder of this omnipresent system’s relative novelty. 

Carry-On revs up fairly quickly, leaving the stilted intimacy of Ethan’s personal life for the bustling drama of LAX. The film’s early tone resembles a workplace comedy, complete with the beleaguered manager, try-hard colleague (Joe Williamson) and personality hire with several side gigs (Gil Perez-Abraham). The actors who make up this gallery of side characters offer brief but wonderful turns, adding humorous touches to a high-stakes story.

Collet-Serra and DP Lyle Vincent (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Bad Education) stage some pretty memorable scenes of TSA agents at work, including one in which Jason tries to soothe a frustrated crowd and help travelers fed up with a system of random checks make their flights. These scenes humanize the agents who don’t want to enforce these rules any more than passengers want to comply. 

While his colleagues try to make the best of a nightmare travel day, Ethan, fresh off the threats on Nora’s life, is on edge. The mysterious traveler (who remains unnamed throughout the film) has given him the nonnegotiable terms and conditions of this arrangement: If Ethan doesn’t let the bag through, Nora will die. Ethan refuses to accept this anonymous bullying, and this desire sets off the principal action of Carry-On. 

A gripping game of cat and mouse begins as Ethan tries to outwit the traveler and his cohort cohort. Egerton and Bateman’s performances elevate Carry-On and contribute significantly to the film’s overall success. Even when the repeated showdowns between the TSA agent and traveler lose potency, these actors maintain the narrative’s tension and viewer investment. As their rivalry slowly becomes one of two equals, wondering how each might outmaneuver the other becomes part of the thrill. Bateman is excellent as a villain, and Egerton finds his groove as a working class American trying not to get fired. The Rocketman star goes beyond the surface of his character’s layabout persona to find the attributes that transform him into a hero.

Running parallel to the confrontation between Ethan and the traveler is an underbaked plot about the local police’s investigation into an incident that might be related. But the external factors that set off the heightened airport chamber drama are less evolved and these scenes, which include an underused Danielle Deadwyler, are some of the weakest in Carry-On.

The Piano Lesson actress plays Elena Cole, a police officer with a hunch about a mysterious fire that opens the film. From minor clues, she figures out a dangerous plot is afoot. But the plausibility of this subplot is cursed by a clunkiness that recalls the more unbelievable moments of F. Gary Gray’s Heist. Ultimately, this thread introduces more questions than Carry-On can realistically acknowledge or even answer — serving as a reminder that in film, as with travel, it pays to pack light.

A movie shot in first person sounds like a gimmick. Part of the magic of filmed storytelling is accepting that something can be from someone’s point of view and yet also from a distance. Using the camera as a character’s actual eyes is the domain of university students and niche experimental filmmakers. In a commercial film, it’s to be deployed only in very limited doses.

And yet, with “Nickel Boys,” filmmaker RaMell Ross not only commits to the idea but delivers one of the most powerful films of the year in the process — a lyrical, heartbreaking and haunting journey into the darkness of a brutal reform school in the Jim Crow South.

Ross and co-writer Joslyn Barnes weren’t working from scratch, but Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel about two teenage boys, Elwood and Turner, who become friends while wards of a juvenile reform school in Florida. It’s called the Nickel Academy in the novel and the film, which is fiction, but based on the horrific abuses at the very real Dozier School for Boys, in the Florida panhandle, where boys were beaten, raped and killed. Some of the bodies were shipped back to their homes. Others were buried in unmarked graves that only have recently come to light.

The haunting truth of the broader picture, the all-too-recent displays of inhumanity and racism, looms over every frame. “Nickel Boys” is not exploitation porn, however. In fact, when one brutal beating does happen, Ross directs his gaze elsewhere: A wall, a shoe, a nervous hand, the corner of a bible. The sounds from the other room, the cracking of the whip and the grunts are undeniable. As in “The Zone of Interest,” we don’t need to see it to feel its impact.

This is more of a memory piece than anything else, a reconciling of unspeakable traumas and human resilience through the eyes of two boys. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is our way in. We see his youth in Tallahassee, growing up with his grandmother Hattie (an especially impactful Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor ) who is as playful as she is protective of this young boy who has only her. He’s smart and attuned to the civil rights movement at large, listening in on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches and impressing his teachers, one of whom recommends him for classes at a technical college. He hitches a ride on his way with a man in a slick suit and car, not knowing that it was stolen. When the man is caught Elwood, the innocent, gets sent to Nickel.

“You’re lucky to be in Nickel,” a younger white employee ( Fred Hechinger ) says to Elwood early on. He’s just received his draft notice and might even really believe it. While he seems like perhaps he’s more friend than jailor, his truest nature will be revealed down the line. Others are more sniveling and obvious, like Hamish Linklater as the school’s administrator who is more than ready to dole out violent punishments with his own hands.

It’s not all Black kids in Nickel, but there’s a segregated hierarchy with the students, one that’s neatly tucked away when inspectors come to the grounds as the employees and administrators scurry to present a good face. Even they knew that their practices are something to be ashamed of.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the first-person camera is its attention to details. It’s not acting like a camera, but a person who doesn’t always see everything “important.” Sometimes it’s one’s own hand, sometimes shoes, tattered shirts, darkness, or a puff of smoke.

And while we’d gotten glimpses of Elwood before, in a camera booth with a girlfriend, the first time we really see him is through Turner (Brandon Wilson) one fateful day in the cafeteria. Turner is laid back and a little world weary, an orphan and a realist counterpart to Elwood’s hopeful idealism. Though opposite in sensibility, these two stick together, finding light and joy even in their hellish surroundings. The camera even starts to shift between them — when they’re looking at one another, they’re also looking through the lens, at us. There are also flashes forward to a man at a computer ( Daveed Diggs ), seen mostly from behind, reading about the discoveries of unmarked graves on the grounds.

The threads do come together, but it requires a bit of patience and giving yourself over to the film, which is both formally and emotionally eye-opening. Adapting great literature can sometimes send filmmakers running towards the conventional; Thank goodness Ross charted his own path instead.

“Nickel Boys,” an Amazon MGM release in limited theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for “violent content, some strong language, racial slurs, smoking, racism and thematic material.” Running time: 140 minutes. Four stars out of four.