The Skeleton Key :Movie Review

Rating:***/*****
BY ROGER EBERT / August 12, 2005

In the real world, motorists get their gas at shiny 24-hour travel plazas, many of them incorporating Taco Bells and sales on the latest cassettes by

Jeff Foxworthy. Not in horror movies, where the Chainsaw Family lurks in the shadows behind the cash register and cackles unwholesomely about newcomers.

The visitor in this case is Caroline (Kate Hudson), a nurse who grows despondent when a beloved patient dies, and quits her hospital job and sign on as private care giver. Her first job pays $1,000 a week, which right there should send up a flare, especially since several earlier employees have quit. She meets a lawyer named Luke (Peter Sarsgaard), and he sends her on to his client, an old lady named Violet (Gena Rowlands). She has lived in the decaying mansion since 1962, "when we came over from Savannah." Now her husband Ben (John Hurt) has suffered a stroke and can't talk. But he sure can look like he really wants to tell Caroline something.

The big house has rooms Ben and Violet have never used. Caroline is given a skeleton key that opens all of them, except, wouldn't you know, a door in the attic. This door rattles loudly, as if someone is locked inside; the Self-Rattling Door is a variation on the Snicker-Snack Rule, which teaches us that in horror movies a knife will all by itself make a sound like it is being scraped on metal, even when it isn't. All movies with self-rattling doors and/or knife self-scraping sounds also contain Unexpected Foreground Surprises, when the heroine is terrified because a character (or a cat) suddenly leaps up out of nowhere.

The opening scenes of the movie promise a degree of intelligent menace that few movies could live up to, including this one. But it works while it's happening. Gena Rowlands, looking far less elegant than when she played James Garner's fading Southern love in "The Notebook," distrusts Caroline: "She wouldn't understand the house," she tells her lawyer. But then again, who would? And what's to understand?

Old Ben, meanwhile, grabs Caroline's wrist in a deathly grip, and really, really has something on his mind. Although he uses a wheelchair, one evening during the nightly monsoon she finds him missing from his room. He has crawled out of his window and onto the porch, and falls to the ground, for reasons that seem clearer at the time than they do later. Carolina becomes convinced that Violet is a threat to Ben, and tries to help him escape, ramming her VW into the big old iron gates, which are mysteriously locked.

Underlying all of these alarms is a local practice known as Hoodoo, not to be confused with voodoo. Hoodoo, we learn is American folk magic incorporating incantations, conjurations, herbal remedies and suchlike; voodoo is a religion, Caroline is told, but "God don't have much to do with Hoodoo." From Violet, she hears the story of Papa Justify (Ronald McCall) and his wife, Mama Cecile (Jeryl Prescott Sales), who were servants at the plantation 90 years ago, and how their Hoodoo practices got mixed up with the rich family that owned the house.

"The Skeleton Key" is one of those movies that explains too much while it is explaining too little, and leaves us with a surprise at the end that makes more sense the less we think about it. But the movie's mastery of technique makes up for a lot. Kate Hudson is convincing as the young nurse determined to help her patient, Gena Rowlands is awesome in the Joan Crawford role, and John Hurt, who says not a word, semaphores whole dictionaries with his eyes.

There's a kind of moviegoer who likes a movie like this no matter how it ends. It's about the journey, not the destination, even though the ending of "The Skeleton Key" really is a zinger. It's just that -- well, what did a lot of the other stuff have to do with anything? How do all the omens and portents and unexplained happenings connect? And what's the deal with Hoodoo? It doesn't work unless you really believe in it, we're told, but if you really do, it really does. Considering what happens when you do, I think it's better if you don't.

Besides, I believe things either work or don't work whether or not you think they can. Especially things that God don't have much to do with.

FOUR BROTHER:Movie Review

Rating:***/*****

There's a shoot-out between critics over John Singleton's Four Brothers that rivals anything seen in the movie itself. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times bestows three stars on the movie and remarks that while it "wants basically to be an entertainment ... it deliberately makes the point that in an increasingly diverse society, people of different races may belong to the same family.

" (The point is embodied by the four brothers of the title, two white and two black, raised by a white foster mother who is murdered at the outset of the film.) Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Daily News describes it as "a rousing revenge flick that delivers the goods with a mixture of tight action, vivid performances and an old-school soundtrack that evokes the best of blaxploitation cinema.

" Lisa Kennedy in the Denver Post remarks that the film might be criticized as old-fashioned, then adds: "Listen up: If old-fashioned is just code for leaving the theater smiling, sign me up." Like several other critics, Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer thinks of the film as a kind of contemporary B-movie. "It's your basic patter, car chase and shootout.

No big budget, stars, or computer-generated tricks. Like cheap booze, it does the job," she writes. But Stephen Holden in the New York Times describes the movie as an "atmospheric, propulsive and ultimately preposterous melodrama.

" Ty Burr blames Singleton for the film's problems. "Grubby to look at and edited with a rusty knife, it's a bumptious, low-rent ride and further proof that Singleton, for all his status and acclaim, doesn't have impressive filmmaking chops," he comments. Kyle Smith in the New York Post is less guarded in his review, writing "Four Brothers? Ringling Brothers is more like it, because John Singleton's latest stinks like something the elephants left behind."