Al Pacino tests credibility as a priestly exorcist in this horror outing

THE RITUAL ★ ½
(MA) 98 minutes
Exorcism movies are as much rituals as the exorcisms themselves, rarely intended to teach us anything new. The writer-director David Midell settles for going through the motions in his lacklustre The Ritual, the only real novelty being the presence of Al Pacino as the exorcist, despite the potential of the subject matter, a 'real' case that occurred in an Iowa nunnery in 1928 and was written up in Time a few years on.
'Real' has been put in quotation marks for obvious reasons, and in theory the film leaves the question open: the exorcism was real, but whether any demons were expelled is for the viewer to decide.
For dramatic purposes Midell skews the balance in favour of belief, presenting Father Joseph Steiger (Dan Stevens), the film's representative of sceptical reason, as a weakling unable to face the truth confronting him.
In any case, the film's claim to historical accuracy is not to be taken too seriously. Emma Schmidt, the possessed woman who is brought to the nunnery, is played by 27-year-old Abigail Cowen, although the real Schmidt was 46 at the time.
I can only suppose this has been done for commercial reasons, meaning someone has decided that on balance the audience would prefer to see a younger woman tied to a bed while she writhes, sweats and makes guttural noises.
The tying-down happens a fair way into the film, after the matter has been debated at length by Steiger, in his capacity as the parish priest, and Father Theophilus Riesinger, the elderly German-American exorcist played by Pacino, whose judgement is vindicated at every turn.
Less prominently featured is the Mother Superior (Patricia Heaton), who complains at one point about a lifetime spent obeying the orders of men, a nod to feminism which under the circumstances is less than convincing.
Nor does the film convincingly feel as if it's taking place in the US Midwest in the 1920s. The handheld camerawork is somewhat jarring in a period piece, but the bigger problem is that none of the actors seem to belong. Cowen is up for what's required of her physically, but lacks a character to play other than 'woman possessed by demons'.

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AFL Sunday: 'Chats have been happening throughout the last month ... they're all sounding relatively positive'

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The Advertiser

4 hours ago

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Australia's enduring love affair with the US is at a critical point

Few stories start in a more compelling way than Ian McEwan's brilliant novel Enduring Love (1997). Several men, strangers to each other, rush across an English field converging on a stricken helium balloon as they try frantically to hold it grounded long enough to free a child cowering in its basket. As the ungainly apparatus is gusted violently aloft during a wind squall, the men suddenly find themselves "treading air", each facing a terrible choice - whether to hang on in the hope their collective weight will bring it down again or let go before rising too high to survive the fall. It might seem rich to describe Australia's umbilical attachment to the United States as an enduring love, but that unanswerable question in the untethered balloon scene feels disturbingly apt. As does the book's title. The bilateral relationship has survived long enough to natural, even definitional. With that "enduring", though, has come less admirable attributes like unbalanced, fawning, and captive. Hence the reckless conservative boast that Australians have fought alongside Americans in every war they've undertaken since 1900. This includes moral, legal, and strategic outrages like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Like McEwan's disparate characters twisting precariously on guy ropes and slaves to untameable forces of physics, the existential question of whether to cling on or let go, is fast becoming existential. Not that the cheerleaders of the AUKUS caucus are awake to it. While the US talks openly of rehabilitating Russia, invading Greenland and seizing the Panama Canal, they mouth terms like strategic alignment, shared values, cooperation and interoperability. In so many ways, McEwan's exquisitely described dilemma seems like a fitting metaphor for this instant. A temporally reflexive metaphor that works, albeit in different ways, for Australia, for Iran, for Israel, and even for those democracies keeping schtum as another American president contemplates a Middle Eastern war. And as Israel reveals its bottomless reserves of military power and lawless vengeance. In short order, Iran must decide if it is to surrender its nuclear enrichment capacities - even for exclusively peaceful domestic purposes like medical isotopes - or face a US aerial bombardment of unimaginable ferocity. Israel must decide, in the same compressed timeframe, if it is to accommodate such assurances - should Donald Trump insist(?) - or fight on condemning Israelis to further carnage and the state itself to perennial insecurity in its region. It is a choice between an unlikely peace and the guarantee of endless war and an ever-enduring hate. The oafish Trump has no plan. He has bought himself a mere fortnight to decide between backing off or pursuing a path he expressly campaigned against. McEwan's well-meaning strangers who've sprinted towards the flailing balloon exhibit some characteristics of the international community. In the nine days since Israel's far-right Netanyahu government began bombing Iran's nuclear sites without warning, a kind of uncoordinated helplessness has taken hold. Those gathered in Canada for the G7 caved instantly to US and Israeli pressure, citing the Jewish state's limitless "right to defend itself". The group called Iran the "principal source of regional instability". While the criticism of Iran is justified, one might have expected the top liberal states to weigh more heavily the authoritative opinions of international legal scholars such as Professor Ben Saul, Challis chair of international law at the University of Sydney and UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism. Saul says Israel's claimed legal impunity simply does not apply here. "Israel claims that its attack is necessary to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and using them in the future. The problem is that under international law, a country may only defend itself from an actual or imminent armed attack by another country," wrote Saul in the Guardian. As the rules break down, such facts have become ethereal, prone to dissipating, like so much helium. READ MORE KENNY: It is worth remembering that the trend to American unreliability now so blatant, started more than two decades ago, when fragmentary intelligence was deliberately "sexed up" to look like solid intel ahead of the Iraq invasion. America's "forever wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the attendant abuses of Abu Ghraib and the eventual surrender to the very Taliban it had expelled - signalled a loss of prestige internationally. But they also sparked a crisis at the moral and institutional core of America. The nativist, protectionist, anti-establishment Trump is its indignant progeny. A vulgar up-yours to the compromises of democracy and the checks on executive power by laws, courts, multilateral bodies and international norms. As Hugh White notes in his latest insightful Quarterly Essay, "Hard New World: Our Post-American Future", the nation which had saved democracy, then created and policed a post-war rules-based international order, has gone and is not coming back. Now, an avowed America First isolationist scoffs at such an order (globally and domestically) and ridicules the haughty ethics that had underpinned it. Even last week, Trump arrived at the G7 only to complain that Vladimir Putin should be there too. To bend McEwan's balloon dilemma further, Australia might ask itself a further question: are we the poor sods clinging white-knuckled to guy ropes? Or are we perhaps the panicked child cowering in the basket, too frightened to determine our own survival as a sovereign nation? Few stories start in a more compelling way than Ian McEwan's brilliant novel Enduring Love (1997). Several men, strangers to each other, rush across an English field converging on a stricken helium balloon as they try frantically to hold it grounded long enough to free a child cowering in its basket. As the ungainly apparatus is gusted violently aloft during a wind squall, the men suddenly find themselves "treading air", each facing a terrible choice - whether to hang on in the hope their collective weight will bring it down again or let go before rising too high to survive the fall. It might seem rich to describe Australia's umbilical attachment to the United States as an enduring love, but that unanswerable question in the untethered balloon scene feels disturbingly apt. As does the book's title. The bilateral relationship has survived long enough to natural, even definitional. With that "enduring", though, has come less admirable attributes like unbalanced, fawning, and captive. Hence the reckless conservative boast that Australians have fought alongside Americans in every war they've undertaken since 1900. This includes moral, legal, and strategic outrages like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Like McEwan's disparate characters twisting precariously on guy ropes and slaves to untameable forces of physics, the existential question of whether to cling on or let go, is fast becoming existential. Not that the cheerleaders of the AUKUS caucus are awake to it. While the US talks openly of rehabilitating Russia, invading Greenland and seizing the Panama Canal, they mouth terms like strategic alignment, shared values, cooperation and interoperability. In so many ways, McEwan's exquisitely described dilemma seems like a fitting metaphor for this instant. A temporally reflexive metaphor that works, albeit in different ways, for Australia, for Iran, for Israel, and even for those democracies keeping schtum as another American president contemplates a Middle Eastern war. And as Israel reveals its bottomless reserves of military power and lawless vengeance. In short order, Iran must decide if it is to surrender its nuclear enrichment capacities - even for exclusively peaceful domestic purposes like medical isotopes - or face a US aerial bombardment of unimaginable ferocity. Israel must decide, in the same compressed timeframe, if it is to accommodate such assurances - should Donald Trump insist(?) - or fight on condemning Israelis to further carnage and the state itself to perennial insecurity in its region. It is a choice between an unlikely peace and the guarantee of endless war and an ever-enduring hate. The oafish Trump has no plan. He has bought himself a mere fortnight to decide between backing off or pursuing a path he expressly campaigned against. McEwan's well-meaning strangers who've sprinted towards the flailing balloon exhibit some characteristics of the international community. In the nine days since Israel's far-right Netanyahu government began bombing Iran's nuclear sites without warning, a kind of uncoordinated helplessness has taken hold. Those gathered in Canada for the G7 caved instantly to US and Israeli pressure, citing the Jewish state's limitless "right to defend itself". The group called Iran the "principal source of regional instability". While the criticism of Iran is justified, one might have expected the top liberal states to weigh more heavily the authoritative opinions of international legal scholars such as Professor Ben Saul, Challis chair of international law at the University of Sydney and UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism. Saul says Israel's claimed legal impunity simply does not apply here. "Israel claims that its attack is necessary to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and using them in the future. The problem is that under international law, a country may only defend itself from an actual or imminent armed attack by another country," wrote Saul in the Guardian. As the rules break down, such facts have become ethereal, prone to dissipating, like so much helium. READ MORE KENNY: It is worth remembering that the trend to American unreliability now so blatant, started more than two decades ago, when fragmentary intelligence was deliberately "sexed up" to look like solid intel ahead of the Iraq invasion. America's "forever wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the attendant abuses of Abu Ghraib and the eventual surrender to the very Taliban it had expelled - signalled a loss of prestige internationally. But they also sparked a crisis at the moral and institutional core of America. The nativist, protectionist, anti-establishment Trump is its indignant progeny. A vulgar up-yours to the compromises of democracy and the checks on executive power by laws, courts, multilateral bodies and international norms. As Hugh White notes in his latest insightful Quarterly Essay, "Hard New World: Our Post-American Future", the nation which had saved democracy, then created and policed a post-war rules-based international order, has gone and is not coming back. Now, an avowed America First isolationist scoffs at such an order (globally and domestically) and ridicules the haughty ethics that had underpinned it. Even last week, Trump arrived at the G7 only to complain that Vladimir Putin should be there too. To bend McEwan's balloon dilemma further, Australia might ask itself a further question: are we the poor sods clinging white-knuckled to guy ropes? Or are we perhaps the panicked child cowering in the basket, too frightened to determine our own survival as a sovereign nation? Few stories start in a more compelling way than Ian McEwan's brilliant novel Enduring Love (1997). Several men, strangers to each other, rush across an English field converging on a stricken helium balloon as they try frantically to hold it grounded long enough to free a child cowering in its basket. As the ungainly apparatus is gusted violently aloft during a wind squall, the men suddenly find themselves "treading air", each facing a terrible choice - whether to hang on in the hope their collective weight will bring it down again or let go before rising too high to survive the fall. It might seem rich to describe Australia's umbilical attachment to the United States as an enduring love, but that unanswerable question in the untethered balloon scene feels disturbingly apt. As does the book's title. The bilateral relationship has survived long enough to natural, even definitional. With that "enduring", though, has come less admirable attributes like unbalanced, fawning, and captive. Hence the reckless conservative boast that Australians have fought alongside Americans in every war they've undertaken since 1900. This includes moral, legal, and strategic outrages like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Like McEwan's disparate characters twisting precariously on guy ropes and slaves to untameable forces of physics, the existential question of whether to cling on or let go, is fast becoming existential. Not that the cheerleaders of the AUKUS caucus are awake to it. While the US talks openly of rehabilitating Russia, invading Greenland and seizing the Panama Canal, they mouth terms like strategic alignment, shared values, cooperation and interoperability. In so many ways, McEwan's exquisitely described dilemma seems like a fitting metaphor for this instant. A temporally reflexive metaphor that works, albeit in different ways, for Australia, for Iran, for Israel, and even for those democracies keeping schtum as another American president contemplates a Middle Eastern war. And as Israel reveals its bottomless reserves of military power and lawless vengeance. In short order, Iran must decide if it is to surrender its nuclear enrichment capacities - even for exclusively peaceful domestic purposes like medical isotopes - or face a US aerial bombardment of unimaginable ferocity. Israel must decide, in the same compressed timeframe, if it is to accommodate such assurances - should Donald Trump insist(?) - or fight on condemning Israelis to further carnage and the state itself to perennial insecurity in its region. It is a choice between an unlikely peace and the guarantee of endless war and an ever-enduring hate. The oafish Trump has no plan. He has bought himself a mere fortnight to decide between backing off or pursuing a path he expressly campaigned against. McEwan's well-meaning strangers who've sprinted towards the flailing balloon exhibit some characteristics of the international community. In the nine days since Israel's far-right Netanyahu government began bombing Iran's nuclear sites without warning, a kind of uncoordinated helplessness has taken hold. Those gathered in Canada for the G7 caved instantly to US and Israeli pressure, citing the Jewish state's limitless "right to defend itself". The group called Iran the "principal source of regional instability". While the criticism of Iran is justified, one might have expected the top liberal states to weigh more heavily the authoritative opinions of international legal scholars such as Professor Ben Saul, Challis chair of international law at the University of Sydney and UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism. Saul says Israel's claimed legal impunity simply does not apply here. "Israel claims that its attack is necessary to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and using them in the future. The problem is that under international law, a country may only defend itself from an actual or imminent armed attack by another country," wrote Saul in the Guardian. As the rules break down, such facts have become ethereal, prone to dissipating, like so much helium. READ MORE KENNY: It is worth remembering that the trend to American unreliability now so blatant, started more than two decades ago, when fragmentary intelligence was deliberately "sexed up" to look like solid intel ahead of the Iraq invasion. America's "forever wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the attendant abuses of Abu Ghraib and the eventual surrender to the very Taliban it had expelled - signalled a loss of prestige internationally. But they also sparked a crisis at the moral and institutional core of America. The nativist, protectionist, anti-establishment Trump is its indignant progeny. A vulgar up-yours to the compromises of democracy and the checks on executive power by laws, courts, multilateral bodies and international norms. As Hugh White notes in his latest insightful Quarterly Essay, "Hard New World: Our Post-American Future", the nation which had saved democracy, then created and policed a post-war rules-based international order, has gone and is not coming back. Now, an avowed America First isolationist scoffs at such an order (globally and domestically) and ridicules the haughty ethics that had underpinned it. Even last week, Trump arrived at the G7 only to complain that Vladimir Putin should be there too. To bend McEwan's balloon dilemma further, Australia might ask itself a further question: are we the poor sods clinging white-knuckled to guy ropes? Or are we perhaps the panicked child cowering in the basket, too frightened to determine our own survival as a sovereign nation? Few stories start in a more compelling way than Ian McEwan's brilliant novel Enduring Love (1997). Several men, strangers to each other, rush across an English field converging on a stricken helium balloon as they try frantically to hold it grounded long enough to free a child cowering in its basket. As the ungainly apparatus is gusted violently aloft during a wind squall, the men suddenly find themselves "treading air", each facing a terrible choice - whether to hang on in the hope their collective weight will bring it down again or let go before rising too high to survive the fall. It might seem rich to describe Australia's umbilical attachment to the United States as an enduring love, but that unanswerable question in the untethered balloon scene feels disturbingly apt. As does the book's title. The bilateral relationship has survived long enough to natural, even definitional. With that "enduring", though, has come less admirable attributes like unbalanced, fawning, and captive. Hence the reckless conservative boast that Australians have fought alongside Americans in every war they've undertaken since 1900. This includes moral, legal, and strategic outrages like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Like McEwan's disparate characters twisting precariously on guy ropes and slaves to untameable forces of physics, the existential question of whether to cling on or let go, is fast becoming existential. Not that the cheerleaders of the AUKUS caucus are awake to it. While the US talks openly of rehabilitating Russia, invading Greenland and seizing the Panama Canal, they mouth terms like strategic alignment, shared values, cooperation and interoperability. In so many ways, McEwan's exquisitely described dilemma seems like a fitting metaphor for this instant. A temporally reflexive metaphor that works, albeit in different ways, for Australia, for Iran, for Israel, and even for those democracies keeping schtum as another American president contemplates a Middle Eastern war. And as Israel reveals its bottomless reserves of military power and lawless vengeance. In short order, Iran must decide if it is to surrender its nuclear enrichment capacities - even for exclusively peaceful domestic purposes like medical isotopes - or face a US aerial bombardment of unimaginable ferocity. Israel must decide, in the same compressed timeframe, if it is to accommodate such assurances - should Donald Trump insist(?) - or fight on condemning Israelis to further carnage and the state itself to perennial insecurity in its region. It is a choice between an unlikely peace and the guarantee of endless war and an ever-enduring hate. The oafish Trump has no plan. He has bought himself a mere fortnight to decide between backing off or pursuing a path he expressly campaigned against. McEwan's well-meaning strangers who've sprinted towards the flailing balloon exhibit some characteristics of the international community. In the nine days since Israel's far-right Netanyahu government began bombing Iran's nuclear sites without warning, a kind of uncoordinated helplessness has taken hold. Those gathered in Canada for the G7 caved instantly to US and Israeli pressure, citing the Jewish state's limitless "right to defend itself". The group called Iran the "principal source of regional instability". While the criticism of Iran is justified, one might have expected the top liberal states to weigh more heavily the authoritative opinions of international legal scholars such as Professor Ben Saul, Challis chair of international law at the University of Sydney and UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism. Saul says Israel's claimed legal impunity simply does not apply here. "Israel claims that its attack is necessary to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and using them in the future. The problem is that under international law, a country may only defend itself from an actual or imminent armed attack by another country," wrote Saul in the Guardian. As the rules break down, such facts have become ethereal, prone to dissipating, like so much helium. READ MORE KENNY: It is worth remembering that the trend to American unreliability now so blatant, started more than two decades ago, when fragmentary intelligence was deliberately "sexed up" to look like solid intel ahead of the Iraq invasion. America's "forever wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the attendant abuses of Abu Ghraib and the eventual surrender to the very Taliban it had expelled - signalled a loss of prestige internationally. But they also sparked a crisis at the moral and institutional core of America. The nativist, protectionist, anti-establishment Trump is its indignant progeny. A vulgar up-yours to the compromises of democracy and the checks on executive power by laws, courts, multilateral bodies and international norms. As Hugh White notes in his latest insightful Quarterly Essay, "Hard New World: Our Post-American Future", the nation which had saved democracy, then created and policed a post-war rules-based international order, has gone and is not coming back. Now, an avowed America First isolationist scoffs at such an order (globally and domestically) and ridicules the haughty ethics that had underpinned it. Even last week, Trump arrived at the G7 only to complain that Vladimir Putin should be there too. To bend McEwan's balloon dilemma further, Australia might ask itself a further question: are we the poor sods clinging white-knuckled to guy ropes? Or are we perhaps the panicked child cowering in the basket, too frightened to determine our own survival as a sovereign nation?

Perth Now

14 hours ago

• Perth Now

Spider-Man and Spaghetti Western actor Jack Betts dead aged 96

Actor Jack Betts has died aged 96. The American star was best known for his roles in Spider-Man, Batman Forever and a long list of Italian Spaghetti Westerns under the name Hunt Powers, and passed away in his sleep at his home in Los Osos, California, on Thursday (18.06.25), according to a statement from his family, with news of his death only emerging on Saturday. (21.06.25) Born in Miami, Florida, in 1929, Jack studied theatre before launching his acting career on the Broadway stage in a production of William Shakespeare's Richard III. He later found fame in Italy after landing the lead role in Sugar Colt, directed by Franco Giraldi, in 1966. Though he had no formal Western experience at the time, Jack bluffed his way into the role — the first of a dozen films in which he would play a gunslinger from 1966 to 1972. Jack told The Dev Show in a 2021 interview: 'In the hotel next to mine was Clint Eastwood. He'd go up to his mountain and do his Western and I'd go up to my mountain and do my Western. But while his films had distribution all over the world, my films were distributed (everywhere) except Canada and America.' Despite the lack of the North American distribution, Jack's performances earned him international recognition. Upon returning to the US in the 1970s, he resumed theatre work, including a run as Dracula on Broadway between 1977 and 1980. He later took on television roles, most notably as Dr Ivan Kipling in the soap opera One Life to Live, which he appeared in until 1985. In 1988, Jack accepted an invitation from his longtime friend, actress Doris Roberts, to move into a downstairs apartment in her Hollywood Hills home. Doris, known for her role in Everybody Loves Raymond, passed away in 2016. Jack said they were 'best friends to the very end' and that they had 'wonderful times together'. The pair also appeared together on Everybody Loves Raymond in a 1999 episode. Over the years, Jack made guest appearances on several hit TV shows including Seinfeld, Frasier, Friends and Power Rangers. He also had small roles in Batman Forever (1995) and Batman and Robin (1997.) In 2002, he appeared in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man as Henry Balkan, a board member of Oscorp Industries. His character delivers the line informing Norman Osborn, played by Willem Dafoe, that he is being ousted from the company — a pivotal moment that sets Osborn on the path to becoming the Green Goblin. Jack's character, along with fellow board members, is later killed in the storyline. Fans of the actor have paid tribute on social media following news of his death. One said: 'Well shoot, another Hollywood gunslinger rides into the sunset. Jack Betts was one of those actors who could make even a B-movie feel like an A-list production.' Another fan added: 'RIP to a legend. Jack Betts brought so much to the screen – from gritty westerns to comic book charm.'