The Witch

Writer/director Robert Eggers easily could have created a version of this story in which the existence of his antagonist as a physical entity was a matter of interpretation, he provides clear evidence of a creature acting independent from the perception of his characters—the central family, which has been banished from a New England settlement because of the refusal of patriarch William to back down from his insistence that the leadership is full of “false Christians.” Left to set up a farm alone on the edge of an ominous wood, William, his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) and their five children try to scratch out subsistence. Rated R. At Century Cinemas Del Monte, Century Marina, Maya Cinemas, Northridge Cinemas