Richard Corliss

Daniel Radcliffe looks like the Devil in this odd combination of horror film, social satire and YA love story

Ignatius Parrish (Daniel Radcliffe) has the power to make people reveal their deepest compulsions: eating all the doughnuts in a box, having sex right now with a coworker, wreaking harm on a balky child. Ig doesn’t really want this gift; it’s a byproduct of the satanic horns that started sprouting from his temples after his one true love Merrin (Juno Temple) was raped and murdered. The police have no evidence to pin the crime on him, but the angry townspeople are convinced he did it. They carry placards that warn, “You Will Burn in Hell,” and the local tabloid paper runs a photo of Ig with the headline “Is This the Devil?” The horns are the objective correlative of prevailing public opinion: Ig is in danger of turning into the awful entity that ignorant people think he is.

Last week Jim Carrey showed up on Saturday Night Live as a red-caped, hornéd Presley — “Helvis.” Now here’s Harry Potter with a Voldemort vibe. Directed by Alexandre Aja and scripted by Keith Bunin from Joe Hill’s 2010 novel, Horns is a horror film with higher ambitions than the usual Halloween movie fare. Actually, it has more on its mind and too much on its plate. The movie takes the concerns of many David Cronenberg chillers about grotesque bodily transformation (Rabid, The Fly, Naked Lunch) and grafts them improbably onto YA romance tales about doomed young people (The Fault in Our Stars, If I Stay). Call it The Fly in Our Stars.

Plus some of the work of Hill’s father, Stephen King. A long flashback of Ig, his brother Terry and their best friend Lou recalls the pubescent taunting and near-tragedies of Stand by Me, the movie made of King’s story “The Body.” A decade or so later, Terry (Joe Anderson) has sunk into alcoholism, perhaps to blur some guilty memory; and Lou (Max Minghella) has become Ig’s public defender. Lou’s fidelity to his defamed pal helps Ig notice a wrinkle in his Horns rulebook: people who believe he’s innocent can’t see them.

Even the movie’s viewers, who can see the horns, know Ig isn’t turning into the Devil. Oh, sure, he’s able to make two burly cops change in a second from mildly bi-curious to lewdly bi-furious. He can summon snakes to do his bidding, and he’s handy with a pitchfork — Lucifer’s favorite farming tool. But Ig is also the most honest, decent fellow in town. He will use these odd abilities only to discover who killed his dear Merrin and to avenge her death. Indeed, if you read the movie’s prominently displayed car license plates (GEN138, 2036LUK, 2017 EXS) as Biblical references (Genesis 13:8, Luke 20:36, Exodus 10:17), you may believe that what compels Ig is not the cunning of Satan but the power of Christ.

Aja, the French director who burst on the international horror scene with the effectively creepy two-girls-in-an-isolated-house thriller High Tension, came to America to helm remakes (The Hills Have Eyes, Mirrors) and sequels (Piranha 3D). Horns aims higher, handing Aja the upmarket London-born actors Radcliffe, Minghella and Temple — all nicely attuned to the cramped gestures and speech patterns of the Pacific Northwest — and the illustrious cinematographer Frederick Elmes, who shot Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart for David Lynch and, recently, the four-hour drama Olive Kitteridge, to be shown on HBO Nov. 2nd and 3rd.

At nearly two hours, Horns dawdles through the flashback and the politics of rural paranoia. It stumbles in turning Hill’s parable into a vivid movie experience. Anyone could imagine the better, cleaner, more coherent 90-min. film at the core of Horns: the one about the physics of apparent demonic possession. In a scene that references James Franco’s literal disarming in 127 Hours, Ig tries to saw off his head-growths; he bursts into flame as if seared by the fires of Hell; and his army of reptiles slithers magnificently to embrace its prey. (Kudos to Brad McDonald, who in the credits is listed as “Head Animal Wrangler, Snakes.”) The power of Satan may not have engulfed Ig, but it keeps him alive. As he observes, in the movie year’s least necessary line of dialogue: “One thing I’ll say in my favor: I am f—in’ hard to kill.”

The central horror elements are so much snazzier than the others in Horns — those dealing with endless love, coming of age and the small minds of small-town folk — that you wonder why Aja retained them. Maybe the Devil made him do it.

Christopher Nolan's sprawling space epic is beautiful, ambitious and flawed

“We’ve forgotten who we are,” says Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper. “Explorers, pioneers — not caretakers.” That could be Christopher Nolan speaking about movies in this timid age of old genres endlessly recycled and coarsened. He’s the rare filmmaker with the ambition to make great statements on a grand scale, and the vision and guts to realize them.

Nolan is also a consummate conjuror. Memento, his amnesiac movie, ran its scenes in reverse order. In The Prestige, magicians devised killer tricks for each other and the audience. Inception played its mind games inside a sleeper’s head, and the Dark Knight trilogy raised comic-book fantasy to Mensa level. But those were the merest études for Nolan’s biggest, boldest project. Interstellar contemplates nothing less than our planet’s place and fate in the vast cosmos. Trying to reconcile the infinite and the intimate, it channels matters of theoretical physics — the universe’s ever-expanding story as science fact or fiction — through a daddy-daughter love story. Double-domed and defiantly serious, Interstellar is a must-take ride with a few narrative bumps.

In the near future, a crop disease called “the blight” has pushed the Earth from the 21st century back to the agrarian 1930s: the world’s a dust bowl, and we’re all Okies. In this wayback culture, schools teach that the Apollo moon landings were frauds, as if America must erase its old achievements in order to keep people from dreaming of new ones.

Farmer Coop, once an astronaut, needs to slip this straitjacket and do something. So does his daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy); she’s getting “poltergeist” signals from her bookshelves. A strange force leads them to a nearby hideout for NASA, whose boss, Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), drafts Coop to pilot a mission to deep space. With Brand’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway) and two others as his crew, Coop is to find a wormhole near Saturn that may provide an escape route for humanity. “We’re not meant to save the world,” Brand says. “We’re meant to leave it.”

Coop, a widower, wasn’t meant to leave his children. Son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) can manage; but the precocious Murph sees abandonment and betrayal in Dad’s journey to save billions of humans. Coop, who thinks a parent’s main role is to be “the ghosts of our children’s future,” shares Murph’s ache. He needs her. He goes out so he can come back.

What’s out there? New worlds of terror and beauty. Transported by the celestial Ferris wheel of their shuttle, Coop and the crew find the wormhole: a snow globe, glowing blue. One planet it spins them towards has a giant wall of water that turns their spacecraft into an imperiled surfboard. Another planet, where treachery looms, is icy and as caked with snow granules as Earth was with dust. Interstellar may never equal the blast of scientific speculation and cinematic revelation that was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but its un-Earthly vistas are spectral and spectacular.

Someone on the icy planet says, “Our world is cold, stark but undeniably beautiful.” Shuttling between the grad-school blackboard and the family hearth, this undeniably beautiful film blows cold and hot, stark and sentimental by turns. Taking the visual wow factor as a given, you may feel two kinds of wonder: a child’s astonishment at the effects and a bafflement that asks, “I wonder why that’s happening.”

It’s not just that the rules of advanced physics, as tossed out every 15 minutes or so, are beyond the ken of most movie-goers. It’s also that some scenes border on the risible — a wrestling match in space suits — and some characters, like Amelia, are short on charm and plausibility. In story terms, her connection with Coop is stronger than that of the two astronauts in Gravity. But Sandra Bullock and George Clooney gave their roles emotional heft, in a film more approachable and affecting than this one.

If the heart of Interstellar is Coop’s bond with Murph, its soul is McConaughey’s performance as a strong, tender hero; in the film’s simplest, most potent scene, he sheds tears of love and despair while watching remote video messages from his kids. He is the conduit to the feelings that Nolan wants viewers to bathe in: empathy for a space and time traveler who is, above all, a father.

With Interstellar, Nolan’s reach occasionally exceeds his grasp. That’s fine: These days, few other filmmakers dare reach so high to stretch our minds so wide. And our senses, all of them. At times, dispensing with Hans Zimmer’s pounding organ score, Nolan shows a panorama of the spacecraft in the heavens — to the music of utter silence. At these moments, viewers can hear their hearts beating to the sound of awe.

Read next: Watch an Exclusive Interstellar Clip With Matthew McConaughey

Edward Snowden is both the ghost and the hero of Laura Poitras' documentary about blowing the whistle on the spooks at the NSA

In December 2012, a mysterious person known only as Citizenfour contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras with promises of important revelations about the U.S. government’s spy apparatus. Before they met, Citizenfour sent her this warning: “For now, know that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial, every cell-phone tower you pass, friend you keep, site you visit and subject line you type is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not.”

As Edward Snowden typed that email, was he humming the 1983 Police song “Every Breath You Take” and transposing Sting’s threat of an ex-lover’s surveillance to the National Security Agency? (“Every single day/ Every word you say/ Every game you play, every night you stay/ I’ll be watching you.”) Snowden, an IT analyst under contract with the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, had downloaded thousands of NSA documents to present to journalists he could trust to sift through the material and publish what was pertinent. This included Poitras and political gadfly Glenn Greenwald, with Greenwald’s Guardian colleague Ewen MacAskill soon joining them in a Hong Kong hotel room.

The news stories from this cache stash revealed a program monitoring the phone calls and social media of U.S. citizens, and earned the 30-year-old Snowden runner-up status as TIME’s Person of the Year for 2013. (He lost to the Pope, who gets his inside information from an even higher source.) For his service, the U.S. government charged Snowden with espionage, invalidated his passport and stranded him in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport for 5½ weeks, before he found temporary asylum in Russia, because no other country would challenge U.S. pressure and accept him as a political refugee. Snowden must believe that, for the rest of his days abroad, they’ll be watching him.

Moviegoers will too, through Hollywood’s lens. Oliver Stone is preparing The Snowden Files, possibly starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and based on a biography by the Guardian‘s Luke Harding (which Greenwald called “a bullshit book” because Harding didn’t speak to Snowden). Sony Pictures has an option to make a movie of Greenwald’s No Place to Hide.

But for the pure, driven Snowden, you must see Citizenfour, an inside view from a filmmaker who is also familiar with government pressure in the Land of the Free: for her 2006 doc My Country, My Country, about a Sunni physician and democracy advocate in U.S.-occupied Iraq, Poitras earned a spot on the Department of Homeland Security’s “watch list.” (Every breath you take, every call you make …) Focusing on the eight days in June 2013 when Snowden first spilled his and his computer’s guts to the three journalists in his 10th-floor room at the Mira Hotel, this is a fascinating, edifying and creepy record of history in the making.

Why Citizenfour? Here’s a wild guess: Snowden sees himself as the latest American — following Daniel Ellsberg with the Pentagon Papers, William Binney for his 2002 NSA whistle-blowing and Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning with the WikiLeaks documents — to risk his liberty by revealing U.S. government secrets. (Ellsberg, like Snowden, was charged under the 1917 Espionage Act, before being acquitted. Manning, accused of “aiding the enemy,” was convicted in a military court of 17 other charges and is serving a 35-year sentence at Leavenworth. Binney, the subject of Poitras’ short film The Program, never did time, but in 2007 armed agents broke into his home and confiscated his computer and business papers.)

Snowden wasn’t a Harvard-educated Beltway insider like Ellsberg, a 30-year NSA veteran like Binney or a soldier like Manning. Getting his high school diploma through a GED and doing a brief spell at a Maryland community college, he impressed employers with his intelligence and his command of encryption. That secured him jobs in the government and eventually a spot as a Booz Allen contractor. Quiet but not a loner, he has a longtime girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, who lived with him in Hawaii and eventually joined him in Moscow. He is a vegetarian who sometimes eats pepperoni pizza, because who doesn’t love pepperoni pizza?

In Poitras’ closeup view, Snowden is a pretty impressive specimen of the genus Nerdus. He speaks in long, fluent sentences, and his tone is serious with occasional flecks of humor. He correctly anticipates what’s in store for him and makes clear that the need for the public to know the range of government eavesdropping is worth the price he will pay. He radiates an almost Zen equilibrium; on one application form he listed Buddhist as his religion because agnostic wasn’t one of the choices. He keeps saying, “I’m not the story,” in the hope that the impact of the revelations he’s providing will distract the media from putting a face, his face, on the news.

He must have known that that wouldn’t happen. For all his calm, Snowden pursues the meticulous safeguards of a hunted man in a John le Carré spy thriller. He devises elaborate codes for meeting Poitras — “I’ll be playing with a Rubik’s Cube” — and when fire-drill bells ring unexpectedly in his room, he gets so jittery that Greenwald says, “You’ve been infected by the paranoia bug.” Snowden covers himself with a sheet while typing a certain password on his laptop; he calls it “my mantle of power,” alluding to the World of Warcraft video games. He also alerts Poitras to the enormous reach, or perhaps simply the enormity, of the U.S. snoop system, telling her, “Your adversary is capable of 1 trillion queries per second.” It’s fruitless to try outracing the NSA megacomputers; the only option may be exposing what’s inside them.

Poitras’ movie works even better as a horror picture — perfect for Halloween week. (Even the title suggests a scare-film franchise: After Insidious 2 and Saw 3 comes Citizenfour.) The heroine of the new movie Ouija, who communicates with the dead through a Hasbro toy, can’t compete with Snowden. His Ouija board is his computer; it helps him access what he sees as the U.S.’s darkest real-life secrets. His hotel room is well lighted, but for eight days he’s trapped in it, like Cary Elwes in the Saw basement, with people he has to hope are on his side. The camera glare gives a ghostly pallor to the young man, who had spent his last few months in sunny Hawaii. He could be a specter reaching out from the other side to warn the living. When he picks up his hotel phone and tells the operator, “There’s no Edward Snowden here,” you almost believe him.

Now for the obligatory George Packer paragraphs. The New Yorker staff writer, in his Oct. 20 story based on his visit with Poitras as she completed the editing of her film in Berlin, criticized her for not taking a more skeptical view of her subject. Packer quoted Binney, a vocal supporter of Snowden and a prominent supporting voice in Citizenfour, as saying in USA Today that when Snowden went beyond leaking information about the NSA’s spying in the U.S. to revealing the agency’s spy strategies against China, he was “transitioning from whistle-blower to traitor.” Packer wrote, “This is a distinction that Poitras might have induced Binney to pursue.”

A Binney follow-up on this allegation would have been welcome, since elsewhere in the interview he lavishly praised Snowden’s efforts. But Packer can’t deny Poitras’ openness to potentially hostile journalists — i.e., him. Last year he wrote a piece for Prospectus called “The Errors of Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald” (and got his own assertions picked apart by Henry Farrell in “George Packer and His Problems”). Yet Poitras agreed to talk to Packer, who apparently never raised the question about Binney. That is a question he might have induced her to answer.

To state the obvious: Poitras didn’t intend her movie as a balancing act of pro- and anti-Snowden opinions — if any film or TV documentary has ever taken the impartial Olympian overview that Packer demands. Citizenfour is, at heart, a portrait of a man at the moment he chooses to change Americans’ understanding of what their government knows about them. And it ends with the hint of another lone wolf ready to spill more essential dirt. Greenwald doesn’t speak to Snowden of the new whistle-blower; he writes some information on papers he then tears into pieces. On one of the scraps we glimpse the word POTUS: President of the United States. Snowden sees this and whispers, “Holy shit.”

Stay tuned for Citizenfive.

You'll shiver through this old-fashioned thriller that may be (faint praise) the best movie ever based on a popular board game

“Hi friend.” The message spelled out on the letters of a Ouija board sends a chill of hope through five teenagers seated at the dining room table. They have sought some sign from their late friend, who recently hanged herself in this very house. It must be Debbie! But over the next few days, the same phrase materializes menacingly as a computer message, or scrawled on a tunnel wall, or carved into a desk, or finger-painted on a misty car window. So the players return to the house and to the Ouija board. The overhead lights are suddenly doused; an empty chair at the table moves out to make room for some invisible force. “Are you Debbie?” they ask, and the planchette moves to “No.” “Who are you?” You don’t want to know. Let’s just say, Not a friend.

“It’s only a game,” says one skeptic at the table, and she’s right. The Ouija board, once and still used as a seance tool for communicating with the beyond, is marketed by Hasbro for plucky or morbid kids. Even nonbelievers can enjoy frightening themselves and others as they spell out words by moving the planchette from one letter to another. As the little girl in Emily Flake’s famed New Yorker cartoon explains, “It’s like texting, but for dead people.”

Hollywood hopes that Ouija, directed by Stiles White and written by White and Juliet Snowden, will get its message across to audiences: that it’s again O.K. to see a horror movie the week before Halloween. Last year was the first October in a decade that a film chiller — that is, a picture with Saw or Paranormal Activity in its title — did not earn at least $30 million its opening weekend. And in the first nine months of this year, no flat-out horror film came within a scare’s breadth of being a hit.

This October looks more dreadful, by which we mean rosier for the horror movie business. Annabelle, made for just $6.5 million, opened early this month to $37.1 million and in three weeks has taken in $75 million, plus another $90 million in foreign markets. Industry savants predict that Ouija will be No. 1 this weekend — a nice relaxing diversion for Americans ready to flee their TVs, having been terrified by much of the news and social media that Isis or Ebola will kill them. Ouija might simply give them a smart case of the shakes, with a seasonal afterchill.

When teenage Debbie (Shelley Hennig) hangs herself after consulting a Ouija board, her lifelong b.f. Laine (Olivia Cooke, who played the possessed girl in this April’s The Quiet Ones) thinks she can use the board to connect with the dead girl. Debbie’s family has conveniently vacated the premises, leaving Laine to keep an eye on things, from this world and the next. The “Hi friend” message seems to have been sent not by Debbie but by some other restless spirit — perhaps a child murdered by her mother in the same house. Anyway, someone, or some thing, is killing off Laine’s seance friends in generically gruesome fashion…

…and in one innovative way. Isabelle (Bianca Santos, the Angelina Jolie clone from ABC Family’s The Fosters) is in her bathroom, drawing the tub water and flossing her teeth. She turns to the mirror and is startled to see that her mouth has been sewn shut by the floss. As the tub water overflows, some power lifts her body a few feet in the air, then smashes her skull against the porcelain sink. (Moral for impressionable kids: Don’t floss.)

Like Annabelle, Ouija is an old-fashioned horror movie that dabbles in many familiar scare tactics: doors mysteriously creaking open or slamming shut, chandeliers swaying, stove burners spontaneously igniting, dolls that may have a malevolent life of their own, dark secrets lurking in a Psycho-inspired cellar. Ouija also honors the convention of characters whose IQs dip ominously as their peril increases. In a dark house, why don’t the kids think to turn on the lights, or to employ the buddy system when entering a room where evil lurks? Because they’re in a horror movie!

Laine at least has a reason for not throwing out the killer board: she’s ready to risk her life to help Debbie achieve a more restful afterlife. Ouija has a steady directorial hand, some attractive young actors who taking the silliness seriously and few admirable genre elements. It renounces the faux-found-footage ShakyCam style, instead employing a traditionally smooth visual style. It prizes suspense over shock, realizing that waiting for The Thing is harder on a moviegoer’s nerve than seeing The Thing. It’s not about a chainsaw-wielding sado-master; it’s a ghost story, a campfire tale for scaredy cats, a tale of the dead reaching out to touch the living.

And in the month of the Ebola scare, hypochondriacs needn’t worry that someone on the screen will sneeze and infect them. They can go home as healthy as when they arrived, and secure in the knowledge that Ouija, like its Hasbro source toy, is only a game.

The Divergent star gives her all to this weird, affectless story of a blooming teenager in a festering family

Do actors ever say no to indie directors? Offered a role in a small movie based on a well-known novel, do they read the script before diving into what may be an empty pool? It’s nice that established and emerging stars agree to appear in ambitious low-budget films. Such pro-bono work gives the movie a higher profile and the actors a potentially more distinguished résumé. But what proved a brilliant career choice for, say, Matthew McConaughey — whose switch from major-studio romcoms to risky indies like Killer Joe, The Paperboy and Mud paid off with a Best Actor Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club — doesn’t necessarily benefit every mainstream name.

This week’s object lesson: Shailene Woodley in Gregg Araki’s White Bird in a Blizzard.

Following the lead of YA-movie star Kristen Stewart, who took a break during her Twilight films to play it serious, and often naked, in an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Woodley lends her Divergent luster to an ’80s-set melodrama about growing up sexy. And yes, to the teen boys wondering, she has a few nude scenes and no regrets. “I felt great doing it,” she told E! Online. “I was not fully robed. And our bodies had no makeup. Who needs makeup? I’m only 22. My boobs are great. They don’t need any help.” Now that’s how to sell a movie.

Beyond the prurient, there’s not much of interest in this dour portrait of middle-class family values. In her midteens, Woodley’s Kat Connor is coming of age physically and sexually. This inevitable course of nature upsets her mother Eve (Eva Green), who feels her youthful allure evaporating as her daughter’s blooms. Trapped in a loveless marriage, Eve reads a sex manual in her bedroom while, downstairs, hubby Brock (Christopher Meloni) masturbates to a Hustler pictorial. That Kat is getting her jollies with Phil (Shiloh Fernandez), the prole stud next door, so infuriates Eve that she reveals herself to him in a sheer peignoir. Then she vanishes, leaving no trace for the town’s hunky Detective Theo Scieziesciez (Thomas Jane) to track down. Eve’s a gone girl. Where’d she go?

Once Eve loved her daughter; she called the eight-year-old Kat her “purr-fect kitty.” But now, with the girl providing unfair competition, and after cooking two decades of dinners for a man she hates, Eve is spiraling into Serial Mom derangement. “I want my f—in’ life back!” she screams just before she goes missing. Brock mopes around trying to tamp the volcano of anger at his wife’s contempt.

And Kat, trying to become her own person, can’t shake her parents’ influence even in her most intimate moments. Her beau Phil is “dull, stupid,” she says — “like my dad.” And when Phil deflowers her, Kat’s voice-over declares: “And like that, in a blink, my virginity disappeared. Just like my mother.” The movie, which hopscotches in time from Kat’s early youth to her post-mom college days at U.C. Berkeley, could be a modern gloss on The Graduate: the hot girl from suburban L.A. (also enrolled at Berkeley), her horny mother and the young man who accepts favors from both women. Go back further, and Blizzard has enough crazy-family material for a Greek tragedy, if Greek tragedies weren’t very good.

Two decades ago, Araki made a bunch of gay or bisexual movies — The Living End, Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation — that brought a perversely larkish lilt to the toxic stain of the AIDS generation. His Mysterious Skin, in 2004, managed to merge gay hustling with an alien-abduction plot. Blizzard, which Araki adapted from a novel by Laura Kasischke, lacks any major gay characters (until the end); so it must serve as a lavender look at the straight suburban world. And God, the view is so awful it’s almost amusing — at least for Araki.

Like Far from Heaven, Todd Haynes’ queer deconstruction of straight Hollywood melodramas from the ’50s, Blizzard lets art direction amplify (and sometimes substitute for) characterization. The Connor home is a living museum of ’80s kitsch, with the costumes coordinated to blend with the furnishings; the clothes really do match the drapes. The noirish lighting of the interiors contrasts with the whiteness of Kat’s nightmares of her mother buried alive in snow. And to show the psychological distance between characters, Araki plants actors at opposite ends of the wide screen. When Kat visits the detective in his man cave, they sit far apart on a curved couch long enough to be King Kong’s boomerang. Then they get this close for the sex scene.

Musing on her therapy visits to a sympathetic shrink (Angela Bassett, with nothing to do), Kat says, “I feel like an actress playing myself — a bad actress.” Woodley is quite a good actress, as she revealed in The Spectacular Now, The Fault in Our Stars and Divergent. Here too, she displays her gift for making wounded emotion visible: her face can sear as if sunburnt. But she’s better at playing the ordinary girl with heroic resolve than a teen so stunning she drives her aging mom bonkers.

The miscasting is especially severe with the 34-year-old Green in the role of Kat’s 42-year-old mother. Green, the siren of this year’s 300: Rise of an Empire and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, regularly seduces viewers with her sexual fury, but she can’t persuade them that she’s a frump suffering from daughter envy.

For Woodley, White Bird in a Blizzard might prove a fun vacation from her Divergent series. But Green, offered an ill-fitting role in Araki’s affectless, ineffectual drama, should have said No thanks.

Seventy-five years ago, 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' premiered in D.C. — and not everyone in the audience was happy about it

In 1939, Frank Capra had just won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director with his film of the Broadway hit You Can’t Take It with You. His 1936 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town had also roused audiences with its story of Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper), a naive bumpkin who inherits a fortune and is beset by big-city predators, including the tabloid press.

Capra had some capital to spend, and he spent it in the Nation’s Capital. His new film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, would send a Deeds-like naïf, James Stewart’s Jefferson Smith, to the U.S. Senate, where his dewy ideals collide with the invested power of corrupt lawmakers. When the film opened 75 years ago, on Oct. 19, 1939, the TIME reviewer noted:

This new Capra fable is as whimsical, the Capra directing as slick, the script as fast and funny as in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The acting of the brilliant cast is sometimes superb. But Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is bigger than any of these things. Its real hero is not calfy Jeff Smith, but the things he believes, as embodied in the hero of U. S. democracy’s first crisis, Abraham Lincoln.

A U.S. Senator dies, and the state’s governor names Smith, editor of a Boy Scout-type newspaper called Boy’s Stuff, to fill the seat. That’s fine with Boss Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold), who figures he can control Smith the way he has run, through bullying and bribes, the Governor, the local industry, the press, the state legislature and Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), the senior U.S. Senator. When Smith proposes a bill to set aside an area near Willet Creek Dam for a Boy Ranger park, Taylor instructs Paine to denounce Smith as “a contemptible young man with a contemptible scheme,” falsely charging him with secretly owning the land the park is to be built on. Scorned by the entire Senate, but encouraged by his wily Chief of Staff Clarissa Saunders (Jean Arthur), Smith launches an all-night filibuster to prove his innocence and righteousness.

Arthur, who had starred in Mr. Deeds and You Can’t Take It with You, was top-billed, but Stewart carries the film in his first career-defining role. With a plangent voice always breaking as if he’s on the cusp of puberty, Stewart’s Smith proves how a young man’s ideals can trump his own ignorance and the infernal forces aligned against him. Seven years later, Stewart would play an older, more desperate Smith type as George Bailey in Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, one of the all-TIME 100 Movies.

In the freewheeling, fire-breathing script by Sidney Buchman, Smith is an overgrown boy searching for a father figure; his own dad was “a struggling editor” whose efforts against men like Taylor led to his death — “slumped over his desk… shot in the back.” (If a politician thinks you’re in his way, he may kill you.) He thinks Paine might be a shining replacement, until he learns of the man’s craven fealty to Taylor. Paine’s rationalization — “I compromised, yes, so that all these years I could stay in that Senate, and serve the people in a thousand honest ways” — sounds like the forlorn words a weaselly Congressman shouts to himself in the bathroom mirror. Halfway through the film Smith realizes that his one and only father figure is the seated figure in the Lincoln Memorial.

Having castigated American governance as a do-nothing cabal of corruption (sound familiar?), Capra then had an even bolder idea: He would premiere Mr. Smith in a special showing hosted by the National Press Club in the capital, with members of the Cabinet and both Houses of Congress present. As TIME reported the following week:

When the picture was over, the audience applauded loudly. [But] Three Senators (who declined to be quoted) upheld Senatorial dignity with these pungent comments on the film: “Not all Senators are sons of bitches.” “Punk!” “It stinks!”

That translates as “How dare he!” — which had to be music to the nervy little Sicilian director. Like Jefferson Smith, Frank Capra had walked into the U.S. Senate, given it a stern civics lesson, endured the catcalls of its denizens and emerged triumphant. Mr. Smith would be nominated for 11 Oscars — winning only for Best Story (Lewis R. Foster) in the sweep year of Gone With the Wind — and became a popular, enduring hit. But Capra’s most savory memory had to be displaying the Senate’s venery to itself. What filmmaker today would have such big steels balls?

Read TIME’s full Oct. 1939 report on the D.C. premiere of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, here in the archives: Mr. Smith Riles Washington