Love, like or loathe 2017’s It, at least the Stephen King adaptation felt different than the 1990 TV miniseries. The same cannot be said for the Pet Sematary remake, so close to being a beat-for-beat Xerox of the 1989 original that audiences are left wanting a good shake of the toner cartridge. Too bad, because as fondly remembered as that King-penned ’89 film is, room for improvement exists; one flip of the gender doesn’t count.
Casting, however, is a coup. Jason Clarke (Winchester) and Amy Seimetz (Alien: Covenant) make for a personable, believable couple as Dr. Louis and Rachel Creed. Soon after moving to rural Maine with their two kids and a cat named Church, they learn their wooded land leads to a cemetery for childrens’ pets, many of whom become residents after being pancaked on the highway. Just past its gravestones — over that unscalable wall of bramble — lies ancient burial ground imbued with supernatural powers of rejuvenation. Those powers are flawed, which becomes apparent when Louis — presumably inattentive the day in school they read “The Monkey’s Paw” — plants the freshly departed Church there … and Church returns to life as an insufferable, feral asshole in matted fur. When tragedy strikes further, lessons are not learned.
John Lithgow (Obsession) would seem born to inherit and inhabit the role of kindly neighbor Jud Crandall, the kindly neighbor who warns Louis about all of the above, yet aides and abets anyway. Although one of our finest and most versatile actors, Lithgow is not nearly as effective as Fred Gwynne was three decades prior. Perhaps the comparison is unfair, but Lithgow apes Gwynne’s distinctive drawl; before delivering the iconic line of “Sometimes, dead is better,” he dramatically pauses as co-directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer (Holidays) push their camera in, as if signaling to a nostalgic audience, “Get those clappin’ paws ready!”
For all the craft and care Team Kölsch/Widmyer has put into giving the new Pet Sematary a shiny coat, it should be more engaging — even mildly frightening (especially since co-scripter Matt Greenberg wrote one of the scariest King adaptations in 1408). The first film’s surefire scare, Rachel’s physically twisted sister, suffers here from sheer overuse and needless extension. This isn’t a bad movie — just unnecessary. Sometimes, less is better. —Rod Lott
Three years after Norway showed Hollywood what a contemporary disaster movie can and should be with 
They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Make that other man a woman — specifically, Down Under filmmaker Sari Braithwaite — and the treasure is [Censored], a documentary constructed solely of film footage once banned by the Australian Censorship Board and now culled from the Australian National Archives. Over the course of 63 minutes, excitement over her find not only fades, but flips, as she narrates each step of a crisis of conscience. 
She more than makes do. The displaced frames find a home as she initially sets out to examine and decry her homeland’s history of censorship, grouping the cuts thematically and presenting them with a modicum of context. We get a montage of screen kisses — chaste to erotic, consensual to forced, hetero- to homosexual — and think little of it. Young men then brandish knives, and their serrated machismo strikes the viewer of silly, if nothing else.