Martha Marcy May Marlene

Martha Marcy May Marlene: Elizabeth Olsen (the younger sister of those tabloid twins) launches her film career with a star-making tour de force as a Martha, a woman recovering from a sexual-religious cult. Winning best director at Sundance for this, his first feature, Sean Dirkin navigates potentially lurid terrain with a poetic eye, shuttling between flashbacks to the cult’s hellish paradise and scenarios of naked disinhibition as Martha disrupts family values at her sister’s cottage. John Hawkes (A Winter’s Bone) is profoundly creepy in the role of the cult leader.