Available for home viewing: Thank You for Your Service ★★★

Over the years, war films have come into and gone out of vogue. At one point, they were mostly about heroism and valor on the battlefield but that changed with 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler’s story about how winning the war across the sea didn’t mean winning the peace upon returning home. PTSD happened long before it entered the vernacular but, over the decades since The Best Years of Our Lives, it has become an increasingly important aspect of films that examine life after combat. Thank You for Your Service is the latest movie to explore this sometimes-forgotten element of a soldier’s experience. The conflict here is the same one that gave birth to American Sniper (which was written by Jason Hall, who wrote and directed this film) but, as with The Deer Hunter, it explores hidden wounds to the psyche while offering a none-too-subtle indictment of the government (not for taking men into battle but for abandoning them to a morass of red tape and poor service once their fighting is done). It’s almost as if these men, like the equipment they use, can be discarded once they are no longer productive.

Hall, making his directorial debut, has adapted Thank You for Your Service from the nonfiction book by David Finkel. The real-life underpinning of the film is undoubtedly one reason for its believability and verisimilitude. Only toward the end do we feel the influence of Hollywood creeping into the production with its need for moments of high drama and closure. For the most part, however, this is a well-formed tale of pain and tragedy about men who give up everything and get little in return. While they’re overseas, "going home" is the dream. When it happens, it can become a nightmare. They may have medals but their mind’s eye sees not the moments of heroism but images of horror and failure.

Such is the case for Sergeant Adam Schumann (Miles Teller), Tausolo Aieti (Beulah Koale), and Will Waller (Joe Cole), three compatriots who have arrived stateside on the same flight. When we first meet them, they appear "normal", or at least as normal as can be expected for men to have spent so much time in Iraq, dodging IEDs and exchanging fire with insurgents. It soon becomes clear that "normal" is a ruse — a brave mask they have worn to fool others and perhaps themselves. Solo has holes in his memory and is afflicted with bursts of uncontrollable rage. Adam is sunk into a deep depression where everything seems hopeless. And Will, after learning of his girlfriend’s abandonment, takes his own life in a stark, shocking scene that happens before the movie is 15 minutes old.

It would be nice to say Thank You for Your Service offers the experience of outliers but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The VA, overwhelmed by so many requests, has a months-long backlog. The scenes in which Solo and Adam navigate the bureaucracy play almost like black comedy, perhaps something out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, except that there’s nothing funny about the treatment being accorded to these men.

Ultimately, the film’s tone is hopeful. That at least saves Thank You for Your Service from being a complete downer. This is about men who, after only a short period of denial, recognize their peril and seek to get help. Adam is supported by his loving wife, Saskia (Haley Bennett), who, despite not knowing what her husband needs, recognizes that he needs something. After painting a bleak picture, Hall provides us with the proverbial "light at the end of the tunnel" — something not all PTSD films have done.

Teller gives a mature interpretation of a conflicted man who can seem calm and at ease at one moment and near to the breaking point the next. The cynic would suggest that this is a foray into Oscar nomination territory but, although I thought he was very good as Adam, I found him to be more compelling a few years ago in Whiplash, although a similar intensity is evident in both performances. Koale’s portrayal of an unstable former soldier echoes that of Tobey Maguire in Brothers. Amy Schumer, as the wife of a soldier killed in Iraq, is excellent in a 100 percent straight role.

There are times when the characters feel more real than their circumstances, which are dictated by a mix of true-to-life incidents and the contortions necessary to groom the story into a workable motion picture narrative. Some PTSD movies (like First Blood) include a share of "rah rah" moments to satisfy certain elements of the audience. There’s none of that here. Thank You for Your Service is straightforward drama and leaves an uneasy impression about how much more the recipients of that platitude are owed than what the government is giving them.

Available for home viewing: I, Daniel Blake ★★½

I, Daniel Blake is an extremely Ken Loach-y Ken Loach film, for better and for worse.

The surprise winner of the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival follows a middle-aged, blue-collar carpenter struggling to navigate the bureaucracy of the British benefits system after an injury leaves him unable to work. Aside from some glimmers of humor early on, it is relentlessly bleak and not terribly subtle as it attempts to create an abiding feeling of realism. But Loach’s film also features some stirring performances and a strong sense of place in its depiction of working-class Newcastle.

Stand-up comedian Dave Johns, starring in his first feature film as the title character, has an everyman directness that makes him instantly relatable before we even see him. We hear him first, over the opening titles, answering ridiculous, circular questions from a government health-care agent that don’t get to what’s really ailing him: his heart. With his thick, musical accent, Daniel can’t help but respond with humor and incredulity in the face of such cluelessness. Who hasn’t felt the same frustration, whether it’s with the bank, a utility company or our own health insurance provider?

But this truly is just the beginning for Daniel, who runs into an even more maddening battle when he physically goes to the benefits office with the hope that an actual human being might help him. Here’s where the veteran director and his collaborator of many years, screenwriter Paul Laverty, undermine their very worthwhile point, though. Except for one unusually kindhearted woman, they depict all the employees there as monsters, from security guards to case analysts to managers. It’s a pretty black-and-white situation without a whole lot of room for shading.

While he’s there, however, Daniel meets a young woman who’s in an even direr financial situation than he is: Katie (Hayley Squires), a single mother who recently moved to town with her daughter and son because they couldn’t afford to live in London anymore. Katie dreams of returning to college and getting a degree, but in the meantime she goes door-to-door seeking house cleaning work and forgoing dinner so her kids can eat. For the most part, Loach depicts her plight in matter-of-fact fashion but with obvious appreciation for this character’s sacrifices. Her welfare claim rejected, Katie goes with great shame to a food bank to feed her kids in the film’s most quietly powerful scene. Subsequent acts of desperation, however, become increasingly melodramatic and maudlin.

But the friendship that develops between Daniel and Katie is rooted in believably mutual sympathy, compassion and respect. Daniel, a widower with no children of his own, comes to function as a father figure to the kids and a much-needed handyman in the family’s dilapidated apartment. In return, the gregarious but obviously lonely Daniel gets to enjoy their company, including a pleasingly platonic relationship with Katie. The sweetness and simplicity of their arrangement is the film’s chief bright spot in an otherwise complicated world.

Returning to filmmaking after saying he was retiring in 2014, the 80-year-old Loach rails against the system with his trademark style of stripped-down social realism. Despite the film’s deliberate pace, quiet tone and intimate camerawork, his rage is unmistakable. His drive to tell the stories of ordinary citizens is clearly as strong today as it’s ever been, and he isn’t interested in letting anybody off the hook with a happy ending.

Escapist cinema, it is not. But with I, Daniel Blake, Loach is using the medium for one of its most crucial purposes: to shine a light on injustices he sees all around him, as well as on our capacity for human decency.

Al Pacino as Joe Paterno

Final Oscar nomination predictions

(Listed in order of probability)

PICTURE
1. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
2. Lady Bird
3. Get Out
4. The Post
5. Dunkirk
6. The Shape of Water
7. Call Be By Your Name
8. The Florida Project
9. The Big Sick
10. Darkest Hour
11. I, Tonya
12. Mudbound

DIRECTOR
1. Guillermo Del Toro; The Shape of Water
2. Christopher Nolan; Dunkirk
3. Greta Gerwig; Lady Bird
4. Jordan Peele; Get Out
5. Martin McDonagh; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
6. Stephen Spielberg; The Post

ACTRESS
1. Frances McDormand; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
2. Sally Hawkins; The Shape of Water
3. Saoirse Roan; Lady Bird
4. Meryl Streep; The Post
5. Margot Robbie; I, Tonya

ACTOR
1. Gary Oldman; Darkest Hour
2. Timothee Chalamet; Call Me By Your Name
3. Daniel Day-Lewis; Phantom Thread
4. Daniel Kaluuya; Get Out
5. James Franco; The Disaster Artist
6. Tom Hanks; The Post

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
1. Laurie Metcalf; Lady Bird
2. Allison Janney; I, Tonya
3. Holly Hunter; The Big Sick
4. Mary J. Blige; Mudbound
5. Octavia Spencer; The Shape of Water

SUPPORTING ACTOR
1. Sam Rockwell; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
2. Willem Dafoe; The Florida Project
3. Richard Jenkins; The Shape of Water
4. Armie Hammer; Call Me By Your Name
5. Michael Stuhlberg; Call Me By Your Name
6. Christopher Plummer; All the Money in the World
7. Woody Harrelson; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
1. Call Me By Your Name
2. Mudbound
3. Molly’s Game
4. The Disaster Artist
5. Wonder

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
1. Get Out
2. Lady Bird
3. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
4. The Shape of Water
5. The Big Sick
6. The Post

CINEMATOGRAPHY
1. Blade Runner 2049
2. Dunkirk
3. The Shape of Water
4. Call Me By Your Name
5. Darkest Hour
6. Mudbound

FILM EDITING
1. Dunkirk
2. The Shape of Water
3. Get Out
4. Blade Runner 2049
5. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
6. Baby Driver

PRODUCTION DESIGN
1. The Shape of Water
2. Blade Runner 2049
3. Dunkirk
4. Darkest Hour
5. Beauty and the Beast
6. Phantom Thread

SOUND EDITING
1. Dunkirk
2. Blade Runner 2049
3. Baby Driver
4. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
5. The Shape of Water
6. War for the Planet of the Apes

SOUND MIXING
1. Dunkirk
2. Blade Runner 2049
3. The Shape of Water
4. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
5. Baby Driver

VISUAL EFFECTS
1. War for the Planet of the Apes
2. Star Wars; The Last Jedi
3. Blade Runner 2049
4. Dunkirk
5. The Shape of Water

COSTUME DESIGN
1. Phantom Thread
2. Beauty and the Beast
3. The Greatest Showman
4. Darkest Hour
5. The Shape of Water

MAKEUP AND HAIR STYLING
1. Darkest Hour
2. Wonder
3. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
4. I, Tonya

SCORE
1. The Shape of Water
2. Dunkirk
3. Phantom Thread
4. The Post
5. Darkest Hour

SONG
1. Remember Me; Coco
2. This Is Me; The Greatest Showman
3. Evermore; The Beauty and the Beast
4. The Mystery of Love; Call Me By Your Name
5. Stand Up for Something; Marshall
6. Mighty River; Mudbound

ANIMATED FEATURE
1. Coco
2. The Breadwinner
3. Loving Vincent
4. The Lego Batman Movie
5. Ferdinand

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
1. Jane
2. Faces Places
3. City of Ghosts
4. Last Men in Aleppo
5. Icarus

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
1. A Fantastic Woman
2. The Square
3. Foxtrot
4. In the Fade
5. Loveless

ANIMATED SHORT
1. Dear Basketball
2. Negative Space
3. In a Heartbeat
4. Cradle
5. Lou

DOCUMENTARY SHORT
1. Heroin
2. Alone
3. Ten Meter Tower
4. 116 Cameras
5. Edith + Eddie

LIVE ACTION SHORT
1. The Silent Child
2. Watu Wote/All of Us
3. DeKalb Elementary
4. My Nephew Emmett
5. Rise of a Star

Available for home viewing: Happy Death Day ★★

Applying the Groundhog Day premise to a horror movie is so obvious a conceit that I’m surprised it hasn’t been previously attempted. It’s a no-brainer. Unfortunately, director Christopher Landon and screenwriter Scott Lobdell have taken that phrase ("no-brainer") too literally, liberally employing frontal lobotomies so that, in true horror film fashion, the actions of various characters sometimes make little sense and come from a place of minimal intelligence. By turns frustrating and tedious, this can sink even the most intriguing story.

Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) is one of the Queen B(itch) sorority sisters. She wakes up on the morning of her birthday with a massive hangover in the bed of nerdy nice-guy Carter Davis (Israel Broussard). She’s mortified — if anyone finds out she slept with this dweeb, her reputation will be ruined. But she’s late for class and an extra-curricular assignation with a professor (Charles Aitken). By evening, she has been able to piss off a wide variety of people and ignore repeated calls from her father. Then, on her way to a party, she wanders into a dark area off campus and is murdered by someone wearing a creepy chubby baby mask. But, instead of ascending into the clouds or descending elsewhere, she wakes up again in Carter’s room on the morning of her birthday. Lather, rinse, repeat. If you’ve seen Groundhog Day, you know where this is going. The filmmakers openly reference it. ("Hey, this sounds like Groundhog Day. You know, the movie with Bill Murray. What do you mean, you don’t know who Bill Murray is…")

The film’s first half-hour is entertaining. It consists of the set-up and the first repeat. We get to see how things play out mostly the same but with slight variations while Tree struggles with what she thinks is a massive case of déjà vu. After that, however, the contrivances mount and Tree’s actions become increasingly inexplicable. After a few deaths, she concludes that the way to stop the repetition is to avoid being murdered. So does she take all the obvious steps, like staying with a group of friends or carrying a big knife or any number of other things that would reduce the possibility of her being filleted like a fish? Or, as a last resort, does she try to rip off the mask so she’ll know her assailant next time around? No and no. Instead, she does things like strip naked and strut across campus or spy on possible suspects to eliminate them from her list. The deaths become repetitious so Landon opts for a montage and, during the montage, he turns up the comedic aspect.

There is a minor twist to the Groundhog Day scenario. In the 1993 classic, Murray’s character lived his single day thousands of times. Here, the number of iterations is in the low double digits and can’t rise asymptotically toward infinity because every time Tree dies, she becomes weaker. She postulates she’s like a cat with nine lives.

This isn’t traditional horror. There are few jump-scares and the murders are neither graphic (the rating is PG-13) nor frightening. As I said, some are played for laughs. The killer’s mask falls considerably short of Pennywise the clown’s costume in terms of its ability to raise the viewer’s hackles. The movie might be more appropriately described as a thriller or a dark fantasy than a horror movie. The Blumhouse seal of approval, however, places it firmly in the genre where it’s most likely to attract viewers.

Happy Death Day is about 90 minutes long and, past the first half-hour, every minute is dumber than the one before it. By the end, things have become so preposterous that it’s difficult to care about any of the (stupid) characters or how they get out of their situation. The movie’s attempts to develop a dramatic backstory for Tree and start a romance between her and Carter aren’t effective because we don’t respect her character. Her every action is artificial, the result of sloppy screenwriting.

Before I Fall, a movie that came out earlier this year, also underutilizes the Groundhog Day premise but, compared to Happy Death Day, Before I Fall offers a brilliant re-interpretation. However, because Happy Death Day rewards lazy, inattentive viewing, it will probably do quite well with young audiences who prefer not to be challenged by unconventional narrative developments or plots that require introspection and analysis. This is yet another example of why chilling, thoughtful horror is an endangered species.

Available for home viewing: Marshall ★★★

The filmmakers behind Marshall understand what it takes to make a successful bio-pic. Instead of using a "greatest hits" strategy that attempts to cram an entire life into two hours, they have targeted a single representative event from the life of 20th century icon Thurgood Marshall. By limiting the film’s time frame, the narrative is allowed to breathe and, as a result, we get a distinct snapshot not only of the main character but of the setting that resulted in his becoming historically important.

The focus of Marshall is the 1941 trial of The State of Connecticut v. Joseph Spell. At the time, Marshall (Chadwick Boseman), one of the NAACP’s star lawyers, is traveling around the country litigating questionable cases with black defendants. Most are in the South but the organization, needing an influx of donations from wealthy supporters in the North, sends Marshall to Connecticut in January 1941 to team with local (white Jewish) attorney Samuel Friedman (Josh Gad). The case is steeped in racial undertones. Wealthy socialite Elaeanor Strubing (Kate Hudson) claims to have been raped multiple times and thrown over the side of a bridge by her black chauffeur, Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown). The case sets off a mass hysteria that results in white folk firing black servants. After speaking with Spell, Marshall is convinced of his innocence.

The resulting trial Is a media sensation. Prevented by Judge Foster (James Cromwell) from speaking in court because he’s not a member of the Connecticut bar (he is only allowed to "silently" advise Friedman), Marshall uses written notes and facial expressions to act as Friedman’s marionette. He also lets his voice be heard in the papers, giving daily speeches on the courtroom steps. The prosecutor, avowed bigot Loren Willis (Dan Stevens), is friendly with the judge and the jury looks as unfavorable as one can envision for a black man in 1941. But Marshall’s investigative tenacity and Friedman’s growing comfort with criminal litigation shine the light on a truth that’s tragic from many angles.

The State of Connecticut v. Joseph Spell was not one of Marshall’s most famous cases but it provides the filmmakers an opportunity to illustrate the characteristics that made him a respected lawyer and civil rights figure. Unbowed in the face of discrimination, he fights back rather than knuckling under. He is fierce and willing to go toe-to-toe with any foe. The family sacrifices he makes are shown, albeit briefly — his wife suffers a miscarriage and, rather than being at her side, he has to remain at the trial. At the time when Marshall is set, the title character is still a quarter-century away from being named as the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, but the seeds of what would lead Lyndon Johnson to nominate him are in evidence.

The movie does a little "myth busting" as well. It’s widely accepted that the South was highly racist during the 1940s. It was, after all, the era of Jim Crow. (Brown v. Board of Education, one of the cases instrumental in dismantling Jim Crow laws, was argued by Marshall in front of the Supreme Court in 1953.) However, racism was still alive and deeply-rooted in the more "progressive" North. For all of its intolerance and segregationist mindset, Greenwich might as well have been deep in Dixie as in New England.

Marshall takes liberties with the historical record but the basic facts are accurate. The movie unfolds more as a courtroom drama than a traditional bio-pic and one can make an argument that it’s as much about co-counsel Friedman as it is about Marshall. In fact, Friedman is the one with the discernable character arc, evolving from small-town insurance lawyer to nationally-known civil rights attorney. Marshall, already a famous and accomplished man at the outset, is little changed at the end.

This is Boseman’s third high profile bio-pic in five years (he also played Jackie Robinson in 42 and James Brown in Get on Up), an indication of how in-demand he is. In addition to playing real people, he is Black Panther, the first black superhero of the MCU. His portrayal of Marshall isn’t likely to earn Boseman an Oscar nomination but the performance illustrates his versatility and force of personality (think Paul Newman during his prime). Gad, known better for semi-comedic roles, acquits himself admirably in a purely dramatic part. He and Boseman evince sufficiently strong chemistry for a mismatched buddy film element to emerge. The supporting cast also includes Dan Stevens (who, like Gad, is an alumnus of the live-action Beauty and the Beast).

The Thurgood Marshall I remember was an old man in black robes. When he resigned from the Supreme Court in 1991 due to failing health, the outpouring of respect and admiration was overwhelming. Dead for a quarter-century, Marshall has become a name in history books; this movie — fiery, well-constructed, and compelling with all the twists and turns viewers like in a courtroom drama — lifts the man off the text book page and imbues him with a movie hero presence. It’s engaging and inspirational but, in terms of what it reminds us of, it’s also important.

Available for home viewing: Rebel in the Rye ★★½

Rebel in the Rye, which tells the story of author J.D. Salinger, falls into the pernicious trap that ensnares many a bio-pic: trying to present too broad a chronology in too limited a time. Utilizing an unwieldy structure that involves a flashback, writer/director Danny Strong attempts to cram about 16 years of Salinger’s life into 105 minutes. As a result, there’s a sense that important events are glossed over, relationships are truncated, and the central character becomes lost in the rapid progression of the narrative. In fact, the movie is so insistent on grinding forward that we never get a strong feeling for Salinger the person. He will remain as much an enigma to viewers of this movie as to those who don’t see Rebel in the Rye. The film offers little more depth about the writer than his Wikipedia article and considerably less than one would get from reading the semi-autobiographical The Catcher in the Rye.

The story picks up in 1939 when Jerry Salinger (Nicholas Hoult) enrolls in the creative writing course of Professor Whit Burnett (Kevin Spacey), the editor of Story magazine. Whit becomes Jerry’s mentor and pushes him to become a real writer. Everyone, except perhaps his father (Victor Garber), recognizes his talent but Whit helps Jerry harness it. At the same time, Jerry flirts with Oona O’Neill (Zoey Deutch), the debutante daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill. Jerry and Oona’s relationship is chaotic and filled with emotional ups-and-downs so when she leaves for Hollywood to pursue stardom, it seems likely they’ll never see one another again. Soon after, Jerry sees a newspaper headline announcing her marriage to Charlie Chaplin.

One thing Rebel in the Rye accomplishes with some degree of proficiency is depicting the craft involved in Jerry’s writing. Representing an author’s mindset is difficult for a visual medium like cinema to achieve, since writing is an internal process, but Strong captures some of this. Jerry speaks of his most famous character, Holden Caulfield, becoming his "companion" during his time spent in Europe for World War 2 and how, once he returns home, it’s difficult for him to continue writing The Catcher in the Rye because thinking about Holden reminds him of the atrocities he experienced. This is by far the most compelling aspect of the film; it’s the only time we get something from Rebel in the Rye that doesn’t seem extracted from a Cliff Notes biography.

The post-war era is rushed through and attempts to tie up Jerry’s relationship with Whit are fundamentally unsatisfying. Not long after The Catcher in the Rye’s publication, Jerry becomes a recluse but the film is unable to effectively dramatize this phase of his life, instead offering a simplistic explanation for the cause: a combination of his growing fascination with Zen Buddhism and his need to escape distractions.

The performances are fine. Hoult brings more than a little of Holden Caulfield to his portrayal of Jerry. Irrespective of the age difference between the fictional character and his creator, the actor understands how much of the latter was in the former. The most "human" character is Whit Burnett; Spacey plays him with a mixture of rapier-sharp sarcasm (early in their relationship) and parental nurturing (later). Hoult and Spacey work so well together that the movie is inevitably better when they’re both on-screen — something that happens far too infrequently.

To date, there has never been a movie adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye because Salinger refused to sell the rights. It’s possible that those who control his estate may reverse this in the future. Until then, however, this is the closest we’re likely to get to seeing Holden on-screen. Unfortunately, in its quest to tell the whole story of J.D. Salinger, Rebel in the Rye speeds along too fast for us to enjoy the little things that would have made an oblique biography more satisfying. This chronology hits all the high points but leaves us longing to explore all the untouched valleys in between.

Available for home viewing: Transformers The Last Knight ½★

Transformers: The Last Knight opens and closes with chaos. The first scene features bodies flying everywhere as flames pierce the sky in Michael Bay’s reimagining of the Knights of the Round Table, in which Merlin’s magic is a gift from the alien robots so many know and love. The last scenes, and this is no spoiler if you’ve ever seen a Michael Bay movie, feature bodies flying everywhere as metal and flames pierce the sky. In between, there’s a bit of mythology, some running and screaming, a ton of slo-mo, a dash of racism, a great actor wasted in a character who could have been named "Exposition Dump," and so much incoherent noise that you’ll want to bang your head on your coffee table just to get some rest.

After two sequels that took the fun spirit of the Transformers and turned them into something with the artistic depth of a Monster Energy Drink, Bay appeared to reboot the franchise with the relatively solid Transformers: Age of Extinction. He found one of our most charismatic leading men in Mark Wahlberg, gave him an awesomely perfect name like Cade Yeager, filled out a better-than-average supporting cast, and provided major set pieces across the world, including leveling a bit more destruction at Chicago. AoE suffered from Bay Bloat (165 minutes!) and some of the other technical problems of the previous sequels, but it offered hope.

Hope dies during Transformers: The Last Knight. From the very beginning, this is an incoherent mess. Cade’s daughter and her boyfriend — both memorable characters from the last film — are gone, the daughter written off with a couple of horrendously manipulative beats about her being at college and Yeager being on the run. He can save the world but he can’t see his daughter. Whatever, fine, but also gone are Stanley Tucci (other than a brief cameo as Merlin in the opening scenes) and Kelsey Grammer. The villains of the first film are replaced here by a purely CGI enemy named Quintessa (Gemma Chan), an interstellar being who wants to use the home planet of the Transformers to destroy Earth by basically crashing them into one another. She’s such a cartoonish, poorly designed villain that she never feels like a real threat.

I’m getting ahead of myself. The Last Knight picks up relatively where the last film left off. Optimus Prime is headed back to his home planet to tell the universe to leave Earth alone. Yeager is now in hiding, as being a massive alien robot is still against international law, and he's still aligned with the remaining Autobots. He’s "in hiding" in the biggest auto field in the Midwest, but those kind of logical leaps are easy to let slide in a blockbuster when it’s working. He has a new assistant (Jerrod Carmichael), is working on repairing Bumblebee, and gets a spunky preteen sidekick who feels like the character sitcoms used to add late in their run when everyone knew the original kids got too old (think Sam on Diff'rent Strokes). And then pretty much all of the set-up — including any sort of immigration analogy about the fear of foreigners represented by the hunted Transformers — is thrown out. There’s a point in the script when you can literally tell when it was handed to a different writing crew. It starts as one movie and then, bizarrely, takes a hard-right turn to England and becomes something else entirely.

You see, Yeager found a talisman on a dying transformer, and that relic ties him to the long and storied history of the aliens. As these films have grown in budget, Bay has piled on more and more mythology, and I think the reason this is billed as the final chapter is because there’s literally nowhere else to go. Through remarkably expository scenes courtesy of Sir Anthony Hopkins and John Turturro, we learn that people have known about the Transformers for centuries and that notable geniuses like Mozart and FDR helped keep their existence a secret. In return, the robots gave the human race gifts, including the Transformer watch that killed Hitler. No, I’m not making that up.

Weaving the mythology of these killer cars into world history isn’t a bad idea, and reflects the tongue-in-cheek pleasure these movies could have been (I’d watch the heck out of Bumblebee vs. The Third Reich) but it’s all so thinly and poorly handled here. Before you can truly enjoy it, we’re back with the revelation that Cade now has a connection with the Transformers (because of the talisman and because of some other nonsense I couldn’t begin to explain) and his new gorgeous friend Vivian (Laura Haddock) is the only one who can wield Merlin’s staff, a necessary skill to save the Earth.

You’re saying, "How could a movie that weaves together metal dragons, Merlin’s staff, Sir Anthony Hopkins and world-killing aliens be all that bad?" Because it’s just not fun. More than any film Bay has made, The Last Knight is incoherent to the point of parody. Action scenes are poorly choreographed, dialogue is weaker than ever, and plot twists make no sense. At one point, the leads are on a submarine and I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why. Not only is it transparent that no one involved bothered with the plot — Wahlberg has never given such a lazy performance as he does here — but the editing and effects are stunningly shoddy. There’s no geography to any of the scenes, so you can’t tell what the heck is happening. At least the last film had a few action set pieces that worked and the third film had the destruction of Chicago to wow viewers. This film does not have a single memorable action sequence in it. And it starts at such a ridiculous pitch that it has nowhere to go — Yeager is reintroduced shooting a robot in slow motion. Bay has always been willing to forego things like rising action or building tension to try and blast viewers to their seats from first frame to last. But it gets so exhausting to watch another movie that starts at 11 and then never varies the volume.

Here’s where the chorus of Critic-Proof Franchises kicks in. Michael Bay made this for fans of the franchise and not the notoriously-hard-on-it critics. Diehards will ignore that I liked the first film and parts of the third and fourth films (the second is still a cinematic abomination). I get it. We love to forgive the failures of franchises we adore. Even critics do that. But even fans of this series have to take a hard look at the outright, shocking laziness of this movie — one that does the bare minimum to lure home viewers. Even in bad action movies, there’s often a glimpse of artistic potential gone awry or attempts to entertain that just didn’t work. I began to actively try to find that here, to find a way to see how this went off the rails. I came to the conclusion that no one cared. There’s just so little effort to make sense or make it interesting, even for the fans. It was a contractual obligation and a paycheck. They could have called it Transformers: Someone Needs a New Beach House.

Available for home viewing: Good Time ★½

Nick and Connie Nikas are brothers, like Josh and Benny Safdie, the directors of Good Time. Nick — played by Benny Safdie — is mentally disabled, while Connie (Robert Pattinson) might charitably be described as an idiot. Motivated by a volatile mix of desperation and bravado, he involves Nick in a poorly planned, haphazardly executed bank robbery. You can bet money on a disastrous outcome, though you might not foresee the precise sequence of mayhem and farce that unfolds on the streets of Queens over a single freezing night. The caper includes an after-hours visit to an amusement park, a soda bottle full of LSD, a case of mistaken identity and plenty of chases, beatings and narrow escapes.

The Safdies are as clever and crafty as Connie is inept and impulsive. Good Time, their third co-directed fictional feature — after the autobiographical Daddy Longlegs and the addiction romance Heaven Knows What — moves smartly and propulsively to the stressed-out strains of daniel Lopatin’s edge-of-a-heart-attack score. The smudgy, grimy urban landscape — emergency rooms, fast-food restaurants, blocks of modest, over-mortgaged, squeezed-together houses — is shot (by Sean Price Williams) with a fastidious avoidance of prettiness. The story doesn’t twist and turn so much as squirm and jump like an eel in the bottom of a rowboat. The biggest surprises confirm what an unbelievable slimeball Connie is. He’s about as hard to root for as any movie outlaw you can think of.

And yet, partly because Pattinson’s movie-star incandescence can’t quite be obscured by facial hair and bad lighting, and partly because of the immutable laws of genre and spectacle, you sort of have no choice but to root for him. You’re stuck with him, and you might as well make the best of it. The Safdies have explored this kind of ambiguity before. In Daddy Longlegs, the wayward father, played by Ronald Bronstein (a character based on their own father), was appalling and charming in almost equal measure; his charisma both enabled and camouflaged his wanton irresponsibility. You might have recoiled in horror at his recklessness, but you couldn’t deny that he loved his kids.

Connie, for his part, adores his brother and has a way with dogs. While these traits don’t exactly make him likable, they grant him a minimal benefit of the doubt. His manipulation of his girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh) isn’t nice, but on the other hand she is so whiny and needy that you can’t feel too bad. Connie also has the good luck (at least as far as the viewer’s good graces are concerned) of falling in with the one guy in Queens who could make him look like a criminal genius — a gangly doofus named Ray (Buddy Duress), who has been spending his first days out of jail aggressively pursuing the opposite of rehabilitation.

This pair is not exactly Butch and Sundance, even in their own addled, delusional minds. And while Ray is hapless and almost heroically stupid, Connie is a more complicated, less clownish figure. He has a hint of heart, as well as a cruel, predatory streak that the Safdies expose for shocks and laughs, daring you to either take offense or take the joke, and banking on your queasiness in either case.

It doesn’t take much looking to notice an ugly racial dimension in Connie’s behavior, though most critics seemed to overlook it when the film was shown in Cannes this spring (at least from the reviews I read). When the Nikas brothers carry out the bank job, they wear hard hats, reflective vests and dark latex masks that function as crude, criminal blackface. Later, Connie takes advantage of a Caribbean immigrant (Gladys Mathon) and her granddaughter (Taliah Lennice Webster), sweet-talking and bullying them into aiding and abetting him. A black security guard (Barkhad Abdi) becomes another brutally abused pawn in Connie’s senseless game.

This pattern does not seem accidental. The question is what it means — what degree of self-consciousness or critical distance Good Time brings to its depiction of bottom-of-the-barrel white privilege. You could infer a satirical dimension if you wanted to, or even a righteous indictment of what a lowlife can get away with if he has Pattinson’s complexion. Or you could look at the film’s riot of racial signifiers — the musical and pop-cultural references as well as the demographics of the setting — as a form of trolling, a coy, self-disavowing provocation.

But the distinction doesn’t really matter, since the movie’s chief investment is not in the fates of any of its characters, nor in anything like realism, but rather in its own cool. Sometimes it flaunts its clichés — Nick’s disability, and Benny Safdie’s slack-jawed portrayal of it, is a big one — and other times it cloaks them in rough visual textures and jumpy, bumpy camera movements, so that a rickety genre thrill ride feels like something daring and new. It isn’t. It’s stale, empty and cold.

Available for home viewing: American Made ★★

The makers of the based-on-a-true-story black comedy American Made fail to satisfactorily answer one pressing question: why is CIA operative and Colombia drug-runner Barry Seal's story being told as a movie and not a book? What's being shown in this film that couldn't also be expressed in prose?

In telling the true story of American airplane pilot Barry Seal (Tom Cruise), writer Gary Spinelli and director Doug Liman (Edge of Tomorrow, Jumper) choose to overstimulate viewers rather than challenge them. They emphasize Barry's charm, the exotic nature of his South American trade routes, and the rapid escalation of events that ultimately led to his downfall. Cruise's smile is, in this context, deployed like a weapon in Liman and Spinelli's overwhelming charm offensive. You don't get a lot of psychological insight into Barry's character, or learn why he was so determined to make more money than he could spend, despite conflicting pressures from Pablo Escobar's drug cartel and the American government to either quit or collude.

But you do get a lot of shots of Cruise grinning from behind aviator glasses in extreme close-ups, many of which are lensed with hand-held digital cameras that show you the wilds of Nicaragua and Colombia through an Instagram-cheap green/yellow filter. American Made may be superficially a condemnation of the hypocritical American impulse to take drug suppliers' money with one hand and chastise users with the other. But it's mostly a sensational, sub-Wolf of Wall Street-style true crime story that attempts to seduce you, then abandon you.

The alarming pace of Barry's narrative, designed to put Cruise’s charisma front and center, keeps viewers disoriented. It's often hard to understand Barry's motives beyond caricature-broad assumptions about his (lack of) character. In 1977, Barry agrees to fly over South American countries and take photos of suspected communist groups using a spy plane provided by shadowy CIA pencil-pusher Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson). Barry is impulsive, or so we're meant to think based on an incident where he wakes up a sleeping co-pilot by abruptly sending a commercial airliner into a nosedive. This scene may explain why Barry grins like a lunatic as he explains to his wife Lucy (Sarah Wright) that he'll figure out a way to pay out of pocket for his family's health insurance once he opens an independent shipping company called "IAC" (Get it? IAC - CIA?).

Barry's impetuousness does not, however, explain why he flies so low to land when he takes his photographs. Or why he doesn't immediately reach out to Schafer when he's kidnapped and forced by Escobar (Mauricio Mejia) and his Cartel associates to deliver hundreds of pounds of cocaine to the United States. Or why Barry thinks so little of his wife and kids that he packs their Louisiana house up one night without explanation, and moves them to a safe-house in Arkansas. There's character-defining insanity, and then there's "this barely makes sense in the moment when it is happening" crazy. Barry often appears to be the latter kind of nutbar.

There are two types of people in American Made: the kind that work and the kind that get worked over. It's easy to tell the two apart based on how much screen-time Spinelli and Liman devote to each character. Schafer, for example, is defined by the taunts he suffers from a fellow cubicle drone and his own tendency to over-promise. Schafer doesn't do real work — not in the filmmakers' eyes. The same is true of Escobar and his fellow dealers, who are treated as lawless salesmen of an unsavory product. And don't get me started on JB (Caleb Landry Jones), Lucy's lazy, Gremlin-driving, under-age-girl-dating, Confederate-flag-waving redneck brother.

But what about Lucy? She keeps Barry's family together, but her feelings are often taken for granted, even when she calls Barry out for abandoning her suddenly in order to meet up with Schafer. Barry responds by throwing bundles of cash at his wife's feet. The argument, and the scene end just like that, like a smug joke whose punchline might as well be, "There's no problem that a ton of cash can't solve."

American Made sells a toxic, shallow, anti-American Dream bill of goods for anybody looking to shake their head about exceptionalism without seriously considering what conditions enable that mentality. Spinelli and Liman don't say anything except, "Look at how far a determined charmer can go if he's greedy and determined enough." They respect Barry too much to be thoughtfully critical of him. And they barely disguise their fascination with broad jokes that tease Barry's team of hard-working good ol' boys and put down everyone else.

Sure, it's important to note that Barry ultimately meets a just end, one that's been prescribed to thousands of other would-be movie gangsters. But you can easily shrug off a little finger-wagging at the end of a movie that treats you to two hours of Tom Cruise charming representatives of every imaginable U.S. institution (they don't call in the Girl Scouts, the Golden Girls or the Hulk-busters, but I'm sure they're in a director's cut). If there is a reason, good or bad, that American Made is a movie, it's that you can't be seduced by the star of Top Gun in a book.

Available for Home Viewing: Despicable Me 3 ★

With its combination of vaguely European stylings, a storyline that effectively combines slapstick and sentiment and the scene-stealing antics of the gibberish-spouting sentient Twinkies known as the Minions, Despicable Me (2010) was a breath of reasonably fresh air in the crowded feature animation marketplace that went on to be a massive success throughout the world. The inevitable Despicable Me 2 (2013) was an equally big hit from a financial standpoint but lacked the freshness of the original and the storyline was largely forgettable. And even though the Minions once again more or less stole the show, even they began to wear out their welcome a bit. That became especially obvious in the spin-off vehicle Minions (2015), a film that did little other than illustrate to youngsters the notion of there being too much of a good thing. Now comes Despicable Me 3, a depressingly rote piece of corporate product that has so little on its mind other than presumably making hundreds of millions of dollars that you half expect the ticket sellers to include copies of Comcast’s latest earnings report with each disc rented or sold.

Having been inspired by his three adorable adopted daughters — Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Grier) and Agnes (Nev Scharrel) — to give up a life of super-villainy, Gru (Steve Carrell) is working as an agent for the Anti-Villainy League alongside new wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig). As the film opens, the two try to stop the fiendish Balthazar Bratt (Trey Parker), a former kid star from the 80’s seeking revenge on the world for cancelling his TV show ("Evil Bratt"), from stealing the world’s largest diamond with the aid of a robot sidekick, scientifically enhanced bubble gum and a keytar capable of playing the most familiar musical riffs of his favorite era. Although he saves the diamond, Gru lets Balthazar get away and as a result, the new head of the AVL (Jenny Slate in a strangely brief role) fires both him and Lucy. No sooner has Gru suffered this professional setback than his personal world is rocked as well when he is contacted by his heretofore-unknown twin brother Dru (also Carrell) and invited to meet him at his home on the faraway land of Freedonia. (If the name "Freedonia" rings any bells with you, consider that a potential signal that you might be just a little too old for this film.)

Gru and the family fly off to Freedonia and discover that Dru is fabulously wealthy and handsome. But just as the even-more-depressed Gru is about to leave, Dru confesses the real reason for summoning his brother — he wants his sibling to teach him the tricks of the super-villain trade so that he can also carry on in the family tradition. Gru refuses at first but since Balthazar has managed to steal that diamond in the interim, he figures that if he can break into Bratt’s lair — an isolated compound topped by a giant Rubik’s Cube — and steal it back, he and Lucy will be reinstated in the AVL. While the two brothers bond and plan their heist — complicated slightly by Dru’s incompetency at even the rudiments of being a villain — the others have their own mini-adventures as well — Lucy struggles to find her way into her new role as the mother to Gru’s daughters, little Agnes becomes obsessed with the notion of finding and adopting her very own unicorn and 12-year-old Margo, in an especially weird turn, takes pity on a boy during a weird cheese-related dance ritual and apparently finds herself engaged to him as a result. As for the Minions, they all abandon Gru early on when he refuses to return to being a villain after getting fired and go on a series of misadventures that land them in prison and on a televised talent show, where they perform what is easily the strangest version of the Gilbert & Sullivan show-stopper I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General to turn up in a movie since the release of The Pirate Movie.

Although the Despicable Me movies have tried to appeal to viewers of all ages, they are aimed primarily at the younger set — how else to explain the presence of two fart jokes in the opening title card? The problem here is that the filmmakers seem to have gone out of their way to concoct a story out of elements that will hold little appeal to that target audience. It is highly doubtful they will care about Gru’s worries about the loss of his job, his attempts to bond with his long-lost brother, Lucy’s attempts to be a good mom or Margo’s accidental engagement. Moreover, the whole Balthazar character is liable to baffle and confuse them more than anything else since he is a joke inspired by popular culture trends of an era long before they were even born. Meanwhile, their beloved Minions are so disconnected from the main proceedings that they could have been eliminated entirely from the film without affecting things in the slightest. Perhaps the producers were trying to skew a little older on the basis that the kids who embraced the original film are themselves older and more sophisticated. My guess is that if those particular viewers are viewing movies at home would be more inclined to try Baby Driver and leave this for their younger siblings.

For most of the people involved with the film, Despicable Me 3 is a payday pure and simple and have responded accordingly. Carrell’s Gru, who seems to consist of equal parts Bela Lugosi and Tommy Wiseau, is still an amusing character but he doesn’t do anything new or interesting in his secondary turn as Dru. The other regulars show up and do their thing while regular supporting players like Julie Andrews and Steve Coogan appear just long enough to ensure future residual checks before disappearing entirely. (Apparently they couldn’t get Russell Brand back into the fold, though the way out that has been devised is kind of funny.) As for Trey Parker’s work as Balthazar, it is more disconcerting than anything else because whenever you hear his voice, you half expect him to go into full South Park mode, a move that would have left the PG rating in the dust but which certainly might have perked things up a bit.

Of course, all of these criticisms are fairly academic since Despicable Me 3 is basically the closest thing to an at-home sure thing, even in a season when most of the would-be sure things have been crapping out to one degree or another. Despite the problematic storytelling, little kids will probably still like it because it is colorful and noisy and filled with silly slapstick, though my bet is that they won’t embrace it to the degree that they did the original. As for parents and guardians charged with watching this with their tykes, it will keep the kids occupied for 90 minutes and they can at least enjoy the 80s-era hits on the soundtrack (with the Madonna classic Into the Groove getting the best play of the bunch) while waiting out the clock. Besides, it isn’t as if it will linger in their minds for too long since the whole enterprise is even more instantly forgettable than Despicable Me 2, which may be its only real accomplishment.