Available for home viewing: "Collateral Beauty"

Grief is a prevalent theme in recent movies. Such diverse titles as Manchester by the Sea, Jackie and Arrival come at the difficult topic from wildly different angles — personal, political and otherworldly. But they all manage to justify their use of dead loved ones as a generator of not just emotion, but of understanding about what happens in the aftermath of such great loss.

Now along comes Collateral Beauty to spoil it all by milking bereavement for shoddy bromides and cheap tears. Not that this knockoff Hallmark special doesn’t go out of its way to camouflage its ill-conceived intentions as well as the considerable debt it owes to such seasonal chestnuts as A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life. Director David Frankel (canine cry-a-thon Marley & Me) and writer Allan Loeb (the scribe behind such DVD bargain-bin dwellers as Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, The Dilemma and Rock of Ages) provide plenty of fancy window dressing, including a stellar cast and a fantasy Manhattan festooned with twinkly Christmas lights, pine limbs and dirt-free curbside snow.

Call me cynical but I always get suspicious when an acting ensemble feels incredibly star-stacked. It’s a sure sign of over-compensation. Consider that Collateral Beauty features two Oscar winners (Kate Winslet and Helen Mirren), three Oscar nominees (Will Smith, Keira Knightley and Edward Norton) and a Golden Globe nominee, as well as an Oscar contender (Naomie Harris of Moonlight) in a pear tree. Even such second-tier players as Michael Peña and Ann Dowd carry some considerable cachet.

Sometimes, I just hate it when I am right.

Let’s start at the beginning. There is the Will Smith that we know and love, with that dazzling smile and oodles of manly self-confidence. He is rallying the troops at his successful ad agency by asking the pseudo-profound question, "What is your why?" I would respond, "What is the what?" But his character Howard, instead, says, "Time, love and death. These three things connect every single human being on Earth. We long for love. We wish we had more time. And we fear death." Deep, right? Wrong.

OK, then. It is three years later, and Howard is a shell of a man, alone, silent and empty after the death of his 6-year-old daughter from a rare disease. He spends his days in his office constructing elaborate mazes using a platoon of domino tiles, only to knock them all down in one fell swoop and start over (at this point, "Warning: Metaphor Ahead" should flash onscreen). At night, in his monk-like apartment, he writes bitter diatribes railing at Time, Love and Death, and then actually mails these notes to their subjects, complete with stamps but no address.

His business partners, played by Winslet, Norton and Peña, are understandably nervous because Howard was the charismatic force driving the agency and is the majority shareholder. With sliding profits, they want to buy him out, but he refuses to discuss such details in his withdrawn state. Norton is so concerned that he hires a private investigator (Dowd) to spy on Howard, and she manages to retrieve his three notes from a mailbox, illegalities be damned.

Then, magically, Norton stumbles upon a solution when he is taken with an attractive young woman auditioning for an ad (Knightley) and decides to follow her across the street to a theater. There, he finds her rehearsing a play with a young man (Jacob Latimore) and an older white-haired lady (Mirren) and decides, hey, let me hire you three to act as the human incarnations of Time, Love and Death, and make Howard completely nuts so we can prove he is unstable and save our company. Mirren, who remains relatively unscathed despite being forced into sassy senior mode, has second thoughts. In one of the more timely asides in the script, she asks if Norton’s character wants the trio to "gaslight" Howard. But as desperate thespians are wont to do, they all agree so they can fund their play.

Of course, it isn’t as simple as that, considering how much attention is paid to the personal travails facing divorced dad Norton, childless workaholic Winslet and a cough-riddled Peña as well. By the time Howard starts opening up to a grief counselor (Harris), who also lost a daughter to disease, there is a growing sense that funny business is afoot and not in a good way. Sure, there are up-to-date references to hard-to-get Hamilton tickets and Norton jokingly observes, "Now they have CSI: Cleveland?" to his dementia-suffering mother while watching TV. But these asides are simply distractions from what appalling twists lie in wait.

I don’t remember witnessing a film in a long time that managed to so completely and utterly collapse into crass garbage in its last few minutes while abusing what little goodwill it has. Sort of the way a shaky line of dominoes can tumble down in a flash. Forget Collateral Beauty, whatever that means. This is "Collateral Schmaltz," the kind that has the power to close rather than open your heart as you finish watching it while the terribly named OneRepublic ballad, Let’s Hurt Tonight, provides ending music.

Available for home viewing: "Toni Erdmann"

There are a fair number of well-regarded films about the link between a father and a young daughter: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Paper Moon, My Girl, Fly Away Home, Eve’s Bayou and Beasts of the Southern Wild, to name a few.

But rarer is the memorable movie that portrays a dad and his adult daughter: On Golden Pond, both versions of Father of the Bride, Coyote Ugly, maybe Chinatown and Taken if you stretch matters a bit. That’s about all that immediately come to mind. I am no Freud, either Sigmund or Anna, but my guess is there exists something more complex, if distancing, about the older male parent-grown female child dynamic that perhaps makes it difficult to successfully translate onscreen.

Not for Maren Ade, the abundantly talented writer and director of Toni Erdmann, Germany’s official submission for a foreign language film Oscar. She fully embraces the inherent awkwardness of a testy emotional bond and tackles it to the ground, all the while mining it for heartfelt humor without the all-too-common safety net of predictability found in big-budget Hollywood fare.

There are several advantages that Ade has at her disposal, in addition to her gender and having a father, which greatly benefit this deceptively shaggy though expertly assembled ramble about generational conflict and caring. The plot sounds simple enough: Winfried (Peter Simonischek), a lonely senior divorced father prone to pulling childish pranks and assuming invented personas, decides to stalk Ines (Sandra Hüller), his career-obsessed 30-something consultant daughter, in Bucharest as she tries to pull off an important contract extension with an oil company. But there is so much more going on than just that.

One of the several attributes that elevates Toni Erdmann, named after Winfried’s most frequent persona, is how believably the actors sink themselves into their roles. Few movie fans in this country — including me — probably have seen either lead before and therefore they appear here baggage-free. Also, Ade has been allowed to make a relationship comedy that runs for an epic-sized 162 minutes. That gives the characters abundant breathing room to slowly yet steadily evolve before our eyes. It also provides the action a chance to percolate to a point around the two-hour mark where audiences will find themselves in a state of constant surprise. Much has been written about the climactic brunch sequence and how Ines performs an aggressively committed rendition of a pop music classic, but it’s better to discover these laugh-igniting highlights for yourself while sitting at home with family and/or friends.

However, my two viewings of the film did provide a slightly different and deeper appreciation. At first, I was more intent on the clash of personalities. Winfried is a kind of Teutonic Baloo the Bear in human form who treats life as a role-playing lark. He also feels the need to save his daughter from herself by showing her that there is more beyond just sealing the deal. Ines, meanwhile, is constantly struggling to prove herself on the job against a phalanx of male colleagues who regularly second-guess and underestimate her. Ade, to her credit, doesn’t simply coat her with an ice queen veneer although Ines does have her flaws. She can’t summon much empathy for those employees who would be laid off if her efficiency plan that involves outsourcing is put in place. She also is a control freak who can’t simply let go and enjoy herself, as shown in a scene when she stomps out of an unsatisfactory massage session, or seeks brief relief through drink, drug use and an odd sexual interlude.

But her saving grace is how Ines mostly tolerates her goofy pop as best she can while he mingles among her colleagues and says and does ridiculous things — such as renting a Hummer limo for himself or posing as an ambassador from Germany. He knows how to get under her skin, like when he tells others that he has had to hire a substitute daughter. She, on the other hand, wishes her father would make better use of his time as she sternly snaps, "Do you have any plans in life other than slipping fart cushions under people?" He denies he has a fart cushion. But, by this point, we know he will soon acquire one.

The second time around with Toni Erdmann, however, I looked at both Winfried and Ines a different way and came to the conclusion that she is definitely her father’s daughter. If he is always pretending to be someone else, as if in a perpetual one-man show, Ines is also an impersonator in many cases, such as when she must feign interest in shopping with a client’s wife. He wears a ratty wig, a garish suit and silly false teeth. She, on the other hand, costumes herself in minimalist office attire and rehearses a presentation as if she were putting on a play. The sad thing is, the people she hopes to impress are more taken by her father, despite his silly idiosyncrasies, than they are by her. It is partly sexism, but also because Ines doesn’t believe in herself and Winfried couldn’t care less what anyone thinks except for her.

There isn’t exactly a happy ending, but there is a satisfying one thanks to a sweet-sad scene near the end that suggests that Ines has learned to at least appreciate her father’s "make ‘em laugh" point of view of the world. And that, in this case, is progress.

NBA first round playoff picks

No explanation necessary

EASTERN CONFERENCE
Boston over Chicago in 5
Cleveland over Indiana in 5
Toronto over Milwaukee in 5
Washington over Atlanta in 7

WESTERN CONFERENCE
Golden State over Portland in 4
San Antonio over Memphis in 5
Houston over Oklahoma City in 5
Los Angeles over Utah in 7

Landing in Nice

Other than the great, ol’ homeland, obviously, France is my favorite country in the world. I used to treasure my regular two-week vacations there. I would fly from Dallas to Nice, changing planes in Frankfort. I would spend a week in Nice, usually staying at a small, boutique hotel on the southern most tip of the Cap d’Antibes, which is that peninsula that juts into the Mediterranean at the beginning of the video below. I loved the quiet, solitude at the tip as well as the pleasant cafes up the road in the city of Antibes. Driving from there to the beaches at Nice and Cannes, as well as a journey once each trip to Monte Carlo, allowed me to visit many of the spots Monet painted during his sojourns to that area. After a week in Nice, I would take the train to Paris, and spend another week there before returning home. If I had an additional week available, I would take the high-speed rail from Paris to London.

Of course, all my views of arriving at Nice were looking through the side windows of the airliner I was arriving on and even those views were somewhat restricted because I always preferred an aisle seat. So I never did get the absolutely fantastic view this video offers. But, boy, does it bring back some pleasant memories.

 

Available for home viewing: "Moana"

If Moana seems like a throwback to the animated Disney films of the late 1980s and early 1990s, it’s not a coincidence. Consider that directors Ron Clements and John Musker have on their resumes both The Little Mermaid (the movie that revitalized the animation department after years of neglect) and Aladdin. For Moana, they have resurrected elements of the template that made those movies beloved: catchy tunes that advance the narrative, a lively young protagonist finding his/her way in the world, and cuddly animal sidekicks. The movie also bucks the recent trend in animated productions of making the main character an anthropomorphized animal or gadget. Zootopia, Finding Dory, The Secret Life of Pets — all of 2016’s highest grossing animated films have featured animal leads. Here, Moana (voice of Auli’l Cravalho) is a 16-year human girl with hopes, dreams, and ambitions that many 16-year olds (and more than a few younger and older viewers) will identify with.

Moana is the daughter of Chief Tui (Temeura Morrison) and his wife, Sina (Nicole Scherzinger). Although Moana’s people once voyaged the seas, they have stopped their wandering ways and established a home on a bountiful island. Now, however, their idyllic lifestyle is endangered. To save her people, Moana must defy her father’s ban on travel "beyond the reef" and seek out the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson). Once that part of her quest is completed, Moana must set off alongside Maui to restore the heart he stole from a sleeping goddess. In order to accomplish that, Maui must retrieve his magical hook, which is guarded by the 50-foot long crab-like creature Tamatoa (Jermaine Clement) in the realm of monsters.

Moana becomes the first animated Disney film in years to return to the musical format that was popular two and one-half decades ago. Although Alan Menken isn’t involved, his place has been filled by Mark Mancina (scoring) and Lin-Manuel Miranda (songs). Miranda’s involvement predated his phenomenal success for Hamilton, making this something of a coup for Disney. His songs are fresh and catchy, recapturing the spirit of the Menken/Alan Ashman tunes from The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. The standout of Miranda’s contribution is Moana’s signature song, How Far I’ll Go, which can stand alongside Part of Your World, Belle, Whole New World, and Can You Feel the Love Tonight as memorable themes.

Although Clements and Musker may be reaching back to their earlier successes for inspiration, there are some notable differences. The most obvious is the style of animation. This is the first time these two men have embraced fully computer-generated imagery. Following Aladdin, they made Hercules, Treasure Planet, and The Princess and the Frog — all primarily hand-drawn. A second change-up is the lack of a romantic subplot. The relationship between Moana and Maui is platonic — a big brother/little sister kind of thing. By not giving Moana a love interest, the film is making a statement that Disney princesses don’t need princes to define them.

The voice cast prioritizes unique vocal styles and singing ability over star power. The only legitimate A-list name is Johnson, and his real-life image plays into his character’s appearance (Maui bears a passing resemblance to the athlete-turned-actor). Hawaiian native Cravalho, making her feature debut, has a sterling voice that serves her well when speaking and even better when singing. Morrison and Scherzinger have small roles as Moana’s parents. Alan Tudyk voices Hei Hei the rooster, whose primary role is comedic. In The Huffington Post, Clements called Hei Hei "the dumbest character in the history of Disney animation" and I’m not about to argue with that assertion.

Although Clements and Musker are "new" to computer animation, it’s not evident from the quality of their work. The film’s visuals, many of which take place in or on water, are as good as anything from Finding Dory. The human characters are excellently rendered, with just enough exaggeration (especially where Maui’s lively tattoos are concerned) to avoid the creepiness factor that accompanies too-accurate representations.

Moana is solid "retro Disney" — a new film that embraces older ideas, themes, and narrative approaches. Unlike many of the studio’s best animated offerings, the movie doesn’t try to push any envelopes or do anything new or surprising. It should provide immensely popular home viewing for its core audience (which one would assume is similar to Frozen’s) and will provide an enjoyable 1½ hours for those outside of it. Moana is an entertaining and worthy way to open Disney’s 2017 home viewing animated roster.

Available for home viewing: "Paterson"

The latest movie written and directed by Jim Jarmusch is a total fantasy. This in spite of being shot on the streets of the New Jersey city in which it is set, and for which the movie itself and its lead character are named. It’s as much of a fantasy as Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, another great film about a poet that was at least partially set in the "real" contemporary world. It’s maybe not as much of a fantasy as the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The movie’s protagonist, played with spectacular attention to detail and what feels like a genuine sense of affinity by Adam Driver, is named Paterson, and he drives a New Jersey Transit bus around the New Jersey city of Paterson, where he also lives. When my dad was born there, Paterson, New Jersey was an industrial center of the United States — a storied manufacturer of silks and textiles — that fell into a kind of ruin by the time I last visited the town in 1978. It has undergone several not-quite-revivals since that time. Its main fame today is in its being the ostensible subject of an epic modernist American poem by William Carlos Williams, who lived in nearby Rutherford. "[A]nd so to man/to Paterson," Williams wrote in the Preface to that work, underlining an ambition that was potentially pantheistic.

The Paterson inhabited by Paterson is not a ruin but it is a largely quiet, sometimes haunted-seeming place. Paterson the man (whose first name is not given, or is perhaps nonexistent) is a fellow of routine. For the most part he gets up at the same early hour every morning, summoned by what his wife Laura calls his "silent alarm watch," a Casio of retro design. Paterson’s marriage is also a little retro (some critics have derided it as retrograde, politically, a claim I find not pertinent). Laura, played by Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani is more or less a housewife. She bakes delicious cupcakes, dubious dinner pies, is unfailingly sweet, and decorates the couple’s small house with bold black and white patterns, which also distinguish her cupcakes. She has some whimsical seeming ambitions that Paterson either indulges or helps her with, depending on how you want to look at it. But aside from muse functions, she has little to do with her husband’s daily routine, which, aside from driving a bus, is devoted to poetry. In his neat notebook Paterson writes, in a neat hand, plain-spoken poems celebrating what the Surrealists called "the marvelous in the everyday." These poems were actually written by Ron Padgett, a still-living poet with roots in the "New York School" which of course was influenced by Allen Ginsberg and his mentor Williams and whose most famous member was Frank O’Hara.

The plain-spoken poems here bear a slight resemblance to the work of James Schuyler, only minus Schuyler’s anxieties and tortured longings — they seem to come from a place of contemplative contentment. Paterson’s nearly rigid approach to life, love and work, seems deliberately designed to produce that state of being. His other muse is, of course, the Paterson Falls, where he sits on his lunch hour and at other times.

His nemesis is an English bulldog named Marvin, who belongs to the couple but is clearly not crazy about Paterson. Every night, though, Paterson walks the growling, grumbling beast, and leashes him outside a bar. There, Paterson has precisely one beer and talks things over with bartender Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley), discussing Doc’s Paterson Wall of Fame (featuring Lou Costello, Floyd and Jimmy Vivino, and others) and contemplating life and love. Paterson gets food for thought on his bus, too; he overhears a teenage girl explaining Italian anarchist Gaetano Bresci to a fellow student, say, or two construction workers discussing (in incredibly polite terms) their potential amorous conquests, which they say they’re too tired or preoccupied to follow through on.

This is the third of Jarmusch’s fictional films in which he concocts a fantasy realm in which he, the image-maker and aesthete, could lead a comfortable and productive existence. In 2009’s The Limits of Control he posited the imaginative realm as one in which an individual could not just escape political oppression but also effectively obliterate it. In 2013’s Only Lovers Left Alive he explored the state of vampirism as a way of building a realm in which one could stay not just forever young but forever young with fantastic taste. Here he constructs an idyll out of orderliness and a circumscribed mode of engagement. Paterson and Laura have no onscreen social life to speak of (the bake sale for which Laura creates dozens of delicious looking black and white cupcakes is not depicted), and no nosy or imposing family members. Paterson has not published his work, and does not even deign to copy it out of his notebook. And yet there’s a sense of interdependent gears at work here. The man, the bus, the passengers, the bar patrons, all pouring into the poetry.

But if the movie were merely an exercise in Jarmusch’s fancy, it would be a pleasurable thing. It is a meticulously composed movie, shot beautifully by Frederick Elmes; every frame is a beauty. Paterson is ultimately more than a whim. It is a movie that actually grows more enigmatic on a second viewing. Asked at one point why he doesn’t carry a smart phone, Paterson responds that it would feel like a leash. And yet he hardly seems a person who would stray. At one point in the movie, Paterson, who maintains a stoic countenance in most circumstances, is forced to intervene before an act of violence is committed. His bearing in the aftermath is odd; he laughs, with a kind of horror. His calm surface disturbed, he reveals he’s fighting something within himself in order to maintain his equanimity. After that, we are shown a photograph of Paterson bearing military medals (the shot is a real picture of Driver during his time in the Marines). The film feels like one in which nothing is happening, but it’s not happening beautifully, and then there finally is a galvanic event that’s both heartbreaking and comical. And what happens after that is moving, and instructive. "I breathe poetry," a character Paterson meets at the end of the film says to him as they both sit and look at the falls. That is ultimately the very real thing that the movie is about: the conviction that if you can live at least part of your life breathing poetry (and that poetry is not necessarily a verbal thing), you can make your life more worthwhile.

Available for home viewing: "Diabolique"

If it had accomplished nothing else, Diabolique would deserve our affection for two reasons: It contains the original of Peter Falk's TV character Columbo, and it inspired one of the funniest stories in screen history. Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1955 thriller, now re-released in a restored print which I watched last night via its Criterion blu-ray release, however, accomplishes much more, creating a diabolical double-reverse plot that keeps the viewer guessing right up to the thoroughly implausible final scene.

The movie takes place in a French boys' boarding school run by a headmaster who makes life there as unpleasant for the teachers as for the boys. Michael Delasalle (Paul Meurisse) is a sadist and a pinchpenny who serves the students rotten fish and slaps around his wife Christina (Vera Clouzot), even though the school really belongs to her.

The boys hate him and the teachers seem to despise him, especially the strapping Nicole (Simone Signoret), who has until recently been his mistress. As the movie opens, Nicole is pressing ahead with a plan she has already explained to Christina. It's an elaborate scheme in which they will visit Nicole's home in a distant village, lure Michael there, drown him in a bathtub, and secretly return to the school to dump the swine in the swimming pool, where he will seem to be a suicide or accident victim.

This is not the plot. It is merely the set-up, and the plot proper begins after the body apparently disappears from the pool and Michael's suit is returned from the cleaners. Are the women going mad? Can they trust the evidence of their eyes and ears — or believe their clear memory of Michael's dead body staring goggle-eyed at them from beneath the water in the bathtub? "Please do not reveal the ending to those who have not yet seen the film!" Clouzot pleads with his final frame. I would not dream of it. But I will observe that the ending would not have happened quite the way it does without the passive cooperation of Inspector Fichet (Charles Vanel), who has apparently figured everything out and is well-placed to prevent the final outcome, but waits too long.

Of course he isn't exactly swift on his feet. He shuffles onto the scene in a rumpled old raincoat, chewing on a cigar and asking apparently aimless questions. His favorite technique is to repeat a question, pretending that he hasn't heard the answer, although it's quite clear that what he hopes to do is trap a suspect in a contradiction. In appearance, mannerism and strategy, Fichet is Columbo; Falk added a squint, a dirtier raincoat and more humor.

The famous plot of the movie usually deceives first-time viewers, at least up to a point. The final revelations are somewhat disappointing, but Clouzot doesn't linger over them. The most disturbing elements of the movie are implied, not seen, in the seedy air of the teachers, all of whom have seen better days and at least one of whom should probably be in jail.

The movie was made by Signoret in her heyday as a fleshier, blowsier French version of Marilyn Monroe. She makes a dramatic contrast to the petite Vera Clouzot, the director's wife; he often frames little Christina with Nicole and Michael looming over her.

There is the possibility, just hinted at, that Nicole may have lesbian designs on Christina. And there is a shabby depravity in the way Christina is so defeated by her husband that she lets him continue to run her school (and abuse her) even after he starts an open affair with the Signoret character.

The movie has fun with the usual whodunit details: The split-second timetables, and the sleepy old guard who must open the gates to let anyone in or out of the school grounds. The Inspector also amuses himself reconstructing timetables and quizzing a small student who seems to see and hear impossible things. Then comes the ending, inspired by Gaslight, in which a woman is either going mad, or nothing is as it seems. Diabolique is so well constructed that even today it works on its intended level — up until, say, the last 30 seconds.

The famous story that I learned from my dear friend and esteemed film critic, the late Philip Wuntch: A man wrote to Alfred Hitchcock: "Sir, After seeing Diabolique, my daughter was afraid to take a bath. Now she has seen your Psycho and is afraid to take a shower. What should I do with her?" Hitchcock replied: "Send her to the dry cleaners."

Available for home viewing: "Jackie"

There are two movies in Jackie, Pablo Larraín's film about Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) immediately before, during and after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. One of these movies is just OK. The other is exceptional. The first one keeps undermining the second.

Movie number one is a fictionalized biography in which a famous subject sits for a long interview, here with a magazine reporter played by Billy Crudup (unnamed but based on biographer Theodore H. White, who wrote "For President Kennedy: An Epilogue," a Life article that ran one week after President John F. Kennedy's assassination). This one is a movie where an important person contemplates his or her place in history and tries to control how they are perceived. It's fuzzy and overreaching and has been done better elsewhere.

The individual scenes in this "historical figure contemplates self" film are competently done and sometimes a good deal more than that, thanks to undertones of empathy and condescension in the dialogue. The reporter is often condescending to the former First Lady. Sometimes he even interrupts her when she's speaking or tries to put words in her mouth or dismiss her concerns, which shows how not-powerful even a very powerful woman can be when she's in a room with a man who's been told since birth that his words and actions are inherently more important than any woman's. This material in this second film connects to moments in the inevitable flashbacks to Jackie's heyday in Camelot and right after John F. Kennedy's murder. We see Jackie, often the lone woman in a room full of men, trying to assert herself and say what she wants and needs, only to be told (by White House staffers, military people, even her RFK) that it's impossible — because of security or protocol or precedent or simply because the men just mysteriously know better than her — and she should give up.

But the framing device is not ultimately necessary (few are, alas) because, whether the reporter and Jackie are talking about what's on the record or off the record, and whether what Jackie is saying is objectively true or merely self-serving, we have already seen everything both of them might have had to say illustrated, in a more immediate and often wrenching way, by the flashbacks.

The flashbacks constitute a second, far superior film, one that has the shock of revelation: we've seen this tight, crucial chapter of history re-enacted many times from all sorts of vantage points, but rarely in depth and mainly from the point-of-view of Jackie, who had to go through the gist of what everyone goes through when they lose a mate, only on the world's largest stage.

But whenever Larraín and his cast and crew build up a head of dramatic steam in the "past" (which feels far more "present" than the interview stuff), and keep building it up until it starts to feel like the raw material for an unwritten opera or an unmade psychological horror movie, Jackie fecklessly yanks us out of that emotional head-space, and returns us to the reporter and Jackie hashing over what it means.

The second movie in Jackie is new and often powerful, and it derives all of its newness and power from specifics. This Jackie is the story of a woman who suddenly, violently lost her husband, then had to figure out how to get through the next few days of her life without surrendering her sanity along with whatever power she once had. The mundane nature of this second movie is what makes it feel so eerily accurate. Details such as the specific bloodstains on Jackie's clothes and the bruise revealed on her shin as she takes her stockings off, the point-of-view shots of Jackie looking at all those men who have concluded they should decide her fate for her, the catch in Jackie's voice as she tries to tell her children that their father is dead without using the word "death," the way she goes into a depressive reverie and starts going through her clothes and trying on various dresses while listening to Jack's favorite album, the original cast recording of Camelot: all of this feels achingly true. But Larraín pushes the "power" of it all too hard (often by ladling on Mica Levi's lyrical yet too often bombastic score). Even Portman's accent-driven performance, while ferociously committed, feels too much like a researched, considered, Marilyn Monroe-breathy impersonation, one that has been constructed from the outside in rather than incarnated from within. Rarely have I seen a more vivid example of artists getting in their own way and tripping themselves up.

A big part of the problem (for me, anyway) is that Larraín seems to want to make a statement, perhaps one of the ultimate statements, on the transformation of lived experience into myth. This film really doesn't have the intellectual chops to pull it off, never mind the question of whether that sort of movie is inherently more important and serious and worthy of critical superlatives than the simpler, more emotionally driven one about a widow coming to terms with the loss of her husband and her responsibilities to her children (both the biological ones and the symbolic ones, i.e. the American people).

Jackie as fantasy object upon whom hundreds of millions of less famous women can project their fears, goals and desires; Jackie as wife and mother, trying to keep it together during the worst few days of her life; Jackie as faithful spouse wounded by her handsome husband's infidelity; even Jackie as First Lady of the United States, looking out over a horrifically altered global landscape and asking what's next: all these Jackies are present in the hours and days preceding and following the murder. These various self-states are embedded in the way Jackie moves through rooms while the camera follows her, the way she looks at objects and people, and the way she struggles to compose herself and articulate her needs without deferring to whatever man she happens to be speaking with.

Jackie has to stand for herself but also for Jackie the historical figure, the myth, the oversimplification, the blank slate, the retrograde but at the same time revolutionary aspirational figure, and so on. We never feel as powerfully connected to this Jackie as we do to the one who suddenly has to move out of the house she's been living in for less than three years because her husband's brains were blown out in a motorcade. Meanwhile, the other characters are allowed to stand for one or two things only, always in relation to Jackie, and as a result, the film's supporting performances (particularly by Peter Saarsgaard as Robert Kennedy, who doesn't look or sound much like him, and who cares) feel a lot more fully imagined and realized. Actors always fail when they are asked to incarnate ideas, while they tend to do quite well with specifics like, "You are playing Robert, the brother of the murdered man, and the only person who understands your sister-in-law's pain."

The great movie that is Jackie keeps fighting to free itself from the clammy clutches of the could-have-been-better, knows-what-best-for-us movie. After a while the struggle becomes indistinguishable from the struggle depicted in the movie itself.

Jackie the drama (at times melodrama) knows what it is and what it wants to say. It trusts the viewer to figure it all out and speaks to us via intuition, often taking considerable risks and making itself quite vulnerable. It is what would have been dismissed in another era as a "woman's movie" — i.e. a movie about the emotional experience of a woman — only to be reclaimed much later by historians and critics who struggle to get others to see that this kind of film is just as valid and worthy of scrutiny as the sort of movie where famous people sit for interviews about their legacy and spar about truth and fiction, performance and authenticity. (The character of Jackie is already starting to shape her own myth in the flashback material anyway; it's all there if you feel like looking for it, and as is the case throughout Jackie, it's done with a lot more imagination than anything in the interview segments.) Ironic that Jackie's story here is mainly one of a woman trying to imagine her own experience on her own terms, only to be told by various parties, mainly male, that she's wrong, or that it's not enough.

Available for home viewing: Doctor Strange

Strange comic book fans, rejoice! Your hero has finally made it into the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse and with that comes the potential of reboots aplenty. The shenanigans we saw in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek movies and the X-Men series may now lie ahead for the Main Marvel Line. Future implications aside, however, Doctor Strange tells a standard tale with just enough cleverness to keep the viewer interested. It is, in superhero parlance, an "origin story" and, as with all episodes falling into that category, it is saddled with a number of obligatory elements.

Because the movie is tasked with telling us how the main character (played with panache by Benedict Sherlock Cumberbatch) becomes the Master of the Mystic Arts, the movie has limited flexibility to do other things. The villain, Kaecilius with the purple eyeshadow (Mads Mikkelsen), is not terribly intimidating. He looks more like a glam rocker than a bringer of darkness. Of greater interest is Kaecilius’ cosmic boss, Dormammu (Cumberbatch again, doing double duty as he did in The Hobbit trilogy), whose special effects-intensive appearance suggests how Marvel might consider rendering Galactus (if they ever get the rights back from Fox). Dormammu doesn’t have a lot of screen time but his confrontation with Strange allows the narrative to try something new (at least insofar as superhero/supervillain confrontations go).

Doctor Strange opens with the introduction of the brilliant but arrogant neurosurgeon Stephen Strange, whose professional skills make him one of the most desired doctors in New York City but whose interpersonal skills (or lack thereof) turn a lot of people off. One evening, while driving his car too fast and paying too little attention to the road ahead, he becomes the victim of a brutal crash. He survives but his hands are shredded. The nerve damage guarantees that he’ll never practice medicine again. Desperate for any strand of hope, he travels to a monastery in Nepal where he trains under the tutelage of The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) and her disciple, Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), learning how to bend reality, control time, and create alternate universes. This is all in preparation for the showdown with Kaecilius and Dormammu, which comprises the final act.

This is a highly special effects-intensive feature. There are times when the visuals are dazzling and dizzying but there’s also a sense that we’re watching something created on a computer as opposed to a genuine bending of reality. Possibly influenced by Christopher Nolan’s Inception, these scenes also recall the "unreality" of the inside-the-computer realm from the TRON films. They also contribute to one of the most inventive chase scenes in recent motion picture memory in which characters appear to be fleeing through a landscape designed by M.C. Escher, with recursive paths that double back on themselves and where the laws of physics no longer hold sway.

One of the reasons why Doctor Strange works is the respect brought to the pulpy material by a cadre of distinguished actors. How about an Oscar winner and three nominees? None of them show up in Marlon Superman Brando or Anthony Odin Hopkins mode just to pick up a paycheck. They are invested in their roles, especially Cumberbatch who’s light years better here than as faux Khan in Star Trek into Darkness. The only one who disappoints is Rachel McAdams and that’s because the script doesn’t give her anything substantial to do.

All of the visual razzle-dazzle needs a great score to keep pace but, sadly, Michael Giacchino’s efforts aren’t up to snuff. The music sounds like a slightly reworked version of what he turned in for 2009’s Star Trek. The similarities are so striking that I half-expected someone to start intoning "Space, the final frontier…" It’s jarring to be watching one movie and hear music that’s familiar from another one.

For those who care to play along at home, Doctor Strange posits some ideas about the intersection between magic and futuristic science. Many of the concepts about multiple dimensions and time travel are offshoots of current scientific theory and the film makes a case for the idea that any advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic. Is Doctor Stranger a Sorcerer Supreme or has he merely mastered quantum mechanics on a practical level?

Apparently, Derrickson has a deep and abiding love for the character of Doctor Strange and it shows in his treatment. Although this falls far from the 2016 superhero pinnacle established by Deadpool, it’s a significant step up from the two Warner/DC debacles and even Captain America: Civil War. The film understands when it’s necessary to get serious but also contains comedic bits that aren’t forced or artificial. The Avengers are referenced, but they are mostly absent from the movie, allowing Doctor Strange to evolve without their interference. Finally, although the comic book tropes are all in place, the acting, tone, and visual effects keep them from becoming tedious. This is yet another solid building block in the foundation to Marvel’s ever-expanding superhero fortress.

Available for home viewing: Rules Don't Apply

Rules Don’t Apply is a strange, schizophrenic sort of movie. Despite moments of emotional strength and bursts of quirky comedy, the film is undone by its generally lethargic tone and the film’s insistence to shift its focus from the putative lead characters to a supporting player who would have been better off left (literally and figuratively) in the shadows.

For the 79-year old actor/writer/director/producer Warren Beatty, Rules Don’t Apply is his first project since 1998’s Bulworth and his first appearance in front of the camera in a decade and a half. The film, like nearly all of Beatty’s projects, is entirely his. He wears almost every hat that matters and his micromanagement and attention to detail are legendary. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. Although Rules Don’t Apply is far from a disastrous outing, there’s nothing special about it. It features some nice performances and contains some strong material but, as a whole, the movie is too slow and too long to really work.

As it warns at the beginning, Rules Don’t Apply doesn’t adhere to the historical record. A subtitle advises us that "names and dates have been changed," and this isn’t an exaggeration. The film is set in the late 1950s and early 1960s but many of the events presented herein transpired during the 1940s. Likewise, although various characters resemble real-life individuals, only a handful actually existed. In fact, the two protagonists, Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich) and Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins), are Beatty’s inventions.

Rules Don’t Apply opens as an unlikely romance between Frank, a driver for reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes (Beatty), and Marla, one of Hughes’ small stable of "contract players." Marla, a devout Baptist, has come to Hollywood (chaperoned by her mother, Lucy, who is played by Beatty’s wife, Annette Bening) to chase fame. The attraction between Frank and Marla is immediately apparent but there are obstacles to a love affair. In the first place, Hughes has a hard-and-fast rule against flirtations between drivers and their charges. In the second place, Frank has a flame "back home" to whom he is practically married. However, as things heat up between Frank and Marla once Lucy has departed, Hughes inserts himself forcefully into both of their lives. He enters into a business venture with Frank and something more personal develops between him and Marla.

The love story, although full of clichés, is well-told. The characters are likeable and actors Ehrenreich and Collins display good chemistry. The movie starts to unravel, however, as Hughes moves from being a background player to taking center stage. Suddenly, the carefully developed romance loses its prominence. Beatty’s interpretation of the legendary eccentric is on-target but the film’s shift in focus isn’t welcome. The character is so much larger-than-life that he sucks all they oxygen from every scene in which he appears. Rules Don’t Apply is much better in the early-going when Hughes is only briefly glimpsed. He’s like the shark in Jaws — less is more. Had the shark dominated the screen and demanded frequent close-ups, Jaws wouldn’t have worked.

Arguably, part of the problem is that Beatty is too good as Hughes to be left out of the spotlight. He brings sufficient humanity to the role to avoid Hughes becoming a caricature. Ehrenreich, who will be portraying Han Solo in an upcoming Star Wars story, is handsome and personable. However, although Lucasfilm may have cast him because of a perceived likeness to Harrison Ford, in Rules Don’t Apply, he is eerily similar to a younger Leonardo DiCaprio. Collins is uneven — she’s excellent in the early scenes when her character exudes bubbly enthusiasm and she has a powerful drunken seduction sequence but there are moments when her acting is as off-key as her singing. Although Beatty, Ehrenreich, and Collins have the lion’s share of screen time, recognizable faces like Matthew Broderick, Candice Bergen, Martin Sheen, and Oliver Platt make appearances, and there is a flotilla of cameos.

If Rules Don’t Apply deserved an Oscar nomination (it didn’t receive any nominations), it would have been in the cinematography department. Acclaimed cinematographer Caleb Deschanel has done his usual superlative job of creating another time and place. Lighting, shot selection, and mood all combine powerfully to suggest Hollywood’s bygone era — the time between its period of legendary greatness and its current climate of excess. During those times when the story doesn’t hold our attention, Deschanel’s camera work keeps us watching.

Whether Beatty’s ego has anything to do with the lack of definition that limits the movie’s effectiveness, it’s hard to argue that less of Hughes and more of the old-fashioned romance would have made Rules Don’t Apply a more satisfying experience. Despite a solid cast, it’s difficult to envision this movie as a mainstream home viewing success. It’s a niche film with limited appeal and its tendency to curdle instead of gel will further diminish its rental/streamking potential. During the one time of the year when there are plenty of good movies to put in your que, there’s little reason to put Rules Don’t Apply near the top.

Available for home viewing: 20th Century Women

Chain-smoking and Birkenstock-wearing 55-year-old Dorothea "comes from the Depression," explains her 15-year-old son Jamie, as though "The Depression" is the planet Jupiter. She presides over a rambling household with an open-door policy. Dorothea has a way of squinting tightly when she listens to people talk: she tries to figure out what's really going on beneath the surface. Her son wriggles away from that piercing gaze. She throws makeshift dinner parties for friends (and anyone else she happens to meet over the course of her day). She's a homebody, but not a recluse. She's somewhat confused by the cultural changes since her own youth ("They know they're not good, right?" she asks when she hears a song by Black Flag). She's "from the Depression." She's tough. Dorothea is played by Annette Bening in 20th Century Women, writer/director Mike Mills's wonderful third feature film, and it's one of the best performances of the year (and one of Bening's personal best as well).

Mills is a hell of a writer. That was evident in his second feature, Beginners, where Christopher Plummer gave an Oscar-winning performance as a father who came out of the closet at age 75. Beginners was about Mills's father; 20th Century Women is about his mother. Together the films form bookend narratives of love, tribute and elegy. John Steinbeck wrote East of Eden, in part, for his two sons, to show them what his childhood had been like, what Salinas Valley was like back in the day, what their ancestors were like. It's a documentary-like approach to a personal history. Mills's films have a similar quality. They aren't acts of nostalgia filmed through a golden gauzy filter. They want to communicate something. Similar to Beginners, Mills uses archival photographs and voiceover to express the connective tissue as well as the abyss between the present and the past. The future is present too. 20th Century Women is narrated, for the most part, by Jamie, although all of the other characters contribute. They tell us who they are, where they came from, where they're going. This approach is like peeking at the last page of a novel.

20th Century Women takes place in Santa Barbara in 1979. Jimmy Carter looks exhausted on TV. Teenage girls smoke cigarettes and devour Judy Blume's Forever. The new crazes are skateboarding and punk music. Dorothea had her son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) at the age of 40 and has raised him alone. Two tenants rent a couple of rooms in Dorothea's rambling fixer-upper house: Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a maroon-haired photographer recovering from cervical cancer, and William (Billy Crudup), a mechanic/potter/carpenter who still speaks hippie-speak ("energy," "earth mothers"), and is tolerant, aimless and helpful. Jamie's best friend from childhood, a ragingly depressed and promiscuous girl named Julie (Elle Fanning), is so unhappy at home she crawls through Jamie's window at night to sleep (platonically) with him on his mattress on the floor. Jamie, naturally, is in agonies of horniness about this situation.

In a panicked impulse, Dorothea senses that a single mother might not be "enough" to usher Jamie into this new phase in his life. She asks Abbie and Julie to help Jamie by sharing their lives with him. How this will help is not exactly clear, and Abbie and Julie are confused, but they give it a go. Over the course of the film, Abbie takes Jamie out to punk music clubs and gives Jamie hardcore feminist literature to read. He really takes to it, getting into a fight with a boy at school over "clitoral stimulation" which then leads to one of the funniest exchanges in the film when Jamie explains to Dorothea what the fight was about. (Bening has one of my favorite line readings of the year in that scene: "Okay. Jesus. Yeah.") Jamie is surrounded by eccentric, complicated women. Their bodies are confusing and erratic: Abbie's "incompetent" cervix, Julie's pregnancy scare, Dorothea's aging process. Jamie wants to understand and wants to be there for them. He tells his mother, "I want to be a good guy, you know?" He means it.

What is so special about Dorothea (and every character in the film) is that they aren't "quirky" in an annoying, independent film way. They are bizarre and sui generis, as people are in real life. This quality is hard to come by in film. It can't be faked. It's in Mills's script, that's for sure, but it's also in his casting. He casts well and then gets out of their way. Everyone inhabits their character like a well-worn sweater. By the end of 20th Century Women, you really feel like you have gotten to know all of these people. There are so many great scenes, including one of the most awkward and hilarious seduction scenes in recent memory.

During scenes in the house, cinematographer Sean Porter sometimes pushes the camera slowly towards the characters sitting around the kitchen table, or pulls it back, the camera moving towards the doorframe. It's subtle, almost imperceptible, but it provides a clear sense that 20th Century Women is an act of memory. The camera seems to be Jamie's perspective in the future, thinking, "Oh, wait … remember that one conversation in the kitchen? Who was there again? What was said again? Oh, that's right, that's right … I remember now."

The photos, the movie clips, the newsreel clips are all ways that help him, the director, and Jamie, the narrator, to remember. Beginners had an inciting dramatic event. 20th Century Women does not, except for the mildly-contrived request Dorothea makes to Abbie and Julie to share their lives with her son. The film is a portrait of a group of people at a specific moment in time, how they lived, what they fought about, what music they listened to, what they ate and what they cared about. Nothing is irrelevant with that approach. The most pleasurable aspect of 20th Century Women (and it's pleasurable throughout) is that it allows itself to be messy. The plot is not bossy, it does not make demands, there are no requirements placed on the characters by an over-planned story. The characters are allowed to breathe. People are weird. People are beautiful. People are annoying and complex. You never ever know what they're going to do next. You never know what's going to happen next. Remember that, the film says. It's important, maybe the most important thing of all.

Downsizing (the movie)

If you saw that a movie bore the title Downsizing, you would intuitively think it would be about what happens when one or more individuals lose their job. Filmmaker Alexander Payne (Nebraska, The Descendants, Sideways, About Schmidt, Election, Citizen Ruth0 is far more adventurous than that. He refuses to go to the places everyone expects.

His latest, Downsizing, is scheduled to be released at the end of the year (i.e., awards season) and is based on the fascinating premise that if you shrink members of the human race down to five inches, it reduces their needs (they now require much smaller homes, less food, tinier cars, etc.) while expanding their purchasing power. The environmental message of the movie is that is also generates a much smaller carbon footprint.

Reese Witherspoon was originally set to star in the film (she agreed to the project as far back as 2009), allowing her to do another film with the director who guided her in Election. A little more than a year ago, however, it was announced that Kristen Wiig had replaced Witherspoon as the female lead. I still don’t know why. The rest of the cast includes Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Alec Baldwin, Neil Patrick Harris, Jason Sudeikis, Margo Martindale and Laura Dern (who starred in Payne’s Citizen Ruth some 20 years ago).

Critic Jeffrey Wells says he saw a 10-minute clip from the film yesterday during a movie convention in Las Vegas and called it "awesome, brilliant, hilarious, sad and a tiny bit scary — an obvious Best Picture contender." He went on to say "It’s well acted, earnest, scientifically palatable as far as it goes, emotionally honest, fascinating and darkly funny. And the visual & practical effects are top-notch. It’s going to be great — you can tell."

Here’s a brief preview which, admittedly, fails to convey either the film's premise or Wells's assertions, but, hey, it's all I've got right now:

Available for home viewing: Loving

Jeff Nichols’ Loving is that rare mainstream film that provokes frustration and rage without resorting to monologues or melodrama. The two people at the center of this period drama aren’t prone to long speeches. They’re quiet, conservative, almost shy folk who ended up at the center of one of the most important Supreme Court cases of the ‘60s by virtue of falling in love, getting married and having children. Nichols’ approach is careful, reserved and deeply considerate of the human story he’s trying to tell. There’s no sense of exploitation here — if anything, he’s almost too reverential in his unwillingness to show any flaws. One can sense a director’s understandable trepidation in telling the story of two private people whose life was made very public. What’s most important to Nichols’ vision is how much trust he has in his two leads, and what they give back to him in exchange for that trust.

In 1958 Virginia, a reserved mechanic and construction worker named Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton) married his pregnant girlfriend Mildred (Ruth Negga). The two drove to Washington, D.C. to make their union official, and Richard bought an acre of land near Mildred’s family home on which he planned to build a house. They hoped that Richard’s mother would deliver their first child, and that they would live in peace in a beautiful, country setting.

In the middle of the night, all of that changed. Officers broke into their home, arresting both Richard and Mildred, stating that their marriage license was no good in Virginia and that they had violated anti-miscegenation laws that stated that mixed-race couples were a violation punishable by jail time. With the assistance of a local attorney (Bill Camp), the Lovings were released under one condition: they had to leave the state of Virginia and not return for 25 years. They had to leave their families, their land, the home that they wanted to build, and the future they had seen for themselves. As the world changed with the rise of the civil rights movement, an opportunity arose to use the Lovings' case to finally eliminate the racist laws still destroying lives in part of the country.

From the opening scenes, there’s a tactile, lived-in quality to Nichols’ filmmaking. People are always doing something with their hands — cleaning a kitchen, laying brick for a house, working on a car, etc. And there’s always something in the air, from the sound of crickets to the palpable heat of the Virginia summer. Nothing here feels like a backlot. The production design and direction is so beautifully detailed that people will take it for granted. The Loving home, the cars he works on, the jail cells in which they spend the night, etc. — every element has been carefully considered but not overly highlighted. It is a masterful example of how to use time and place in a film without drawing attention to it as so many award season movies tend to do. There’s nothing flashy here.

And that filmmaking aesthetic applies to the performances as well, two of the best acting turns you’ll see this year. Edgerton, long a fascinating actor, has never been better than he is here, especially as the weight of his situation almost looks like it’s physically pushing him down. His eyes are squinty, his posture bent from hard labor and the concern over the well-being of his wife and family. As the Loving case became more high-profile, Richard Loving had to live with constant fear and the realization that his family was arguably safer if he would just leave them. Rarely has the oppressive, every-minute-of-every-day atmosphere of the impact of racism been captured as it is here. It is like the dust in the air or the crickets at night — always there.

As phenomenal as Edgerton is here, it’s arguably Negga’s movie. It’s her eyes that I will remember, conveying so much inner monologue with just a downward glance or adoring look at her husband. There’s a scene in which Mildred gets some surprising and good news via a phone call and Nichols knows two things. One, he knows that he shouldn’t give Mildred an exclamation or a monologue. Two, he knows not to leave Negga’s face. Her eyes say so much more than dialogue possibly could in this situation. And that speaks to Nichols’ gifts as a filmmaker: one who understands how to use the tools at his disposal more than just writing expository dialogue. We see films every day in which people openly convey how they feel and what they want in ways that don’t reflect the human experience. And yet there’s more reflected about what it means to be a human being in Negga’s eyes than anything I’ve seen on film in a long time. It’s a complex, subtle, quiet performance that gains its power through its believability more than the showiness we’ve come to expect in films like this one.

Loving has few twists and turns. It is a rather straightforward drama, and therefore probably won’t be flashy enough for some viewers. And yet it feels urgent and current to today’s drama. Why do some films set a half-century ago feel like history lessons while others feel essential to not just the ‘60s but the ‘10s? Because there’s truth in the story of Richard and Mildred Loving. There’s something about people who just want to be allowed to start a family that is timeless and always will be. And it takes an incredibly talented trio of people in Nichols, Negga and Edgerton to convey that timelessness in a way that feels genuine. When Loving ends, one doesn’t feel like they spent time being manipulated by awards bait or melodrama. One appreciates a story well-told and having been allowed a brief, believable window into the lives of Richard and Mildred Loving, two people who changed the country just by falling in love.

Available for home viewng: Nocturnal Animals

Nocturnal Animals employs one of the most inventive uses of neo noir tropes and techniques I have seen in recent years. Intense, insightful, and strangely powerful, Tom Ford’s adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel, Tony and Susan, assumes an intelligent viewer. The movie isn’t afraid to ping-pong back and forth between past and present, between fiction and reality. It doesn’t worry that the viewer might get lost (believing that, if such a thing happens, they’ll catch up along the way).

After an unforgettable opening in which art gallery curator Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) offers a glimpse into what can only be described as "performance art", we’re plunged into the midst of an upper class marriage on the rocks. However, just as Susan’s relationship with her current spouse, Hutton (Armie Hammer), is crumbling, she is pulled back into the orbit of her first husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal). Finally, after many false starts, he has found the inspiration to finish a novel. He wants Susan, to whom it is dedicated, to have a chance to read "Nocturnal Animals" before its publication.

The book-within-the movie introduces us to Tony Hastings (Gyllenhaal), who is on a road trip through the wide open spaces of Texas with his wife, Laura (Isla Fisher), and his teenage daughter, India (Ellie Bamber). After becoming involved in a road rage-inspired game of cat-and-mouse, Tony’s car is forced off to the side with a flat tire. The family’s tormentors — three twenty-somethings whose consciences are nowhere to be found — start out with teasing and taunting before moving to darker actions.

During the course of its nearly two-hour running length, Nocturnal Animals repeatedly returns to this fictional story because it illustrates a critical aspect of how Edward finds closure. To explain where the protagonists are in the present, the film delves into the past, rummaging through scenes from Susan and Edward’s marriage — from the giddy, optimistic early days to the ultimate betrayal Susan commits at the end. "Nocturnal Animals" is Edward’s therapy and, after reading it, Susan hopes they can reconnect.

Nocturnal Animals’ first book-within-movie segment is harrowing — as taught and unnerving as any extended sequence in any recent horror movie or thriller. The three antagonists, as portrayed by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Karl Glusman, and Robert Aramayo, exude menace and the slow, torturous manner in which they prey on their victims enhances the level of tension. Although this is an enactment of events found in Edward’s novel, we’re initially unsure whether this is purely "fiction" or whether it’s a partially autobiographical reflection. After all, Edward and Tony are both played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Isla Fisher is made to look like an Amy Adams clone. That uncertainty, coupled with cuts to Susan’s reactions as she reaches key moments in the book, creates an ambiguity about whether this might have happened.

A series of flashbacks highlight the highs and lows of Susan and Edward’s relationship as it traverses the road from friendship to marriage to divorce. These jumbled memories are interleaved with Susan’s reading of "Nocturnal Animals," which turns into a meditation on what steps a victim can take when traditional justice fails. The film’s ending is a gut-punch and, as powerful and appropriate as it is, it will shock some viewers with its suddenness and bleakness.

Both leads are excellent. Amy Adams brings the sad introspection she evidences in Arrival to this performance. The characters of Susan and Dr. Louise Banks are similar in many ways — both are haunted by regrets and find their present circumstances to be intolerable. Jake Gyllenhaal plays two parts. Although Edward isn’t fully fleshed out, Tony is a repository of guilt and anger. The characteristic that weds the two roles is that of a supposed "weakness" — some see this trait as a flaw of Edward’s and Edward, through his writing, ponders whether it’s a failing of Tony’s. Michael Shannon’s portrayal of the lawman supporting Tony’s desire for justice is small (at least in terms of screen time) but critical. Finally, Laura Linney’s scene-stealing cameo as Susan’s mother is a highlight.

As was true of Ford’s directorial debut, A Single Man, the fashion designer’s eye is evident in how every shot is framed. There are some gorgeous images, such as the one where a young Susan and Edward meet on a snowy New York street. There are audacious moments, such as the opening credits sequence where fully nude, corpulent women are shown dancing and posing. Although there are times when a visual director can become obsessed with the look of his film (to the detriment of the narrative), that’s not the case here. Ford’s aesthetic enhances the movie’s story and momentum.

Although the second half of Nocturnal Animals doesn’t rise to the level of the white-knuckle first 45 minutes, the production as a whole represents an effective melding of visceral and intellectual filmmaking. This movie leaves an impression that’s difficult to shake.

A toast to Daisy’s Saloon

I’ve spent a lot of time in San Juan. For four months back in 1966 I actually lived in a small town called Fajardo, a coastal community about an hour’s drive east of San Juan. I started a weekly newspaper there and it was printed in San Juan so I spent an average of two days a week in Puerto Rico’s capital.

Most of that time was spent in the area of town known as "Old San Juan." I didn’t make enough to stay in the tourist section, but even if I did I know I would have found Old San Juan more to my liking anyway. I never ran across a joint called Daisy’s Saloon in Old San Juan. That’s not to say it didn’t exist there or anywhere else in San Juan, or that the bar didn't spring up long after I moved from Puerto Rico to Bermuda. Actually, I prefer to think that Daisy’s Saloon doesn’t exist anywhere outside the poetic mind of Keith Greeninger.

Greeninger (in a classic understatement) is not among the most well known of singer-songwriters, especially around these parts. Here he may be remembered as someone who won the New Folk competition one year in the late 1990s at the Kerrville Folk Festival. He makes his home in Northern California and spends most of his public time touring the clubs, college campuses and folk festivals in that area, especially around Santa Cruz. In fact, I must admit I am not an avid collector or even semi-knowledgeable of Greeninger’s musical output. I do know, however, that this song about Daisy’s Saloon and Eddie and Marshal and Larry and the San Juan Bakery and Merle Haggard and the Mission Café absolutely haunts me and I mean that in a very positive way. Take a listen.

Celebrating McDormand

I have been a huge Frances McDormand fan ever since 1984's Blood Simple, one of my favorite films of all-time. Her most famous role, of course, was as Sheriff Marge Gunderson in 1996's Fargo, a performance that earned her an Oscar for best actress. She has received three other Oscar nominations, for her brilliantly moving understated performance in 1988's Mississippi Burning, and then for Almost Famous (2000) and North Country (2004).

Other than her much lauded television appearance in 2014's Olive Kitteridge, and her overlooked job in Moonrise Kingdom in 2012, McDormand hasn’t done that much of late to get all that excited about. That might be about to change, however.

I’m not saying she’s a slam dunk for a best actress Oscar nomination for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Minnesota, but from the looks of the trailer below I think she certainly has to be in the running. She plays the mother of girl who was raped and murdered and after a couple of months, when she doesn’t see any progress made toward solving the case, she makes over three billboards leading into town with controversial messages criticizing the town’s respected police chief (played by Woody Harrelson).

Three Billboards began filming in Sylva, N.C., last May and is expected to be released through Fox Searchlight sometime in the fall. It is written and directed by Martin McDonagh, who made another one of my favorite thrillers, In Bruges (2008).

Available for home viewing: Julieta

Orson Welles famously said that, in preparing to direct Citizen Kane, he studied the Old Masters: "John Ford, John Ford and John Ford." In the work of Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar, an innovator who’s also a cinema-classicist, one can detect the influence of various masters, from Alfred Hitchcock to Douglas Sirk. But at this point we must also recognize another master associated with his oeuvre: Almodóvar himself.

Julieta, Almodóvar’s 20^th feature and his best, in my view, since Volver a decade ago, is a film of such quietly assured mastery that it reminds you American cinema today has virtually no one comparable to him: an artist who exercises total control over his work, employs a filmic idiom derived largely from the lushest productions of classic Hollywood, and operates in a fictional realm of his own creation.

Granted, he’s no longer as fashionable as the post-modern provocateur of Matador, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Yet the mature mastery of Julieta exhibits a higher, more refined level of accomplishment than those films, as must be recognized by anyone who doesn’t confuse youthful insouciance with real artistry. Surely, any filmmaking teacher trying to instruct a class of young Orson Welleses today in the subtleties of film craft could find few models better than Julieta.

Like most Almodóvar films, this one centers on women. Its narrative premise can be simply stated: a woman faces the painful mystery of her long alienation from her daughter. But this is only the germ of a drama that grows steadily richer, more resonant and complex as the filmmaker elaborates it.

As usual for Almodóvar, the film opens with images that feel strikingly significant. We see folds of rich red fabric swaying against each other, almost like the bodies of lovers. What seems inscrutable, though, is soon revealed to be the gown of Julieta (Emma Suárez), a middle-aged, middle-class woman who soon takes a small sculpture and swathes it in bubble wrap. At home in her chicly minimalist Madrid apartment, she’s soon visited by the man in her life, Lorenzo (Darío Grandinetti), who wants to discuss their upcoming vacation to Portugal. But this is a getaway that’s not to be.

That’s because her seemingly happy and settled life is suddenly derailed by a chance encounter. One day, she runs into a very fashionable young woman who says she has seen Julieta’s daughter at Lake Como and that she now has three kids. Stunned by this news, which signals that it’s been a long time since mom saw her progeny, Julieta falls into depression, finding her mind thrown back into the past.

Three decades earlier, Julieta (now Adriana Ugarte), an attractive and adventurous classics teacher, sets off on a nocturnal train trip that will change her life. When an older man tries to chat, she flees to the bar car, where she meets Xoan (Daniel Grao), a handsome young fisherman. The two make love that night, but something else happens: the man she first met commits suicide — creating a spark of guilt that will take other forms later in the story.

It’s a story that ranges over many years and various locales. When Julieta moves in with hunky Xoan in his pretty Galician seaside cottage, she finds life complicated by the proximity of a beautiful female artist friend of his (Inma Cuesta) and a Mrs. Danvers-like housekeeper (Almodóvar regular Rossy de Palma) who seems to resent anyone else’s happiness. Julieta and Xoan have a daughter, Antía, who has a happy childhood. But after family disruption propels a move to Madrid when the girl is a teen, an abyss begins to open between her and her mother.

A while later, Antía leaves home for a "retreat" in the Pyrenees, and when Julieta goes to pick her up, she’s told her daughter no longer wants to see her. She discovered her life "lacked a spiritual dimension" and has found something she missed: faith.

I must confess that I’ve been very up and down about Almodóvar’s films over the years, but one of the pleasures of following his work is seeing how he continues to evolve. No film is just like any other. Of this one, he has said in the film's press notes: "I’ve contained myself very much in the visual composition, in the austerity of the supporting characters. No one sings songs. Nor do I introduce scenes from other films to explain the characters. There isn’t the slightest trace of humor, or any mixing of genres, or so I believe. From the outset I had in mind that Julieta is a drama, not a melodrama, a genre to which I’m partial. A tough drama with a hint of mystery: someone who’s looking for someone without knowing why she left."

That gives a concise picture of some of the qualities that set Julieta apart from others of his films, but "austerity" shouldn’t be taken to mean that he’s gone all Bressonian us. There’s a luxuriance to both the storytelling and the visual manner of the film, but it’s a luxuriance without flamboyance or cheekiness. Almodóvar stages scenes economically and elegantly, in such a precise way that they could indeed be used as classroom examples. Along with cinematographer Jean-Claude Larrieu and editor José Salcedo, his collaborators include composer Alberto Iglesias, whose haunting score I think is the best I’ve heard in a movie this year.

The two actresses who play Julieta deserve commendation, both for their individual excellence and for the way that Almodóvar blends their performances. Honestly, when watching the film, I couldn’t be sure whether I was seeing two women or one transformed by makeup and special effects. That almost uncanny seamlessness is a marvel in itself.

Almodóvar’s script was based on three stories by Alice Munro, and for a while he considered making it in her native Canada. That he ended up back in Spain is of course altogether fitting. He may share Catholic roots with Hitchcock and Bresson, but this film’s concern with guilt, transference, fate, mystery and (more obliquely) faith connects intricately with his native culture as well as the ideas expressed in his previous films. Building on his previous work while also charting a new course, it is suffused with the casual confidence of an established master.