This week's DVD releases

Arrival ***½

Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi contact drama is dreamy, freaky, audacious. It skirts the edge of absurdity, as anything like this must, but manages to keep clear, and it includes a big flourish in the manner of early films by M Night Shyamalan, which adroitly finesses the narrative issue of what exactly to do with a movie about aliens showing up on Earth. I have been agnostic about this kind of movie recently, after the overwrought disappointments of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, among others. But Villeneuve’s Arrival is both heartfelt and very entertaining.

As is now expected with this kind of film, the protagonist is a flustered, bewildered civilian with special expertise, brusquely pressed into service by the military, which has got the spacecraft surrounded in the short term. Amy Adams is Dr Louise Banks, a professor of comparative linguistics with nothing and no one in her life but her work. But as it happens, Dr Banks was once seconded as a military adviser to translate a video of insurgents speaking Farsi. So when a dozen giant spaceships land in 12 different locations on Earth, each looking like a bisected rugby ball standing on end, a bunch of army guys led by Col. Weber (Forest Whitaker) show up on Louise’s doorstep, demanding she come with them to help translate what the aliens are saying. Why, you ask, did they not approach Noam Chomsky, with his understanding of "deep structure" in language? Perhaps Prof Chomsky did not care to help America’s military-intelligence complex.

At any rate, Louise’s liaison is the flirtatious Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), a military scientist who, in a stereotypical and fallacious way, equates his masculinity with science and affects to despise what he sees as the softer discipline of linguistics. Michael Stuhlbarg plays Halpern, the glowering CIA chief. But unbeknown to them, there is a secret tragedy in Louise’s life: a lost child, dead of cancer in her late teens. Her attempts to communicate with the aliens cause painful but illuminating echoes in her mind.

If a lion could speak, said Wittgenstein, we would not understand him. Does the same go for aliens? Spielberg solved this issue elegantly in Close Encounters of the Third Kind by making the form of communication a five-note musical phrase, ending questioningly on the dominant. Villeneuve’s solution is more literal. The aliens have a code which — a little preposterously — Louise finds herself more or less able to crack, with the crowdsourced expertise of the other 11 human-contact teams around the globe. But it is her human intuition, vulnerability and spontaneity that finally enable her to reach out to the visitors.

Inevitably, these "contact" moments are where the film’s real impact and atmosphere have to be. And Villeneuve doesn’t disappoint in sequences of eerie and claustrophobic strangeness — though I concede the film is most effective before the physical form of the aliens is revealed. There are also touches of comedy: Ian and Louise decide, for convenience’s sake, to nickname two aliens Abbott and Costello— maybe in homage to the linguistic misunderstanding in the duo’s famous routine about a baseball team’s positions.

By coolly switching focus to political intrigue and betrayal within the human ranks, Villeneuve keeps a grip on his story and creates ballast for its departure into the realms of the visionary and supernatural. And he also prepares us for the film’s sense that language itself, freed of our usual sense of its linear form, might be more important than anyone thought. (I wonder if Villeneuve has seen the 2010 documentary Into Eternity, by Danish film-maker Michael Madsen, about attempts to devise a new universal language to label underground repositories of nuclear waste — labels whose warnings have to be understood by future humans whose language has evolved away from what we know now.)

Arrival is a big, risky, showy movie which jumps up on its high-concept highwire and disdains a net. And yes, there are moments of silliness when it wobbles a little, but it provides you with spectacle and fervent romance.


The Edge of Seventeen ***

In the best teen films, from Sixteen Candles to Clueless to Superbad to the greatest high school movie of the last 10 years, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the main characters have a way of occupying the moral high ground. Even when they’re outcasts or "losers," their cleverness and wit — the sheer humanity of their alienation — puts us right on their side. But that’s not quite the case with Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld), the radiantly troubled heroine of The Edge of Seventeen

She’s a creature of intense magnetism who, in theory at least, has all the qualities that an viewer could want. She’s poised and beautiful, with a wardrobe — colorful wedgy sneakers, parochial-school skirt worn as ironic fashion statement — catchy enough to be just this side of fatally hip. She speaks in drop-dead verbal volleys, which she stretches out into entertainingly long and winding sentences, and she surveys the world with an awareness that links her to several generations of precocious movie rebels. When she interrupts one of her teachers, Mr. Bruner (Woody Harrelson), during his lunch hour, all so she can deliver a big speech about how she wants to commit suicide, it’s clear that she’s drama-queening whatever’s going on with her. We sit back and chuckle at her over-the-top audacity. It all seems a bit broad, and maybe a bit too familiar.

But Nadine, it turns out, isn’t just an outrageous charmer. She’s a pill, a narcissist who speaks in forked tongue — a girl who uses her God-given brains and humor by turning them against everyone around her. The Edge of Seventeen was written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig (it’s her first feature), with James L. Brooks serving as its lead producer, and it’s a teen movie that starts off funny ha-ha but turns into something more like a light-fingered psychological thriller. The drama is all in Nadine’s personality, in how far she’ll go to act out her distress.

She’s got a major problem with her brother, Darian (Blake Jenner), a golden-boy jock who’s the most popular dude in his senior class. She can’t stand the fact that he outshines her, so she turns him into her enemy. "Your head is too big for your body," she snaps. "It looks ridiculous, and you’ll never be able to fix it." Handsome as he is, we look at him and think, "She’s kind of right." Therein lies Nadine’s power: She’s so smart that she zeroes in on people’s weak spots, and spouts them, and trumps them. But the one this all leaves in the dust is her.

It takes a certain high-wire daring to make a teen comedy in which the heroine acts like a holy terror, and The Edge of Seventeen all but invites you to gaze at Nadine and think of her as, you know, the B-word. Except for one important qualifier: Deep down, she’s not really out to wound people — she’s trying, almost compulsively, to push them away. Ever since her big-screen debut in 2010, playing Mattie Ross in True Grit, Hailee Steinfeld has gathered confidence as a performer, and The Edge of Seventeen is her breakthrough. She’s a fantastic actress, with a sharpness and verve that belies the catlike softness of her features. She’s like the young Elizabeth Taylor, with playful flexing eyebrows that italicize her every thought. Even when she’s just tossing off lines, Steinfeld makes Nadine a hellion you can’t tear yourself away from. She isn’t just the star of The Edge of Seventeen — she’s its center of gravity.

Why does a girl who looks like such a sweet person behave like she wants to burn the room down? The film explains it all, and it also (mercifully) doesn’t. A flashback reveals that Nadine was always difficult: a 7-year-old who refused to get out of the car to go to school. She was already at war with her mother (Kyra Sedgwick), while her pockmarked Billy Joel-loving nerd of a daddy (Eric Keenleyside) doted on her and made her feel protected — until she was 13, when he died (while driving in the car with her) of a heart attack.

You could say that that tragedy unhinges her family, and that she’s never recovered. Yet the quirky, slow-gathering force of The Edge of Seventeen is that it’s not a cause-and-effect melodrama. The fact that Nadine lost her father is part of her unhappiness now, but her crisis is more like a perfect storm of fate, temperament, jealousy, and the era we’re living in. In the midst of a sleepover, her longtime best friend, Krista (Haley Lu Richardson), falls into bed with her brother — a far-from-outlandish situation, but one that Nadine can’t deal with. Something in her snaps. She tells Krista that it’s either Darian or her — a totally fascist thing to say — and when the sincere Krista (rightly) chooses love over a friendship that’s starting to look like not so much of a friendship, Nadine is cut loose, on her own. She now has nothing to rely on but the echo chamber of her own personality.

At lunch, she visits Mr. Bruner, played by Harrelson as a seen-it-all saintly cynic who can match Nadine rejoinder for ironic rejoinder. She does a hilarious deconstruction of his baldness (and his salary), and she has a telling moment with him, confessing that she loathes her fellow students because she’s an "old soul," a girl out of time. But it’s a sign of what a strong filmmaker Kelly Fremon Craig is that the old-soul line is subtly undercut by the reality we’re shown. Nadine, with her snark and mockery, her way of treating life as a taking-off point for vicious teasing, is anything but an old soul. She’s a pure product of the digital age, though she has a depth that the heroines of films like Easy A or The To Do List did not.

The Edge of Seventeen is often a kick, especially when Nadine gets together with her classmate Erwin (Hayden Szeto), a slyly chivalrous Korean-American animator she reduces, at moments, to a quizzical stutter; the two of them match right up. She also throws herself at Nick (Alexander Calvert), a dreamboat she promises, in a spontaneous text message from hell, to sleep with — though by the time they get together, she has figured how to flip even the object of her affection into a figure of resentment. It’s at this point we realize she’s just going to keep sinking lower and lower, until she hits bottom. Yet the way The Edge of Seventeen works, Nadine’s descent isn’t a downer. It’s darkly hilarious and even necessary. She just has to break through to the other side of it.


Christine ***

In the final moments of Antonio Campos's Christine, the warming theme song from The Mary Tyler Moore Show is heard, providing a brilliant signoff that's simultaneously droll and tragic. That cheery lite-feminism anthem evokes a 1970s TV career girl tossing her hat in the air as she accepts her single status and takes ownership of her town, nodding to the parallel universe of positivity and achievement that Christine Chubbuck dreams of inhabiting.

Played by Rebecca Hall with an awkward abrasiveness that swings fearlessly between off-putting and affecting, the character is a sad pop-cultural footnote who is now receiving her primetime moment, 42 years after she shot herself in the head, live on camera. How curious today's video viewers will be about that bizarre story remains a big question.

Chubbuck's 1974 suicide on a local news show in Sarasota, Fla., had satirical echoes in the film Network, an earlier teleplay version of which predates her death. In Network, however, the central figure was a nightly news anchorman whose psychotic breakdown and threatened suicide were broadcast ratings manna until his truth-telling rants became inconvenient. The more private events surrounding Chubbuck's death in a much dimmer spotlight are the subject of two films that premieried right around the same time, the other one being Robert Greene's meta-docudrama, Kate Plays Christine.

Having touched on the dark power of video technology in his previous features, Afterschool and Simon Killer, Campos goes deeper into that territory here, working for the first time from a screenplay by another writer, Craig Shilowich. The result is a peculiar film — chilly and uncomfortable, but also steeped in a sly sense of irony. The prickly humor makes some scenes play almost like a King of Comedy-type riff on media culture, fashioned into an extremely muted workplace comedy.

That creates some tonal uncertainty in the first hour, especially given the amount of time it takes to reveal the pathos in Hall's brittle characterization. But the movie gets on firmer ground once the disappointments and frustrations start mounting up, and Christine's gnawing ambition inexorably gives way to a sudden fatalistic awakening. To their credit, Campos and Shilowich never play the senseless death of the protagonist for movie-of-the-week poignancy, nor as trite commentary about the hunger for fame and success. Rather, Christine is an unblinking yet also understated character study of an unstable woman with a consuming professional drive, who hits a wall as her 30th birthday approaches and sees no way around it.

Played out against the unfolding of Richard Nixon's fall from grace on the national political stage, the film juxtaposes that dramatic news fodder with the mind-numbing items Christine is forced to cover on her community-interest beat — strawberry festivals, egg production, zoning disputes. Even when she tries to get her teeth into a story, micromanaging every segment with backup from her supportive cameraperson, Jean (Maria Dizzia), her irascible producer, Mike (Tracy Letts), yawns.

With ratings in the toilet and advertising down, Mike delivers a new mandate calling for juicier stories: "If it bleeds, it leads." But Christine fights him every step of the way, refusing to sensationalize work that she approaches with integrity. Her eventual attempts to compromise, by uncovering some grit in sunshiny Sarasota, are unimpressive. But when word trickles down that station owner Bob Anderson (John Cullum) is looking to poach talent for a new network in Baltimore, a top-30 market, Christine's bids to play the game become more manic.

To the extent that she has a life outside the studio, it's a series of paradoxes that don't quite fit with the hard-edged professional woman itching to make her mark. She drives around town in a bright yellow VW bug, singing along to John Denver; volunteers at a clinic, performing puppet shows for disabled kids; and spends hours in a girlish pink bedroom plastered with MOR pop posters, cooking up ideas for lead news items that will never happen.

Incapable of a relaxed social interaction, Christine lives with her well-meaning but flaky mother Peg (J. Smith-Cameron). Peg loves her daughter but doesn't know how to talk to her, nervously wondering if she's slipping into another funk like the one that caused her to uproot from her previous home in Boston. Along with her obvious mood disorder, Christine suffers from physical pain caused by an ovarian cyst. When she's informed that surgery will lessen the chances of her having children, another empty canyon opens up in her life.

That encroaching desolation is fed also by her unrequited love for the channel's anchorman, George. He's played by Michael C. Hall in a delicious turn as a suave charmer with a cocked eyebrow and a winning smile but not much substance. When George finally gets past Christine's stiffness and asks her out to dinner, what seems at first to be a date ends up turning into a misguided motivational project that rakes up stark truths. To make things worse, the evening ends with Christine absorbing the crushing lesson that nothing succeeds like mediocrity.

While Campos's tone and storytelling are not always the smoothest, and some of his choices are perplexing (that distracting tick-tock music, for instance), he slowly builds a detailed mosaic of his central character and the environment she's so determined to conquer. The fact that it's so cheap and unglamorous (production designer Scott Kuzio's recreation of '70s decor and color schemes is just right) makes Chubbuck's story all the more plaintive.

There's tasty character work, not just from Michael C. Hall, embracing the inherent cheesiness in the caricature of the former golden-boy quarterback rarely troubled by his limitations. Letts is also terrific as the exasperated newsroom veteran with the explosive temper; Veep regular Timothy Simons is funny and endearing as the gangly weatherman; Cullum nails a specific breed of eccentric but unpretentious wealthy businessman; and Dizzia has several quietly moving moments as the colleague who would be Christine's friend if she'd let her.

But the movie rests on Rebecca Hall's capable shoulders, bowed from the chip Christine carries around. Even her walk is clumsy, as if she's so possessed by the need to get somewhere and do something meaningful that she can barely coordinate her limbs. Like the director and screenwriter, Hall refuses to sentimentalize her character by making her a gifted, misunderstood victim of a culture that tends more often to reward women like shapely sportscaster Andrea (Kim Shaw). On the evidence presented here, Chubbuck reads as dour and almost scarily intense on camera, so her professional aptitude is questionable even if her dedication is not. But Hall makes it impossible to look away from this portrait of a woman brought to the heartbreaking conclusion that she's beyond hope.


Bleed for This **½

Bleed for This starts out like a traditional underdog-fighter-makes-good flick, based on a true story, pivots and becomes something else, then goes back to being traditional.

Miles Teller plays Vinny Paz, aka Pazienza, aka The Pazmanian Devil, an Italian-American junior welterweight fighter from Rhode Island. He's a likable, young, working class guy who doesn't take the sport as seriously as he should. He barely makes weight and stays out all night before fights blowing his money on gambling. His domineering dad (Ciaran Hinds) hooks him up with legendary trainer Kevin Rooney (Aaron Eckhart), one of the wizards who helped channel Mike Tyson's rage. It's Rooney who recommends that Paz move up one weight class, a bold move. Everyone else in Paz's circle (including his manager Lou Duva, played by gravel-voiced character actor Ted Levine, who's never looked worse or more weirdly compelling) thinks it's a bad idea. But it turns out to be a stroke of genius. Paz becomes not just a winner but a sensation, beating champ Roberto Duran (Edwin Rodriguez, radiating intelligence and focus) and priming himself for stardom.

Then he gets blindsided by life: a car slams into him head-on as he's driving to the Foxwoods casino in Connecticut and throws his vehicle into a ditch. His spine is damaged. He has to wear a "halo" to keep his head upright; it sits on his shoulders like scaffolding, but despite the theologically loaded name of the device, director Ben Younger (Boiler Room) and cinematographer Larkin Seiple restrain themselves from playing up the Christ-crucified parallels that are sure to form in viewers' minds. The doctor tells him not only will he never fight again, he'll probably never walk again. Undaunted, Paz charms Rooney into undertaking a secret training regimen in his parents' basement, and the film becomes a recovery story. The emphasis is mainly on what the injury does to Paz's body, and how he manages and transcends the pain: a mind-over-matter narrative.

The problem, though, is that we never get enough sense of Paz's interior life to judge this movie as anything other than a comeback story about a nice guy who got knocked out by the cosmos and hauled himself up. Its modesty is welcome, and its deep knowledge of boxing pictures and sports weepies helps the story glide along. Still, there's a deeper, more powerful tale here that remains frustratingly untapped, maybe because the film knows that if it got too messy, contradictory or raw, it would lose the "inspirational" label and become art.

Many reviews of this film have complained about how predictable the story is, which seems like an odd complaint, given the script's basis in fact. But if you think of Bleed for This in terms of a commercial drama rather than as a simple story of a man rebuilding his life, you might have to admit they're on to something.

The direction, the photography, the editing, the production design and most of the performances are on point. And there are ways in which Bleed for This transcends cliche — mainly in the sociological margins of the story. We get more journalistic details than pictures like this often provide: the scene-setting driving shots of Providence and leafy surrounding counties, the texture of the wood paneled walls in characters' homes, the cigarettes they smoke, the beer they drink, and the cadence of their talk, which often revolves around men expressing love by busting each other's chops. "You get cable with that thing?" Rooney asks Paz, indicating his halo. "You got heart, kid," Duva tells Paz, "but you wear it on your f--n' chin."

The film excels in its portrayal of what it means to be injured. Too many boxing films downplay the fragility of the body, unless a hero is being warned that if he keeps fighting, he'll go blind or suffer brain damage (he always disregards the warning and wins anyway). The middle section of Bleed for This, which focuses on Paz and Rooney's secret rehab project, is an exception. We see Paz sneaking into the basement, gingerly sliding onto his weight bench, and trying to bench-press a barbell he hasn't touched in years, then removing weight after weight until only the bar remains. The first rule of rehab is "start small." It's great to see a movie not only acknowledge this reality, but make the man embracing it seem heroic.

But the movie has major problems. The biggest is Teller, a committed and likable actor miscast as Paz. You're aware of how hard he must have worked to get in shape, sell the accent, get the demeanor right, and so on, but he's never wholly credible as the hero. This performance feels built from without, not found within. Teller lacks the affable meathead quality that made Mark Wahlberg so compelling in The Fighter, the movie that this film's modern, white ethnic, working class setting evokes. He's just right in films like The Spectacular Now and Whiplash, playing nonviolent guys struggling with specific personal demons, but I never bought him here as an Italian-American, a guy with a working class sensibility, or a boxer who's driven and skilled enough to win five world titles in three different weight classes (lightweight, junior middleweight and super middleweight). He's bouncy, even chirpy, verging on Tom Hanks or John Cusack in light-comic-lead mode, and while he gets certain signatures right in the ring (such as Paz's whirligig punch) the editing and camerawork often seem to be doing too much of the work for him (when he throws a flurry of combinations, he looks like he's dog-paddling).

To be fair, the writing and filmmaking are probably as much at fault as Teller — actors are only as good as their collaborators and their material — but it's a debilitating strike against the movie. The supporting cast, though, is flawless, especially Katey Sagal as Paz's mom, who listens to fights from the next room because she can't bear to watch her boy get hit on TV, and Eckhart, whose transformation into Rooney is both emotionally and physically complete. He seems to have made himself shorter and changed his bone structure, which is not something they teach you at Stella Adler. When his character appeared onscreen for the first time, I mistook him for Dean Norris. Teller can't keep up with any of them. He's a promising junior welterweight, and this is a heavyweight cast.

The frame the movie puts around Paz's comeback is iffy, too. It's unabashed in telling us that Paz reset his life through optimism, stubbornness and hard work. There's no denying Paz's achievement, but it's one rarely shared by people who've suffered massive physical trauma, and it would've been nice if the film had acknowledged that. As is, there are scenes and moments (particularly during Paz's closing interview, a bewildering mistake) where Bleed for This seems to be suggesting that if Paz did it, you can, too, and if you can't, it's because you didn't try hard enough. That surely wasn't the point, but it's what comes across, and it gives what might otherwise have been a pretty good, occasionally inspired sports movie a sour aftertaste.


Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk **

"Hey, are you alright?" a fellow movie-goer asked me as I emerged from the theater after seeing Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. I was wondering the same thing myself, and pondering my recent medical history in doing so. A few weeks ago, while walking my dog, I began to feel terribly dizzy and disoriented and started sweating profusely. I quickly got over it with some sound medical advice from my son. It reminded me of when I went to see Ang Lee’s movie and came out feeling much the same way — disoriented, dizzy and feverish. Did the film literally make me sick?  If so, I can imagine a couple of reasons why.

First, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk was shot in 3D at a frame rate of 120 per second (five times the normal rate) at 4K, with the aim of producing a picture that offers far greater clarity and detail than standard movie images. Sony Pictures, though, elected not to go the expense of outfitting theaters so it could be viewed in the way it was shot, so it was seen as Ang Lee intended it in only a handful of theaters in the country. The version I saw was the "normal" version that will be released most places, which prompts a question: Would the "real" version have left me feeling less ill, more ill or about the same?

I would guess more, or about the same, to the extent that the feeling was owed to the movie’s unusual visuals. The experience left me recalling an event I attended back around the year 2000, where several industry experts explained the nature of digital projection, which was soon to be introduced to movie theaters. One noted that film has an innate graininess and lack of definition that digital shooting and projection can eliminate. But, he said, his team did an experiment where they filmed a driver’s-eye-view of a car careening down at a mountain road. Shown as a standard film image, it gave viewers the sense of an exciting rollercoaster ride. But with the graininess of film removed and a hyper-clear digital image put in its place, the same scene was so realistic that it made some moviegoers vomit.

Previously, the most noteworthy proponent of higher-frame-rate movie images has been the legendary cinematographer Douglas Trumbull, who shot 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Kubrick’s sci-fi epic — with its slow-moving planets, spaceships and vast distances — is arguably one of the few examples of a film that benefits from hyper-real images. Used in a standard dramatic movie like Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, the technique engulfs the viewer’s eye in a surfeit of razor-sharp detail that entail, quite literally, too much information. I don’t know how many people will share this sensation, but for me the effect was akin to a mild case of car sickness.

The second factor, which may be connected to the first, is the film’s main setting. Transpiring in 2004, the story (scripted by Jean-Christophe Castelli from Ben Fountain’s novel) follows the members of Bravo Squad, American soldiers from the Iraq War sent on a publicity tour after one of their number, Billy Lynn (Joe Alwyn), is acclaimed a hero for an on-camera attempt to rescue a fellow soldier during a firefight. For most of the single day we observe them, they are at a Dallas Cowboys football game, where they will take part in the halftime show. Though the film recurrently flashes back to the squad’s experience in Iraq, and Billy’s earlier dealings with his Texas family, we are repeatedly immersed in the football stadium’s garish grotesquerie and bizarre artificiality, complete with Jumbotron — an environment that oddly compounds the photography’s dizzying impact.

In an election year four decades ago, Robert Altman made a film called Nashville that X-rayed the ways showbiz leads Americans into thickets of self-serving fantasy and delusion. To an extent, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk seems to have similar things on its mind. The soldiers have a handler/agent (Chris Tucker) who spends much of the story on the phone trying to get a movie deal for them. That effort eventually leads them into the presence of a thoroughly odious zillionaire played by Steve Martin, who seems to be channeling Dick Cheney.

Then there’s the way soldiers are used in the halftime spectacle, when they’re paraded on the field behind Destiny’s Child. (Beyoncé is seen only from behind, as a bod beneath a bouncy wig: surely the movie’s most ridiculous special effect.) Yes, the boys are simply propaganda tools put on display like gladiators in ancient Rome, and it’s here that Billy reaches the climactic memory of his heroic deed, which doesn’t seem so glorious in retrospect: filmed in a single shot, it shows him tangling with an Iraqi fighter, then getting on top of him and sliding a knife into his throat.

The contrast between this grisly reality and the way it’s framed as jingoistic spectacle makes a satiric point that’s a bit too obvious to be effective. But that’s in keeping with the rest of the movie, unfortunately. The characters are paper-thin, the dialogue trite and superficial. And needless to say, this is another movie about the Iraq War that only cares about its impact on Americans, not its causes or, heaven forbid, its effects on Iraqis. The film’s only slight glimmer of political consciousness comes in the character of Billy’s sister (Kristen Stewart, excellent as always), who tries to talk him out of returning to Iraq.

When a book is written some day on "The Semiotics of Cute," surely there’ll be a chapter devoted to actor Joe Alwyn, who boasts cuteness roughly akin to that of Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. Even the cheerleader he romances at the big game (Makenzie Leigh) can’t help but remark that he’s "so darn cute." And would the reason for that be that, at a key moment, the audience is supposed to choke up at a giant close-up showing a single tear rolling down his cheek? Do ordinary-looking soldiers stand no chance of tugging at our heart strings?

Ang Lee is a great director whose last film, the Oscar-winning Life of Pi, made ingenious and very effective use of 3D technology. But that film had a much better story than Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which displays many of Lee’s skills but does little to advance the case for high-frame-rate cinematography.

Other new releases this week
The Witness *** Even if it is at times difficult to watch, this documentary remains riveting, and even important, as an honest and unflinching examination of despair.
National Bird *** This documentary shows that war will always be hell, even for those who aren’t on the battlefield. Sonia Kennebeck directs with a cold, distant eye, almost giving her subjects the same treatment they gave all those poor souls they targeted.
Seasons **½ While it features some of the most breathtaking nature photography this side of BBC’s Planet Earth miniseries, this gorgeously cinematic documentary ties said footage to a leaden all-purpose eco-consciousness message that nearly spoils the otherwise timeless experience.
Tharlo **½ A bit of anthropology, offering a glimpse into Tibetan life today, it’s perfectly serviceable.
King Cobra *½ A cut above most homoerotic masturbatory screen fantasies, but not by much.
London Town *½ An awkward merger of wide-eyed innocence and political unrest, Derrick Borte’s sweet, almost sugary picture wants to rock, but never finds the gumption.
Five Nights in Maine *½ A pensively maudlin Hallmark commercial, if such a thing exists, this film aspires to the level of high-minded, heart-wrenching tear-jerkery, and falls short.
Priceless *½ While the intentions behind this film might be honorable, the results are much less so.
The Crash ½* Several respectable actors offer dicey performances here, but the screenplay is the real villain, expecting thin references to real-world financial peril to paper over gaping holes in credibility and plain-old drama.

RATINGS
**** Excellent.
*** Good.
** Fair
* Poor
No stars Abysmal

This week's DVD releases

Loving ***

As straightforward "based on a true story" movies go, Loving is a strong account of the key factual events that led to the landmark 1967 Supreme Court decision overturning anti-miscegenation laws. Effectively acted and occasionally moving, the film both benefits from and is undermined by writer/director Jeff Nichols’ no-frills approach to the circumstances leading up to the court case. Although it could be argued that Loving does little more than bring life to a Wikipedia entry, it does so with tact and craftsmanship, teaching a history lesson while offering a cautionary message for current and future generations.

Most movies set in the 1960s focus on the cultural and sexual revolution — hippies, drugs, rock & roll, and the anti-Vietnam War movement. For Loving, those things are far removed and of little consequence. Nearly 100 years after the abolition of slavery, the South remains gripped by deep-rooted bigotries that disallow people of color to do many things, including intermarry with whites. Legal prohibitions have never been effective at stopping people from falling in love and that’s no different in the case of Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred Jeter (Ruth Negga). When we first meet them, they have been together for some time — long enough to have conceived a child. Now, with this unborn baby on the way, they have to decide how to move forward.

Virginia does not allow interracial marriage so a wedding at home is impossible. To legitimatize their union, they travel to Washington D.C. where a justice of the peace is more than happy to name them man and wife. They return to their small town and resume their lives, staying with Mildred’s family while Richard, a builder, prepares to craft the house that will become their home. But the secrecy surrounding their marriage doesn’t last. Someone says something and the local sheriff (Marton Csokas) show up in the middle of the night to arrest the couple. Their lawyer arranges a plea bargain and the judge agrees to suspend their sentence if they leave Virginia immediately and stay away for the next 25 years (they can return separately but can’t both be in the Commonwealth at the same time). The sentence, which is difficult for Richard, proves intolerable for Mildred and it’s only a matter of time before they violate the terms of their probation and place their freedom in jeopardy.

Loving chooses to focus on the domestic aspects of the Lovings’ marriage. The legal part of the story, which might make for a fascinating movie in its own right, is of secondary concern. Nichols introduces the two ACLU lawyers, Bernie Cohen (Nick Kroll) and Phil Hirschkop (Jon Bass), but they never evolve into more than secondary characters and their arguments in front of the Supreme Court (with the Lovings not in attendance) are only briefly excerpted.

The screenplay’s shortcomings are largely the result of time pressures. Even with a two hour running time, Loving needs to cover a decade’s worth of events and this doesn’t allow for it to "breathe" the way it should to cross the threshold into greatness. The narrative is comprised of key vignettes that take place over the course of the 1957-1967 period. The characters are not well fleshed-out, although a strong performance by Edgerton and an even better one by Negga help to overcome that hurdle. Where Loving does a good job is in illustrating the prejudices that surround both the inter-racial marriage and the decision to fight the statue that prohibits it. (Some of the secondary characters are represented as stock, stereotypical "’60s-era Southern racists" but I’m perfectly willing to accept that this may be a valid choice considering the setting.)

As Richard, Edgerton inhabits the character of a taciturn, reclusive man whose forte isn’t verbal communication. Richard isn’t warm or easy to like but there’s no doubt that his devotion to Mildred is genuine. Edgerton makes him marginally sympathetic without resorting to the usual tropes. Richard isn’t galvanized by circumstances to become a "new man." He doesn’t suddenly exhibit hitherto hidden charisma nor does he become a great orator. He’s pretty much the same man at the end as in the beginning. On the other hand, Mildred blossoms, transforming from a shy girl to a strong, determined woman who embraces the media attention because of what it might mean for the case. Negga’s performance places Mildred at the film’s emotional center. Her acting radiates authenticity and her expressive face fills in gaps left by the dialogue. She’s the best thing about this good film.

Nichols’ understated approach deflects melodramatic pitfalls but it keeps us at arm’s length. Historical authenticity is obviously one of Nichols’ primary goals and there’s no question he achieves that. The movie reflects the period, right down to the vintage Corelle dishes that Mildred uses. Loving’s emotional impact is more erratic, however. There are times when Nichols has difficulty balancing the personal story of a family’s struggles with the bigger picture of history-changing events and this results in pacing issues. Loving is an important and interesting motion picture but it’s not always as involving as it might have been.

Trolls **

I’m shocked, if not exactly appalled, that it took Hollywood more than half a century to bring the trolls phenomenon to the screen. To be sure, the little ugly dolls with crazy long hair are featured in the Toy Story films. But the poor critters, who were introduced to the American market in the early 1960s, ain’t ever had a film of their own.

In comes DreamWorks Animation and its shiny new mass market product, the computer-animated 3D family musical adventure Trolls, a $120 million tentpole extravaganza featuring a nicely varied selection of pop, R&B, hip-hop, and folk songs produced by pop god Justin Timberlake, who sings quite a few himself. Timberlake does a rousing rendition of Can't Stop the Feeling! and has several memorable duets — with Anna Kendrick on True Colors and September and with Gwen Stefani on What U Workin' With? — while he and Stefani are joined by Ron Funches for a funny Hair Up. Other vocalists include Zooey Deschanel and Ariana Grande, and there’s even a fun, slightly spooky version of Paul Simon’s The Sounds of Silence sung by Kendrick.

As for the story, Timberlake and Kendrick lead the cast as a pair of young trolls named Branch and Poppy who team up to save Troll Village, despite having fundamentally opposite views of the world. Branch, who is given a wonderfully woebegone tone by Timberlake, is a prickly pessimist, a grouch who’d rather hunker down alone in his hovel than take part in Troll Village’s joy-stuffed daily routine. His lack of joy makes him an outsider, an outcast. See, most trolls are like Poppy, psychotically happy, boundlessly optimistic airheads who spend their every waking hour hugging, singing, laughing, and tripping the light fantastic under a really big groovy disco ball.

Trolls are small, defenseless beings who live in a secret corner of the forest. But when Poppy throws a particularly loud bash, their location is discovered by the Bergens, an ugly race of monsters whose only joy in life is the taste of raw troll, sushi-style. An evil Bergen chef (Christine Baranski) swoops up the revelers one by one into her fanny pack. Only Poppy and Branch escape. Convinced their fellow trolls will be kept alive until the Bergen royal family can prepare a public feast, they journey to the lion’s den with a daft rescue plan.

Despite the competent animation, the great tunes, and funny voice work by costars Russell Brand and John Cleese, Trolls is a lackluster entry. The story is clichéd and predictable. Overall, the film has no real magic. It doesn’t have the silly-yet-profound soul of DreamWorks' Kung Fu Panda films, the heartbreaking artistry of animated masterpieces like Spirited Away and The Illusionist, or the madcap inventiveness of Disney's Frankenweenie and Zootopia.

What rankles is the fact that DreamWorks could have made a perfectly magical fable had they simply told the story of how the troll dolls were invented. The unisex toy, which has sold millions if not billions of units, was the brainchild of Thomas Dam, a Danish fisherman and woodcutter from a small town, who had fallen on such hard times in 1959 that he didn’t have money to buy a Christmas present for his beloved daughter Lila. As the story goes (it’s a factual tale with a bit of myth mixed in), Dam came up with the concept of the Good Luck Troll, as he called it, using ideas from folklore and his own imagination. He hand- carved the doll from wood, hoping the ugly little creature would bring Lila joy and luck. It sure did: Soon, other kids the fishing town of Gjøl wanted one, and orders came flooding in. Dam eventually founded a factory and began mass-producing the troll using vinyl and eventually plastic.

I’m not sure if anyone at DreamWorks bothered to read this wonderful little origin story. It’s a tale about real-world magic, about love and hope in the face of despair, about children’s relationships with their parents, about fishing, woodcarving. Man, it’s all there, a treasure trove of narrative ideas worthy of Hans Christian Andersen. But no, we get disco tunes, disco balls, troll-eating villains, and a Mission: Impossible rescue. Shame on you, DreamWorks!

American Pastoral *½

One poorly thought-through action can have a devastating ripple effect. So learns Mary Levov, the 16-year-old domestic terrorist in Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel American Pastoral, and so, I fear, has Ewan McGregor, who decided an adaption of this rich, layered and elusive text would be good material for his directorial debut.

McGregor directs himself as Seymour "The Swede" Levov, the golden boy of 1940s Weequahic, the Jewish section of Newark, N.J. A living, breathing example of excellence and assimilation, Swede was the sports titan and pillar of local industry who attained legendary status with his peers when he married Dawn, a non-Jewish former Miss New Jersey. Taking over his father’s glove factory in downtown Newark, Swede earns enough to buy a piece of American paradise — a small farm just a short drive from the city. Here Dawn can raise cows and their daughter Mary can frolic in sun-dappled meadows. As Woody Allen once joked "had I been born in Poland or Berlin I’d be a lampshade right now," but everything seems to have gone the right way for Swede.

But if American Pastoral is about anything it’s about how perception is just guess work. What we think we know is likely wrong, and no amount of examination, extrapolation or investigation is going to get at the actual truth. So who knows why young Mary, whose pre-teen years are marred by stuttering and perhaps some confused sexual feelings toward her father, became a raging, angry left-wing radical. Sure, it was the 1960s and those Jefferson Airplane records and copies of Rampart’s got a lot of kids’ blood boiling, but not everyone blew up the local post office and killed a man.

The bulk of the film dwells on Swede and Dawn dealing with the after effect of their daughter’s actions and subsequent disappearance in the hard left underground. The closest thing to exciting film-making comes once Swede is approached by a young woman (Valorie Curry) who knows of Mary’s whereabouts and shakes him down for some cash. These tawdry scenes are quite effective as they give McGregor something active to do to show his frustration, guilt and grief. The rest of the movie consists mostly of people just talking.

That won’t be too surprising to readers of the book, as part of its strength is how it plays with time and reliability. Those unfamiliar with the source material or how Roth can dwell on one concept for paragraphs at a time with some of the greatest prose in the English language may find themselves making the "get on with it gesture" on their couches. When we do meet up with Mary again in her third act persona, Dakota Fanning, who is quite strong as the angry bleeding-heart teen, is quite out of her depths masquerading as a ghostly spiritual being.

What we have on our hands is a dud, but there are a few grace notes that save it from being an unmitigated disaster. (As far as terrible idea Roth adaptations, Ernest Lehman’s Portnoy’s Complaint’s position is secure.) Swede’s glove factory ends up being at the epicentre of the Newark race riots and while McGregor’s reliance on newsreel footage is cheesy (and sets up similar shots of the Moon landing, Woodstock and another use of Buffalo Springfield’s For What Its Worth on the soundtrack, so help us all) it does touch on how well-meaning liberals react in the face of potential revolution. Swede proudly boasts his factory employs "80 percent Negros," but yanks his daughter back in fear when she tries to give a black power salute to a group of men who may or may not be forming an angry mob.

The best moment in the entire film is when Swede proudly shows how a glove is made, from dark leather shipped from Africa, turning a white girl’s hand a similar shade to one of his devoted black workers, who then tests it out by making a fist. There are signifiers flying all over the place and McGregor is wise enough to let them stay in the background. The unfortunate thing is that it’s the foreground that’s so dull. Jennifer Connolly acts her guts out in a monologue sequence that is airless and uninspired. And as the movie drones on the most engaging thing is trying to figure out just what is up with McGregor’s accent. American excellence may be an unattainable dream, but sometimes the facade will appear real to outsiders. This production is not such a case.

Other Releases This Week
Little Sister *** A slight, sweetly cynical indie drama about family and belonging and the ways we cope with life’s disappointments.
The Alchemist Cookbook *** So compelling is writer-director Joel Potrykus’s unnerving scenario — with its largely ambiguous tone of horror dramatically offset at times by explicit frights — that a viewer isn’t necessarily bothered by a lack of basic story information about who, what, where, when and why.
The Eagle Huntress *** A stunning location and a winning character are cannily deployed to create a likeable film in which viewers will need little persuasion to cheer the triumph of the underdog.
Burn Country **½ There’s plenty of intelligence and atmosphere in play here. But the prevailing tone is of pressure applied and nothing released, a genre exercise that plays as educational rather than exhilarating.
Antibirth ** Although often narratively cryptic and stylistically uneven, this could serve to establish director Danny Perez’s reputation in low-budget horror.
Frank & Lola ** Despite being played by two charismatic and more than capable actors (Michael Shannon and Imogen Poots), the title characters never click in the way they need to. They’re too cool and vague for the volcanic story they enact.
Almost Christmas ** The film’s energy can be relentless, but the feelings are real, and they’re wrapped in a dysfunctional-family package that’s so venerable and endearing as to seem a little bit new.
Desierto ** What should have been a solid B-movie thriller with a premise torn from today’s headlines is instead as arid and desolate as the land between Mexico and the United States in which it is set.
The Take *½ Imitating the Bourne capers rather than establishing an identity of its own, this is a strictly by-the-numbers political thriller that fails to capitalize on Idris Elba’s formidable screen presence.
Nerdland *½ With a scuzzy style to match its sleazeball vision of spotlight desperation and depravity, this Tinseltown satire — led by the voice work of Paul Rudd and Patton Oswalt — revels in the foulness of 21st-century pop culture, albeit to a degree that’s ultimately both exhausting and redundant.
The 9^th Life of Louis Drax *½ This is a intriguing but uneven thriller that doesn’t fully establish the tone and style that would be needed for a viewer to accept its supernatural plot.
Life on the Line ½* Underappreciated occupations deserve better than this cliché-clogged, utterly predictable film, a terrible move about the workers who keep the electrical grid functioning.

RATINGS
**** Excellent.
*** Good.
** Fair
* Poor
No stars Abysmal

Nailed It

About the only good thing to come out of the Trump administration so far is the incredible amount of fodder it has provided for comedians and satirists. Both Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer and Kate McKinnon as Betsy DeVoss are absolutely brilliant in this bit.

This week's DVD releases

Elle ***½

Perhaps only Paul Verhoeven would open a film mid-rape — the violent attack observed by an unimpressed green-eyed cat — and then follow up with a scene where Michèle, the rape victim, face puffy from the beating, picks up a phone and orders takeout, asking questions about the "holiday roll." She's not blasé about what happened. She's freaked out. She stuffs the dress she was wearing in the trash. She takes a bath, blood from her genital area staining the bubbles above. She does not call the police. Instead, she orders food. It's hard to picture this woman shedding a tear. Ever. The opening sequence of Elle is just the start of the demented and exhilarating experience that is this movie. Elle is a high-wire act without a net.

Based on the novel by Philippe Djian, adapted for the screen by David Birke (and then translated into French by Harold Manning),Elle is a maniacal and confident hybrid of various genres. It's a rape-revenge-ensemble-comedy-thriller-stalker mashup, if you can even picture that. But the film (with a couple of sick and twisted adjustments) is mostly reminiscent of the "women's pictures" of the 1930s and 40s, starring the shoulder-pad boss-bitches of Hollywood’s Golden Age, dominant dames like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, whose characters were put through wringers involving snake-in-the-grass boyfriends/husbands, ungrateful children, career treachery. You can picture Stanwyck stuffing her dress in the trash, lighting a cigarette and then ordering takeout after being raped in the middle of her living room. You can't imagine any of those women, or Isabelle Huppert, who plays Michèle, going to a support group or therapy. They'll gut it out on their own.

The film is crowded with characters. Michèle has a lot going on: a slacker son (Jonas Bloquet) who has an abusive pregnant girlfriend, an ex-husband (Charles Berling) now dating a young yoga teacher, a bored sex fling with a married man, an elderly Botox-ed mother (Judith Magre) carrying on an affair with a gigolo, a pressing project at work (she co-owns a video game company), a handsome married neighbor (Laurent Lafitte) whom she stares at longingly from across the street, and a complex backstory not revealed until far into the film. This woman has too much to DO to fall apart after the rape. But then she starts getting creepy texts from the unknown rapist: he knows where she is, what she's wearing. It could be anyone. Every man she knows is a suspect. She buys pepper spray (and, on impulse, a small axe) to protect herself. She says at one point, "Nut jobs I can handle. My specialty." You believe her. Maybe somewhere she always expected something like this, that horror would reach out its tentacles to find her again.

Verhoeven unbalances the existing tension of the "whodunit" aspect of Elle by giving us some pretty obvious clues early on who probably did it. Verhoeven does not "bury the lede" because he's interested in things other than the plot cranking itself out to a "satisfying" conclusion. He’s interested in the psychology and behavior of this particular woman. His camera follows her everywhere, like a stalker, like a lover. As in life, whether we want to admit it or not, those lines are often blurred. Every interaction, not just sexual and political, contains small jostles for power, position, dominance. Who's the "top"? Who's the "bottom" in any given moment? There are competing objectives in every conversation, each side maneuvering to get what they want. Jostling for power comes in many different forms, playing out in romantic relationship, office dynamics, even in a conversation with a group of friends where you have something to say and everyone is too busy talking to give you "the floor." Elle is a dissertation on power dynamics.

Verhoeven's approach is, unsurprisingly, extremely provocative. Michèle is a woman in her early 50s, and her sexuality surges around inside her, seeking expression. It leads her into some pretty dark stuff. In real life, sex doesn't progress in a checklist of approved behaviors happening in the proper order. Sometimes people are drawn to danger, to risk. Rape fantasies are so common as to be mundane. The current view is that consent in sex is a cut-and-dry thing. Either you consent, or you don't. There is no doubt that the rape in Elle is horrifying. Verhoeven does not eroticize it. The rapist wipes the blood from Michele's vagina off of his hip bone as he gets up off of her. But later in the film, when Michèle does consent to sex, enthusiastically, watch how her lover is unnerved by a woman who wants it, who doesn't have to be talked into it. He's almost turned off by her sexual urgency. And that, ultimately, is the most cutting observation in Elle, and Verhoeven's aim is accurate and deadly. Men not knowing what to do with a woman who wants sex and knows how she wants it, men needing to be the "top," always, threatened by a woman taking the "top" role (not in sexual positions, but in attitude) … well. These issues have been with us from the beginning of time, and won't be solved overnight. But Elle is one of the smartest films about consent I've ever seen.

Huppert does not make even an unconscious bid for our sympathy. She never has, throughout her lengthy career and it is one of the things that distinguishes her from other actresses. Even very talented actresses want to make sure that we "understand" why the character does what she does. Huppert doesn't care. She's completely beyond those concerns. It's why she's so thrilling to watch and why she is in such rare company (Anna Magnani, Liv Ullmann, Gena Rowlands, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford — it's a short list). There's always some element of mystery left intact in Huppert's work. Huppert can be frighteningly blank (The Piano Teacher, La Cérémonie), she can be human and flawed (Amour, and the upcoming Things to Come). In Elle she gets to be funny, and it's such a joy to watch! It's effortless for her. She's funny in her line-readings ("Bimbos with big tits never worried me, but the girl who's read The Second Sex will chew you up …"), in her gestures and expressions. You cannot take your eyes off of her. Neither can Verhoeven. In a Q&A following the public screening at the New York Film Festival, Verhoeven reportedly described Huppert (also in attendance) as "unique in the world." She is.

Watching Elle feels like climbing Everest without an oxygen tank. The air is dizzyingly clear up there. And dangerous, too.


Queen of Katwe ***

Director Mira Nair reportedly introduced her thoroughly crowd-pleasing Queen of Katwe at the Toronto International Film Festival by quoting the slogan of a film school she had founded in Uganda, where she lives: "If we don’t tell our own stories, no one will." That sense of ownership and authorship permeates Queen of Katwe, elevating it above your average feel-good biopic and allowing its message to feel not only inspirational but genuine. The story of Phiona Mutesi is a fascinating one on its own, but what could have just been an extended 30 For 30 feels lived-in, compassionate and truthful. It helps greatly to have not only Nair’s clear love for her country guiding every decision but also the amazing depth of David Oyelowo and Lupita Nyong’o to ground it from most of its sentimental clichés. Some of the dialogue in the final act feels a little false and manipulative, but those scenes stand out because it’s been so believable up to that point.

The nuanced, subtle newcomer Madina Nalwanga plays 10-year-old Phiona Mutesi, a young lady who lives in the slum of Katwe in Kampala, Uganda. She has almost no possessions, can’t read and sells maize in the street to try to scrape together change for her family, which includes two brothers, a sister, and her headstrong mother Harriet (Nyong’o). Phiona and her oldest brother Brian (Martin Kabanza) cross paths with a local sports ministry head named Robert Katende (Oyelowo). Recognizing that the slum kids he’s working with aren’t going to compete at football, he decides to teach them something he mastered at a young age, the art of chess. It’s a game that equalizes issues of class, education and income. It can be played by anyone in the world, and Katende soon realizes that this young girl from Katwe has a special gift, especially when she starts beating him.

It’s to be expected that the education segments of Queen of Katwe include a number of nods to how the game reflects Phiona’s life, but the execution doesn't feel heavy-handed. Nair is confident enough in her characters and the story she’s telling to avoid the pitfalls of repetitive lessons. So we get the idea that Phiona likes the act of "Queening" because a pawn makes it all the way across the board, against all odds, and becomes a Queen. We don’t hear it 15 times like we would in a lesser film. When Katende explains the idea of finding a "safe space" whenever your opponent is on the offensive, it’s easy to translate that to Phiona’s real life but the movie doesn’t hammer it in. This subtle touch is undermined a bit in the final act as issues of Phiona’s success and class conflicts start to tear the family apart in a way that feels manipulative and melodramatic, but Nair recovers by the end.

Two of the reasons she manages to get the film back from the edge of treacle are right there in Oyelowo and Nyong’o. The Selma star is as charismatic as ever, capturing the kindness of a man who saw a potential escape for a young lady and did whatever he could to make it happen. Oyelowo’s work here is subtle but so consistent. He never looks like he’s working the message of the film more than the character he’s playing. Opposite him, Nyong’o is phenomenal. She has an incredible ability to convey backstory. We believe Harriet isn’t merely a sounding board for our heroine or an emotional plot device. She feels real because of the intense passion that Nyong’o brings to her. And it’s in the subtle things, like a glance that conveys fear about her family’s future or the different tone she takes with each of her children. One also shouldn’t miss how good Nalwanga is here, giving a fluid and physical performance.

Of course, much of the credit should go back to Nair and her technical team, who capture the streets of Uganda in a way we haven’t really seen before, certainly not in a Disney film (Nair has joked that it was the first Disney film set in Africa that doesn’t have a single animal in it). From the way Nair and her designer use costumes to convey economic status to how the great cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (12 Years a Slave) fluidly captures a corner of the world that makes it feel specific, Queen of Katwe is a team effort. With the combined efforts of Nalwanga, Nair, Nyong’o, Oyelowo, Bobbitt and many more, Queen of Katwe makes it clear that we can’t successfully tell "our stories" alone. To make them resonate, we need people this talented working together for a common goal. It seems unlikely that Phiona Mutesi ever imagined her life would one day be the subject of a Disney film. But she certainly learned that life is full of surprises. When it comes to movie surprises, Queen of Katwe is a truly pleasant one.


Jack Reacher: Never Go Back *½

If there had been any doubt, the tepid Jack Reacher: Never Go Back firmly establishes the adaptations of Lee Child's books about a wrong-righting former military police commander as Tom Cruise's B-unit action film series at Paramount, compared with his ongoing luxury-brand Mission: Impossible franchise.

By-the-numbers plotting, seen-it-all-before action moves, banal locations and a largely anonymous cast alongside the star give this a low-rent feel.

Based on the 18th of Child's 20 Reacher best-sellers, the film serves up nothing that hasn't been seen in countless action films before, and it's striking how little effort appears to have been made to give it any distinction: The villains are military guys gone rogue, the female lead is basically fighting the same fight Rosalind Russell did to be recognized for her equal worth among men in His Girl Friday more than 75 years ago, the hand-to-hand combat won't make anyone's highlight reel and even the star looks a bit pale and out of training compared with the shape he invariably gets himself into for the far more elaborate and fun Mission outings.

The film also marks quite a step down, in both ambition and accomplishment, from Cruise and director Edward Zwick's previous collaboration on The Last Samurai 16 years ago. It's even a notable drop-off from the first Reacher feature, which brandished some decent mystery-thriller elements, a very good and realistic car chase, Rosamund Pike in the female lead, juicy supporting turns by Robert Duvall and Werner Herzog and fine Caleb Deschanel cinematography.

This one, by contrast, has little to write home about. For a guy who's been out of the military for a while, Reacher (no one calls him Jack) still can't manage to stay away from soldiers and their institutions. Unfortunately, most of them are up to no good, as he finds out when he pops into Washington to check out the woman who now has his old job, Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders). Unfortunately, their potential date will have to wait, as she's just been arrested for espionage, although this gives him an excuse to prove how slick he is by rescuing her from the high-tech prison where she's held.

This puts him at odds with a Blackwater-like security firm that seems to be running the show and is both willing and anxious to rub out anyone who's on to its big-time weapons and drug dealing. Narratively, the film is almost entirely nuts and bolts, with Reacher and Susan literally on the run most of the time from a coolly efficient assassin (Patrick Heusinger) simply called The Hunter who, in one-on-one combat, can give Reacher a pretty hard time.

The one real twist in the strictly mechanical script by Richard Wenk (the very recent The Magnificent Seven), Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz (the latter two now a very long way from Thirtysomething days) is the presence of a teenager, Samantha (Danika Yarosh), who may or may not be Reacher's daughter from a relationship 16 years earlier. Left largely to her own devices by her mother, Samantha (unlike the novel) ends up accompanying the pair to New Orleans, where the trio scenically arrive just as the Halloween parade is about to swing into action.

We just see snippets of the locals celebrating as only these locals can, however, as Reacher and The Hunter have it out on the rooftops of the French Quarter while the revelers party on obliviously below. As ever, Reacher is most into hand-to-hand combat, as is The Hunter, resulting in some pretty intense bone-crushing snaps, jabs and well-placed slugs. But there's nothing that hasn't been seen innumerable times before, and in neither style nor substance do Zwick and his writers bring anything new to the genre table here.

The one element that puts a smidgen of snap in the proceedings is something resembling a rivalry between Reacher and Susan in which the latter introduces the gender issue. Unfortunately, neither the screenwriters nor the actors know quite where they want to take this little skirmish of the sexes (not very far, obviously), nor do they have the flair to handle it in a witty fashion, which leaves the matter just sitting out there on a limb.

For an actor who usually seems all-in no matter what he's doing, Cruise comes off as somewhat less engaged than usual here, just going through the motions compared to, certainly, his last Mission: Impossible outing. Committed most noticeably to the physical side of her performance, Smulders can't or won't offer up the humor that might have struck some sparks with her co-star, while Yarosh, sidelined through much of the New Orleans interlude, doesn't have much real to work with as the fraught would-be daughter.

Undistinguished visually, this marks a return to the old days, when sequels were almost always markedly inferior to originals that spawned them.


This week’s other new releases:
Masterminds *½ Sometime it’s an absurdist comedy. Sometimes it’s a dark comedy. Sometimes it’s out-and-out killing-people drama (almost, but not quite). It’s often funny, but it never quite hangs together as a coherent movie.
Boo! A Madea Halloween * At 103 minutes, this film has way too much dead weight. Scenes are repeated over and over, and some of the acting would not cut it in a school play. But in the rare moments when Tyler Perry’s movie is firing on all cylinders, it displays a cleverness that hints at, with more time and a few more iterations of the script, this might have been a good movie.

RATINGS
**** Excellent.
*** Good.
** Fair
* Poor
No stars Abysmal

A reasonable plea

 

This man is dangerous, Olbermann argues, not strictly because he lies to the American people, but because he lies to himself.

This week's DVD releases

The Handmaiden ***½

Chan-wook Park’s The Handmaiden is deliciously perverse, delightfully twisty, and unapologetically erotic. Delivered with a dash of black humor and a fair amount of bare flesh, Park (using Sarah Walters’ novel Fingersmith as a template) delves into Hitchcockian territory and delivers a story that would have had the Master of Suspense roaring his approval. Unfettered by concerns about an MPAA rating, Park doesn’t hold back when it comes to the sex scenes. The Handmaiden may not be high art but it’s tremendous entertainment. For those who enjoy this kind of material, there’s nothing better out there and one can make a compelling argument that this is the best work of Park’s career (yes, even better than Oldboy, although certainly not weirder).

The Handmaiden is divided into three parts. The first two are mirror images of one another, presenting the same story from different perspectives. The third unites the first two and drives the narrative forward to its conclusion. Although Park isn’t the first director to employ this approach, the device works exceptionally well in this case since the viewer will not have the same interpretation of the scenario after Part 2 that he or she has after Part 1.

The movie focuses on Lady Hideko (Min-hee Kim), a lonely Japanese heiress living in 1930s Japan-controlled Korea. A con man who goes by the name of "Count" Fujiwara (Jung-woo Ha) has designs on her fortune and, to that end, he employs a Korean pickpocket, Sook-Hee (Tae-Ri Kim) to pose as Hideko’s handmaiden. Sook-Hee’s mission: convince Hideko to reject her current suitor (and uncle), the sadistic Kouzuki (Jin-woong Cho), and instead marry Fujiwara. However, during the course of her assignment, Sook-Hee develops feelings for Hideko, which she believes are mutual, and becomes jealous when Fujiwara attempts to take possession of his "prize."

The Handmaiden is loosely adapted from Welsh writer Sarah Walters’ 2002 novel, Fingersmith, with the location and time period shifted. Although the underlying premise and structure resemble those of the novel, Park adds numerous flourishes to the production and one of the film’s most notable twists is new to the screenplay. Additionally, the character of Uncle Kouzuki is filtered through Park’s worldview. Kouzuki is as twisted a monster as has appeared in any of Park’s productions, and that’s saying something.

Many of Park’s films, regardless of how violent and degrading the content might seem, have an underlying current of dark humor and The Handmaiden is no different. There are some very funny moments, including one literal instance of gallows humor. The lesbian sex scenes, hot and explicit as they may be, are important to italicize the deepening relationship between the two main characters. The central sex scene is presented twice (once in Part 1 and once in Part 2) with key differences that are crucial to understanding the importance of this moment to both characters and the overall narrative.

The casting couldn’t be better. Korean A-list actress Min-hee Kim presents Lady Hideko as a multi-layered character who is far more than the timid, high-bred heiress she initially seems to be. Tae-Ri Kim makes Sook-Hee spunky and energetic but imbues her with the unfortunate anchor of a conscience. Jung-woo Ha’s Count Fujiwara oozes charisma and shallowness. And Jin-woong Cho creates the most diabolical of human monsters.

I don’t think I’ve ever compared Park to Hitchcock. His previous efforts (including Oldboy, the "Vengeance Duology", and his only English-language movie, Stoker) are closer in tone and intent to Tarantino or Burton. There’s a lot about The Handmaiden that fits with his oeuvre but this is a more ambitious and, in many ways, compelling endeavor. Its twists and turns are better plotted and its weirdness seems in keeping with the story rather than a garish appendage. The Handmaiden is one of the best neo-Hitchcockian mystery/thrillers to have emerged from any country in any language during the last few years, if not longer.


The Light Between Oceans **½

Great drama requires trust. The director has to trust his actors to convey the complexity of the human experience without smothering their performances in manipulative filmmaking devices. He also has to trust the viewer to bring their own interpretations and emotions to the story, meeting the characters halfway along the spectrum of the human experience. Derek Cianfrance can’t find this trust in The Light Between Oceans, an adaptation of M.L. Stedman’s novel. It's a film with greatness within that’s been lost due to varying degrees of distrust; ridiculously tight close-ups in soft focus feel like they’re pushing you to cry instead of allowing emotion to come organically. Narrative beats and themes are hit repeatedly, just to make sure you don’t miss an opportunity to feel something. Buried beneath this melodrama — but shining through nearly enough to justify a look — one can see the film that could have been, as anchored by great performances and emotional truth. It’s just lost in the fog.

Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender, giving a very measured, confident performance) is a World War I veteran battling Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder before his condition really had a name. In some of the film’s best scenes, we learn that Tom has been burdened by the randomness of life and death. Why did he live but his fellow soldiers die? One almost gets the sense that Tom doesn’t think he "deserves" to have made it home, and that he’s going to spend the rest of his life in solitude, refusing to take the creature comforts that other young men lost forever when they went to war.

To that end, Tom signs up to take a job that not many would want, manning an extremely remote lighthouse in Australia, at a spot in which one can see two oceans from its top. The last lighthouse keeper was fired when he told someone that he allowed his wife to signal a passing ship. The break in protocol was a small problem — the fact that his wife had been dead a few years was a much bigger one. And yet this not-at-all-coveted job changes Tom’s life when he meets the daughter of his new boss, a headstrong and beautiful young lady named Isabel (Alicia Vikander). Before long, Isabel and Tom are married, planning to start a family on Janus Island. Isabel gets pregnant, but loses the baby in a heartbreaking scene in which Tom is in the lighthouse and she can’t get to him. She gets pregnant again. Tragedy strikes again.

While Isabel and Tom are mourning the loss of their second child, a miracle happens. A rowboat washes ashore, carrying a dead body and a baby. No one on the mainland knows that Isabel lost the second baby. They could just take this new child as their own and no one would know any differently. At first, the plan seems to work perfectly as Isabel, Tom, and their new daughter Lucy find happiness, but a visit to the mainland forces an encounter between Tom and a mysterious woman (Rachel Weisz) that changes everything.

Derek Cianfrance has undeniable skill with actors, drawing masterful performances out of Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine and his large ensemble in the highly underrated The Place Beyond the Pines. That skill is evident here mostly in Fassbender’s largely internal turn. His take on Tom is often stoic, haunted by the ghosts of World War I in a way that makes him quiet, sometimes uncertain. Vikander often goes in the other direction, offering the more extreme emotions that Tom keeps hidden, but she’s rarely given the room to breathe life into the performance. And I mean that almost literally. Cianfrance and cinematographer Adam Arkapaw put us right in her face in extreme close-up, thinking that this will help force a viewer’s response. It’s distracting more than effective, as is the soft focus and overcooked score by Alexandre Desplat. When Arkapaw and Cianfrance let their characters breathe, or even when they admire the gorgeous landscape, the film feels more effective and less manipulative.

Ultimately, it comes back to trust. Don’t force us to feel, trust that we will do so. This is a film that I kept wanting to emotionally connect with and give myself over to the human power of its tragedy, but it kept pushing me away. With the undeniable, unwavering skill of the trio of actors at the film's center, we would have followed them through this heartbreaking tale without the signposts that tell us what to feel along the way.


Inferno *½

One of the biggest mysteries about the Robert Langdon movies is why they don’t work. Dan Brown has a large, built-in fan base. There’s no lack of talent in the productions. The director is Oscar winner Ron Howard (who was near the zenith of his career when he made The Da Vinci Code) and the lead actor is household name Tom Hanks. Yet these movies have never succeeded. The Da Vinci Code was adequate but forgettable. Angels & Demons was godawful. Inferno is somewhere in between — watchable but by no means worth the effort to make a special effort to rent or stream it.

Inferno starts with the hero, symbologist Langdon (Hanks), awakening in a Florence hospital with a head wound. He has no memory of how he got it. The attending physician, Dr. Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), informs him that he was grazed by a bullet and the short-term amnesia he is suffering will pass. Soon, however, an assassin (Ana Ularu) has invaded the hospital and is gunning for Langdon. He and Sienna escape using staircases and a back door and, as the symbologist recovers both his memories and his powers of deduction, he begins a quest to determine who is trying to kill him, and why. It is connected to a lethal virus that the late nutcase billionaire Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) intended to spread. Following Zobrist’s death, the virus remains "out there", waiting to be activated by an unknown disciple. Meanwhile, a consortium hired to assist Zobrist has become disturbed by his activities. After watching a video elucidating The Plan, the consortium’s Provost (Irrfan Khan) decides to join forces with the World Health Organization to stop the madness. But there are traitors aplenty, making Langdon’s task all the more difficult and dangerous.

The movie can be neatly divided into three sections. In the first, lasting about 30 minutes, we have no idea what’s going on as director Howard attempts to replicate Langdon’s fragmented state of mind. The movie feels disjointed and there are repeated apocalyptic visions inspired by Dante. Unfortunately, this isn’t a good way to provide viewers with a gateway into a motion picture world (especially those unfamiliar with the character from his previous outings). The first act is confusing and Langdon’s infirmity distances him from us.

The second section, which comprises the film’s middle hour, has Langdon, supported by his attractive doctor-turned-assistant, in investigative mode as he hopscotches across Italy. To the extent that Inferno works, it’s because of this segment. Langdon’s dogged pursuit of clues (which generally lead to other clues rather than a solution) is engaging and there are a couple of action sequences inserted to keep things from becoming too exposition-heavy. Unfortunately, the screenplay suffers from compression issues — too many pages being condensed into too little running time. The pacing is poor and plot holes result from cuts to the material.

The third section is an anticlimactic disaster. Not only does it not follow the book (which had a smarter, albeit less cinematic, resolution) but it devolves into generic James Bond-inspired action. Langdon is no 007 and the logistics of the finale make little or no sense. The same can be said of the motivations and actions of some of the characters. To the extent that Inferno‘s first 3/4 can be called "entertaining", the climax is a letdown of catastrophic proportions.

The acting is a tick above adequate. Hanks, as was the case the other two times he played this character, is collecting a paycheck. Jones isn’t given much of an opportunity to do more than walk in his shadow. (Attempts to give her a backstory — scenes that don’t happen until well past the halfway point — are perfunctory.) Foster has little screen time. (We can be thankful for this because he moved on to make the superlative Hell or High Water.) The best work is turned in by the nearly mute Ana Ularu (whose fierce expression speaks volumes) and Khan, whose character is intriguing enough to deserve more screen time.

The problem with adapting a narrative as complex as the one spun by Brown in Inferno is that it requires considerable massaging to pummel it into screen-ready shape. In this case, most of the choices made by Howard and script writer David Koepp seem to be the wrong ones. They diminish the story’s intelligence and plausibility, transforming it into a cut-rate Bond/Sherlock Holmes hybrid … and that probably sounds more interesting than it is. Inferno is a disappointment — perhaps not to the degree that Angels & Demons was but enough to sadden fans of Brown’s books and confuse and distance those who haven’t been exposed to the author’s prose.


Other New Releases This Week
The Monster **½ In the end, this film does more by way of thrilling tension and heartfelt admissions than it does through any scares, but that doesn’t make it a bad horror film. Director Bryan Bertino reveals a gushy soft side, only to tear out his heart and hoist it for all to see.
The Vessel **½ A modest but not maudlin parable of hope about mustering the strength to vigorously plunge again into life’s uncertainties after a devastating loss.
I’m Not Ashamed * Many Christians yearning for faith-based entertainment will be moved by this film. But more picky viewers will admit that even taken solely as an exploration of the trials of being a Christian teen, it’s awfully weak tea as a movie, instantly disposable if not for the tragic backdrop.
USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage * This is a World War II "epic" that’s overscaled yet underimagined. It’s a tale of survival that never provides the viewer with a basic entry point into how and why we should care.

RATINGS
**** Excellent.
*** Good.
** Fair
* Poor
No stars Abysmal

My final 2017 Oscar nominations predictions

The Oscar nominations will be announced Tuesday morning so I figured this would be as good a time as any to look into my cracked crystal ball to forecast the results (listed alphabetically):

Picture
Arrival
Fences
Hacksaw Ridge
Hell or High Water
La La Land
Lion
Manchester By the Sea
Moonlight

Director
Damen Chazelle, La La Land
Barry Jenkins, Moonlight
Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester By the Sea
Martin Scorsese, Silence
Denis Villeneuve, Arrival
(Possible: Denzel Washington, Fences)

Actress
Amy Adams, Arrival
Annette Bening, 20th Century Women
Isabelle Huppert, Elle
Natalie Portman, Jackie
Emma Stone, La La Land
(Possible: Meryl Streep, Florence Foster Jenkins; Ruth Negga, Loving)

Actor
Casey Affleck, Manchester By the Sea
Andrew Garfield, Hacksaw Ridge
Ryan Gosling, La La Land
Viggo Mortensen, Captain Fantastic
Denzel Washington, Fences

Supporting Actress
Viola Davis, Fences
Naomie Harris, Moonlight
Nicole Kidman, Lion
Octavia Spencer, Hidden Figures
Michelle Williams, Manchester By the Sea

Supporting Actor
Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
Jeff Bridges, Hell or High Water
Hugh Grant, Florence Foster Jenkins
Lucas Hedges, Manchester By the Sea
Dev Patel, Lion

Adapted Screenplay
Arrival
Fences
Lion
Moonlight
Nocturnal Animals
(Possible: Hidden Figures)

Original Screenplay
Hell or High Water
Jackie
La La Land
The Lobster
Manchester By the Sea

Cinematography
Arrival
Jackie
La La Land
Moonlight
Silence

Costume Design
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Florence Foster Jenkins
Jackie
La La Land
Silence

Film Editing
Arrival
Hacksaw Ridge
Jackie
La La Land
Moonlight
(Possible: Manchester By the Sea, Silence)

Make-Up and Hairstyling
Deadpool
Florence Foster Jenkins
Star Trek Beyond

Production Design
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Jackie
The Jungle Book
La La Land
Silence
(Possible: Arrival)

Score
Jackie
La La Land
Lion
Moonlight
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Song
"Audition (The Fools Who Dream)," La La Land
"Can't Stop the Feeling," Trolls
"City of Stars," La La Land
"How Far I'll Go," Moana
"Runnin'," Hidden Figures
(Possible: "Try Everything," Zootopia)

Sound Editing
Arrival
Hacksaw Ridge
La La Land
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Silence
(Possible: The Jungle Book)

Sound Mixing
Arrival
Hacksaw Ridge
La La Land
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Silence
(Possible: The Jungle Book)

Visual Effects
Arrival
Doctor Strange
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
The Jungle Book
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Animated Feature
Finding Dory
Kubo and the Two Strings
Moana
The Red Turtle
Zootopia

Documentary Feature
Cameraperson
The Eagle Huntress
I Am Not Your Negro
O.J.: Made in America
13th

Foreign Language Film
Land of Mine
A Man Called Ove
My Life As a Zucchini
The Salesman
Toni Erdmann

Animated Short
The Head Vanishes
Inner Workings
Pearl
Piper
Sous Tes Doights

Documentary Short
Extremis
Joe's Violin
The Mute's House
Watani: My Homeland
The White Helmets

Live Action Short
Nocturne in Black
The Rifle, the Jackal, the Wolf and the Boy
Sing Mindenki
Timecode
The Way of Tea

The 25 Best Films of 2016

The Oscar Nominations will be announced in a week so with that in mind I thought it was time to list my selections for the best films of last year:

1. Moonlight

2. Manchester By the Sea
3. La La Land
4. Paterson
5. Elle
6. Hell or High Water
7. Krisha
8. Love & Friendship
9. Little Men
10. The Handmaiden
11. Weiner
12. Kubo and the Two Strings
13. Everybody Wants Some
14. De Palma
15. The Witch
16. Don’t Think Twice
17. The Lobster
18. Embrace of the Serpent
19. 20^th Century Women
20. Silence
21. Arrival
22. Certain Women
23. Moana
24. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
25. A War