Available for home viewing: "Raw"

I’m not feeling the love. Raw, the 2016 French/Belgian horror film, has received considerable praise across the international cinematic landscape for its contribution to the genre. However, what Raw offers isn’t so much original as it is a repackaging of select aspects of zombie/vampire lore. Although there’s nothing inherently wrong with that — even the best horror films typically beg, borrow, and steal — the movie’s qualifications are suspect. At times, it seems like a showcase for director Julia Ducournau, an opportunity for her to show off her considerable skills as a filmmaker. Raw is often visually arresting but it fails at a key aspect of basic horror: atmosphere. There’s nothing creepy or remotely scary about this movie. It relies on gross-out scenes to earn the right to be called "disturbing" and seems more interested in delivering schlocky shocks than suffocating the viewer with suspense or dread.

Raw feels unformed — a collage of partially realized ideas and moments that never gel. The movie relies on our inherent revulsion for the consumption of human flesh to keep us from seeing the thinness of the screenplay. When it comes to gore, Ducournau doesn’t skimp — we see scenes of severed fingers being nibbled like mini corn cobbs, brains being sampled, and love bites go beyond the norm. But the characters are incomplete, the scenario is absurd, and the story doesn’t really go anywhere. Raw feels like a premise in want of a film.

The setup is simple enough: the young protagonist, wunderkind Justine (Garance Marillier), is dropped off at college by her parents. Her school, a prestigious educational establishment for veterinarians, is an ominous-looking place. On her first night, she is subjected to a hazing ritual that culminates in a rave. After enduring her ritual humiliation, Justine encounters her upper classman sister, Alexia (Ella Rumpf). The next day, as part of the ongoing initiation process, she is required to consume a raw rabbit kidney. As a lifelong vegetarian, she is understandably reluctant but, faced with possible ostracization, she succumbs. This turns out to be a bad move — the consumption of uncooked meat awakens a hunger in her that she can’t control and, when Alexia loses her finger in a freak accident, Justine discovers that family bonds are no barrier to what constitutes food.

To the extent that the movie is about anything other than inappropriate food habits, it focuses on the odd relationship between sisters. As it turns out, that’s about the only aspect of Raw that works. This is partly because of the spot-on performances of Marillier and Rumpf and partly because Ducournau has a better sense of how to handle the human aspects of her characters’ interactions than the unsavory ones. This makes Raw a bizarre outlier — a horror film where the dramatic elements work better than the scary ones.

The pace is slow and the tone is far too serious. There are instances of black humor but, for the most part, Ducournau keeps things somber. Visually, the movie has its share of showy moments. I especially liked the blue+yellow=green exploration of primary colors, and there are a few other arresting images. I never felt as if my stomach was going to rebel, which makes me skeptical about the reports of mass turn-outs (with viewers fleeing for the nearest sink). Yes, Raw peddles blood and gore but, c’mon, we’ve seen worse.

If I was to guess, Raw might be headed for cult classic-dom. It has that sort of feel. As something to watch at home on a normal evening (rather than a midnight screening in the neighborhood theater in about 10 years), it’s a dubious proposition — not bad enough to be interesting and not good enough to be worth paying money for.

This has nothing to do with a hard rock band

I’m not an engineer so I never really knew, until just recently, there are significant differences between alternating and direct currents (known as AC and DC). I thought they were always considered together as part of the overall fabric making up the blanket I call electricity. As their respective names imply, DC is current that flows in only one direction while AC is a flow of charge that changes direction periodically, which also changes the voltage level.

What I recently learned was that home and office electrical outlets are almost always AC, while most of the electronics plugged into those outlets or that use a USB cable run on DC.



Thomas Edison

What’s more, I didn’t know that the theories behind AC and DC sparked (pardon the pun) an all out battle in the late 19^th Century between two American scientific/engineering titans, Thomas Alva Edison, who by 1887 had constructed 121 DC power stations in the United States, and George Westinghouse, who in the following year purchased from none other than Nikola Tesla the patents for AC motors and transmissions. The problem with Edison’s DC at this time was that it could not easily be converted to high voltages. As a result, Edison proposed a system of small, local power plants that would power individual neighborhoods or city sections. Even though the voltage drop across the power lines was accounted for, power plants needed to be located within a mile of the end user. This limitation made power distribution in rural areas extremely difficult, if not impossible.



George Westinghouse

With Tesla’s patents, Westinghouse worked to perfect the AC distribution system. Transformers provided an inexpensive method to step up the voltage of AC to several thousand volts and back down to usable levels. At higher voltages, the same power could be transmitted at a much lower current, which meant less power lost due to resistance in the wires. As a result, large power plants could be located many miles away and service a greater number of people and buildings.

This led to a major battle between Edison and Westinghouse. Edison tried to prove AC was too dangerous for public consumption and he went so far as having his cohorts stage public executions of animals using AC and having two direct employees, Harold P. Brown and Arthur Kennelly, design the first electric chair for the state of New York using AC.

Today, I’m not sure that many people care enough about this historical battle to shell out the bucks to see a movie on this subject, even one with such high-powered acting talent as Benedict Cumberbatch as Edison and Michael Shannon as Westinghouse, especially when you consider the educational level of today’s average moviegoer. The filmmakers have come up with a great title for their film, The Current War, in hopes. I’m guessing, to make it seem more relevant while not misleading the public as to the subject of the movie. I have a feeling this could be a very fine film that could very easily and very quickly be nothing more than a dim bulb.

The most recent Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner

Coming soon to a theater near you.

Available for home viewing: "Baywatch"

When it comes to resurrecting defunct TV shows as big-screen events, Hollywood has a less than stellar track record. With only a few exceptions, the results are forgettable and, consequently, forgotten. Despite having a legitimate A-list actor at the top of the marquee, Baywatch isn’t about the change the trend. The waterlogged end product is an example of lazy writing and direction with the vague hope that perhaps the involvement of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson will attract viewers. Regardless of whether Baywatch generates sufficient interest to make it profitable, it represents 2017’s first genuinely awful high-profile box office challenger.

Perhaps the best indicator of what we’re getting with Baywatch could come from examining director Seth Gordon’s track record (at least once he moved past his charming documentary debut, The King of Kong). His one good movie, Horrible Bosses, came out six years ago. He is also responsible for the lackluster Four Christmases and the godawful Identity Thief. The latter has a close kinship with Baywatch, riddled with unfunny humor and pointless, tedious action. Those characteristics define this film and make it, if not unwatchable, a waste of time and money.

It would be foolish to craft a "straight" adaptation of the TV series, which was viewed as cheesy even when it was popular. (Those who watched Baywatch did so for reasons — most of which either jiggled or rhymed with "trough" — other than the writing.) So Gordon and his screenwriters decided to go the 21 Jump Street route of making things openly comedic. However, instead of going for broke and attempting something daring, Baywatch treads water. It adds some raunchy humor that feels desperate and regurgitated, throws in some obvious self-referential gags ("Doesn’t she look like she’s running in slow motion?"), and pulls a lot of punches. Attempts at satire are weak and, although Baywatch frequently pokes fun at itself, the jabs aren’t forceful or vicious.

One key flaw is common in would be action/comedies: too much plot. That wouldn’t be a bad thing if the material was compelling but it’s not. It’s a standard order story about a rich villain with megalomaniacal tendencies (the uber-sexy Victoria Leeds, played by Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra) trying to buy all the coastal land to create a private resort. To do that, she’s not above drug dealing, kidnapping, and murder. The Emerald Bay lifeguard corps, led by Mitch Buchannon (Dwayne Johnson), CJ Parker (Kelly Rohrbach), and Stephanie Holden (Ilfenesh Hadera), begin an investigation, because that’s what lifeguards do when there’s a dead body on their watch. And, while they’re uncovering Victoria’s dastardly scheme, they’re integrating three new recruits into the team. One is a rolly-polly, athletically challenged geek (Jon Bass), another is a competent, drop-dead gorgeous woman (Alexandra Daddario), and the third is a two-time gold medal winning asshole named Matt Brody (Zac Efron).

In addition to spending an inordinate amount of time on the "investigation" (including by-the-numbers action scenes like a rescue at sea and a speedboat chase), Baywatch devotes far too much effort into humanizing Matt and giving him a redemption arc. If the filmmakers’ intention is to satirize this kind of overused plot device, they fail. The movie uses a lot of old pop songs, but misses the most appropriate one: We Are Family, because that’s what Matt, a product of the foster care system, is looking for. Gag.

Baywatch has a problem with finding a stable tone. It doesn’t know what it wants to be and, as a result, it stinks like an undercooked stew of rancid, mismatched ingredients. There are some funny moments (mostly related to Mitch’s endless list of Boy Band nicknames for Matt) but there might be 20 minutes of attention span-killing tedium between the chuckles. Many of the laugh-inducing bits are in the trailer I have included above, removing any need to sit through the entire film.

The movie acknowledges (how could it not?) that the primary appeal of Baywatch was the eye candy and it has a little fun with this. Daddario and Rohrbach spend most of the movie in bathing suits and a shirtless Efron shows off abs, pecs, biceps, and triceps to rival The Rock’s. The film’s star flashes his white teeth, flexes his muscles, and shows off his charisma, but none of this is enough. David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson have cameos in which they are treated reverentially. (Contrast this with Johnny Depp’s appearance in 21 Jump Street.)

Despite being aware of its existence during the 1990s, I never saw an episode of Baywatch, so I am unable to hazard a guess as to how fans will react to this new incarnation. Viewed as no more than a high-profile late summer home viewing release, however, it disappoints in almost every way, not succeeding at anything it tries and boring viewers in the process. More than lifeguards in spandex are needed to resuscitate this beached whale.

Lady Bird

My Top 15 College Football Teams

Preseason ranking in parenthesis

1. Alabama 1-0 (1)
2. Ohio State 1-0 (2)
3. Clemson 1-0 (3)
4. Oklahoma 1-0 (4)
5. LSU 1-0 (8)
6. USC 1-0 (7)
7. Wisconsin 1-0 (11)
8. Michigan 1-0 (10)
9. Penn State 1-0 (9)
10. Washington 1-0 (5)
11. Auburn 1-0 (12)
12. Oklahoma State 1-0 (14)
13. Stanford 1-0 (13)
14. Florida State 0-1 (6)
15. Virginia Tech 1-0 (18)
16. Colorado 1-0 (25)
17. Georgia 1-0 (23)
18. Tennessee 1-0 (19)
19. Louisville 1-0 (16)
20. Kansas State 1-0 (21)
21. Miami, Fla. 1-0 (15)
22. Notre Dame 1-0 (New)
23. Washington State 1-0 (20)
24. Iowa 1-0 (New)
25. Florida 0-1 (17)
Dropped out: Texas A&M, South Florida

Available soon for home viewing

Beatriz at Dinner *** Directed by Miguel Arteta. A holistic medicine practitioner attends a wealthy client's dinner party after her car breaks down. Selma Hayek turns Beatriz into her own breed of wonder woman, John Lithgow’s character is definitely a super villain of sorts and their head-to-head battle is clearly worth seeing even if, in real life, it has only begun.

Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie **½ Directed by David Soren. Two overly imaginative pranksters named George and Harold hypnotize their principal into thinking he's a ridiculously enthusiastic, incredibly dimwitted superhero named Captain Underpants. The best animated movies for children are sublime. This one generally settles for noisy, though it throws in a positive message at the end.

Fun Mom Dinner * Directed by Alethea Jones. Four moms whose only common ground is their kids' preschool class, decide to get together for a harmless "fun mom dinner." It’s all about both fellatio jokes and falling on love all over again, but it’s so rushed and the characters are so underdeveloped that the film feels frustratingly slight.

It Comes at Night ***½ Written and directed by Trey Edward Shults. Secure within a desolate home as an unnatural threat terrorizes the world, a man has established a tenuous domestic order with his wife and son. Then a desperate young family arrives seeking refuge. There are no zombies in the streets, boogeymen in the basement or witches in the woods — and yet this is one of the most terrifying films in years.

The Mummy ½* Directed by Alex Kurtzman. An ancient princess is awakened from her crypt beneath the desert, bringing with her malevolence grown over millennia, and terrors that defy human comprehension. The Mummy reboot from 1999, directed by Stephen Sommers and starring Brendan Fraser, was kind of fun. Monster movies frequently are. This one, directed by Kurtzman and starring Tom Cruise, is an unholy mess.

Available for home viewing: "Ghost in the Shell"

Like the greatest screen goddesses, Scarlett Johansson rises above it all. In the thrill-free science-fiction thriller Ghost in the Shell, her character comes at you in pieces, emerging first during the opening credits in the form of a metallic skeleton. It’s a good look — it evokes the original Terminator — but soon the skeleton is being dipped like a chip in whitish goo. This technological soup gives the metallic frame a humanoid cladding, making it more reassuringly and pleasantly familiar, from bosomy top to round bottom. It looks like a giant dream Barbie, hairless pubis and all.

Enjoy these credits because they offer some of the more arresting, inventive images in this visually cluttered yet often disappointingly drab movie. A live-action version of a Japanese manga by Shirow Masamune, Ghost in the Shell is one of those future-shock stories that edges around the dystopian without going full-bore apocalyptic. To that end it is set in a possible future world that looks distant enough to seem exotic and familiar enough to seem plausible. The original manga takes place in what’s described as a "strange corporate conglomerate-state called ‘Japan,’" while this movie unwinds nowhere in particular, just a universal megalopolis filled with soaring gray towers.

Anyone who has seen Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or that film’s innumerable 2.0 follow-ups (Strange Days, The Fifth Element) will recognize this Ghost cityscape, with its jumbled forms, neo-noir shadows, patina of art-directed decay and its conspicuous Asian-Hollywood fusion touches. Some of this tickles the eye, like the semi-translucent, pony-size koi fish that float through the air, seemingly just because they look cool. The koi don’t seem to be selling anything other than the movie’s production values and visual concept; elsewhere, enormous spectral human figures loom over buildings like embodied billboards, nicely evoking rampaging movie monsters of the past.

The most important leviathan, of course, is Johansson, whose mysterioso cyborg, Major, effortlessly slides right into this scene, with her preternaturally still face — often as blank as a mask — and the ports in the back of her neck that she uses to jack into cables and other characters. These artificial orifices are pleasingly mysterious and highly suggestive, at once creating a sense of human vulnerability and raising the possibility of the posthuman. Major occasionally stuffs goo in her ports and also uses them to plug into others. About the only part of her that’s human is her soul, or "ghost" in the story’s poetic parlance. The rest of Major is a bendable, mendable shell, which makes her well suited for hard-core tactical work with a police outfit known as Section 9.

As the title suggests, Ghost in the Shell is haunted, including by the original manga, its sequels and several excellent animated movies: the first, also titled Ghost in the Shell, and the entrancingly lovely Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, both directed by Mamoru Oshii. The new Ghost in the Shell was directed by Rupert Sanders, who has made commercials and one other feature, Snow White and the Huntsman. He likes a dark palette and is good with actors, but there’s little here that feels personal, and he mostly functions as a blockbuster traffic cop, managing all the busily moving, conspicuously pricey parts.

That’s too bad, especially because the original Ghost in the Shell is such a delightful philosophical plaything, with pleasures that simultaneously bewitch the eye and enchant the mind. This version, by contrast, ditches the original’s big, human, all-too-human questions, but keeps all the firing guns and car chases, the action clichés and intentional genre stereotypes. Stripped of its deeper-dish musings, the story turns into a perfectly watchable, somewhat bland action movie, tricked out with sharp details, some fine actors and one slumming legend, the director-actor Takeshi Kitano, who plays Aramaki, Major’s boss. He only speaks in Japanese; Major and almost everyone else speak in English.

The characters understand one another, presumably because they’re beyond mere language and, in any event, they sometimes communicate telepathically. At first, the fact that they can speak to one another comes across as an inventive flourish, but like so much in Ghost in the Shell — the toddling geishas, the Asian extras — it helps to reduce an entire culture to a decorative detail. The movie has been widely criticized for casting Johansson in a role that was, of course, originally Japanese, a decision that isn’t offset by an absurd narrative twist that seems to have been created to forestall criticism but will only provoke further ire. This isn’t just appropriation; it’s obliteration.

The Shape of Water

"I'm taking a bath"

Available soon for home viewing

All Eyez on Me (no stars) Directed by Benny Boom. The story of rapper, actor, poet and activist Tupac Shakur. One of the most useless music biopics ever made — it’ll be too confusing for newcomers and too underwhelming for those familiar with the work and life of the of the rap prophet.

Austin Found *½ Directed by Will Raée. A woman who is fed up with her mundane lifestyle hatches a scheme to make her family instant celebrities, but not everything goes as planned as her wild tempered ex-boyfriend starts to lose it. The cast is surely capable of sharper comedy, but Raée doesn’t get everyone on the same page. Linda Cardellini and Kristen Schaal offer cardboard caricatures, while Skeet Ulrich, among others, plays it mostly straight.

Band Aid *** Directed by Zoe Lister-Jones. A couple who can't stop fighting embark on a last-ditch effort to save their marriage by turning their fights into songs and starting a band. Both leads are excellent together and the movie is good at showing how Anna (Lister-Jones) and Ben (Adam Pally) push each other’s buttons.

Chronically Metropolitan * Directed by Xavier Manrique. First time novelist Fenton Dillane (Shiloh Fernandez) returns unannounced to New York City to confront his family, his ex- girlfriend and a few lingering childhood fears. One longs to praise Manrique for attempting a serious-minded story in this, his first feature. But there needs to be a real reason to embrace it, rather than what’s on the screen.

A Dark Song ***½ Written and directed by Liam Gavin. A determined young woman and a damaged occultist risk their lives and souls to perform a dangerous ritual that will grant them what they want. Dives into the black arts with methodical restraint and escalating unease.

First Kill ** Directed by Steven C. Miller. A Wall Street broker is forced to evade a police chief investigating a bank robbery as he attempts to recover the stolen money in exchange for his son's life. The movie doesn’t hold a lot of surprises, but there is worse terror-in-the-woods fare out there — rather a lot of it, in fact.

The Last Face (no stars) Directed by Sean Penn. A director (Charlize Theron) of an international aid agency in Africa meets a relief aid doctor (Javier Bardem) amidst a political/social revolution, and together face tough choices surrounding humanitarianism and life through civil unrest. As well meaning as this film is, it is also a turgid, muddled one.

Lowriders **½ Directed by Ricardo de Montreuil. A young street artist in East Los Angeles is caught between his father's obsession with lowrider car culture, his ex-felon brother and his need for self-expression. Cars could easily have been the stars of Lowriders, but the film makes them supporting players in a family drama that’s a mix of strong scenes and shopworn ones punctuated by clichés.

Megan Leavey ***½ Directed by Gabriela Coperthwaite. Based on the true story of a Marine corporal (Kate Mara) whose unique discipline and bond with her military combat dog saved many lives during their deployment in Iraq. If the conclusion doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, you’re way too cynical.

Paris Can Wait * Written and directed by Eleanor Coppola. The wife of a successful movie producer takes a car trip from the south of France to Paris with one of her husband's associates. By the time the final meal is devoured, you’ll be wanting nothing so much as an antacid.

Raw **½ Written and directed by Julia Ducournau. When a young vegetarian undergoes a carnivorous hazing ritual at vet school, an unbidden taste for meat begins to grow in her. There’s nothing creepy or remotely scary about this movie. It relies on gross-out scenes to earn the right to be called "disturbing" and seems more interested in delivering schlocky shocks than suffocating the viewer with suspense or dread.

Rough Night *½ Directed by Lucia Aniello. Things go terribly wrong for a group of girlfriends who hire a male stripper for a bachelorette party in Miami. It’s all blithely formulaic and would be more irritating if the performers — who include Zoë Kravitz and Ilana Glazer — weren’t generally so appealing.

Score: A Film Music Documentary ** Written and Directed by Matt Schrader. A look inside the musical challenges and creative secrecy of the film score. This is a movie that is too frenetic and basic to make a substantial impression. I appreciated a kernel of observation here and there, but not enough for me to give it a whole-hearted embrace.

The Wedding Plan *** Written and directed by Rama Burshtein. When her fiancé bows out on the eve of her wedding, Michal refuses to cancel the wedding arrangements. An Orthodox Jew, she insists that God will supply her a husband. Feels less like My Big Fat Jewish Nuptials and more of a faith-based variation on a Disney princess fantasy. Instead of a fairy godmother, God himself will find her Mr. Right.

Available for home viewing: "The Boss Baby"

The Boss Baby sounds like a killer concept for an animated caper to attract kids young and old. Hiring Alec Baldwin to lend his calmly melodious-with-a-whiff-of-malice intonations for a tiny tycoon? Right on the money — and kudos to the movie’s makers for sneaking in a Glengarry Glen Ross gag. Add a plotline that pits adorable tykes vs. cuddly puppies in a cuteness competition and what could go wrong?

A lot, it seems. Much like any child, even a supposedly surefire nugget of an idea requires careful nurturing. In this case, The Boss Baby often tries too hard and succeeds too little. Part of the problem is its source material, Marla Frazee’s 36-page picture book from 2010 whose irresistible premise transformed it into a go-to shower gift. It boiled down to a precious metaphor about how a new baby in a business-suit onesie treats his parents like harried employees, conducting middle-of-the-night meetings and squalling constant demands. That novel notion pops up early in the film and produces some of the funnier and more emotionally relatable moments.

Starting off with only enough material for a cartoon short, however, director Tom McGrath (the Madagascar franchise) and writer Michael McCullers (the Austin Powers sequels, Baby Mama) add a sibling rivalry element with a 7-year-old older brother, Tim (voiced by Miles Christopher Bakshi, grandson of animation maverick Ralph Bakshi of Fritz the Cat notoriety), who resents this usurper of parental love and recasts him in his imagination as a kind of briefcase-toting corporate raider of affection.

This approach borrows from the same genetic material that made Pixar’s Inside Out so popular — which took its cues from the workings of an 11-year-old girl’s mind. But that story, partly based on how brains really work, was meticulously plotted. Here, there’s a lack of logic and coherence that is regularly compounded by a slapdash execution as messy as a week’s worth of poopy diapers. In the book, Boss Baby just exists. Here, there is a long and not especially inspired credits sequence involving a conveyor belt that decides whether or not an infant joins a family after taking a tickle test. If no giggles are heard, he or she are declared "management" and become part of an entity known as Baby Corp., a competitor to Puppy Co., where Tim’s mom and dad both work.

If this doesn’t sound exactly like a bundle of laugh-out-loud joy, that’s because it really isn’t.

Efforts, some strained, are made to inject zing both visually and story-wise into the proceedings. The look of old-school Warner Bros. cartoons are emulated, including a stylized nod to German Expressionism. But instead of rightfully milking Baldwin’s bad-ass babe for all he’s worth, there are detours involving action sequences featuring the themes from ‘70s TV shows S.W.A.T. and The Six Million Dollar Man as well as a lame homage to pirate flicks. We learn that Tim awakens every day at 7 a.m. to an alarm clock with a replica of a wizard that is clearly Tolkien-inspired as it declares, "Wake up, halflings!" It’s a cool tchotchke but has little to no useful connection to matters at hand.

The creators of The Boss Baby desperately try to find hooks for all ages to enjoy, inserting the Beatles’ Blackbird as the song Tim’s folks use to sing him to sleep (which leads to a Lennon-McCartney name check). They tease with naked bottoms, tee-hee-inducing pixelated baby privates and a wee fart that results in an expulsion of baby powder. The script even mentions "Baby Jesus" in one of the better jokes. Sure, drop in a power nap reference and feature a magic formula that is an actual baby formula. But as much as I got a kick out of a gathering of chubby Elvis imitators heading to Vegas that uses on-screen subtitles for the slurred Presley-ese being spoken, it has little connection to the race-to-the-end finale.

As Boss Baby and Tim go about finding common brotherly ground, including a weird moment involving mutual pacifiers, some rather familiar voices are heard. They include Tobey Maguire as the older Tim who narrates, Steve Buscemi as a villainous Puppy Co. honcho, Jimmy Kimmel and Lisa Kudrow as Tim’s parents — but none have the memorable impact that Baldwin has. To put matters in perspective, The Boss Baby doesn’t give you that choking on a hairball feeling that last year’s felonious talking-feline movie Nine Lives did. But if pint-size chatter is what you’re after, 1989’s Look Who’s Talking, with its toddler whose thoughts are spoken with smart-aleck verve by Bruce Willis, might make for a more satisfying movie night.

My preseason top 25 college football teams

1.  Alabama
2.  Ohio State
3.  Clemson
4.  Oklahoma
5.  Washington
6.  Florida State
7.  USC
8.  LSU
9.  Penn State
10. Michigan
11. Wisconsin
12. Auburn
13. Stanford
14. Oklahoma State
15. Miami, Fla.
16. Louisville
17. Florida
18. Virginia Tech
19. Tennessee
20. Washington State
21. Kansas State
22. Texas A&M
23. Georgia
24. South Florida
25. Colorado

Available for home viewing: "Alien: Covenant"

When Ridley Scott released Prometheus five years ago, his stated intention was to explore a new story in the Alien universe. He had limited enthusiasm for continuing the evolution of the xenomorph he first brought to the screen in 1979 but marketing considerations demanded some kind of linkage. So, although Prometheus contained a subplot about the aliens’ origins, it was primarily about the travails of a space exploration seeking to discover something about the beginnings of life. The movie was met with a tepid response and Fox began exploring other avenues to continue the franchise, including an alternate universe concept that would re-write post-Aliens history. However, when Scott indicated a willingness to make another Alien that was more like the original film and less like Prometheus, it didn’t take long for an approval to be forthcoming.

Alien: Covenant is as much a sequel to Prometheus as it is a prequel to Alien. Like the recent string of Planet of the Apes movies, it’s about spinning a tale that’s interesting in its own right while not losing sight of the end goal. Although Alien: Covenant ties up the plot threads left dangling at the conclusion of Prometheus, this story is more about giving birth to the familiar xenomorph than advancing the larger mythology of the universe. The only returning cast member from Prometheus is Michael Fassbender, who plays two roles: reprising his part as the android David and portraying Walter, David’s "younger brother."

Alien: Covenant combines high-minded sci-fi ideas with the visceral horror-inspired shock aspects of a slasher movie. Unable to wed these disparate elements with the competence he showed 38 years ago, Scott risks tonal whiplash. At its best, this film echoes the creepiness and tension of Alien. At its worst, it sinks into the pretentiousness that at times threatened to derail Prometheus. It’s a mix of the good and the bad. One seemingly endless indulgence in tedium, which ends with a Fassbender-on-Fassbender kiss, has the two androids ponder life and play music. Much is forgiven, however, when the real xenomorph (rather than a prototype) shows up and starts killing people. For some of these scenes, Scott borrows from ‘80s horror movies. One couple discovers that it may not be the best idea to have sex in the shower when an alien is on the prowl.

Alien: Covenant opens with the traditional science fiction premise of a deep space cruiser zipping along at sub-light speed on its way to a new world. On board are two thousand colonists, all in hyper-sleep. The only one "aware" is Walter the android, who is able to handle all the day-to-day maintenance tasks without aid — until the ship runs into trouble and he is forced to wake up the crew. Everyone survives the de-freezing except the captain, Branson (an uncredited James Franco), who burns up in a fire. The new captain, Oram (Billy Crudup), is unprepared to be thrust into a leadership role, and Branson’s wife, Daniels (Katherine Waterston), struggles doing her job while coping with her loss. Once the repairs are completed, Oram decides that rather than putting everyone back to sleep and finishing the seven years left on the journey, they will take a detour to a potentially habitable planet and explore. Daniels is against the decision but everyone else agrees. The die is cast. The planet is not somewhere even a well-armed group of explorers should be going, especially when communications between the surface and the ship are difficult.

The special effects rival those of Prometheus for the most impressive of the series. Perhaps because it has been seen so often in the other movies (especially the best forgotten Alien v. Predator and its misbegotten sequel), the xenomorph isn’t relegated to the shadows. Scott gives it plenty of screen time and, thankfully, it has regained the toughness it had in the original Alien. Over the years, the creatures have become disappointingly easy to dispatch; the ones in Alien: Covenant aren’t so easily killed. Jed Kurzel’s score is an asset in the way it echoes Jerry Goldsmith’s 1979 music without directly copying it.

The characters are as flat and two-dimensional as in any slasher film. The screenplay struggles to make David interesting but, for the most part, he’s just philosophical and narcissistic. Daniels is intended to be the kick-ass heroine but she comes across as a second-rate Ripley, emphasizing how, although the umbrella series is called Alien(s), Sigourney Weaver may be a necessary ingredient to make everything gel. Perhaps Scott is aware of this — although the voice of the ship’s computer, Muthur, is credited to Lorelei King, it sounds eerily like Weaver.

Most members of the crew are generic and interchangeable. Thinking back to Alien and Aliens, it’s remarkable how effectively those scripts breathed life into characters without much screen time, whether it was John Hurt’s Kane, Harry Dean Stanton’s Brett, Bill Paxton’s Hudson, or Jenette Goldstein’s Vasquez. There’s nothing like that here. Billy Crudup’s Oram, for example, is described as a "man of faith", but there’s not much else there. Likewise, although Danny McBride gets a decent amount of screen time, he’s just a skeleton — no flesh on the bones.

Those who watch the Alien films for the gore and action will find Alien: Covenant more satisfying than Prometheus, although it falls considerably short of the high bar established by the first two chapters of the series. Those who appreciated Prometheus’ attempts to inject hard science fiction into the proceedings may be disappointed. Although Scott doesn’t jettison the ideas that underpinned the 2012 episode, he dispatches many in such a perfunctory manner that they’re hard to process. There’s a missing chapter here (although, to be frank, I don’t have much interest in seeing it filled). Alien: Covenant has enough of what made Alien great to deliver two hours of big-budget sci-fi/horror entertainment but it also cements the realization that, as good as the series may have been at its start, it’s not likely ever to reach that level again.

Available for home viewing: "The Circle"

The highlight of The Circle is producer-costar Tom Hanks' performance as the CEO of the titular company, a Google- or Apple-styled high-tech octopus that's spreading its tentacles into every nook of our lives. The brilliance of Hanks' performance as Eamon Bailey, founder of The Circle, is that it's not remarkably different from the humble, charming average guy performance he gives as himself whenever he goes on talk shows, accepts awards, or narrates a documentary about the unsung heroes of World War II. For whatever reason, you can't help trusting Tom Hanks. That's why The Simpsons Movie cast him in a voice cameo selling "The New Grand Canyon," a name for the hole that would have been left in the ground if the military went through with its plan to bomb the recently contaminated town of Springfield into oblivion. "Hello, I'm Tom Hanks," he says. "The U.S. government has lost its credibility, so it's borrowing some of mine."

The notion that Tom Hanks, a patriotic emblem right up there with apple pie and the American flag, would be hired to put a smiley face on an American Hiroshima is scarier than a lot of current horror films. You just know that if he ever used his considerable influence for evil rather than good, almost no one would resist him, and the handful that warned against him would not be believed. And yet Hanks has never played a straight-up bad guy who chills you to the bone whenever he shows up onscreen. The closest he's gotten to that sort of character was in "The Road to Perdition," where he played a mob hitman who was more of a morose antihero than a bad guy, and the The Ladykillers, a slapstick comedy that cast him as an obnoxious, bumbling Satan with a Foghorn Leghorn accent. His performance in The Circle as Evil Tom Hanks is the best thing in the picture.

That isn't saying much. James Ponsoldt's film based on Dave Eggers' same-titled 2013 book has a lot of good ideas and a few engrossing sequences, but it never quite finds a groove, or even a mode, and it ends in an abrupt, unsatisfying way. Emma Watson stars as Mae Holland, a young woman who gets a job at The Circle, a cult-like corporation based in the Bay Area that has a campus with man-made lakes and a sky filled with buzzing drones.

You probably have a good idea of where this story is going even if you've never read Eggers' book or seen an anti-tech warning tale before. Mae is handpicked by Eamon and his right-hand man, company co-founder Tom Stenton (Patton Oswalt), to take part in an experiment to glorify a new tiny camera they've invented. She'll wear cameras on herself and plant them all over her apartment and in other significant locations of her life and embrace the idea of "total transparency" hyped by her boss. "Transparency" and "integration" and other multi-syllable words get tossed around a lot by guys like Eamon, who are really interested in getting access to our data so they can monitor our lives, sell us new products, and resell our information to third parties. The Circle gets this and uses it to generate low-level paranoia in every scene, and amps it up whenever Eamon strides onstage to give one of his TED-talk styled addresses to the company or to unveil a groundbreaking new product (such as the tiny spherical cameras that Eamon distributes all over the world, giving the resultant Orwellian surveillance network a granola-crunching progressive label: SeeChange).

The problem is, The Circle never finds a good way to escalate its paranoia in anything other than a tedious, obvious way. And the meat-and-potatoes manner in which Ponsoldt has adapted and directed this material reveals the limits of his talent. A mad visionary stylist who paints with light and sound might've made a memorable film out of this story, but that's not the kind of director Ponsoldt is. He thrives in a low-key mode, telling stories of ordinary people interacting in ordinary spaces; Off the Black, Smashed and especially The Spectacular Now were about as good as intimate character-driven indies could be, and The End of the Tour had its moments, too. There's a Hanks-like decency to the way Ponsoldt looks at human beings.

But this story doesn't have many recognizable human beings in it. They're mostly plot functions with names. Watson's character is The Heroine, really more of a Gullible Ingenue. Glenne Headley and the late Bill Paxton are The Parents (Paxton shakes visibly because his character has multiple sclerosis). Hanks is the Villain, even though he doesn't play him that way, and Oswalt's character is the Scary Right Hand Man, sizing up Mae and pushing her back onto the beaten path whenever she's about to stray. Ellar Coltrane of Boyhood plays her ex-boyfriend Mercer, who warns her that The Circle is evil and that she's selling her privacy and her soul. Karen Gillan is The Friend who hires Mae to work for The Circle, only to become jealous and irritated when the founder selects Mae as the company's poster girl, then worried when the extent of Eamon's exploitation becomes apparent.

What I'm describing here is the cast of a horror movie that traffics in archetypal situations, one in which the characters don't have to be plausible human beings to rivet our attention and merit our sympathy. David Cronenberg and David Lynch, both of whom might've done a brilliant job with this same material, are aces at making films fueled by dream logic and filled with archetypal characters and images. (Just imagine what either of them could do with Oswalt, a reliably excellent comic character actor who unexpectedly radiates power and menace here.) Ponsoldt does not appear, on the basis of this film, to be that sort of director, and that sort of director is what The Circle needed. This movie might represent the least sensible match of filmmaker and material since Sidney Lumet adapted The Wiz.

As you watch the film, the subdued performances, realistic-looking locations and active-but-not-baroque camerawork make you expect a more realistic film about tech, along the lines of The Social Network or Steve Jobs. When the story turns into something akin to a nightmarish cousin of The Truman Show or Network, or the kid sister of Cronenbeg's ExistenZ, you want it to get bigger, wilder, more outrageous, more frightening, and it's too nice and reasonable and conscientious to do that. The result feels undernourished in just about every way, although Hanks's performance, John Boyega's brief role as a founding programmer, and a couple of frightening action sequences break through the tedium. This is one of those movies that has nothing and everything wrong with it. It's frustrating in a singular way.

When is a sequel not a sequel?

One of my all-time favorite films, The Last Detail, was adapted from a novel of the same name written by Daryl Ponsican, who wrote a sequel featuring the same three main characters called Last Flag Flying.

Quaid, Nicholson and Young
 in "The Last Detail"

Now, one of my favorite directors, Austin’s own Richard Linklater, is completing work on a film adaptation of Last Flag Flying, the script of which he co-wrote with Ponsican. However, both Ponsican and Linklater insist the film, unlike the book, is not a sequel even though the story line of the movie essentially follows the story line of the book.

In Hal Ashby’s original film, the three main characters (and the actors who played them) were Badass Buddusky (Jack Nicholson), Richard Mulhall (Otis Young) and Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid). These are the names of the same three main characters in the novel Last Flag Flying. For the film version, however, their names have been changed to Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston), Mueller (who doesn’t have a first name and is played by Laurence Fishburne) and Larry "Doc" Shepherd (Steve Carell).

Fishburne, Cranston and Carell
in "Last Flag Flying"

Ponsican is publicly proclaiming that while his novel Last Flag Flying was a sequel to The Last Detail, the movie version of Last Flag Flying is definitely not a sequel to The Last Detail and will not be promoted as a sequel even though, except for the name changes and a few other details (no mention is ever made in the new film of the shared event depicted in the original film that bound the three together), the film is a faithful adaptation of the novel.

New editions of both books have recently been published and they contain prefaces from Ponsican on the origins of both the books and the movies adapted from them.

Available for home viewing: "The Lovers"

If all middle-aged marrieds were having as much sex as Mary and Michael (Debra Winger and Tracy Letts in The Lovers, then the ratings for NCIS would go into a tailspin. Yet the extracurricular bonking that they gingerly enjoy — she with a needy writer (Aidan Gillen) and he with a neurotic ballet dancer (Melora Walters) — appears to bring only marginally more pleasure than their sclerotic union.

Sadly, that’s only one problem with this over-determined, fussily managed romance. Falling with a thud between two stools, it has neither the zip nor the zaniness of farce nor the airy vivacity of the best romantic comedies. The sugary, violin-heavy score that elbows its way into virtually every scene might beg to differ, but its cudgeling chords can’t force enchantment when, improbably, Mary and Michael’s jaded passions are rekindled.

That would require a screenplay (by the director, Azazel Jacobs) with sparkle and energy instead of one that takes forever to nudge characters from staring to kissing. No one suffers more from this programmatic approach than Winger, whose warm, loamy sexiness demands roaming privileges. Only watch her in The Sheltering Sky, playing a dissatisfied wife who finds her true self in the middle of the desert. She’s the beating heart of that movie, turning what could have been a sterile exercise in alienation and ennui into something vibrantly human.

Which brings me to a third stool that Jacobs (who also directed and helped to write the smart, adorably prickly HBO series Doll & Em) could have claimed. Beneath its mushy music, The Lovers nurses something altogether more sour and more fruitful: a self-sabotaging desperation that you can sense Winger straining to vocalize. It isn’t love that Mary and Michael are seeking; what really turns them on is sneaking around.

Available soon for home viewing

Baywatch ½* Directed by Seth Gordon. Devoted lifeguard Mitch Buchannon butts heads with a brash new recruit, as they uncover a criminal plot that threatens the future of the bay. The waterlogged end product is an example of lazy writing and direction with the vague hope that perhaps the involvement of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson will attract viewers.

Born in China ** Directed by Chuan Lu. The movie, filmed in the wilds of China, captures intimate moments with a panda and her growing cub, a young golden monkey who feels displaced by his baby sister, and a mother snow leopard struggling to raise her two cubs. The film partly confirms what The Lion King already taught ‘90s kids: We should take comfort in knowing that everything in life is natural when seen as part of the "circle of life," as surprisingly effective voiceover narrator John Kransinski reminds us.

Dean ** Directed by Demetri Martin. A comedy about loss, grief, and the redemptive power of love. Dean is a New York illustrator who falls hard for a Los Angeles woman while trying to prevent his father from selling the family home in the wake of his mother's death. A movie with which it is easy to find fault, and if you’re a particular kind of person, you’ll find fault with it without even trying too hard.

A Family Man ** Directed by Mark Williams. A headhunter whose life revolves around closing deals in a survival-of-the-fittest boiler room, battles his top rival for control of their job placement company — his dream of owning the company clashing with the needs of his family. Whenever the movie reaches for poetry it lands somewhere in a chain drugstore's greeting card aisle, trying to choose between one that shows an adorable child laughing in a Photoshopped field of sunlit daisies, one that tries for gallows humor but isn't really that funny, and a third with a quote about mortality and wisdom that only seems thoughtful because it's written in cursive.

My Cousin Rachel  ½* Directed by Roger Mitchell. A young Englishman plots revenge against his late cousin's mysterious, beautiful wife, believing her responsible for cousin’s death. But his feelings become complicated as he finds himself falling under the beguiling spell of her charms. One of the problems with this version of the classic story is that it’s hard to come up with any issue or reason relative to its creation, I’m afraid.

Available for home viewing: "The Fate of the Furious"

One of the givens of Fast and Furious is that the latest movie will be bigger and more enjoyably ludicrous than the last. The miniskirts will be shorter, the toys zoomier, the stunts more delirious. Yet, like every successful series, this one delivers its sleek new bits and pieces in reassuringly familiar packaging. James Bond has queen and country. Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto — the monotonal Fast and Furious paterfamilias — has cars and camaraderie, an ideal combo for movies about American outsiders whose home has always been one another.

Family is the most important word in these movies, the one that’s dropped with moist emotion and hushed Sunday-sermon reverence. It’s the idea that has held the franchise together — movie to movie, race to race, prayer to prayer — in an episodic soap about kith, kin and custom cars. It’s what connects this franchise to its fans, another kind of family, though one that pays to sit down at the table. It’s what has always bound Dom to his wife, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), and the rest of his crew, most crucially Brian, the cop-turned-soul-partner played by Paul Walker, who died in an off-set car collision in 2013.

The latest movie’s title, The Fate of the Furious, seems like a nod to the lingering existential crisis created by Walker’s death, as do the tears that fall in the story. They’re shed over time but before they are, the movie does what’s expected, which is cut loose attractive characters in different choreographed formations in assorted machines and locales. Directed by F. Gary Gray (Straight Outta Compton), this one opens in Havana, where the young local beauties swirling around Dom and Letty move and dress more or less like the other young beauties in the series, as if they were part of a continuing global house party, this time with Che Guevara and prettily peeling buildings.

Gray, an action-movie veteran, gets that party started quickly. Dom and Letty are hanging out in the new Havana, which in this case means chatting in Spanish and English while checking out a vintage car with a boat motor under the hood. It’s a nice emblem of the movie’s old-school opener, which involves some macho posturing that leads to Dom racing in a rusted-out beater. As he drives, ripping past one classic American car after another, he clutches the wheel, the camera pointing up at him. Like a supermodel’s long legs, Diesel’s sculptured, often-bared arms are one of his trademarks, and they do a lot of work, signifying strength and command. Here, though, they shudder.

Both the old cars and Dom’s unsteadiness set up a movie that clearly still needs to contend with Walker’s death even as it delivers the goods. To that end, the filmmakers quickly isolate Dom from his crew (Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, et al.) and give him a proxy heartbreak. Elsewhere, the franchise’s increasingly most valuable players, Dwayne Johnson and the bouncy Jason Statham, take care of business, going hard and funny. Kurt Russell shows up as a man in black with a newbie played by Scott Eastwood, whose resemblance to Big Daddy Clint adds intertextual genre frisson. Charlize Theron slinks in as a villainous hacker in silly blond dreads, jetting around while doing a lot of fast, furious typing.

Punctuated by crashes and drums of doom, the movie moves to a dependable blockbuster beat, as a little exposition is followed by an action scene, and more exposition is followed by a bigger, noisier, nuttier action scene. As the cars zig and the story line zags, these sequences grow baroque, defying reason and gravity, which have progressively come under siege in this franchise. In New York, cars swan-dive off buildings or cut corners like rampaging dogs or, outfitted with Bond-like gizmos, harpoon a bucking ride. There’s an odd Melville thing going on here: In a Bond-esque battle in Russia that typifies the franchise’s expanded reach, a submarine breaches like Moby-Dick.

Zoom, crash, repeat with squealing, burning and flaming tires — it’s all predictably absurd and self-mocking, and often a giggle when not a total yawn. The tedium that sets in is a function of the blockbuster ethos in which everything must smash and ignite so that a solitary man can emerge phoenix-like to fight another franchise fight. Yet while Dom endures baptisms of fire, he is never genuinely alone. Part of the draw of the Fast and Furious movies has always been their multicultural cast, but the series’ strength is a utopian communitarianism that insists the group must be greater than any one man or nation. That’s why Dom will only ever be the franchise’s co-pilot; it’s the crew that rules.

Available for home viewing: "The Zookeeper's Wife"

It's a great — and as yet untold — story: Jan Zabinski and Antonina Zabinska, Polish husband and wife zookeepers, owners of the Warsaw Zoo, opened their zoo to Jewish refugees after the September 1939 German invasion of Poland, and continued to "host" people throughout the occupation, smuggling them out of the Warsaw ghetto, hiding them in animal cages and basement tunnels leading from the house to the zoo. Considering that the German army had commandeered the zoo for an armory, this "hiding in plain sight" strategy was extremely risky. Diane Ackerman, an author who focuses on the natural world, told the tale in her book The Zookeeper's Wife, dovetailing stories of animal camouflage techniques with stories of human survival. Sometimes the metaphor was a bit strained, but Antonina's vivid journals (she also wrote a children's book about animals) was the thread that held it all together. Only two of the 300 Jewish "guests" (as they referred to them) hidden in the zoo were captured by the Nazis and murdered. The rest survived.

The film adaptation, written by Angela Workman and directed by Niki Caro (Whale Rider), has many lovely and moving moments but fails to capture the many layers of this unique story, relying instead on plainly-stated metaphors. "A human zoo," Antonina (Jessica Chastain) breathes, when Jan (Johan Heldenbergh) suggests they take in Jews. There are also some fictionalizations that come straight out of the familiar and cliched Nazi-movie playbook. The opening sequences are effective, showing Antonina's daily routine before the bombs start falling, her affinity for animals, her Snow-White-like gift for relating to them on their level. She is called to the elephant yard to aid with a suffocating baby elephant, and is able to remove the obstruction from the baby's trunk all while calming down the panicked mother elephant. The couple's villa, on the zoo premises, is filled with an eccentric menagerie: badgers and parrots and a pair of baby lynxes, snoring in bed with the Zabinski son Rys (the Polish word for lynx). It's an Edenic world.

But so much information is missing, including the real personalities of these eccentric and tough people. Jan's involvement in the Polish Underground and the Home Army, his weapons stashes all over the city, his long absences, are sketched in, if that. He is shown fighting the Germans at one point, but it's handled so haphazardly it's not clear what's going on. In the book, Jan and Antonina carried cyanide pills on them at all times, to be used if their secret should be discovered. What an illuminating fact! But Workman chooses to leave that out (and many other details), focusing instead on the less-interesting (and fictionalized) domestic dramas going on inside the house: Antonina coaxing a feral Jewish child (raped by Nazi soldiers) to trust her, in the same way she coaxed animals to trust her, in case you didn't get the connection. The Zookeeper's Wife also spends a lot of time showing the lengths Antonina goes to to ingratiate herself to nosy German zookeeper Lutz Heck (Daniel Brühl). She flatters him, flirts with him, and all of this makes Jan jealous. There are unfortunate moments when the real cliffhanger of the film is whether or not Antonina will sleep with Heck, instead of what will happen to the Jews curled up in animal pens.

Caro is on sure ground when showing familiar events through a new filter. There's a haunting sequence on the day of the invasion when the animals in the zoo sense what is coming before the humans do. The sound drops out. The tiger paces wildly in its cage. The monkeys scream into the air. When the zoo is bombed, the animals are let loose on the city, and Warsaw residents peek out their windows at the bizarre sight of a camel trotting by, or a couple of lions prowling through rubble on the corner. Caro shows some of the activities of the Polish Underground, its organization and coordination: setting up a room in the back of a bakery where documents are forged, the rituals of dyeing Jewish black hair platinum blonde, the underground-railroad of helpful citizens who put their lives on the line to save their neighbors, the machinations and bribes that allow Jan to enter the Ghetto officially, and smuggle people back out: these details are fresh, specific, frightening.

Meanwhile, back at the zoo, Antonina hangs out with Heck, listening to his babble about the Nazi's plans to breed back to life the extinct "auroch" as a testament to German's racial purity, and she unbuttons her top button, allows him to wash her hands near the bison pen. These sections are forced, unnecessary. The villain is not Lutz Heck the potential rapist-seducer Nazi. The villain is the Nazi war machine and the racist ideology that kept it alive.

Chastain is an actress who quivers with a vulnerability so palpable you can practically see the pulse beating in her throat. She is able to completely submerge her softness (Crimson Peak), or transform that softness into single-minded obsession (Zero Dark Thirty) or taut anxiety (Miss Julie). In Take Shelter, her wifely concern for her husband's increasing madness is partially why Michael Shannon's performance is so powerful. And of course there's The Tree of Life, a celebration of her vulnerability. As Antonina, though, Chastain seems bound up as an actress, held back in creating a character mainly by the demands of doing a Polish accent.

If an actor's accent is belabored and clumsy, the audience doesn't think, "Wow, I am so involved in this story." They think, "Oh, look, a famous actor trying to do an accent." Chastain's inconsistent Polish accent calls so much attention to itself that even she seems aware of it, lowering her voice to a near-whisper throughout. She is surrounded by European actors, all of whom speak English in a variety of accents (and Jan is played by a Flemish actor), so her attempt is even more distracting.

These are some pretty serious caveats, but it's important to reiterate that there are many sequences of the film that work beautifully, filled with emotion and tension, fear and pain (the Warsaw Ghetto scenes are especially terrible, a spectacle of horror). The story of the zookeepers who risked their lives repeatedly throughout the war is an incredibly moving and important story, in and of itself. Years later, when asked why they did what they did, Jan Zabinski answered, "I only did my duty — if you can save somebody's life, it's your duty to try."

Available for home viewing: "Gifted"

What’s in a child’s best interest? It depends on who’s answering the question. That’s the crux of Gifted, the director Marc Webb’s return to small-scale features after tangling with Spidey.

The gifted child here is a 7-year-old math prodigy, Mary (Mckenna Grace, charmingly precocious), who is being raised by her uncle Frank (an impressive Chris Evans). He wants a normal life for Mary; her mother, also a math genius, was under pressure and committed suicide when Mary was a baby. So they live a simple life with their one-eyed cat in Florida, where Frank fixes boat engines; the grime under his nails (and the beer he swigs) suggest that he’s firmly rooted in the working class.

Yet Frank and Mary’s strong bond — one of the film’s most convincing parts — is tested when he sends her off to the first grade. She’s been home-schooled, but Frank thinks it’s time she tried "being a kid." While Mary can solve differential equations, she has less-than-advanced social skills and manners. Her teacher (Jenny Slate) recognizes her abilities immediately, and floats the idea that Mary would be better served at a prep school. Frank objects, but it’s too late: Soon Frank’s rich mother (a haughty Lindsay Duncan) arrives from Boston to usher Mary off to a life of higher learning. Next stop: the local court, where a fight for her "best interest" ensues, bogging down the story.

Octavia Spencer also pops up in this otherwise fleet-footed film, but the supporting role — if you can call it that — is paltry. She’s brilliant in her few scenes, yet hardly plays as full-fledged a character as she did in another film about mathematicians, Hidden Figures. If only there were a court for this injustice.

Available soon for home viewing

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 **½ Directed by James Gunn. The Guardians must fight to keep their newfound family together as they unravel the mystery of Peter Quill's true parentage. It’s tough being a hitmaker who isn’t weighed down by corporate expectations, but for a while, Gunn does a pretty good job of keeping the whole thing reasonably fizzy, starting with an opener that winks at the audience with big bangs and slapstick.

Kill Switch ½* Directed by Tim Smit. A pilot battles to save his family and the planet after an experiment for unlimited energy goes wrong. The plot, unlike its execution, is not terrible.

Available for home viewing: "Kong Skull Island"

As a big-budget B-grade monster movie, Kong: Skull Island is a home run. It offers all the tropes and clichés one expects from this sort of endeavor, sparing no expense when it comes to special effects. As a King Kong movie, however, Skull Island is less successful. The supersized ape stomping around this tropical atoll isn’t recognizable as any Kong we have previously seen. Call him "Kong in Name Only." Superficial physical resemblances aside, it’s hard to find much of the Big Guy’s personality in this incarnation. The Kong of Skull Island is a hulking force of nature who exists exclusively to wreck helicopters and beat up other monsters. Forget all that Beauty and the Beast crap. At 300+ feet tall, he’s about 10 times the size of his 1933/1976/2005 "little brother" — a change that was made so he can eventually go toe-to-toe with Godzilla — something that wouldn’t work if he was only in the 30-50 foot range. For the producers, the end game is 2020’s King Kong versus Godzilla, as is made evident in a post-credits scene.

Kong: Skull Island isn’t a sequel, prequel, or reboot. It’s a completely new story set in a parallel universe where nothing that happened in any previous King Kong movie has transpired. Why use the name Kong when so much is different and previous continuity has been thrown out the window? Marketing! The name "King Kong" has tremendous name recognition. How many millions of people will see this movie because of "Kong" that wouldn’t see it if was about "ApeX"?

Unlike Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, which kept its title creature under wraps for half the running time, it doesn’t take Kong long to get into the action. After a brief cameo during a prologue set in 1944 (which has two World War 2 pilots crash-landing on Skull Island), Kong makes his grand entrance about 20 minutes into the main story. Set in 1973, this allows for countless nods to Apocalypse Now and a few references to the 1976 King Kong. Ignoring the time period, Skull Island has a Jurassic Park 3 vibe.

The movie follows the travails of a group of scientists and soldiers who become trapped on Skull Island after Kong smashes their transport helicopters to smithereens. They’re a diverse lot: mission leader Bill Randa (John Goodman) and his assistants, Houston (Corey Hawkins) and San (Tian Jing); Vietnam vet Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson); tracker and ex-British operative James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston); anti-war photographer and feminist Mason Weaver (Brie Larson); and the Rip Van Winkle-inspired Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly), who has been marooned on the island for about 30 years.

Some aspects of Kong lore have been retained. As in the 1976 version, the island is obscured by clouds. It’s also inhabited, although the natives don’t speak (a clever way to avoid the language barrier). The iconic wall is there, although it has been repurposed since there’s no way it would be much of a deterrence to a 30-story ape who can swat helicopters out of the sky. The dinosaurs of the 1933/2005 movies (DeLaurentis opted to go with just a giant rubber snake) have been replaced by lizard monsters since a T-Rex wouldn’t be much of a challenge for this Kong. The movie collapses into three basic elements: Kong vs. people, Kong vs. animals, and lots of running.

The special effects are extraordinary considering the low bar set by the screenplay. This is a wise decision and a case of the producers understanding the audience. No one goes to a King Kong movie expecting well-developed characters and a complex narrative. They go for adventure, excitement, and kick-ass monster battles and all three are in place. As I wrote earlier, this is a good monster movie. It has all the elements. 13-year old boys will be in heaven. It only disappoints when one considers that Kong, distinguished in earlier incarnations as one of the most anthropomorphized of all the big monsters, has been diminished in concept.

For director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, this is an introduction to the big time and he handles it well. His focus is where it should be and the various human actors (including an Oscar winner, two Oscar nominees, and a former Taylor Swift boyfriend) do their best to provide background color. Despite having the best stare of the cast members, Jackson is out-overacted by Reilly, who ends up being the only person we care about.

There have always been pro-environmental themes in the King Kong movies (most clearly emphasized in the 1976 version) and it’s impossible to miss the inclusion of those ideas here. Sticking with the tenet that subtlety has no place in a monster movie, the screenwriters get out the sledgehammer and slam home their commentary about humanity’s (negative) impact on the world around us. They also throw in some anti-war stuff as well, although the frequent call-backs to Apocalypse Now become tiresome after a while. We get the point from the poster’s homage; no need to keep beating the dead horse.

To be fair to Legendary Entertainment, there have been worse representations of King Kong. The two Japanese movies with their laughable production values and man-in-a-monkey-suit approach top the list with the (thankfully) forgotten kids’ cartoon not far behind. Compared to these, Skull Island, despite genericizing the legendary ape, comes across as deeply respectful. And if the ultimate point of this movie is to get Kong into the ring with Godzilla, this isn’t a bad appetizer.

Available for home viewing: "The Lost City of Z"

The Lost City of Z is an adaptation of David Grann’s non-fiction book of the same name. Expanded from the author’s 2005 New Yorker article, the 2009 hardcover became a New York Times bestseller and garnered over a half-dozen major awards and citations. Part biography and part true life detective story, The Lost City of Z recounted the life and exploits of early 20th century explorer Percy Fawcett, who became obsessed with a mythical city in the Amazon that he simply called "Z". Since many things about Z and Fawcett’s final mission remain shrouded in mystery, Grann’s book looked at various scenarios and explored the available evidence.

Although a documentary might have offered a straightforward interpretation of the book, director James Gray moved forward with a feature instead. This approach necessitated taking liberties with the text, not the least of which was condensing episodes from the protagonist’s life. The ending is muddled as an unsuccessful attempt is made to provide closure to a story that, if told frankly, shouldn’t have one.

The movie opens in 1906 with the 39-year old Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) traveling for the Royal Geographic Society to the wilds of South America to map the Brazil/Bolivia border. Accompanying him are two other British army soldiers: Henry Costin (Robert Pattinson) and Arthur Manley (Edward Ashley). Although several members of the expedition die, it is considered a success and Fawcett returns home as a minor celebrity (explorers being revered in the early 1900s). He is convinced that the remains of a great city exist within the Amazon awaiting a well-funded and determined mission to uncover them.

Accompanied by another explorer, James Murray (Angus Macfadyen), who served on Shackleton’s 1907 Antarctic crew, Fawcett returns to the Amazon in 1911. This trip, although offering additional evidence of the existence of the ruins, fails to provide conclusive evidence and, when Murray falls ill with blood poisoning, an abrupt return home is necessitated. World War I breaks out, scuttling additional expeditions. It isn’t until 1925 that Fawcett is able to once again head into the wilderness, this time accompanied only by his son, Jack (Tom Holland).

The Lost City of Z’s structure is problematic. Covering nearly 20 years of Fawcett’s life results in discontinuities in the character’s life and, although more than a half-dozen expeditions have been compressed into three, the movie rushes through each to get to the next chapter. There’s arguably too much material to fit into a 141-minute movie, especially presenting it chronologically, and there are times when The Lost City of Z’s approach feels superficial.

"Green Inferno" movies (as they have come to be called) often rely strongly on a sense of atmosphere — something almost entirely absent in The Lost City of Z. Here, the Amazon isn’t some implacable adversary whose dense foliage hides unimaginable terrors. Instead, it’s camera-friendly scenery that allows the great cinematographer Darius Khondji an opportunity to display his skill. Gray’s arm’s length storytelling offers a coherent narrative but there’s little in the way of suspense or tension. The journeys are perfunctory, offering little in the way of adventure. Although it’s probably unfair to make a comparison with the likes of Apocalypse Now, Fitzcarraldo, and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, the Heart of Darkness journeys in those movies possessed a visceral power that The Lost City of Z never achieves. They were uncomfortable and immersive; The Lost City of Z seems inspired by them but its jungle scenes are indistinct echoes at best. On the home front, attempts to flesh out the loving relationship between Fawcett and his wife, Nina (Sienna Miller), are only partly successful and the resolution of the long-simmering resentment of Jack for his father is sudden and unsatisfying.

Strong production values and a capable lead performance by Charlie Hunnam offset some of the film’s narrative issues but, although The Lost City of Z held my interest, it felt like a missed opportunity. Like too many biographical movies, this one tries to do too much. There are tantalizing glimpses of ideas that could have blossomed (obsession, patronizing Colonial attitudes, resource exploitation) but were nipped in the bud because of time constraints and a determination to concentrate on breadth rather than depth. The result is a collage of people, places, and events set in an era that seems foreign despite having existed only a century ago. Historical inaccuracies aside, the film provides an uneven but compelling portrait of one of the last members of a dying breed and gives us cause to mourn how technology has made the explorer extinct.