The Post

THE POST (Steven Spielberg, 2017)

When the New York Times starts to publish reports from the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) bristles at the competition’s ability to break such big stories. In THE POST his newspaper is viewed as a local publication scratching for access to the President’s daughter’s wedding rather than a national outlet revealing how multiple administrations got the country involved with the Vietnam War. Even when the paper gets its hands on some pages from the classified Department of Defense studies, the Times is already ahead of them.

Opportunity arises when the Nixon administration pressures the Justice Department to impose an injunction blocking the Times from printing stories based on the Pentagon Papers. Post reporter Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk) tracks down the leaker, Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys), but as he and other writers and editorial staffers work furiously against the deadline, legal concerns may kill their pieces. It’s ultimately up to Post publisher Kay Graham (Meryl Streep), the first woman in the country to hold such a high role, to decide whether or not to risk going to press. Not only does she and others risk being charged with a felony and a prison sentence, but such an action could also drive investors to pull their funding of the Post’s initial public offering.

Collected with LINCOLN and BRIDGE OF SPIES, THE POST completes an unofficial American civics trilogy from director Steven Spielberg. All three films depict the struggle to live up to the country’s foundational ideals and the openness needed for a healthy democracy to function. The camera glides around the official and unofficial newsrooms, and telephones are like physical extensions emphasizing the connections to spread the information to the masses. Still, many of the most consequential conversations occur in confined spaces, marked by characters closing doors and showing how the biggest decisions are made by a select few out of view.

Spielberg ensures that this isn’t stodgy history about the importance of a free press. THE POST is paced, shot, and lit like a thriller. The delivery of a shoebox is fraught with the uncertainty of the explosiveness of its contents. Although a cardboard container wrapped in twine is less ornate than the Ark of the Covenant, the low angle opening of it is treated as though it too holds unimaginable power. When the printing press rumbles to life to produce the Post’s first Pentagon Papers story, Spielberg makes its strength known by showing items bouncing around on a desk like the ripples in a cup signalling a Tyrannosaurus rex’s arrival in JURASSIC PARK.

THE POST recognizes that rights are meaningful as long as they are exercised. In that way the film honors the people who jeopardized their well-being for the greater good. Hanks has grown to stand for Hollywood’s conception of American decency, a modern Jimmy Stewart, and although his newspaper editor acts with self-interest, his position is built upon principles he believes are essential to free society. His performance crackles with humor and righteousness, in part because Bradlee is privileged to be able to express himself unquestioningly. Streep is more reserved but no less determined. THE POST often shows how Graham is overwhelmed in rooms by men and how women are often split off from where power resides. Streep is so good at showing how her character thinks through the situation and stands up for her choices even as her board and advisers challenge her decisions. THE POST understands that bravery can take many forms, even if it’s merely ink on a page.

Grade: A

The Shape of Water

THE SHAPE OF WATER (Guillermo del Toro, 2017)

The life of a mute cleaning woman in the early 1960s changes dramatically when she encounters the strange creature being studied in THE SHAPE OF WATER. Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon) found an amphibian man (Doug Jones) in the rivers of South America and brings this great discovery to an aerospace facility in Baltimore with the intention of using it in research to assist the U.S. in the space race with the Soviet Union. While working the late shift there, Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) grows curious about this humanoid animal.

Injuries as an orphan have left Elisa unable to speak, but lacking a voice is no barrier to communicating with the amphibian man. Elisa feeds him hard-boiled eggs, plays him music, and teaches him signs. She is horrified by the abuse he receives from Strickland. When she overhears that the amphibian man is to be vivisected, Elisa is determined to break him out. She executes her plan with the help of her artist neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer), and, to her surprise, Dr. Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Russian mole posing as an American researcher.

As strange as it sounds, THE SHAPE OF WATER might be thought of as AMÉLIE meets CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. Director and co-writer Guillermo del Toro’s ravishing film swirls together fantasy, romance, black-and-white Hollywood musicals, and old monster movies into a simple and oddly affecting love story. The film emphasizes the power of being seen and accepted as one is, even if in this instance half of the unlikely couple looks like the sort of abomination spoken of in legend to terrify children. Through the perspective of del Toro, whose fondness for monsters runs through his body of work, and Elisa, who can identify with feeling out of place, the amphibian man is not to be feared but empathized with. Alexandre Desplat’s lush score feeds the sense of longing that pumps through the lovelorn characters.

Hawkins grounds the film with the soft heart and dancer’s grace she brings to Elisa. THE SHAPE OF WATER hinges on her expressiveness. Listening and reacting are often said to be the most important parts of acting, and Hawkins does both beautifully as she manifests her emotions and thoughts through the looks she gives and the smoothness of her movements.

THE SHAPE OF WATER cuts to the feelings, working in broad strokes and bold colors. The visuals are drenched in gorgeous, storybook tones indicative of the time in which the film is set and its fairy tale qualities.

Grade: A

Lady Bird

LADY BIRD (Greta Gerwig, 2017)

Strong-willed high school senior Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) has a good idea of what she wants and is willing to pursue it tenaciously in the coming of age comedy LADY BIRD. Christine decides she would rather be known as Lady Bird and insists upon being called by the name she gives herself. When a boy captures her attention, be it sweet fellow thespian Danny O’Neill (Lucas Hedges) or budding anarchist Kyle Scheible (Timothée Chalamet), she focuses on him like a sniper. While she has a deep connection with best friend Julie (Beanie Feldstein), that relationship is susceptible to Lady Bird’s self-interested choices causing a rift.

Inevitably Lady Bird’s biggest conflicts are with her loving but equally resolute mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf), who is quick to call her out for real and perceived shortcomings. Lady Bird’s dad Larry (Tracy Letts) is a soft touch, so Marion’s demanding nature helps to balance the parental qualities their daughter needs as she moves toward independence, self-sufficiency, and, if Lady Bird has her wish, far away from Sacramento.

Greta Gerwig is already established as a talented actress with a flair for comedy. She co-wrote and starred in the exquisite FRANCES HA, and with LADY BIRD she expands upon her gifts in character creation as the writer and director. This sharply observed film understands the hair trigger emotional state of adolescence, particularly in that transitional period from high school to college and youth to young adulthood. The highs are higher, and the lows are lower. Lady Bird’s first kiss with Danny brings her the kind of overwhelming joy she can’t contain, but she plummets in an instant from that peak moment to the bottom of the valley when her mother chastises her for not putting away her clothes. Walking home alone after the kiss Ronan shows how Lady Bird is so happy she screams, covers her mouth, and doubles over, as if it’s only polite not to beam too much. That her unaware mother won’t let the feeling linger only increases the injury.

The loving tension in families, specifically between mothers and daughters, is central to LADY BIRD. The film opens with Lady Bird and Marion sleeping face to face in the same hotel bed and then bonding while listening to THE GRAPES OF WRATH on tape on the long drive home from college visits. They have a tight connection, yet that also means they can expertly press one another’s buttons and obliterate the peace that existed one second earlier. Lady Bird and Marion exchange cutting remarks while shopping for a dress in a thrift shop, but when Marion pulls the perfect one off the rack, they both light up like the noon sun.

Coming of age films are inclined to empathize more with the person growing up, but in LADY BIRD Gerwig fairly distributes the sense of who’s right and who’s wrong. Lady Bird can be an outspoken, self-centered brat, and Ronan leans in very humorously to the character’s attitude. She’s also more vulnerable than her exterior tends to reveal. Marion is tough, probably in an overcompensatory manner, but Gerwig’s screenplay and Metcalf’s performance detail how her sternness with Lady Bird comes from a good place and can be necessary.

LADY BIRD is a very funny movie with its witty dialogue and retroactively embarrassed observations of high school. The theater rehearsal scenes are the sort of thing that students would find fun in the moment and be mortified by in retrospect, especially if anyone not involved saw. The film also has a big heart for the complexity and challenges in being a teen and a parent, even if sometimes you can’t see the bigger picture until it’s in the past.

Grade: A

Mudbound

MUDBOUND (Dee Rees, 2017)

In MUDBOUND two families in the Mississippi delta farm the land, often with a great deal of difficulty, but while there is much they have in common in post-World War II America, their races make profound differences in how their lives unfold. Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke) moves his wife Laura (Carey Mulligan), their two daughters, and his racist father Pappy (Jonathan Banks), from Memphis flush with the expectations of what being a landowner will bring. They soon are faced with the hard reality that the grueling labor and stark living conditions aren’t entirely what Henry had in mind when he purchased the property. Nearby with a wife Florence (Mary J. Blige) and three children is Hap Jackson (Rob Morgan), a tenant farmer who wishes to own the land that his descendants worked as slaves.

Henry’s brother Jamie (Garrett Hedlund) and Hap’s son Ronsel (Jason Mitchell) enlist when the time comes for the United States to enter the Second World War, and both come back seeing things differently. Ronsel has become accustomed to being treated more equally. He also leaves behind a German woman for whom he was great affection and seems restless back home. Jamie is haunted by the death he witnessed in wartime and often gets drunk to assuage the pain. The two bond over what they saw and did in the European theater even as such chumminess draws negative attention from the locals.

MUDBOUND’s screenplay by Virgil Williams and director Dee Rees fluidly shifts among perspectives through weary narration stained with the disappointment and bitterness that colors the day-to-day realities and futures for these characters. All wish for something better but know that they seem doomed to be stuck in the mire.

Racism exerts a strong pull on what transpires, and MUDBOUND demonstrates how it destroys through overt and less obvious guises. Pappy’s virulent strain of hatred is the most appalling and easiest to condemn. Its consequences for those he targets and his own corroded soul are readily apparent. Rees also shows how a quieter, less loud form of racism tips the power dynamic. Henry does not make explicit threats or direct disgusting comments toward Hap and his wife, yet they know that if they don’t heed his requests, he won’t continue to ask nicely. Their interests are subservient to his, whether it’s jeopardizing their health or taking leave from their family to attend to his.

While MUDBOUND observes that the muck in this mindset drags everyone down, it also spots the potency of shared experiences to foster understanding that breaks down barriers. Hedlund and Mitchell give the richest performances, in part because their characters breach what separates the others.

Grade: A-

Goodbye Christopher Robin

GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN (Simon Curtis, 2017)

Wrestling with how to appreciate a work of art when the artist’s actions range from objectionable to abhorrent is nothing new, but in light of the number of sexual misconduct and assault allegations emerging in creative communities, such a question seems particularly worthy of consideration right now. Because 2017 seems to be the year of explaining why we can’t have nice things, along comes GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN to potentially ruin Winnie the Pooh. The author behind the beloved character didn’t do anything as horrid as what is dominating today’s entertainment news, but becoming aware of how he exploited his son in promoting the Pooh books introduces some acidity into the gentle mystique around them.

Years after serving during World War I, writer A.A. Milne (Domnhall Gleeson), who often goes by the nickname Blue, remains haunted by the experience. Blue wishes to get out of the city decides that he, his wife Daphne (Margot Robbie), and their eight-year-old son Christopher Robin (Will Tilston), who they call Billy Moon, will move from London to the countryside. The new home in Sussex isn’t the cure-all for what ails him, though. Frustrated with his inability to work, Daphne leaves and vows not to return until he writes again.

Neither Blue nor Daphne are the most active parent, leaving the child care to the nanny Olive (Kelly Macdonald), who Billy is attached to like a mother. When Olive needs to leave to care for her ill mother, Blue is left to watch over the boy for awhile. This time could have been yet another obstacle to his writing, but instead it inspires his most enduring work. Their walks in the woods and Billy’s play with stuffed animals, including a yellow teddy bear named Edward, generates a popular poem and then the Winnie the Pooh books. Daphne comes back home, and the works are massively successful. The public’s love for the books also prompts a keen interest in the real Christopher Robin. The Milnes eagerly involve Billy in the publicity cycle.

GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN attempts to tell a rather acrid tale within a placid, storybook world. The prim and proper surface disguises the sourness of the material. It’s like taking a drink of what one thinks is light lemonade and discovering it is lemon concentrate. As directed by Simon Curtis, Gleeson and Robbie appear to be playing very loving and very emotionally distant parents. The actors aren’t at fault for the lack of consistency in which they interact with their screen son. Rather, Curtis seems to want to resist the truth as represented in the screenplay while achieving some measure of vindication on Billy’s behalf. Macdonald, playing a tender and concerned motherly stand-in, is the only one who comes across with any awareness of what is happening in this household.

It doesn’t help that GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN lacks a perspective. This isn’t Milne’s reckoning of his shortcomings as a father. Nor is the film viewed from Billy’s side as a kid or an 18-year-old who resents how the books affected his life. Curtis sands off the rough edges and tries to be sympathetic to father and son, but it simply isn’t credible in the way he tells is, especially the especially phony-seeming ending.

Whether Curtis deserves all the blame or if some can be attributed to Frank Cottrell Boyce and Simon Vaughan’s screenplay is difficult to know, but it is easy to see how GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN could have been much different in someone else’s hands. A hypothetical Terry Gilliam version might have played up the phantasmagoric fairy tale qualities of a child whose imagination is plundered for his father’s creative renewal and whose odyssey through the media circus denies his real self. Another director might have focused on how the trauma of war lingers long beyond the battlefield. Yet another might have zeroed in on the public’s weird fascination with child stars, made all the stranger here because Billy is the basis for a fictional book character. GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN could have rich thematic layers, but Curtis settles on a bland, psychologically confused way of exploring them.

Grade: C-

Buster's Mal Heart

BUSTER’S MAL HEART (Sarah Adina Smith, 2016)

For five years the scraggly-bearded mountain man dubbed Buster mostly eludes being spotted as he scavenges in the wilderness during the warm months and breaks into Montana vacation homes when the weather turns cold. BUSTER’S MAL HEART alternates between the police chasing him toward a showdown, the life he had before he withdrew from society, and his time at sea.

Prior to going off the grid, this fringe figure was known as Jonah (Rami Malek), a late-night hotel concierge with a wife, Marty (Kate Lyn Sheil), and a two-year-old daughter. They live with her parents in a tense arrangement, so he dreams of one day buying some property and living off the land. One night at work someone proclaiming himself The Last Free Man (DJ Qualls) approaches Jonah about the societal illusion and the collapse in a few years with Y2K. Jonah may or may not fully buy into talk of a second inversion and how to escape the system, but he is happy to listen to what this stranger has to say.

Like MR. ROBOT, a TV series that features Malek, BUSTER’S MAL HEART is steeped in a paranoid world in which mysterious forces are at work behind the scenes manipulating the rest of us. Writer-director Sarah Adina Smith’s film is less plot-driven and more opaque, something along the lines of Shane Carruth’s mindbender UPSTREAM COLOR. The dreamy quality running through BUSTER’S MAL HEART isn’t so abstract to be thoroughly confounding, yet the resolution amount to less than the enigmatic elements trying to be pieced together. Smith employs religious symbolism in telling the main character’s tale, although this Jonah only seems fleetingly connected to his Biblical namesake.

Malek’s expressiveness performs the hard work of convincing that this weary family man could fracture, disappear into the countryside, and become the stuff of local legend. His eyes reveal how weighed down he is by frustrations of what his circumstances offer and the need to trick his body into getting a decent rest while the sun is out. They reveal Jonah’s internal vacancy and the opportunity for anyone to fill him up with even a halfway persuasive argument. Malek voices skepticism while those eyes appear to plead for the answers he hasn’t found. Even after his conversion of sorts in reverting to a more animalistic state, his civilized humanity shines through when face to face with those who assumes are blind to his reality.

BUSTER’S MAL HEART likely doesn’t succeed if the flashbacks with Jonah’s family weren’t so effective. Malek, Sheil, and Sukha Belle Potter as their daughter Roxy have minimal moments to flesh out a loving relationship facing the strains from personal finances, especially as they relate to living situation and expectations. The tenderness in their interactions and the rawness between Malek and Sheil emphasize the enormous support in this unit perceived to be threatened by those in the shadows.

Grade: B-

Only the Brave

ONLY THE BRAVE (Joseph Kosinski, 2017)

In ONLY THE BRAVE Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin) oversees a unit within the Prescott, Arizona Fire Department that fights wildfires, but because they are not certified at the highest level, they are relegated to tasks he feels the team is overqualified for. With the help of the department’s Duane Stinebrink (Jeff Bridges), Eric gets his chance to get the team to the level of hotshots. He also convinces the mayor that as hotshots they'll earn more for hire to other communities than it costs to maintain the team. Among the firefighters is Brendan McDonough (Miles Teller), a burnout who says he’s determined to turn around his life after fathering a daughter.

ONLY THE BRAVE holds up the honor and dignity of a group working tirelessly and selflessly toward a common cause. Although the men may carry themselves with a certain swagger, the danger in what they do is always apparent to them and the loved ones worrying as they rush off to stop a big conflagration. While Ken Nolan and Eric Warren Springer’s screenplay holds these men up as heroes, it doesn’t do so at the expense of portraying their flaws and the tensions among them. These guys must rely on each other, but the personality clashes and self-destructive behaviors that exist in every team are just as visible here. Such a large crew can make it difficult to get to know all of them beyond a defining trait or two, which is why Marsh, McDonough, and Taylor Kitsch’s Chris MacKenzie, the wilder spirit in this bunch, receive the majority of the focus. Still, ONLY THE BRAVE does well at providing glimpses of those who are no less important than the ones who dominate the story.

Director Joseph Kosinski shoots the firefighting scene with attention to the technical requirements and strategy involved in taming the flames gobbling up the land before they reach homes. The hotshots literally fight fire with fire, which sounds counterintuitive but proves to be a remarkably effective approach as long as the situation has been properly assessed. ONLY THE BRAVE houses deep respect for the people who do this work, and in explaining how they achieve positive results, it honors all those whose accumulated knowledge and losses allow for such remarkable achievements now.

It’s fair to assume that a film about civic protectors probably contains its share of tragedy. ONLY THE BRAVE fits into the tradition of memorialization for such people. Rather than doing so with a plaque, the moving images, in the literal and metaphorical senses, depict what some are willing to risk for the safety of all. Kosinski handles the inevitable scene of informing loved ones about deaths on the job with delicacy and power combining the joy and jealousy for those who survived and anger and sorrow on the part of those who don’t come home. There can be a tendency for empty valorization of sacrifice, as though death in service makes it more acceptable while denying the impact that resonates through those left behind. ONLY THE BRAVE acknowledges the heroism but respects that all of the ringing words of praise can never make up for what is given.

Grade: B

Barton Fink

BARTON FINK (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 1991)

New York playwright Barton Fink (John Turturro) is fresh off a stage success in 1941 when Hollywood comes calling. Barton fancies himself as working toward a new theater for the common man, but he is reluctantly drawn to accept an opportunity that can help to finance much more of what he really wants to do. In BARTON FINK studio executive Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner) couldn’t be more enthusiastic about hiring this writer in to bring his special touch to the pictures, but Barton soon learns he’s not going to be working on anything highbrow. Jack assigns him to pen a wrestling B-movie starring Wallace Beery and wants a screenplay by week’s end.

For his time in Los Angeles Barton strives to abide by his principles, choosing to take residence in the ramshackle Hotel Earle than the swankier places where the studio could put him up. Driven to distraction by the noise from the neighboring room, Barton complains to the front desk, resulting in Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), the traveling insurance salesman next door, to come by to apologize. Charlie is a friendly guy, and he makes it a habit to drop by Barton’s room when he fears him enter. Although Barton wants to work, he has a hard time rejecting Charlie’s company. Anyway, he’s in state of paralysis in which he can’t get past describing the film’s first scene.

BARTON FINK unspools like the spiritual predecessor to last year’s Coen brothers’ film HAIL, CAESAR! Although they take place ten years apart, both are set at the fictional Capital Studios and initiate existential crises in their main characters. Barton’s most obvious conflict is an ill-timed case of writer’s block, but what brings it on is harder to pin down. Is he simply out of his element in a different medium? Can he not write because he thinks the work is beneath me, or is he not as in touch with the common man he reveres? The film is too slippery to identify as being about one particular thing. Stylistically it’s a supremely weird combination of satire, horror, film noir, and religious allegory. Still, at its core is the despair of not being able to escape the one’s own mind.

The aphorism of indeterminate origin “no matter where you go, there you are” succinctly describes Barton’s predicament. BARTON FINK puts forward that the writer might occupy a literal fiery furnace, one that makes the wallpaper glue drip and the decorative surfaces peel. It seems significant that the film begins and ends with shots of the wallpaper, the sort of thing one can’t look away from or would stare at while trying to pump ideas out of a dry mental well. Yet it’s just as plausible that the heat Barton feels is stoked by his own feelings of impostor-like inadequacy.

For all of the esteem Barton expresses for the common man, he doesn’t listen to the one in his midst. Charlie, a fellow as affable as they get, struggles to get a word in edgewise, and when he does, Barton doesn’t listen. A solution to his problem is right in front of him, but Barton is so preoccupied with what’s rattling around his skull that he can’t spot it. That grand cosmic joke stretches across Joel and Ethan Coen’s films. The suffering person’s inability to save themselves is a grand cosmic joke that stretches across Joel and Ethan Coen’s films. It’s darker in BARTON FINK, in part because the writer embraces that pain as if it is inherently holy.

Grade: B+

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED) (Noah Baumbach, 2017)

To friends, acquaintances, and strangers, the life of sculptor and retired professor Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman) looks like a success, but the man himself nurtures jealousy of his peers’ wider acclaim and animosity toward an art world that has failed to appreciate him sufficiently. He sold a work to the Whitney decades ago, yet it’s indicative of his status that no one is exactly sure where it is being stored. In THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED), Harold’s self-centeredness has contributed to the strained relationship he has with the three children his four marriages have produced.

Danny (Adam Sandler) and Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), the two oldest, share a mother and the sense that they were never especially important to their father. Such treatment fuels Danny to be a doting dad with his daughter Eliza (Grace Van Patten). While Matthew (Ben Stiller) is perceived, not incorrectly, to be the favored child, he carries his share of grudges regarding Harold. Despite their frustrations, all three still seek approval from him. Danny and Jean strive to secure a retrospective show of Harold’s work. Although Danny objects, Matthew tries to arrange the sale of the big, costly New York City house where Harold and his current wife Maureen (Emma Thompson) reside.

The episodic nature and title of THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED) suggest that the glimpses of this dysfunctional family don’t tell everything but encapsulate the fundamental truths about them and viewpoints within this unit. Writer-director Noah Baumbach’s film depicts a period of critical transition. Danny has separated from his wife and needs direction. Eliza is starting college. Matthew is at a crossroads in his marriage and career. Harold is trying to adjust to retirement. Although the chapter-like structure leaves gaps, it contains the greatest hits and misses in Meyerowitz family history. Life brings new developments, but these events all tend to circle back to be understood through the lens of old resentments. The stories each person tells himself and herself have as much to do with constructing their identities as what actually happens.

Baumbach’s comedies about families often have a strong undercurrent of anger. MARGOT AT THE WEDDING, THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, and WHILE WE’RE YOUNG, among others, laugh at the ways people can get maligned and twisted in their most central relationships, but the humor provides a thin cover for bitterness. The characters in THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES exist in the state of a soft boil. Their emotions are adequately hot without making them hard. Baumbach crafts a warm, humane movie accepting of people in spite of their faults. The Meyerowitzes aren’t going to resolve all of their differences in the course of the film or beyond it, but Baumbach shows why blood ties and shared history can be worth saving in spite of the aggravations.

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES cast is superb at conveying the commonly understood order and unspoken, or whispered, opinions in families. Baumbach excels at capturing the dynamic in which each person assumes the role they’ve adopted through the years whether or not they’ve changed outside the family. He’s also really sharp and funny in observing how parents and siblings don’t fully understand what the adult kids do in their jobs and how watching TV together can be as meaningful as anything in maintaining the peace.

Sandler has proven to be a good actor when working with directors who can modulate his tendencies. Here he’s quite affecting playing a loving father who transforms into an ignored little boy desperate for validation when around his dad. His tender scenes with Van Patten reveal Danny at his best. His goodness is visible in how he’s attentive in a way that Harold wasn’t and isn’t and also in how she protects him when she knows he’s vulnerable. The ease and honesty they have with one another contrasts powerfully with how Harold and Danny communicate. Hoffman is funny and tragic as a wrecking ball of a patriarch, one whose narrow vision fails to acknowledge that in chasing acceptance from the world at large he’s missed the love those closest to him are so eager to give. A life has many potential narratives, but it’s the one we select, rather than what is written for us, that determines if we are satisfied.

Grade: A

Battle of the Sexes

BATTLE OF THE SEXES (Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, 2017)

Having founded the first women’s professional tennis tour in reaction to being paid much less than the men, Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) was well acquainted with being undervalued because of her gender. In BATTLE OF THE SEXES she gets to defend women’s excellence on the court when retired tennis star Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) challenges her to a highly publicized 1973 match. Bobby is a loudmouth who belittles women as being inferior in tennis and daily life. While it takes some time for Billie Jean to accept her part in the TV sideshow, she welcomes the chance to prove what she and other women are capable of.

BATTLE OF THE SEXES places a lot of emphasis on the lead-up to the the consequential match between one of the best women’s players in the world at the time and a 55-year-old former champion. Billie Jean is dealing with personal and professional stresses that threaten to distract her from what she most wants to accomplish. Helping to run the tour steals some time and focus from training. Falling into a relationship with hairdresser Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough) leads her to revelations about herself that she’d either ignored or denied as a married woman. On the other hand, Bobby relishes the carnival he constructs around the big showdown. He’s back to being the center of attention, even if he is acting like a piggish buffoon. For a man who seems to have lost his purpose in life and is afflicted with a gambling addiction, the Battle of the Sexes could help to fill both of those holes.

Directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton do excellent work with the meticulous recreation of the period and using the camera to illustrate the division. The placement of men and women within a room and often in separate shots highlight the frustration Billie Jean and her tourmates feel at being restricted by the men in power and cut off from what they deserve. Stone locates the right mix of drive, intensity, and vulnerability in Billie Jean to show a person who enjoys being in the spotlight but feels the pressure that comes with it in public and private life. Billie Jean’s story is served best in BATTLE OF THE SEXES, as the film empathizes more with her predicament, yet it doesn’t come at the expense of Bobby. His motivations and beliefs are not as clear as they might appear, and his demons make him seem sadder than the foolish role he gladly plays for the cameras.

BATTLE OF THE SEXES entertains even as Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay wobbles in spots and raises questions about if this is the best form for this story. This exhibition match provided the basis for an ABC TV movie starring Holly Hunter in 2001. A documentary would have been better suited for contextualizing the Battle of the Sexes. Regardless, the strength of the drama and the look make this tennis showdown worth revisiting again.

Grade: B-

Medicine for Melancholy

MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY (Barry Jenkins, 2008)

Two strangers wake up after a drunken one-night stand at a mutual friend’s party and awkwardly interact in the harsh light of morning in MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY. Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and Jo’ (Tracey Weggins) get coffee and share a cab ride, but he seems much more interested in building upon what happened the night before than she does. If it weren’t for her forgetting her wallet in the taxi, they’d likely never see each other again.

Micah tracks her down with a little difficulty. Jo’ doesn’t seem too keen to invite him into her spacious San Francisco apartment because, as she grudgingly reveals, she’s living there with her boyfriend, a curator who is currently in London. Nevertheless, Micah possesses a certain charm he deploys to persuade her to spend the day exploring the city with him. Although Jo’ sends him mixed signals, he’s happy to have the time together.

Writer-director Barry Jenkins’ first feature film finds him testing out themes and soaking up the atmosphere in ways he refined eight years later with MOONLIGHT. MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY unspools as the inverse of BEFORE SUNRISE. The pair’s brief, shared time, roughly twenty-four hours, begins intimately and then works toward lively conversations about their views on all manner of topics. The film is also clearly indebted to Wong Kar-wai’s IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE and Claire Denis’ FRIDAY NIGHT, from which Jenkins borrows a song for the soundtrack. MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY wallows in the romantic tension fueled by desire and loneliness fighting with personal circumstances that make such a relationship illicit.

Jo’ already being with someone hangs over her day with Micah, as does the fact that she’s dating a white man. Cenac plays Micah as a funny, down-to-earth guy, but his character doesn’t hide his resentments. He bristles at his position as a black man in a gentrifying San Francisco that would outprice him and those like him from the city and the shoebox of a studio apartment he rents. Meanwhile, Jo’ doesn’t have to worry about paying for the big place where she lives. Micah doesn’t accuse her of betraying her race, but the privilege he perceives her benefiting from is implicit in the frustration he expresses, particularly when he has a few drinks in him.

MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY succeeds more at getting into Micah’s head than Jo’s. Jenkins lets the characters’ actions speak for themselves. While Micah’s motives are straightforward, the psychology behind Jo’s decisions are obscured more. She’s wary of revealing much about herself to Micah and displays an awareness that she shouldn’t be doing what she’s doing. Still, she submits to this encounter and takes an active role in ensuring that hanging out isn’t innocent socializing. Jenkins doesn’t need to explain all of Jo’s choices, but he could have done better at balancing our understanding of the two protagonists.

Cinematographer James Laxton’s work on MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY stands in sharp contrast to the visual style of his lighting for MOONLIGHT. Where the latter boasted sumptuous colors, MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY is often bleached so that it almost appears to be in black and white. Like cautionary and prohibitory signals, faded yellows and reds peek out most prominently from the delicate, silvery images. In part Jenkins’ film is about how you interpret your surroundings. Although MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY exhibits potential checked by limitations of a young filmmaker, the visual cues Jenkins employs suggest he understands how to have images and words serve one another to achieve something greater than either on their own.

Grade: B-

The Glass Castle

THE GLASS CASTLE (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2017)

The Walls family doesn’t have much in THE GLASS CASTLE, but as far as father Rex (Woody Harrelson) and mother Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) are concerned, that’s all part of the adventure in their nomadic way of life. Rex is an alcoholic who can’t hold a job for long and is often rushing his family out of town to avoid the police or those seeking overdue payment. Rose Mary spends her days painting and enabling Rex’s destructive behavior. The family moves constantly, relocating all over the western U.S. before the reluctant return to Rex’s hometown of Welch, West Virginia. The shabby home where they place roots is no glass castle, the long-promised and aspirational home Rex talks of building, but at least it provides some stability.

THE GLASS CASTLE is based on the memoir by Jeannette Walls, Rex and Rose Mary’s second oldest child, and the film is told from her perspective. Played at different ages by Chandler Head, Ella Anderson, and Brie Larson, Jeannette admires and tries to help her father while regularly being disappointed by him. She eventually saves enough money to flee West Virginia, get a college degree, and become a professional success as a writer in New York City, yet her parents are the shadow she can’t shake. She lies about her family in social situations, and it’s not hard to see why. When Rex and Rose Mary move to the Big Apple, she does not avoid them, but she is ashamed that they are squatters who sift through the trash to survive.

Co-writer and director Destin Daniel Cretton studied those coping with trauma in his previous film, SHORT TERM 12. THE GLASS CASTLE also explores the cycle of abuse, although this time he focuses on the dysfunction within a single family. To the average person, the squalor and extreme poverty the Walls family lives in is horrifying, yet Cretton emphasizes how normal these conditions seem to those who don’t know anything different and have just accepted it. Rex and Rose Mary romanticize their dire situation, a strategy which comes off like self-protection and a manifestation of mental illness. They don’t beat their children, but the neglect and psychological damage they inflict is no less harmful. It is sad but altogether unsurprising to discover that the unhealthy dynamic Rex and Rose Mary raise their kids in looks better when compared to the upbringing he had.

Although viewers will surely leave the film unlikely to feel charitable toward the parents, THE GLASS CASTLE isn’t interested in judging Rex and Rose Mary. In it and SHORT TERM 12 Cretton seeks for the victim to move on from steeping in deserved resentment, as hard as that may be. Jeannette loves her mom and dad and despairs at the wreckage they’ve made of their lives and and its effect on her. Seen through her eyes, the film demonstrates enormous amounts of empathy and forgiveness while not discounting all the complicated and conflicted feelings churning inside the Walls children. THE GLASS CASTLE wrestles with how to integrate the positive qualities and memories with all of the pain those same people brought on.

When Jeannette is a child, Rex tells her about the point that’s hard to distinguish where a flame ends but heat is visible in a clear, wavering form. He explains that this place is between turbulence and order, where rules don’t apply. Rex and Rose Mary choose to occupy this space but fail to recognize that this zone distorts what is seen in it. They are not beholden to anyone, but their situation is stifling more than it is freeing. THE GLASS CASTLE carries you through a range of emotions with this family. Harrelson in particular is adept at showing how an important family member can attract and repel loved ones to the point of confusion. THE GLASS CASTLE permits the knotty family relationships to stand as complex, unresolved interactions, which is why showing the real people in the end credits seems like a mistake. Perhaps Jeannette and her siblings have worked through all their grievances, but the way the subjects of the dramatized story are presented, it comes across like an apology of sorts or a hastily applied but ineffective bandage. The film embraced the contradictions and opposing feelings, so it feels like being undermined somewhat with the conventional happy ending suggested when the real Walls family appears.

Grade: B

A Ghost Story

A GHOST STORY (David Lowery, 2017)

In the brief time the couple credited as C (Casey Affleck) and M (Rooney Mara) in A GHOST STORY are together, we see how close they can be and the disagreement they have over whether or not to stay in their current home. He feels attached to the place where they share their lives; to her the house holds no special importance.

The difference of opinions about the space continues when they are parted. C is killed in an automobile accident. When he becomes conscious of being on a new plane of existence, he declines to move on. Instead, donning the white sheet that covered him in the morgue, C is drawn back to the house, where he watches M but is invisible to her. What he recalls about his time before being a ghost is unclear, but something keeps him there. M grieves but in time moves on from him and the house. C remains even as the occupants change, rooted to a location where he feels an unexplained loss and unresolved anger.

C can make things go bump in the night and lash out in the ways other stories have conditioned us to think of ghosts, but writer-director David Lowery has other interests than eliciting jumps from an apparition that goes, “Boo!” For one, A GHOST STORY portrays the experience of grief for the deceased. The metaphysics at play are vague, but C appears to have a choice to advance to a different level or stay on this earthly one. The decision to remain haunts him and others like him. These ghosts are like dogs left at home without any way of knowing when or if their owners will return. They are waiting for that happy moment when they are reunited with someone, except they experience time much differently and have little to no memory of why they feel holes at their cores. The ghost’s grief is not specific but a general emptiness with no obvious way of filling it.

Lowery also studies the grief for a place. Time transforms everywhere, so even if a spot has little turnover in residents or a lot through the years, the space is not what it once was. Just as the physical qualities change, the relationship with the location adapts. Mental associations are as much a part of the structure as the beams. C’s link in life and afterlife to the house are all of the emotional ties and memories that it contains, yet what he struggles to realize is that those don’t vanish even with the absence of the four walls around him. In contrast to the film’s minimal dialogue, Lowery spells this out effectively, although somewhat heavy-handedly, with a monologue delivered by a prognosticator played by Will Oldham.

A GHOST STORY unfolds in the style of European and Asian slow cinema so it can better convey the different experience of time and put our years into perspective regarding the universe’s age. Little tends to happen, but when C flits through time in a less comprehensive version of THE TREE OF LIFE’s birth of the universe section, Lowery powerfully evokes the impermanence of what we tend to assume as eternal.

Rather than generating restlessness, the stillness and relative silence in A GHOST STORY create room for meditation and appreciating the visual detail. C’s ghost sheet is gorgeously wrinkled with impenetrably dark eyeholes, more like a haute couture version of a death shroud than a homemade costume from the Charlie Brown Halloween special. The score by Daniel Hart and key song “I Get Overwhelmed” by his band Dark Rooms express the wistfulness in time’s redefining of things throughout life. A GHOST STORY aches for what no longer is but reminds that truly the most valuable things transcend.

Grade: A-

War for the Planet of the Apes

WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (Matt Reeves, 2017)

At one point as a kid I wondered what it would be like in movies or after-school cartoons if the bad guys won for a change. After all, no matter how things appeared to be going in these shows and films, everything predictably worked out in the end. I suspect that this fleeting thought from my childhood was common among those of the same age who were becoming bored with the formula. Now that my generation has a lot of sway in what gets made, it seems that we’re getting the chance to discover what it feels like when the course reverses and good doesn’t triumph or its victories in mass entertainment are pyrrhic. Think of all the remakes and franchise reboots in the last decade or so whose differentiating quality is that they are now dark, gritty, or edgy. The new normal is an overwhelming sense of gloom and doom, in part because it is considered more artistically serious. While any framework will yield worthwhile and lousy results, this worldview in event films has become exhausting.

WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES picks up two years into the combat between humans and the apes. Having toppled Koba in the previous film, Caesar (Andy Serkis) leads his kind, making him the top priority for The Colonel (Woody Harrelson) to find and eliminate. Caesar wishes for the fighting to stop, so when the apes capture some of the enemy, he sends them back as a gesture meant to broker a detente. Instead the intel of where Caesar is invites a slaughter of many he’s been trying to protect.

Caesar sends most of the survivors toward a new home while he intends to exact revenge on the Colonel. Rocket (Terry Notary), Winter (Aleks Paunovic), and Spear (Alessandro Juliani) refuse to let him go alone. On their search they take pity on and add to their group a mute girl given the name Nova (Amiah Miller). They also come across former zoo animal Bad Ape (Steve Zahn), who knows where the Colonel and his men are stationed and agrees to show them.

Beginning with 2011’s RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, the rebooted series has always had dark clouds looming over it because the original films provide the roadmap for where the new ones will arrive. They’ve become progressively darker and now reach the exceedingly grim WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES. What gets depicted is restrained enough to stay within the confines of a box office-maximizing PG-13 rating, but what happens is pretty horrific regardless of which side comes out on top. Tragedy builds upon tragedy to the point that by the time this aggressively feel-bad film concludes I left the theater hoping the sun hadn’t been extinguished in the interim. WONDER WOMAN features its share of darkness, but at the core it prizes earnestness, decency, and love over fear, nihilism and hatred. It’s unfair to WAR OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, but I’m seeking more of what WONDER WOMAN is promoting at this point in time.

Perhaps I was just in the wrong mood when I saw WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES. It’s a marvelous technical achievement that the number and variety of simians are so convincing that it’s taken for granted that they are real. Although Zahn’s Bad Ape probably belongs in a more lighthearted film, the provides comic relief and a much-needed glimmer of fun. Director and co-writer Matt Reeves lingers on the breathtaking scope of the landscapes being traversed and occupied. The action scenes are brutally effective. The film’s allegory about humanity’s penchant for mutually assured destruction hits hard in the context of the daily news. But WAR OF THE PLANET OF THE APES is such an oppressive film to watch. Plus, there’s the sneaking suspicion that its purpose is just to advance the series to where we knew it was eventually headed.

Grade: C+

The Discovery

THE DISCOVERY (Charlie McDowell, 2017)

Thomas Harbor (Robert Redford) finds overwhelming proof that the afterlife exists in THE DISCOVERY, although what that other plane of existence is like remains unknown. Two years after he announces the discovery, four million people have committed suicide, often with the expectation of getting a fresh start. Thomas’s son Will (Jason Segel) remains more skeptical regarding what his father’s findings mean and detests the widespread social response to them. He protests that the evidence is not definitive, nor does it promise a better life. Upon hearing that his father has built a new machine, Will returns to their island home, now a fortress-like building where Thomas, his other son Toby (Jesse Plemons), and a group of people whose suicide attempts failed continue the secretive work to learn what exists beyond the veil.

On the ferry there Will encounters Isla (Rooney Mara), the only other passenger making the trip to the island in the off-season. Both dodge explaining why they are going to such a place and part ways without expecting to see one another again for reasons that become clear soon enough. Will does not want his father to reflect on him, and Isla is hiding her intention to kill herself. Later Will spots Isla’s attempt to drown in the ocean and saves her. He also smooths the way for her to receive a spot among the selected in his father’s home. It’s a momentous time there as Thomas now believes he can record what is seen in the afterlife. When the experiment appears to fail, only Will knows that a recording is made, although what he sees is difficult to translate.

Director and co-writer Charlie McDowell imparted a TWILIGHT ZONE-like quality to his debut feature THE ONE I LOVE, and he does it again with THE DISCOVERY. Both films take place in worlds very much like ours except in one specific aspect that recontextualizes everything we know. The consequences of the discovery mostly take place off-screen and emerge in anecdotes, but the impact hangs heavy over the proceedings. Thomas is as driven as ever because he bears the weight of all the people who interpreted his pioneering finding in a way he likely didn’t anticipate or desire. The film eludes questions about the religious implications, yet Thomas has constructed something like a cult around him. Whether intentional or not, THE DISCOVERY recalls THE MASTER in shots of the ocean and Thomas’s private, personal interview method for determining who can stay. (Both also have small roles for Plemons.)

THE DISCOVERY is most compelling as it dives deeper into the search for answers. McDowell wisely does not get into the speculative science involved, leaving it to suspension of disbelief to accept the film on its own terms rather than getting bogged down debating the viability. He explains what developments mean more often than allowing the viewer to do the math, which takes some of the fun out of THE DISCOVERY, but he draws out the hunger to comprehend what new information signifies. Humans want to bring order to the unknown, so it is imperative that the film satisfies that craving. McDowell’s most prominent stumble occurs at a climax that seems like it should be revelatory yet, more than anything preceding it, confused me in the Christopher Nolan-like layers upon layers. The romantic element between Will and Isla comes off as more forced than credible even as it becomes more integral.

Although the material is treated seriously, THE DISCOVERY carves out room for some humor. As the more dutiful son, Plemons displays a cavalier attitude about the research and arrangements that highlight what those deeply embedded in something weird accept as normal. Mara lends a sarcastic edge to Isla, particularly when she identifies the strangeness of her and Will selecting and returning a corpse.

Whether one believes in eternal spiritual existence after death or not, THE DISCOVERY asks a provocative question: does the inability to know with complete certainty what comes next invest more meaning in life? The film’s answers could be more rigorously considered but are thoughtful nonetheless.

Grade: B

It Comes at Night

IT COMES AT NIGHT (Trey Edward Shults, 2017)

A contagious disease has forced those who have survived so far to hole up in their homes, preferably far removed from the rest of society in IT COMES AT NIGHT. The family led by Paul (Joel Edgerton) and Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) has managed to make do in the country, but when her father (David Pendleton) catches the illness, they know they must euthanize him if the rest are to live. It’s a difficult thing for their seventeen-year-old son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) to help with. Still, what must be done must be done.

One night they find that a man has broken into their home. Will (Christopher Abbott) claims that he thought the place was abandoned and is seeking water for his wife Kim (Riley Keough) and their little boy Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner). Paul roughs up Will and considers killing him. Eventually he agrees that it may be safer to retrieve Will’s family and their supplies and have them move in as long as they agree to the strict rules of the house.

Writer-director Trey Edward Shults treated the searing family drama of his debut KRISHA like a horror movie. With IT COMES AT NIGHT he’s made a horror film featuring two families. While his latest may have more surface commonalities with genre films, both films study the dynamics in a closed system when tensions run high. In IT COMES AT NIGHT the stakes are elevated to matters of life and death rather than feelings and relationships. Of course, the latter can feel like the former among relatives.

In spite of its narrative and scenic asceticism, IT COMES AT NIGHT generates a fair amount of uneasiness. Shults doesn’t provide many details about the doomsday scenario the characters exist in, but he keeps the audience keenly aware that the smallest break from protocol could have fatal results. The suffocation is felt as the camera slowly wanders down a dark passage in the house and into a heavily wooded area. Shults understands that living in persistent dread is perhaps worse than terrible things popping out at you on occasion.

Although the spareness of IT COMES AT NIGHT is undeniably effective, it reaches a limit where the lack of detail becomes more frustrating than rewarding. The film doesn’t need a news report to fill in a lot of backstory about how things have devolved to current conditions, but it would help to have a better sense of the immediate threats and how the characters might keep the most pernicious one--the disease--at bay. If Shults is commenting on the insular and potentially damaging nature of families, then the film needs a stronger point of view. It’s aligned with Travis, who is at an age when, under normal conditions, he would be able to start establishing an identity separate from his parents. That can’t really happen when it’s everyone or every unit for themselves. Travis is exhibiting signs that he is developing different opinions, but IT COMES AT NIGHT doesn’t develop this angle enough for it to be fruitful.

Keeping everything cloaked in generality grants assigning all sort of meaning to what little action there is, yet the sinking feeling in IT COMES AT NIGHT is that the mystery amounts to less than the scraps examined for clarity.

Grade: C+

The Lovers

THE LOVERS (Azazel Jacobs, 2017)

Although Michael (Tracy Letts) and Mary (Debra Winger) are husband and wife in THE LOVERS, they are effectively already separated. Whether each is aware the other is having an affair or not doesn’t seem to matter. Michael makes half-hearted excuses about meeting a friend or staying late at work while slipping away to be with ballet teacher Lucy (Melora Walters). Mary doesn’t really mind as she is often getting together with writer Robert (Aidan Gillen).

With some pressure from their paramours, both Michael and Mary are close to telling the other that they are leaving the marriage. They just need to wait until after their son Joel (Tyler Ross) and his girlfriend Erin (Jessica Sula) come home for the weekend. A funny thing happens in the lead-up to this visit. Michael and Mary wake up nose-to-nose one morning and rediscover something that attracted them so many years ago, causing them to sneak around with each other on their lovers.

THE LOVERS has the makings of a farce or the kind of romantic comedy that the French tend to be better at executing than other countries, but writer-director Azazel Jacobs makes the unpleasantness of these relationships almost oppressive to bear. Michael and Mary are miserable people who have supposedly found at least a small measure of happiness outside their marriage, although even their lovers seem more like diversions than emotional investments. This material could be presented as tragedy or comedy. It certainly could be funny--and it’s apparent that it’s meant to be to some degree--yet Jacobs chooses a middle ground that doesn’t flatter the heavier or lighter components. He flattens the couple’s inner lives and employs Mandy Hoffman’s score as counterpoint, sweeping music for people not prone to grand or sweet gestures.

THE LOVERS’ lack of humanity cannot be blamed on its lead actors. Letts, a writer with scene-stealing supporting performances in INDIGNATION and CHRISTINE, favors highlighting Michael’s absurdity, especially in how he’s ended up pursuing a woman who exhibits some of the nagging wife-like qualities that one might assume caused him to cheat in the first place. Letts reveals that the character knows he’s letting down everyone because he’s given up on himself. Winger’s Mary seems fatigued and is just drifting wherever the currents take her. Winger is good at wielding Mary’s relational boredom as a defense. Neither performance cuts very deep because the roles are not written with complexity, but Letts and Winger hint at layers there to be uncovered.

To acquaintances Michael and Mary might appear to have functional lives. Evaluated on their own, the various pieces of THE LOVERS look like they will assemble into a compelling portrait of a broken marriage. In actuality, the film and the relationship in it amount to less than what can be observed. They have a shell of a marriage, and the film, while rich with promise, is similarly hollow.

Grade: C

The Wall

THE WALL (Doug Liman, 2017)

The Iraq War is officially winding down in 2007 in THE WALL, but fulfilling their duties are no less dangerous for Staff Sergeant Shane Matthews (John Cena) and his spotter Allan Isaac (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). The pair are summoned near a pipeline under construction where an Iraqi sniper has been picking off contractors. They are on the scene to ascertain whether there are any survivors and if they can find the enemy responsible for killing with surgical precision.

Scanning the site from a distance while camouflaged, they determine that no one is alive but are less certain if the gunman might still be in the vicinity. Matthews grows tired of waiting and approaches the construction scene. It’s not long before a bullet strikes him and brings him down. Isaac attempts to come to his help, but unable to locate the sniper, he is also shot and is forced to take shelter behind a crumbling wall. His radio is damaged in the exchange, so when he is able to make contact with his communications device, the voice on the other end belongs to Juba (Laith Nakli), the hidden Iraqi responsible for all of these casualties.

THE WALL provides a good example of how direction and editing can enhance what is on the page. The screenplay by Dwain Worrell could be realized as a stage play mounted on a shoestring budget and not lose its essence. That quality doesn’t inherently detract from the film but reveals its limitations. THE WALL is primarily a dialogue between Iraq War counterparts that hits familiar notes about soldiers on opposite sides of a conflict. The film feels most vital when the conversation is about the matter at hand and digs into the cat-and-mouse tactics each man employs to gain advantages. Exploring this single faceoff as emblematic of the larger conflict yields more ordinary observations.

What Worrell brings to the film isn’t to be discounted, but director Doug Liman keeps this showdown tense when the story and dialogue fade in urgency. THE WALL has something of an exercise or challenge aspect to the production. It’s as though it is being made under limitations for the sake of prompting more creative decisions. Liman and editor Julia Bloch are up to the task as they never lose sight of the real-time (or mostly real-time) pressures and constrain the film’s perspective to what Isaac can see with the naked eye or his busted scope.

With Juba existing as a disembodied voice, he assumes the mantle of confessor and executioner. Isaac continues to live not out of mercy but so he can account for his and his country’s sins while receiving no promise of absolution for either. The desert setting lends to the impression of Isaac and Juba’s interaction harkening to a stark, primitive time when man felt more deeply vulnerable to an unseen interlocutor in control of his fate. THE WALL is not obliged to resolve the issues it inspects about this particular war, but its bitter conclusion smacks of a beginner’s casual understanding of nihilism. The pessimism isn’t necessarily uncalled for; it just seems like the easiest way out.

Grade: B-

The Lost City of Z

THE LOST CITY OF Z (James Gray, 2016)

An undecorated British soldier whose family name was tarnished by his father’s drinking and gambling, Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) seeks to make his mark when London’s Royal Geographical Society asks him to map the the border separating Bolivia and Peru. The assignment in THE LOST CITY OF Z offers the promise of respect and glory that has so far eluded him. Although it means leaving his pregnant wife Nina (Sienna Miller) and their son for more than a year working in the field beginning in 1906, Fawcett accepts. Deep in the Amazon he and his aide-de-camp Henry Costin (Robert Pattinson) come across what might be artifacts from a hidden city his native scout spoke of, but circumstances prevent them from exploring further.

Fawcett remains enthusiastic about returning to search for a place that sounds to some like the mythical El Dorado. Years later Nina’s discovery of a document fuels his belief that there is an advanced place in the jungle that would upend western civilization’s perception of what they think to be a savage land. Nina hopes that her part in building support for another exploit in the Amazon can be parlayed into joining her husband, but despite his belief in their equality in mind, he rejects her suggestion that she can endure the physical hardships in such an undertaking. Again his journey to Amazonia hints at the promise of a find, but he comes up short. Nearly two decade after his search, Fawcett is funded for another opportunity.

Based on a true story told in David Grann’s book of the same name, THE LOST CITY OF Z promises a grand adventure that plumbs the depths of a man’s obsession. Fawcett may have a smidgen of Indiana Jones in him--a single shot, intentionally or not, mirrors one from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK--but the hero and the film have more in common with the explorers in Werner Herzog’s AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD and FITZCARRALDO. The persistent tugging at Fawcett’s soul to achieve something great could be what allows him to make a singular discovery in history. It could also be a touch of madness, which certainly inflicts Klaus Kinski as an expedition leader in AGUIRRE and might be diagnosed in his rubber baron endeavoring to have indigenous Amazonians drag a steamship over a hill in FITZCARRALDO.

Writer-director James Gray makes clear the daunting nature of Fawcett’s efforts but is coy when it comes to the strange experiences the protagonist has. THE LOST CITY OF Z possesses a dream-like quality enhanced by a hushed sound design that invites watching in a state between being awake and lost in a reverie. There are moments in which it could be possible that what is presented is fevered illusion instead of reality. Gray doesn’t demarcate whether what transpires under stress and strain in the wild Amazonian environment is as tangible as conversations in the shadowy, tamed interiors of England and Ireland. Hunnam plays Fawcett with firm and fervent belief, building a man who one would be confident to place trust in even as he might be self-deluded and bringing about his own ruin. Miller’s performance is key because Nina bears the burden of what consumes Fawcett yet puts her faith in him nonetheless.

Gray and cinematographer Darius Khondji evoke a bygone era for this story and in cinema with painterly shot compositions and lighting that provide an unending source of pleasure in their own right. THE LOST CITY OF Z is constructed of sumptuous and often very dark visuals, which underline the mystery and the desire to dive inside into the unknown to see what others haven’t spotted. The knockout final shot does not clarify what to make of the characters’ outcomes but instead emphasizes again the seductive power of vanishing into a place ripe for discovery.

Grade: B+

Colossal

COLOSSAL (Nacho Vigalondo, 2016)

In COLOSSAL unemployed writer Gloria (Anne Hathaway) moves from New York City back to her parents’ empty house after her self-destructive ways become too much for her boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens). Gloria catches a break when she runs into Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), an elementary school friend with whom she’s long lost touch. He’s eager to help her out, including giving her a part-time job at his bar, although that may not be for the best considering her troubled relationship with alcohol.

Life gets much more complicated for Gloria when, twenty-five years after first appearing in Seoul, a giant monster again manifests out of thin air in the South Korean capital. The significance of this isn’t immediately apparent, but Gloria comes to realize that somehow she is connected to the kaiju. If she sets foot within a playground’s boundaries at the right time, the creature materializes a continent away and follows her movements. Not only is this supremely strange, it also gives Gloria reason to be remorseful for the inadvertent damage she wreaks as this monster.

Gloria’s bond with the beast functions as an inventive allegory for problematic drinking, although that perspective has a limit. Whether in her blacked-out stupor or monstrous self-projection, she has a habit of causing harm to those around her. Hathaway avoids giving a mannered performance, favoring instead a more casual way of acting that highlights the character’s ability to function while noticeably in need of a healthier lifestyle and self-image. COLOSSAL skirts the question of if Gloria is an alcoholic, in part because that subject is not what is of primary interest.

While the film looks like it may view the Hathaway-starring drama RACHEL GETTING MARRIED or Billy Wilder’s THE LOST WEEKEND through a contemporary genre lens, writer-director Nacho Vigalondo has a different target in its sight. To reveal in depth what’s really being explored would spoil the pleasure of discovering it for oneself. Suffice it to say that it seems deliberate for Vigalondo to hide the pill inside a film likely with the most surface appeal for a young male audience. The purpose of the trick is to evoke empathy in those who might be more resistant if Vigalondo was more direct about what he wants to address.

COLOSSAL could get to the point faster than it does and would benefit from smoothing a pivotal character shift that seems rather abrupt even if, in retrospect, the revealed qualities were there all along. The sarcasm Sudeikis often brings to roles can make him seem insincere, but that trait serves him well in a character whose motivations are submerged. The film’s humor lightens the heavier thematic components and provides a great exclamation point. Although COLOSSAL is a bit ungainly, this unusual comedic mash-up of monster and message movie profits from its ambition.

Grade: B