Not Bob

Palo Alto

Crit

Another Friday postwork sad sad sad bastard movie: a bunch of teenagers, none of whom is really bad and none of whom is stupid, but each of whom repeatedly raises the fuckup bar. Very good, very real, and very, very disturbing directorial debut by another Coppola, Gia (granddaughter of Francis, niece of Sofia and Roman), who adapted the screenplay from a collection of short stories by James Franco, who also appears as a boundaries-violating teacher and girls' soccer coach.

I'm younger than that now

X-Men: Days of Future Past 3D

Crit

Ow! Ow! Ow! My brain hurts from thinking too hard--now I know how Professor Ekzavier (hey, if they insist on mispronouncing it, I'm going to misspell it accordingly) feels.

Time travel to fix the present is not exactly a novel idea, but the rapid cuts between then and now, and the interactions between each given character then and now, keep us off-balance in terms of who and what to root for.

Good to see Peter Dinklage as an out and out villain, even in the worst '70s hair imaginable.

Chef

Crit

Gosh. Long time since:

• I found a character played by Jon Favreau remotely appealing;
• I went into a film so resistant to the crowd-pleasing qualities that have boosted its Rotten Tomatoes numbers and ended up being so thoroughly won over;
• I've so wanted meat.

Yes, it's another of those beautiful-food, joy-of-cooking films, and it is about as persuasive in the foodie respects as any I've seen. The plotting is mechanical, the direction is unremarkable, and Scarlett Johansson is wasted, but damn, that food looks great, and that's enough. Oh, and the music helps too.

Trailers

• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes--Caesar is back!
• The Fluffy Movie--Huh?
• The Green Inferno--Two words: Eli Roth.
• Wish I Was Here--Two words: Zach Braff?

Wretched refuse

The Immigrant

Crit

I don't have much to say about this but "bleak." "Unremittingly bleak." "Even bleaker than that." "So bleak that when you think it can't get any bleaker, it turns out you're wrong." "So bleak that when you finally acknowledge that it's just going to keep getting bleaker and bleaker, it turns out you're right." I feel ready to be quarantined in the Ellis Island infirmary for 60 days.

Trailers

• Yves Saint Laurent--Potentially effective biopic.
• Calvary--Brendan Gleeson as a priest in a comic drama.

Drive, he wrote and directed

Fed Up

Crit

Yes, I was the guy consuming his typical movie theater lunch of large popcorn, large soda. No, the irony was not lost on me, even though the soda was (and always is) diet and the corn was (and always is) unbuttered. (And full disclosure: today's corn was seasoned liberally with sugary apple-cinnamon topping.)

The obvious heroes here are the remarkably articulate obese teenagers who share their agony and their hopes, but the surprise hero is Iowa senator Tom Harkin. I'd want to check his voting record on farm subsidies before I sign off on this assessment, but for a politician in a state rich in the corn that provides much of the sweetener that fattens us to work so hard to fix our diets is laudable, even if he has already announced that he won't run for another term.

Locke

Crit

The highest of concepts: except for a few moments at the start, the entire 85-minute film is Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) driving south toward London while talking, mostly on the phone, and trying to negotiate crises professional, personal, respiratory, and existential.

But those phone calls, and those crises, and Hardy's portrayal of a man flawed and emotionally stunted but possessed of an uncompromising code of Hemingwayesque honor, make this gimmick movie one of the most compelling I've seen this year.

A headshakingly remarkable achievement by writer-director Steve Knight.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Crit

Remember when we were all excited about True Blood? Those of us who hadn't read the novels were hoping that it would be smart and subtle and poetic; we were, in other words, looking for something with a little Jim Jarmusch to it.

Adam (Tom Hiddleston) is suicidal, Eve (Tilda Swinton) relishes undeadness, but they are a match made in heaven, and even when they're thousands of miles apart, nothing matters when they're dancing, especially if it's to "Trapped by a Thing Called Love" by Denise LaSalle or "Funnel of Love" by Wanda Jackson.

Trailers

• Jersey Boys--Another Broadway smash comes to the screen.
• The Giver--Yet another futuristic dystopia, this one in the guise of a utopia.

It wasn't the airplanes, it was altruism that laid low the beast

Godzilla

Post

I didn't really enjoy this much, I'm afraid. As a neighbor said, not enough Godzilla; as she didn't say, way too much mutos, the insectish enormoids that allow the big green titular fellow to be on our side (it's complicated; well, not really too much, but it's more involved than it's worth the telling). Moreover, not enough Imax 3D magic.

The mutos owe pretty much everything to Big Mama Alien, but Big Mama Alien had personality, and personality goes a long way. These things not only don't resemble any known living thing, they just look like fake sci-fi movie monsters. I believed BMA's murderous protectiveness toward her progeny; here, I just felt like Big Female Muti was following the script.

Just pretty drab, sadly.

Trailers

• Maleficent--Lots of Lord of the Rings recycling here.
• Jupiter Ascending--More futuristic dystopia from the siblings Wachowski.
• Interstellar--More futuristic dystopia from Christopher Nolan.
• Lucy--Once again, Scarlett Johansson is . . . special. Luc Besson wrote and directed.

Black and white world

Belle

Crit

Sometimes a stacked deck is every bit as satisfying as a fair deal, and a smart screenplay by Misan Sagay and smart performances by Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson, and TV veteran but feature relative newcomer Gugu Mbatha-Raw keep this polemical text alive, despite its having not a single surprise in its 100 minutes.

Well, wait, maybe one surprise: the polemics focus mainly on race, but there's a healthy helping of sexual politics as well. And if "slavery is bad" is not exactly a revolutionary message today, the illusion of its revolutionary flavor in the 18th century is well staged.

Trailers

• The Fault in Our Stars--Weepy teen cancer flick apparently based on a young adult novel; can Shailene Woodley save it?

Past posting

The Sting

(1973)

Long after you've stopped being stung yourself by the countless narrative cheats and misdirections, it's still fun to imagine the film through the eyes of the first-time viewer and enjoy the stinging happening to him or her. It is, in fact, enough.

Career opportunities

Fading Gigolo

Crit

What a sweet story about a guy pimping out his friend to two beautiful women who have decided that they simply must try a threesome; is it bad form to wonder why none of my friends has ever thought of exploiting me thus?

What the story--written and directed by John Turturro, who also plays the titular Fioravante--is really about is the awakening of Avigal (Vanessa Paradis), a young Hasidic widow who meets Fioravente through Murray (Woody Allen) after delousing one of Murray's black stepchildren. Got that?

The two tricurious women are played by the pneumatic Sofía Vergara and the still-crazy-sexy-after-all-these-years Sharon Stone, and whatever you think about Stone (and my feelings have always been mixed), it is worth the price of admission to see the expression she summons when her character realizes, mid-ménage, that the boy has fallen in love, and not with either of the women he's in bed with.

Trailers

• I Origins--New Haven kid Mike Cahill wrote and directed, and I really admired his Another Earth, but the trailer suggests that he has gone all-in this time on trying to make silly and implausible work as surprisingly profound. Still: open mind, about the film, if not about the new-agey religion it seems to be pushing.

Potato guns and moose safaris

Beneath the Harvest Sky

Crit

Van Buren, Maine, sucks. Casper Carr (Emory Cohen) is a fuckup every which way. Dom (Callan McAuliffe) is a fuckup only insofar as he is unconditionally loyal to Casper, the only person in town who doesn't expect Casper to follow his father (Aidan Gillen--right: Littlefinger from Game of Thrones) into the illicit drug trafficking game. But nothing good can happen until they get out of town, to Boston, to LA, to Europe--Dom has the options mapped out on his ceiling, the legend for Van Buren reading, "You are here--but not for long."

The saddest of sad bastard films--and I mean that in a good way.

Bipolar

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Crit

When the eight-legged plot was spinning its ornate web, I kept thinking about the 8-year-old boys sitting in the second row: were they getting all this? Probably: 8-year-olds are more attuned to narrative complexity in comic books than old fogeys are. And in any case, it probably didn't matter. But as a fogey, I got the idea that the filmmakers didn't believe enough in any one plot to let it carry much weight. Electro, for example (Jamie Foxx, wasted as a disturbed, reality-challenged savant before the typical event that conveys superpowers in comic books), is a distinctly unelectrifying villain, so you can understand the impulse to get a little Green Goblin action going too (Dane DeHaan, with hair even weirder than Harry Osborn had in the comic); but the previous Spidey franchise went heavy on Gobby, so you can see why these guys would want to go lean on the Green.

Next time around, we've practically been promised former New Havener Paul Giamatti as the Rhino, and we've also been teased with a couple other single-digit issue numbers' villains, Doctor Octopus (also a veteran of the previous franchise) and the Vulture (who, let's face it, was one of Spidey's all-time least interesting foes).

And another new character is inevitable, too, but to explain, I'd have to reveal that the film did something to a major and ostensibly beloved but undeniably inconvenient character much earlier than the mag did the same thing, and you know how I feel about spoilers.

Anyway, I'm feeling pretty webbed out right now; number 3 is where I stopped in the previous run, and we'll have to see whether this one is any stickier.

Trailers

• A Million Ways to Die in the West--What a brilliant, original idea: a surreally irreverent take on the Western! Can't wait for the beans-at-the-campfire scene!
• Edge of Tomorrow--This is why I carry a notebook: had no recollection of this one. Cruise, Blunt, futuristic actioner.
• X-Men: Days of Future Past--It's about time a film was named for a Moody Blues album!

By myself

The Band Wagon

(1953)

No, this was never a legitimate deaccession candidate, but it (just!) satisfied the unscreened-in-5-years criterion, and more to the point, it has lots of DVD extras I've never used as workout fodder, and that's what I needed.

A delightful, happy musical--but does any other delightful, happy musical begin with such a sad song as Astaire's opener here?

Unto others

Blue Ruin

Crit

Yeah, if I were going to avenge myself against the guy who killed my family, that's probably how I'd go about it, too: half-assedly. No, to be fair, I wouldn't even be as effective as Dwight (Macon Blair), who--trained by his time as a Dumpster diver living in his titular Pontiac--actually does have a generally systematic way of going about things. But he neglects certain key elements, too: that the killer he kills comes from a family of conscienceless killers, whereas he comes from a family that consists of a sister and two vulnerable nieces. And that pulling an arrow out of his thigh not only is going to hurt like hell but . . . well, is nigh onto impossible. There's a lot of Coen here, but writer-director-cameraman Jeremy Saulnier, who made the film for less than half a million bucks, has plenty of his own thing going on too. A gem.