Impediments

The Love Witch

Crit

Wow, is that ever weird. To the extent that a plot description matters, Elaine (Samantha Robinson) has really bad luck with relationships, and the breakups are no picnic for her boyfriends, either.

But what has gotten this insanely high numbers on Rotten Tomatoes is its loving (!) and bizarrely feminist sendup of the sort of psychedelic soft porn I associate with the early days (and late nights) of Cinemax. And like those flicks, this is amusing for a while, then turns tedious. By all means have a look when you can stream it for free and quit once you get your fill.

Loving

Crit

Was skeptical  of the trailer, and was last week told by a professional critic not to expect too much, but this is a quiet gem, completely unlike anything else writer-director Jeff Nichols has done, except in its excellence. Nichols repeater Joel Edgerton plays the taciturn Richard Loving, who wears every feeling on his face, and Ruth Negga is his rock, the slightly more talkative and gently determined Mildred. They have broken Virginia law by marrying in the District of Columbia in 1958, then coming home to live as man and wife.

Yes, the deck is firmly stacked, but Nichols is smart enough to depend not on our own assumptions of right and wrong, instead throwing the force of the argument to the self-evidence of the Lovings' love. I see Oscar nominations for both leads.

Trailers

• The Zookeeper's Wife--Another popular novel I haven't read; 2017 Oscar bait for J. Chastain.
• Fences--Man, I'm glad this has finally gotten to the screen. I may spend Christmas with Denzel and Viola.

Chastity loves company

Rules Don't Apply

Crit

Not really much here: standard issue innocents love story, complicated by Howard Hughes (Warren Beatty, who also wrote and directed), a complication that mostly just takes the narrative in confusing and unfulfilling directions. Alden Ehrenreich is appealing as an ambitious young man hired mostly to chauffeur members of Hughes's stable of would-be starlets on contract, and Lily Collins is irresistible as the cutest and the most virtuous of the starlets, but the single surprise in the film seems manipulated, and I just didn't much care.

Trailers

• Fifty Shades Darker--I wonder whether I'll ever watch the first one, which I DVR'd one free HBO weekend?

Worm forgives the plow

Peter and the Farm

Crit

A documentary about Walt Whitman, if Whitman were an alcoholic, depressive, possibly suicidal sexagenarian Vermont farmer estranged from two ex-wives and four children. OK, Peter Dunning's Whitmanian qualities are highly selective, but not nonexistent. Filmmaker Tony Stone and his minuscule crew, particularly cameraman Nathan Corbin, have made a tone poem featuring the small American farm as a place of, in order of importance, beauty, agony, death, and life.

Thanks to Fandango for my even knowing about this: even now, it's not on the Criterion's own website, and the only other person in the screening room was someone who learned about it from me. Films like this have enough trouble getting the audience they deserve without their venues sabotaging them.

Illegals

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Crit

The title is accurate, beasts fantastic enough to keep me awake almost without exception despite a serious sleep deficit, though when the more conventionally fantastic beasts disappear in favor of a smoggy wispy thing, the flick flags a bit before finding its legs (and heads, and wings) again near the end. Timely political text too, with fear and mistrust of the "other" encouraging calls to violence.

Eddie Redmayne, who needs a haircut almost as badly as I, is unfailingly charming, duh, and I was convinced from eyes and expressions and bursts of sad laughter that Katherine Waterston must be Laura Linney's daughter, and I think you know what high praise that is from me. According to the IMDb bio, she's Sam Waterston's daughter, but I'm not convinced.

Trailers

• King Arthur: Legend of the Sword--Maybe. Directed by Guy Ritchie.
• Valerian--Maybe. Graphic novel adaptation, directed by Luc Besson.
• Power Rangers--Almost certainly not, but education gained at my grandchildren's and geeky son-in-law's home allowed me to recognize what this was before the reveal.
• Beauty and the Beast--Disney already skillfully ripped off Jean Cocteau's perfect 1951 La Belle et la bête for its 1991 animated version, so I'm at a loss why the studio thought necessary a live-action version with the same conceit that everything in the Beast's house is sentient. But open mind. Emma Watson plays one of the title roles.

Lost for words

Arrival

Crit

But wait: I wanted to hear that opening lecture in which Dr. Banks (Amy Adams) is about to explain why Portuguese sounds so different from the other Romance languages. Something to do with its rising in Galicia, where language is not communication but art. Tell me more!

Stop me if you've heard this one: a dozen eggs walk into a bar. Or float into our atmosphere and park over 12 places where Sheena Easton had a number one hit. And they're full of squiddly things. And nonetheless, this may be the smartest contact film to date. And one of the elements you groan at the studio-interference obviousness of turns out in fact to be a critical plot element.

Linguistics programs are about to become a bull market.

Trailers

• Allied--Don't you hate when it turns out your wife may be a Nazi spy and you'll have to execute her?

Free floating

Moonlight

Crit

I had heard good things about the "gay black coming-of-age story," but at the end of a week that seemed at times to be all about the differences between us, I saw a film about commonalities, about the human imperatives of love and protection, of belonging and defining your own space, of being yourself even if that involves radical reinvention. This is the most moving film I've seen in a long time, and one of the most beautiful I've ever seen.

And talk of its beauty has to include the remarkable actors who populate the film. The trio of actors who portray Chiron (yeah, like the Styx ferryman, but pronounced shy-RON), aka Little and Black, mesh into a thoroughly credible visual and emotional single soul, evolving but integral. Alex Hibbert is the 9-year-old bullied for his perceived effeminacy and weakness, and Ashton Sanders the high schooler still bullied but experiencing a delicious moment of requital of his love (followed by bitter betrayal) for Kevin (also tripled, nearly as effectively, by Jaden Piner, Jharrel Jerome, and André Holland).

When we meet the grown-up Black (Trevante Rhodes), the resemblance to his younger selves is evident, but it's overwhelmed by his adoption of the character of Juan, the prosperous drug dealer who had become his protector and father figure at 9. Juan is played by Mahershala Ali, and if you're a fan of House of Cards, you've seen enough of Remy Danton's half-clad frame to guess the physicality (and the insouciance) he brings to this role--and that Black brings to his own role of drug slinger at the same level of success.

Chiron's mother, Paula, veers the nearest to cliché of any character--the middle-class single mother dragged down by drug addiction--but Naomie Harris invests the part with the humanity required to get us to love her with just the undercurrent of hate that her son carries. And the pleasantest surprise is the screen debut of R&B's magnificent Electric Lady Janelle Monáe as Teresa, Juan's partner, who continues to provide a social safety net for Chiron after Juan's death.

A nearly perfect film.

Gimme Danger

Crit

Everything you wanted to know about the Stooges and then some, but as we knew from Danny Says (which, crap, I just realized I never got around to posting the blog entry on which LB collaborated, though if there's a live link there now, that means I finally have done) and from a featurette on the Criterion Repo Man disc, time spent with Iggy Pop is never time wasted, at least in the conventional sense of the phrase.

Trailers

• Free Fire--Wacky lawbreaking, great cast.

Conscientious

Hacksaw Ridge

Crit

Oh, come on: how does this have an 87% rating on Rotten Tomatoes? It's just a gimmick (soldier who won't carry a gun) thrust among war movie clichés old (one member of every white American ethnicity, plus a brain, a bigot, etc.) and more recent (what I'd call the poetry of carnage: slo-mo, detailed viscera shots, bullets coming out of nowhere through helmet and skull).

And because it's Mel, the uncompromising man of peace is valorized by staying peaceful amid grotesque violence toward him and everyone else.

Meh. I don't really need any more of these.

Trailers

• Logan--Wolverine with a daughter equivalent.

You've got time

Doctor Strange

Crit

I was a straight-ticket Marvel voter as an adolescent (even subscribed, at a time that 12 issues x 12₵ = a $1.75 subscrip), but I can't really can't say I awaited the new issue of Strange Tales (which the Doc shared with . . . the Hulk, maybe?) with the same eagerness as I did Spidey or the Fantastic Four, or the X-Men or even Daredevil. Perhaps I wasn't sufficiently attuned to psychedelia.

This, though, may be one of my favorite Marvel flicks, as discombobulated as the narrative is. It's without doubt the trippiest, and--this is taller cotton--the most lovingly imaged Manhattan has ever been in a Marvel movie, and maybe one of the top 20 in that category for all films. Even with that stupid Avengers skyscraper (I guess) pasted in at Midtown, near GTC & the Chrysler.

Trailers

• Guardians of the Galaxy--A sequel to a riotously funny film, so yeah, probably.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales--Another one? Seriously?
• Life--In space, no one can hear you say "huh?"
• Wonder Woman--Outrageous: a DC trailer before a Marvel movie!