Sometimes I admire what a hypocrite I am

Song to Song

Crit

OK, I think maybe I've had enough of Terrence Malick. Were I an admirer of this film, I'd tell you it's about love, compulsion, betrayal, power, guilt, and regret. As it is, though, I'm telling you that it's 129 minutes (seems like 300) of banality encased in a Lucite globe of pretentiousness.

One class of exemptions from this verdict: a handful of scenes brought to life by rock artists--Iggy Pop, John Lydon, and especially Patti Smith, who gets more screentime than I expected, though not nearly enough to save the film. You should hold out for the Rock Stars Cut.

It's fun until somebody loses 40 months to hard time

Wilson

Crit

Yeah, I guess I get why the critical response has been lukewarm, or maybe a little cooler than that. But you know I'm a sucker for a redemption-ish story about a misanthrope with a heart of . . . well, not shit, anyway, initial appearances notwithstanding. And Woody Harrelson is the guy to play the protagonist of a Daniel Clowes graphic novel about a screwed-up ex-couple (Laura Dern plays Wilson's behaviorally challenged former wife, Pippi) stalking the teen daughter (Isabella Amara, nailing surly-needy) Wilson just discovered wasn't aborted when they broke up.

Then add 10 points for Judy Greer as a warm-hearted dog sitter. Always add 10 points for Judy Greer.

Trailer

• Baywatch--Even a foundation of Dwayne Johnson seems unlikely to hold this up. [Congratulate me: unlike the trailer, I didn't make a cheap boob joke.]

Media

Personal Shopper

Crit

Really expected to like this more. Really expected Kristen Stewart to sell the implausible ghost story about Maureen, a twin waiting for her brother to give her a sign from the beyond (he died of a congenital heart ailment that she shares--get it? Their hearts are fragile, prone to break! Literally!). Really expected to find it less goofy. Really expected to care more about the weird and annoying and ultimate fatal shit going on around her. Really expected the mysterious string of texts on her phone to be more mysterious. Didn't know there was going to a murder, but once there was a murder, would have expected the perpetrator to be less obvious and the potential legal and metaphysical consequences for Maureen to be more credible.

Expected it, I guess, to a little less ectoplasmic.

Fake news

Beauty and the Beast

Crit

I never recognized this before, and in fact I didn't get it until well into the film, but this is the story of an egotistical blowhard who is harmless enough until he takes up demagoguery and stirs up the people to rise up against people who are different, whom they don't understand and thus fear.

There's also a subplot, with songs I found universally blah and special effects I found mostly meh. But it became magical for me at about the same time it did for Belle (Emma Watson): you can see her feel an unaccustomed moistness at her first glimpse of the Beast's enormous . . . library. When their love begins to develop as the marriage of true minds, I confess I got a little soppy myself.

Trailers

• Coco--Guitars and generations, appropriate in the wake of the Chuck Berry obit.

A name that they never get right

The Sense of an Ending

Crit

A clockwork memory/mystery/sort-of-ghost story elevated by (wait for it!) great English actors. I mean, come on: Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling, and Emily Mortimer could have sold The Shack.

Trailers

• (Dean)--Writer and debutant director Demitri Martin is precisely as old as my first marriage would be if it still existed, but he looks about 60% of that.
• Tommy's Honour--I'm always wondering why there are so few biopics about nineteenth-century Scottish golfers.

Istanbul and Constantinople, and probably Byzantium to boot

Kedi

Crit

If you've never gotten the appeal of cats, this documentary about the millennia-long relationship between strays and the populace of the Turkish metropolis won't change your mind, but İstanbullular seem united in their belief that, even apart from their service in controlling the rodent population, cats bring good fortune and emotional healing.

Moreover--and here's where even dog people and members of Congress can take something from the film--the cat admirers and caretakers interviewed recognize that a sure way to do good to yourself is to do good to those weaker and more vulnerable than yourself.

Erectile dysfunction

Logan

Crit

Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, who has now played the character [fake news alert!] more times than Basil Rathbone played Holmes or Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan) is having trouble getting his claws up and firm, if you catch my drift. He has aged badly, been rode hard and put up wet, and Patrick Stewart's Charles Eksavier (which is how I spell it, because everyone knows that's not how you pronounce Xavier) is even older and feebler. The wraith in the black cloak with the scythe haunts this film. Plus, there are said to have been no mutants born in a couple of decades.

Except.

Not the best movie ever about aging and death, but probably the best such in which we hear the word "adamantium" spoken, and it gives us the juvenile character (the stunning 4-foot-tall Dafne Keen's Laura) who spills blood most effortlessly and convincingly of any since Eli in Let the Right One In. I hope the kid gets a lighthearted comedy for her next role. Also therapy.

It wasn't the choppers . . .

Kong: Skull Island

Crit

Call it Ape-ocalypse Now. Set in 1973, at the moment Nixon declared peace in Southeast Asia, the film includes some Vietnamese locations, but it might have been shot in Carlsbad Caverns, so insistently does it echo the war's greatest film. It must have been a challenge, in fact, to assemble a soundtrack that did not overlap with that one. (Though in doing so, they gave a late musical shout out to the best antiwar comedy.)

Perhaps the most notable aspect of this film is its endorsement of the proposition that the female lead's jaws can be squarer and broader than the male's.

Trailer

• Sleight--Dude's got powers!