The heptapus

Spectre

Crit

Oh my god! They killed Bond! You bastards!

I may have used that joke for the previous movie, but hey, the classics never age. And equally surprising, and true, is that the femme du film (Léa Seydoux) gives Bond the brush--regretfully, but definitively . . . well, as definitive as such a thing can be in Bond's world.

A new Bond film is cinematic comfort food, and since I am currently being held hostage by the evil cartel Phlegmtre, I'm in the market for all the comfort I can get.

Elephants on tiptoe

Meadowland

Crit

Golly, that was a cheery post-Mets World Series loss pick-me-up.

Parents' worst nightmare, as elementary schoolteacher Sarah (Olivia Wilde) and NYC beat cop Phil (Luke Wilson)'s little boy goes missing from a gas station bathroom in a safe-as-houses-looking leafy New Jersey suburb. The rest of the excruciating, compelling film follows each in a separate, manifestly unshared, unsharable hell. Brutally magnificent, largely down to the leads, especially Wilde, and a wonderful secondary cast including Elisabeth Moss, Giovanni Ribisi, Juno Temple, and John Leguizamo. You'll want a drink after; it's High West Double Rye for me.

The banality of conformity

Good deeds punished double feature

Experimenter: The Stanley Milgrim Story

Crit

Peter Sarsgaard at his usual low-key best plays the title character, who, working at a New Haven university in the early '60s, made a surprising and self-evidently important discovery about people's tendency to bow to the instructions of perceived authority figures, only to be attacked for the alleged ethical violations of the experiment's (vital) deception and encouragement of subjects to inflict (illusory) torture on others.

A fascinating portrait, elevated from standard biopic fare via carefully crafted selective surrealism.

Bridge of Spies

Crit

Tom Hanks as a Cold War Schindler, gliding easily from business to gotta-do-more altruism, an insurance lawyer drafted to defend a Soviet spy who then goes all Mr. Smith Goes to Washington about the sacredness of the Constitution instead of giving the pro forma courtroom performance expected of him.

Cheese of the very finest Spielbergian sapor. Oh, and a wonderful performance by Mark Rylance as the Rooskie (via the north of England).

Trailer

• Victor Frankenstein--Meh.

Brilliant mistake

Steve Jobs

Crit

Golly! What I didn't understand going in was that this is a stunning experiment by director Danny Boyle in pacing, or rather the abandonment of pacing: no action film has ever moved more helter-skelter than this. Miraculously, it works, partly because Boyle is brilliant, partly because he's got the brilliant Aaron Sorkin writing his screenplay, partly because he has the brilliant Michael Fassbender bringing . . . well, not humanity, but something empathy producing, to the brilliant asshole title character, and partly because Fassbender/Jobs has the brilliant Kate Winslet/Joanna Hoffman constantly as his side, desperately trying to school him in how empathetic human beings actually behave.

With this and The Social Network to his credit, Sorkin needs only to write the screenplay for a Bill Gates biopic to be directed by, say, Quentin Tarantino to have nailed the 3 tech genii of our time.

Trailers

• Hail, Caesar--Oh, hell yeah!
• The Big Short--Uh, hell maybe?
• The Danish Girl--Oh, hell yeah!

Building and loan

99 Homes

Crit

Huh! Who could have foreseen that the satanic home-foreclosing Realtor® played by Michael Shannon would be named Chase Utley? Nah, just kidding.

Andrew Garfield plays the innocent in the postlapsarian, postbubble garden, and that he will be seduced by the serpent is a given; the only question is whether he will lose his soul irrevocably. I won't spoil that for you, but it is Andrew Garfield, don't forget.

Surprisingly flat, disappointingly simplistic.

Actor on wire

The Walk 3D

Crit

I was so wowed by Man on Wire--the 2008 documentary that covers the same essential ground (or air) as this, about loony Frenchman Philippe Petit and his quest to walk a wire stretched between the twin towers of the World Trade Center--that I was prepared to hate this. But I don't; I don't really feel strongly enough about it to hate it.

In Robert Zemeckis's attempt to dramatize what could not have been more dramatic to begin with, he shoots for gripping and compelling and thrilling, but he gets only as far as interesting: if you haven't seen the other, better film, you'll certainly find your two hours and change adequately repaid, but I think you can guess what my recommendation is.

For one thing, what an asshole the guy was (maybe still is)--brilliant, unique, artistic, yes, but a manipulative, selfish bastard--is more told than shown here, and it's an essential point that all the people who helped him (including his lover of some duration) were really only his props. For another, the relation of narrative and audience to those buildings is handled much more adeptly in the earlier film. Maybe the fact that nearly a decade and a half has passed now makes it easier to look at Zemeckis's reconstruction of those unlovely, undistinguished boxes--enormous file cabinets, one character calls them--but in Man, 9/11 is never mentioned but always present. Here, the fatal day is just something we know that the characters don't until two hamhanded bits in the coda--in one, it's proposed that Petit's feat, more than a quarter of a century before the event that really accomplished this, gave the buildings "a soul" and changed the way New Yorkers felt about them; in the other, Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, with a bad accent) pointedly boasts that a pass he received from the Port Authority after the walk entitles him to access to the observation deck "forever," whereupon we pan from his perch atop France's most favorite gift to America to the downtown skyline; apparently it didn't occur to Zemeckis to drive home the point by showing the skyline as it exists now. Thank god.

Trailers

• The Last Witch Hunter--You were wondering, weren't you, when Vin Diesel and Michael Caine would appear in a film together.
• Star Wars: Episode VII, The Force Awakens--The old gang is back (and old). Hard to imagine missing this; hard to imagine not being disappointed.

Unbreakable

He Named Me Malala

Crit

One good thing about the Mets' postseason opener not starting until the ungodly hour of 9:45 (seriously, what's the deal with Pacific Daylight Time?) is that I had time to go to a movie after work, and now I have time to blog about it.

As you'll see if you click on the title link, this documentary has gotten middling reviews. I guess that's because it's oversimplistic. I mean, the opposing view is never aired in counterpoint to such assumptions as:

• schools shouldn't be blown up
• girls should be able to go to school
• girls shouldn't be shot in the head for going to school
• the Taliban don't speak for Islam

So, yeah, if you're looking for a balanced discussion of those propositions, you'll be disappointed. If you're looking for inspiration from one of the bravest people of our time, I think you'll be OK.

Trailers

• Youth--Looks star-heavy.