If nobody sees it . . .

Black Mass

Crit

"Unrecognizable" is a word tossed around promiscuously in film writing. An otherwise excellent profile of My Future Wife Julianne Moore in the current New Yorker calls her unrecognizable in a still for her role as Laurel Hester in the upcoming Freeheld. Well, I haven't seen the still, but I've seen the trailer for the film several times, and from the first, in early scenes and late, cancer-invaded ones, the face, the smile, the grimace are all unmistakably Julie.

In contrast, there was a moment about an hour and a half into this film when I looked at the alien, shark-eyed face that I'd been looking at in almost every scene and thought, for the first time, "Oh, yes: I see Johnny Depp there." Not a great film, and probably not even one of Depp's top ten performances (which is not to say it's not excellent; it is), but if there's not a makeup Oscar® nomination here, somebody wasn't paying attention.

Oh, and one other thing (well, actually about a million): Julianne Nicholson's freckles.

Trailers

• Our Brand Is Crisis--U.S. political wonks wonking in South America.
• My All-American--"Based on the inspirational true story"; 'nuff said.
• Legend--Holy shit--Tom Hardy as the Krays. I'm all in.

Tow zone

Learning to Drive

Crit

Oh, I get it! It's a metaphor! See, she (My Future Wife Patricia Clarkson, striving heroically to add a third dimension to her cardboard cutout, and except for the future wife part, that applies equally to the whole excellent leading cast, including Ben Kingsley, Grace Gummer, and the shamefully caricatured Sarita Choudhury) gets dumped by her husband and has to learn how to drive forward into a new life! Get it? A grotesquely heavy-handed parable in which the ostensible characters consistently behave according to the dictates of the plot, and if that should differ with behavior of human beings motivated by the things that motivate human beings, well hey, what do you want, good drama or good metaphor?

I paid nothing for this (MoviePass prepay) or for my popcorn & Diet Coke lunch (Criterion Club freebies)--nothing except 2 hours of precious life that I'll never get back.

The triangle

The Diary of a Teenage Girl

Crit

OK, put this in your datebook: in August 2015 we are at last able to acknowledge without prurience that a 15-year-old girl can be just as sex-obsessed as a 15-year-old boy, and equally ill-equipped to deal with the ancillary issues that arise with the pursuit of sexuality, which is to say marginally more ill-equipped than the average sexually active adult.

A beautiful film that is about as close in spirit to Scary Normal as any I've seen--sort of its raunchier, acting-out cousin from '70s San Francisco. Bel Powley can be in any film I exec produce. And by the way, another truth this film tells is that all the experimentation of '70s (and by extension '60s) San Francisco probably did more good than harm.

Trailers

• Grandma--I was already 100% in on this, and if I hadn't been, Lily Tomlin and Julia Garner (so good as Kimmy in season 3 of The Americans) would have convinced me.
• Labyrinth of Lies--A lawyer with a conscience pushing postwar German to own up; looks like the rare Holocaust film we haven't already seen.

Five feet to the left and unhappy

Mistress America

Crit

You may well hate this. You hay find the writing insufferably precious rather than acerbically brilliant. You may want to drop Brooke (Greta Gerwig, who cowrote the screenplay with the director, her honey, Noam Baumbach) from the highest precipice rather than relishing your time with this deceptively fragile underthinking oversharer, and you may want to consign the precocious Tracy (Lola Kirke) to a newly established tenth circle of hell for her treacherous spinoff of puppy-dog hero worship. Worse yet, you may just find all these people too annoying even to hate. You might find the film a waste of your 84 minutes.

I, on the other hand, feel just the opposite.

Trailers

• Brooklyn--The biz's go-to Irish girl Saoirse Ronan in Nick Hornby's adaptation of Colm Tóibín's acclaimed novel, which I haven't read. Looks good.
• The Finest Hours--Coast Guard heroism; hard to take anything seriously with a title like that.
• Freeheld--MFW Julie and Ellen Page as a couple fighting for their rights; if the film's as good as the trailer, we've got something here.

A contender

Listen to Me Marlon

Crit

OK, I think we can all agree that filmmaker Stevan Riley's strategy of digitizing Brando's disembodied cranium into Max Headroom's nonstuttering brother Mar was a Bad Idea, and we can also agree that the discovery of a huge trove of the actor's personal cassette tapes of memoir, film commentary, meditative "self-hypnosis," and philosophy falls into the category of luck-too-good-to-be-true, but let's give him credit: he has interleaved this miscellany with judiciously chosen film clips to fashion a compelling film biography of the greatest actor this continent has produced. Particularly revealing are clips of the heretofore mythic (to me anyway) figure Stella Adler in the classroom and explaining the Method to an interviewer.

Speak low

Phoenix

Crit

It's Vertigo in postwar Berlin, a thoroughly implausible, thoroughly gripping melodrama. Nelly (Nina Hoss) is a camp survivor whose face was ripped by a gunshot, necessitating reconstructive surgery that makes her remarkably pretty but not herself. She sets off to find her beloved Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), despite her sister's (Nina Kunzendorf) reasonable suspicion that he's the one who betrayed Nelly.

So Johnny, in order to grab his dead wife's survivor's inheritance, remakes a woman into a woman from his past, not knowing that she actually is that woman from his past. Is Johnny simply a greedy cad, or is he just getting by as best he can in a kleptoeconomy, while pining for the woman he lost? And what was it Chekhov said about that gun?

Motherfuckin' role models

Straight Outta Compton

Crit

Lots to cover in 2½ hours, so we get generous helpings of showbiz-movie set pieces, but F. Gary Gray's film (and can you name another director whose given name is an anagram of his surname?) about the rise and fall of N.W.A thrives on the vitality of the performances, in particular O'Shea Jackson Jr. as Ice Cube, Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E, Corey Hawkins as Dre, and Paul Giamatti as the manager who launches, cultivates, and exploits them.

Mistakes are made, but apart from rival manager Suge Knight (R. Marcos Taylor), everyone maintains a claim on our sympathy--as with a star-crossed romance, we're rooting for a tearful final-reel reunion. Which happens, of course, though not quite in the way we'd have wished.

Trailers

• Creed--Michael B. Jordan plays the son of the boxer who famously battled Rocky Balboa, and you'll never guess who plays the scion's grizzled white manager.
• Ride Along 2--Thanks, I'll just walk.
• The Perfect Guy--Spoiler alert: the title is ironic.