Reaction time

Sully

Crit

An odd, un-Eastwoodish, un-Hanksish film, unavoidably part action movie, unavoidably part 9/11 reminder, but for all that, very quiet and interior where it matters, as Hanks's Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger comes slowly to the realization that yes, as everyone except the busybodies at the National Transportation Safety Board recognize, he is a hero, and then, in a sudden epiphany, realizes how he can prove it to the NTSB.

Trailers

• Collateral Beauty--One of those supernatural premises that can mean brilliance or disaster; my money's always on disaster, because pleasant surprises are more fun.
• Keeping Up with the Joneses--Seems to be a comic spin on Pitt/Jolie's Mr. and Mrs. Smith of a few years ago.

Crime and parenthood

The Light between Oceans

Crit

Hi, I'm Tom, and as I'm played by Michael Fassbender, I'm the most beautiful man in what seems to be Australia, but I'm terribly and invisibly damaged.

I'm overcome to meet you, Tom--I'm Isabel, and, coincidentally, since I'm played by Alicia Vikander, I'm the most beautiful woman in what is actually New Zealand, as it turns out, and I too am deeply and invisibly damaged.

Really? I guess that makes sense, though why don't either of us--why does scarcely anyone in the movie--have an antipodal accent? I'd have thought we were somewhere remote in England except for the "between two oceans" thing.

Yeah, I know: that's confusing, but check the end credits. Anyway, given everything we have in common, let's get married and, just to give the gods an easier time to smite us some more, let's live in isolation on your symbolically named lighthouse island, Janus.

I was thinking the same thing! Our babies will be too beautiful to live anyway, and that way we'll have to try to bring them to term hours from any medical assistance!

Brilliant! Frankly, I think the odds are better of a viable child being tossed up by the sea than by my loins.

I'll take those odds! And when it happens, let's give her a symbolic name, like Lucy. What could possibly go wrong?

Right, it's not as if her biological mother, played by Rachel Weisz, and thus the second-most beautiful woman in Oceania, is going to turn up and want her back, and want to restore her original symbolic name, Grace.

And even if she does, I'm sure that while there will be lots of anger and guilt and pain and sorrow--and damage, more damage!--to be gotten through, eventually there will be opportunities for redemption for us all, don't you think?

Perfect! Can I have a piano, too? A symbolic piano, fallen out of tune, but then brought to mellifluous life?

Only if I can symbolically uproot our second dead baby's grave marker!

Oh, Tom/Michael, let's get together in real life too! 

Best idea yet, Isabel/Alicia. What shall we wear to the Oscars?

Right thing

Southside with You

Crit

Near the end of this first-date movie (about a, not ideal as a, though probably that too, though irrelevant to my purposes), I asked myself, "Would this be as moving and as funny and as charming and as thoroughly involving if it were just about two fictional young lawyers or whatever color?" And I had to admit, no, probably not.

But--and I don't bandy this clause about promiscuously--it is what it is, a chunk of somewhat fictionalized history important to where we are today, and as that, it is simply irresistible, at least to those who don't believe the president is a foreign socialist crypto-Muslim. And I'm guessing the nationwide audience among those who believe that will be less than the 7 in my audience.

Public offering

Equity

Crit

Hey, guess what? Women can be as ambitious and as venal and as duplicitous and as disloyal as men--and that's a really high bar. Good performance by Anna Gunn (who to me is still Mrs. Bullock in Deadwood, not whatever her character was named in Breaking Bad), and excellent performance by Alysia Reiner (who to me is still the corrupt prison administrator in Orange Is the New Black), but this was one of those films I couldn't like as much as I wanted to, and whose execution I couldn't admire as much as its intentions.

Oh, also: seriously? High-powered investment bankers use Blackberries?

Trailers

• Complete Unknown--One of 3 Rachel Weisz films trailered at this screening, and the 1,041st exploitation of a lyric from this song.
• The Eagle Huntress--Whale Rider, but in Mongolia, with golden eagles.
• Queen of Katwe--Whale Rider, but in Uganda, with chess.

Cowboy's lament

Hell or High Water

Crit

Smart, steady brother Toby (Chris Pine) enlists crazy, criminal brother Tanner (Ben Foster) in his plan to rob enough money from the banking chain that stole the family ranch from their late mother to pay off the reverse mortgage and taxes and then put the place in trust for Toby's sons--administered by the same bank.

Nothing could go wrong, right? Nor does anything, until they find a target branch failed and padlocked, and shift to a bigger and better-protected branch than they're used to, and people get killed.

It's a story about hierarchy of crimes, of course--as one witness says, he's seen a bank robbed that has been robbing him all his life--but it's a love story, too, or rather a pair of them: between the brothers, neither of whom can make eye contact when saying "I love you," and between the Texas Rangers on their trail (Jeff Bridges, chasing another Oscar, and Gil Birmingham), who would never say the words at all. Ranger Marcus's declaration of love is vengeful, and comes from the business end of a rifle.

Bleak, hopeful, ambivalent, and ambiguous.

Trailers

• Hacksaw Ridge--Andrew Garfield as a pacifist soldier.
• Mechanic Resurrection--Jason Statham, OK?
• A Monster Calls--Big friendly arboreal giant.

Market price

Little Men

Crit

An unsettling story by writer-director Ira Sachs of gentrification, privilege, and friendship, focused on the titular Jake and Tony (Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri, two more additions to the growing roster of brilliant young actors), sons, respectively, of the inheritor of a town house in a trending Brooklyn neighborhood and the Chilean immigrant who runs a dress shop on the ground floor, and whose rent the new owner plans to triple.

Our good liberal sympathies are firmly in place, yet the Jardines (Greg Kinnear and the ever-welcome Jennifer Ehle) are villains only if you believe that an economically challenged family is evil to demand 60 percent of market value rather than settling for 20 percent.

Still, what matters is not what happens to the parents but what happens to the boys' friendship (which, in one direction at least, is pretty clearly and agonizingly a bit more than friendship). The villain, if you must have one, is a world where real estate has come to have more value than love.

Baked goods

Sausage Party

Crit

Far be it from me to encourage the consumption of criminally proscribed substances, but if you live in one of the increasing number of locales where cannabis is legal or legalish, I think this would be a pretty good flick to see high. Since noted pothead Seth Rogan is among the creative forces as well as the voice of the protagonist, that's no surprise.

But see it straight, too. You'll appreciate more fully the qualities that might surprise you: the excellence of the Pixar-tweaking-while-admiring animation, for example, and the depth of the theological exploration and the conviction of the geopolitical satire, for a couple of others.

Mostly, though, it's just funny and obscene and anarchic as hell.

Florence Foster Jenkins

Crit

Meryl will probably get yet another Oscar nomination for this, and I wouldn't argue--or with nominations for Hugh Grant or Simon Helberg; it is without doubt an actorly picture--and I'm glad to have more of the tone deaf diva's medical background, something closer to the real-life source's real life, but I remain partial to the French telling earlier this year of the same story, Marguerite.

Trailers

• Resident Evil: The Final Chapter--Good, maybe we'll see whether there's anything left in Milla Jovavich worth saving.
• Doctor Strange--In the lower half of my Marvel fandom back in the day--but that doesn't mean I didn't buy & read every issue (mostly shared w/ the [Incredible, natch] Hulk in those days, as I recall), or that I'm not inclined to see Benedict Cumberbatch as the good doc.
• Rules Don't Apply--Star-studded cast in a flick about Howard Hughes and Hollywood, written and directed by Warren Beatty; back in the days when Jennie Tonic and I pre-rated flicks, I'd have given this a 5, as in it would take unimaginably bad reviews to keep me away.