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.

The entertainment

Best of Enemies

Crit

Lunatic fringe bloodsport: this documentary shows how TV news changed when ABC, then the distant third of the then-three major networks ("It would have been fourth, but there were only three," one interviewee remarks), ceded gavel-to-gavel coverage of the 1968 presidential conventions to NBC and CBS, throwing a wrinkle into the affair by inviting the rabidly liberal Gore Vidal and the convulsively conservative William F. Buckley Jr. to "debate" during the conventions. Well, the 10 sessions were called debates; they were really character-assassination tennis matches, riveting and appalling, and harbingers of the partisanship in the future for television news. A train-wreck fascinating film.

The End of the Tour

Crit

It's no exaggeration to say that, via Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace changed my life, and not just my reading life. His suicide was one of the saddest of a whole bunch of sad deaths in recent years, and his memory is pretty nigh sacred to me. And much as I like Jason Segel as a comic actor, casting him as Wallace seemed odd at best, catastrophic at worst.

In the event, Segel performs brilliantly opposite Jesse Eisenberg as a Rolling Stone writer in what plays out essentially as a tragic love story. Terrific film, even if they did use Michigan as a stand-in for my native Illinois plains.

Trailers

• Room--I let out an audible gasp when I recognized this adaptation of one of the most disturbing and moving novels I've read in recent year. I think I'm rooting for reviews good enough to make me see it, though part of me would be relieved not to have to go there again.
• Steve Jobs--Michael Fassbender fronts an excellent cast as the monomaniacal visionary.
• Suffragette--Streep plays Mrs. Pankhurst, but the film seems to be about the rank and file, with Carey Mulligan in the lead role.
• Mistress America--Another Baumbach-Gerwig project; I'm in.
• 99 Homes--Evictee sells soul to evictor to keep a roof over his family's head.

Time wounds all heels

The Gift

Crit

You know what occurred to me today? We see more people brushing their teeth in the movies nowadays than smoking.

Simon (Jason Bateman) and Robyn (Rebecca Hall) have secrets, only one of which is hinted at in the trailer, which I saw way too many times. A movie that starts out masquerading as a conventional thriller turns into a Hitchcockian near-masterpiece by the veteran Australian character actor Joel Edgerton in his directorial feature debut.

Edgerton also wrote the devilishly misdirectional script, about which if I told you much more I'd have to kill you or, more likely, you would be inclined to kill me. A brilliant piece of suspense and suspicion.

Debt to society

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Crit

My apologies, but my stupid Blogger app ate my review of this after it was published. In brief (even for me), this is an excellent, hard to watch film based on an actual experiment that was terminated after 6 days of a scheduled two weeks when it revealed things that weren't being looked for, among them power's potential for corruption and the experimenters' own inability to maintain scientific distance.

Blinded by the lite

Ricki and the Flash

Crit

OK, there are worse way to spend two hours than in the presence of Meryl Streep, and no one ever panned a rock & roll song for inadequate complexity, but is it wrong to ask more from Diablo Cody and Jonathan Demme than a paint-by-numbers family drama? It's not as if Demme doesn't know rock & roll. But unfortunately, the geriatric rock is eroded, and the roll is relentlessly downhill.

Favorite thing: the X Los Angeles T-shirt Mamie Gummer wears in her first scene--and then, because her character is paralytically depressed, for two days' worth of scenes thereafter.

The company you keep

Mission: Impossible / Rogue Nation

Crit

Spoiler alert: no matter how certain it seems and how often it seems certain that Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, duh) is doomed, he somehow survives to the end.

This is only the second of these I've seen, I believe, the other being the one where Keri Russell proved that, cute blondness notwithstanding, she could credibly play a spy; the rest is The Americans history. (That would be MI3, I guess; before I started blogging.)

Hunt knows something that important people don't believe, has to overcome foes, friends, and a femme fatale who seems to be both at once, yadda, yadda, yadda. Perfectly entertaining, perfectly silly, perfectly popcorn-and-Diet Coke-and-air conditioning-on-a-steamy-summer-day.

Trailers

• 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi--Is Michael Bay anti-Hillary? The January release date suggests campaign attack timing.
• Zoolander 2 (aka 2oolander)--What a brilliant freakin' teaser! Don't want to spoil it: just go to lots of movies until you see it.