Boyhood

Best-of time again, and again this year Tom Breen, Arnold Gorlick, and I will be sharing our lists on Tom's radio show on WNHH--Thursday, and streamable thereafter. My goal this year is to reduce my "uh"s by half.

But that's next year; while a few minutes are left in 2016, let's do this.

• January was pretty much 2015 catch-up, though some goodies, especially The Revenant and Anomalisa.
• In February, I liked the Coens' Hail Caesar! more than most did, Deadpool was smartass funny superhero stuff, the Scandinavian-seeming The Witch was the year's first entry in the horror renaissance, and one more 2015 Oscar straggler, Son of Saul.
• Funny, a couple of weeks ago I was thinking the momentum of the aforementioned horror renaissance was slowing, but 10 Cloverfield Lane was a second already. The first new-to-America film that might end up on the list is Marguerite, which is infinitely better that Florence Foster Jenkins, the American telling of the same true story later in the year, even though that one had Meryl Streep going for it. The month also brought my first Manhattan trip, which included the trippy-in-every-way A Space Program.
• Busy year for my favorite young filmmaker I'm not related to, Jeff Nichols, and Midnight Special is also one of two films (Arrival the other) this year that made me feel the awe and wonder that Close Encounters never has.
• Hold my feet to the fire and ask the best film I saw in a thin May, I guess I'd claim Francophonia.
• An absurd June contender: The Lobster, by Yorgos Lanthimos. And I guess this too, a documentary I've thought about more than all but a few features in this political clusterfuck of a year: Weiner. And the neo-screwball Maggie's Plan, on, what, my only trip this year to the Cine 1-2-3-4?
• The brilliant and warmhearted New Zealand comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople came back to town late in the year; is it angling for Oscar? Technically, I don't think Kiwi is a foreign language. Jesus! I compared Café Society favorably in some respects to Annie Hall! And Captain Fantastic wowed me with fantastic acting from a bunch of kids. A fine July
• Early August, The Land, a tough The Wire-esque look at part of a World Series city that Commissioner Manfred would prefer to have hidden. The anarchic yet serious in its theological probing Sausage Party probably made me laugh more than anything else this year.
• There are still September movies I haven't blogged: I blame the ghastly The Light between Oceans for sapping my energy.
• "Hard-edged gem" is how I described Chronic, the best of October, Tim Roth as a caregiver for the dying.
• And then in early November came the painfully beautiful Moonlight, which set the bar for best of the year. The documentary Peter and the Farm is a tone poem about both the small farm and mental illness that almost sneaked in and out of town unnoticed. Nichols returns with the story of the interracial Virginia couple Richard and Mildred Loving.
• OK, December: can anything beat Moonlight? Not Manchester by the Sea, but Kenneth Lonergan's surprisingly comic tragedy of guilt and regret gives it a good run. Oh, right: yet another fine, quirky horror film: The Eyes of My Mother. Penultimate Manhattan trip had two goodies: 13th, Ava DuVernay's documentary about the stubborn evolution of lynching by other means, and the real horror classic of the year, the originally creepy The Autopsy of Jane Doe. And finally, a great play and a pretty good movie, Fences.

The envelope, please? But wait . . . let's hold a slot open for Paterson or Hidden Figures or 20th Century Women.

10. Sausage Party

9. Hunt for the Wilderpeople

8. The Autopsy of Jane Doe

7. TK

6. Weiner

5. The Lobster

4. 13th

3. Captain Fantastic

2. Manchester by the Sea

1. Moonlight

Transit

New Year's Eve eve M3

Julieta

Sun

Almodóvar, so about mothers. And mystery. And time. And it's lovely but not one of his first rank.

Casablanca (1942)

FF

Oddly, this 35mm print is not as good a copy of the film as I have at home, and the picture is maybe 6 times as big, but having missed my usual July screening, I couldn't resist the rare viewing in a crowd. Though even the crowd wasn't as big or as appreciative as I'd have expected. So I suppose I'd say that if it's possible to be disappointed by a screening of my favorite film, this would be the time. But it's not, and I wasn't.

Toni Erdmann

FF

Wow. I do not remotely get why smart film critics love this. Of the three factors cited in every review--charm, hilarity, and length--the last is the only one that made an impression on me.

Trailers

• My Life as a Zucchini--I actually got in too late to know anything about this, but I couldn't resist the title. 
• La toutue rouge (The red turtle)--More Ghibli, and I wasn't even at IFC this time.
• Marius, Fanny, and César--Marcel Pagnol's Marseilles trilogy.
• Panique--From a Simenon mystery.
• Everybody Knows . . . Elizabeth Murray--Nope, not me.
• The 100 Years Show--Nope, don't know Carmen Herrera either
• I Am Not Your Negro--I do know James Baldwin, a bit.
• Franz--Love, guilt, and confusion.

Two strikes

Sing

Post

Well, that collection of c'mon-kids-we-can-do-it-let's-put-on-a-show clichés was a thoroughgoing delight, but I have one question: how did they know to use "Hallelujah" (Leonard Cohen) and "Under Pressure" (partly David Bowie) back to back in the soundtrack? If the "Faith" they played in the end credits had been George Michael's instead of Stevie Wonder's, it would have been really spooky.

Oh, also, if you're going to go see it, here's a premovie assignment: guess what Beatles song will be the first song you hear in the film (and will later get a bigger role).

Fences

Post

Yeah, it's a fair cop that this is more a filmed play than it is a motion picture, but if you can listen to Denzel Washington and Viola Davis play bloodsport tennis for two and a quarter hours with August Wilson's words and come out of the theater feeling cheated, I don't know what to tell you.

Trailers

• The Emoji Movie--No, I am not making that up. I'd give anything to be making it up. Just a teaser, not a trailer, hosted by Meh.
• The Lego Batman Movie--Nor this, but this one looks potentially fun.
• Despicable Me 3--Yeah, whatever.
• The Bye Bye Man--Why so many horror-movie trailers before Fences?
• Underworld: Blood Wars-Yeah, whatever.

Street view

Lion

Crit

Well, that was an odd film: determined to warm your heart, but determined also to earn the emotion, so much so that it rather shortchanges what seems as if it ought to be the central questions: what is family, where does one family end and another begin, and how is "family" earned?

I hate it when a reviewer complains that the film is not the one he would have made from the same material, and I apologize for being that guy, but I think I'd have been more on board had we had less of Saroo as the admittedly adorable and admittedly dealt a crap hand of cards young Sunny Pawar and more as the young adult played by Dev Patel. Specifically, we don't get enough of the privileged Tasmanian adoptee Saroo before his madeleine moment to make much sense of the obsession that moment spurs. Clearly, there's a lot more of that mostly metaphorical journey (enabled by Google Earth) than we see, but we don't miss a click of young Saroo's literal journeys. The film needs both less and more.

Trailers

• Gold--Matthew McConaughey prospecting in Indonesia.
• Julieta--¡Sí, sí, sin cuestión!
• The Last Word--Shirley Maclaine as a cranky old bat who wants a good obit.

Gravity

La La Land

Crit

Yes, this was a good way to have my heart broken on Christmas evening.

Oops: was I supposed to say "spoiler alert"? Sorry, but if you don't recognized perfectly matching Mia (Emma Stone) and Seb (Ryan Gosling) as doomed from the get-go, you have neither lived enough nor seen enough movies. In fact, if you don't recognize that from the get-go, you probably don't even recognize that when they meet with cute mutual enmity (in an LA traffic jam, he leaning on his horn, she flipping him off), they're destined to fall in love. You should probably see Why Him? instead.

I was gaga over Damien Chazelle's breakthrough Whiplash, and I also loved 10 Cloverfield Lane, which he wrote (and which also reminds me that in fact I had not had to wait until The Autopsy of Jane Doe to see an excellent horror film this year), but let's face it: there's a lot not to like here. Neither Stone nor Gosling is any more than passable (and maybe a bit less) as either a singer or a dancer, and I suspect that if you listened to the soundtrack before seeing the film, you'd find the songs uniformly un-special. And then there's that long dramatic segment in the middle, when doom is rearing its doomy head and the film altogether forgets that it's a musical, never mind a musical comedy.

And yet.

The songs are not out of context, and in context they charm, and the leads' very humanly minimal mastery of vocal and terpsichorean technique is irrelevant when we've already fallen for them individually and as a duo. It's also a terrific film to look at, and after it has broken your heart, it finds a genius salve to melt that sucker altogether. Just beautiful.

Trailers

• Going in Style--Another unnecessary remake.
• The Shack--Looks unbearably uplifting.

Surplus population

Scrooge

(1951)

So a guy who has lived his whole life (well, mostly) thinking of nothing but the bottom line and of how to advance himself suddenly has a chance at redemption and learns to love and care for his fellow humans.

I'd vote for that.

Strange fruit

Preholiday M3

13th

IFC

Yes, I could have streamed this on Netflix (and you should if you're a subscriber), but (1) I'm currently getting discs from Netflix,  not streaming, and (2) I'm not an altogether rational moviegoer.

Oh, and I also wanted to see it on a big screen and among an actual audience, but in fact, the screen it was on isn't vastly bigger than the one in the bunker, and the size of the audience was only about 5 more than I usually have there.

But none of that matters. What matters is that Ava DuVernay has created a remarkable and horrible document of the way lynching has not gone away so much as evolved into inequitable laws enforced inequitably, prosecuted inequitably, and sentenced inequitably so as to evade the titular constitutional amendment's proscription against involuntary servitude. It would be a powerful call to action if the presidential election had gone differently; as it is, it's a terrifying prediction of a trend extended.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe

IFC

Well, here I was concerned that the golden age of horror films I'd been talking up was eroding. Holy crap, not so!

André Øvredal's first English-language feature (you may have seen his wonderfully wacky Trollhunter) gets us in ways we've been gotten before, but what makes the film great (yes, great)  is the brand new way it gets us: by making the slow, painstaking, ostensibly tedious process of the titular forensic procedure creepy far beyond any standard blood-and-viscera squeamishness you might bring to it.

Brian Cox's usual broadness is made for this role, and Emile Hirsch is perfectly OK, but the fresh face of Olwen Kelly is what will stick with you. I hope she isn't doomed to typecasting.

Elle

Ang

Jesus, Isabelle Huppert could give a shit what you think--we already knew that she has no fear about playing a despicable character, but she also has no fear about carrying an arguably despicable film, by veteran despicable-film maker (which is not the same as "despicable filmmaker," technically) Paul Verhoeven, and carrying it as heroically as she has carried all her nondespicable films.

Elle can fairly be described as a rape romance, though as they say on Facebook, it's complicated. I'm sure someone invested in the film's defense could make a case for its being a feminist manifesto, wherein Huppert's Michèle is only briefly a victim and is for the most part as much in control of the events of her life as she is of the events of the adolescent-boy-sex-and-violence-fantasy video games her company makes. And then there's her backstory, which strikes me as a red herring but could be served as psychological poached salmon, I suppose.

In short, it's a film I needed to see, and I don't wish I could unsee it, if only for Huppert's high-wire act, but don't try to make me watch it again.

[A footnote, which I am not making up: I dreamed the night after seeing the film that I was the willing consort of a (literally, I think) vampiric Huppert.]

Trailers

• Umi ga kikoeru (Ocean waves)--Damn, IFC loves Ghibli.
• Rester vertical (Staying vertical)--Wolves and (human) sex.
• Forushande (The salesman)--Directed by Asghar Farhadi, he of A Separation and The Past.
• Under Sandet (Land of mine)--German soldiers held in Denmark after World War II to clear mines; was the pun necessary in the English title?

Brief shining

Jackie

Crit

Honestly don't know whether to call this a good film (though I'm pretty sure it's not a great one), but Natalie Portman's performance of the just-widowed title character--in a constant fog and at the same time scrupulously in control of every word she subsequently declares off the record to a reporter or nonconfessional to her priest--should produce her 3rd Oscar nomination, though probably not her 2nd win.

Trailers

• A United Kingdom--I want to believe that this based-on-actual-events film about a hereditary African king marrying a white Englishwoman despite everything will be less cheaply melodramatic than the trailer suggests.
• Gifted--Likewise, want to believe that this story of a well-meaning uncle's struggle to raise his orphaned niece despite everything will be less squishily sentimental than the trailer suggests.
• Silence--Scorsese, religious faith, yes.

Image

Harry Benson: Shoot First

Crit

You know that photo of Muhammad Ali knocking over four moptop dominoes? Harry Benson took that. The photo of an aged Greta Garbo in a swimcap? Harry Benson. Frank and Mia masked at the Black and While ball, Ronnie and Nancy waltzing on the cover of whatever magazine it was? Benson, Benson. And the camera Ethel Kennedy is trying to block from photographing her dying husband? That's in Harry's hands, too.

A documentary about a brilliant Scot that barely nods at the ethics of images like the second and fifth mentioned above, but no less enthralling for that. The images are what matters to Harry and, in the end, to us. And good god, what images they are.

Episode III.i

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Crit

I'm a pretty big fan of the franchise--love the original, consider The Empire Strikes Back a great film by any measure, liked The Force Awakens, would prefer not to talk about the others--but there's a galaxy-sized chasm between enthusiasts like me and full-fledged Star Wars nerds, and that's who this film was made for. The filmmakers spent so much effort planting Easter eggs to other films in the series that they seem to have forgotten about storytelling.

Two appealing characters: K2SO (Alan Tudyk), unfiltered, attitude heavy, and the first genuinely fun droid in the entire series, and Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen), or, as I have been referring to him before looking up his name, Blind Jedi Dude.

The character we're supposed to love, as the series continues its admirable trend of giving our daughters and granddaughters tough female characters, is Jyn Erso, sadly miscast in Felicity Jones, who seemed to be every bit as bored as I was.

Trailers

• Fate of the Furious--OK, time to start a Kickstarter campaign to keep Charlize Theron from having to be in stuff like this.
• Spider-Man: Homecoming--Huh! A re-reboot with a kid (Tom Holland) actually almost young enough to play a high schooler.
• Dunkirk--Christopher Nolan directs.

Now, voyager

Miss Sloane

Post

Jessica Chastain plays the iciest of D.C. lobbyists, somehow inspired to do the right thing (risk her career to fight the gun lobby) for the right reason. Well, the right big thing, built from a lot of ethically and morally wrong smaller things. It's kinda like The Sting, only without the ragtime.

Moana

Post

The Wizard of Oz meets The Ark.

A huge contribution from Lin-Manual Miranda makes the songs infinitely better than in most Disney flicks, in most flicks for kids, and in most movie musicals--and also makes you feel a sort of Hamilton vibe. Loved the flick, and honestly spent scarcely any time thinking about how girl-empowering, how anti-Disney princess, how--are we even allowed to use this word in the Trump era?--feminist it is; the look and the quest and the music pretty much pushed the politics to the background. Which makes this an exceptionally good political text.

Trailers

• The Smurfs: The Lost Village--Don't expect me to look for it.
• Rock Dog--The Jazz Singer redux, animated.
• Cars 3--At least I think that's what this ultrateasy teaser must have been for.

Vivisection

The Eyes of My Mother

Crit

Look, I'm not saying Francisca wasn't unusually fascinated by blood even as a little girl (Olivia Bond), her family intact. I'm just saying that if that weird, giggly visitor (Will Brill) hadn't shown up one day to bludgeon her mother (Diana Agostini) in the bathroom, and if the reaction of her wordless father (Paul Nazak) hadn't been to imprison the psycho in the barn, the adult Francisca (Kika Magalhaes) might have had a better chance of learning how to relate to others in a less sanguinary fashion.

A stylish and spare film without a hint of the supernatural from first-time writer-director Nicholas Pesce, lovingly shot in bloody black and white. 

Moving violation

Nocturnal Creatures

Crit

The novel as vengeful wish fulfillment. From Tom Ford a film stunningly stylish (duh), wickedly clever, and ultimately as nourishing as a Twinkie. A really, really tasty Twinkie, and the best-looking Twinkie you've ever seen, but a Twinkie nonetheless. Though I'll admit: the title sequence may haunt me forever.

Trailers

• A Cure for Wellness--Looks like Minority Report meets The Matrix.
• The Circle--Based on the Dave Eggers novel of which I read only the New Yorker excerpt, but probably, yes.

Grim reaping

Les Saisons (Seasons)

Crit

First, this is an absolutely spectacular nature documentary, cameras placed inside lairs and on bird- and beetle-stalking drones, or fixed with zoom lenses to provide stunning intimacy to the cycles of the European forest.

After a while, though, one species--mostly seen dimly, and at a distance not afforded any of the others--intrudes and establishes a narrative, inevitably of domestication and destruction, of single-minded progress, if you will.

Two products of that species came to mind as I watched: this song, and this Gary Larson cartoon.

Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened . . .

Crit

A documentary about faith and failure on Broadway. If you're the sort of musical theater junkie my daughter is, you probably know Merrily We Roll Along as the audacious show--starring young people, mostly amateurs, as characters whose story is followed backward from jaded adulthood to idealistic youth--that lasted 16 performances in 1981 and killed the long-running collaboration between Stephen Sondheim and Hal Price, but that later became an improbable standard of the genre.

I knew nothing about that, but found the film--by Lonny Price, one of those fresh-faced kids (Jason Alexander was the only one I'd heard of) who put on the show--heartwarming and -breaking in pretty much equal parts. Everyone who went through the experience came out of it scarred, and while most were unbowed, few stayed in musical theater. Several, though, tellingly, kept some tangential connection to the biz.

Shark school

Manchester by the Sea

Crit

Look, most of us do multiple stupid things ever day of our lives, and few carry any significant consequences (just as few of the smart things we do matter much). And for all of us, there's a stupidest thing ever (I remember mine: it involves alcohol and a motor vehicle), and most of us (including me) are lucky enough that even that stupidest thing had no consequences, or no major ones. Near the other end of the luck spectrum, some people's stupidest-ever things carry them away, so the consequences, while perhaps painful, are short-lived.

But at the very end of the bad-luck spectrum, the dumbest thing you ever did doesn't kill you. It just rips away everything that protects a human from pain, leaving you an animate raw nerve, an untouchable in every literal and figurative way. That's Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), in writer-director Kenneth Lonergan's third, and third great, film.

I knew going in that this film was going to hurt. What I didn't know what how much it would make me laugh. Yes, the comic parts are mostly of the whistling-past-the-graveyard ilk, but they're no less hilarious--as in, you-miss-following-lines-because-the-big-Friday-night-crowd-you're-unaccustomed-to-being-part-of-is-laughing-that-loud hilarious--for that.

I came out of the theater thinking this was the best 100% Caucasian film of the year, but then I remembered Quincy Tyler Bernstine's early brief (and funny) appearance. Yes, I think Lonergan would admit that his great melting-pot film is yet to come (and what better time than the coming 4 years, though 4 years between films would be a rapid turnaround for him), but damn, he's good with the canvas he uses.

Trailer

• Split--M. Night Shyamalan goes psycho kidnap porn.

Impediments

The Love Witch

Crit

Wow, is that ever weird. To the extent that a plot description matters, Elaine (Samantha Robinson) has really bad luck with relationships, and the breakups are no picnic for her boyfriends, either.

But what has gotten this insanely high numbers on Rotten Tomatoes is its loving (!) and bizarrely feminist sendup of the sort of psychedelic soft porn I associate with the early days (and late nights) of Cinemax. And like those flicks, this is amusing for a while, then turns tedious. By all means have a look when you can stream it for free and quit once you get your fill.

Loving

Crit

Was skeptical  of the trailer, and was last week told by a professional critic not to expect too much, but this is a quiet gem, completely unlike anything else writer-director Jeff Nichols has done, except in its excellence. Nichols repeater Joel Edgerton plays the taciturn Richard Loving, who wears every feeling on his face, and Ruth Negga is his rock, the slightly more talkative and gently determined Mildred. They have broken Virginia law by marrying in the District of Columbia in 1958, then coming home to live as man and wife.

Yes, the deck is firmly stacked, but Nichols is smart enough to depend not on our own assumptions of right and wrong, instead throwing the force of the argument to the self-evidence of the Lovings' love. I see Oscar nominations for both leads.

Trailers

• The Zookeeper's Wife--Another popular novel I haven't read; 2017 Oscar bait for J. Chastain.
• Fences--Man, I'm glad this has finally gotten to the screen. I may spend Christmas with Denzel and Viola.

Chastity loves company

Rules Don't Apply

Crit

Not really much here: standard issue innocents love story, complicated by Howard Hughes (Warren Beatty, who also wrote and directed), a complication that mostly just takes the narrative in confusing and unfulfilling directions. Alden Ehrenreich is appealing as an ambitious young man hired mostly to chauffeur members of Hughes's stable of would-be starlets on contract, and Lily Collins is irresistible as the cutest and the most virtuous of the starlets, but the single surprise in the film seems manipulated, and I just didn't much care.

Trailers

• Fifty Shades Darker--I wonder whether I'll ever watch the first one, which I DVR'd one free HBO weekend?

Worm forgives the plow

Peter and the Farm

Crit

A documentary about Walt Whitman, if Whitman were an alcoholic, depressive, possibly suicidal sexagenarian Vermont farmer estranged from two ex-wives and four children. OK, Peter Dunning's Whitmanian qualities are highly selective, but not nonexistent. Filmmaker Tony Stone and his minuscule crew, particularly cameraman Nathan Corbin, have made a tone poem featuring the small American farm as a place of, in order of importance, beauty, agony, death, and life.

Thanks to Fandango for my even knowing about this: even now, it's not on the Criterion's own website, and the only other person in the screening room was someone who learned about it from me. Films like this have enough trouble getting the audience they deserve without their venues sabotaging them.

Illegals

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Crit

The title is accurate, beasts fantastic enough to keep me awake almost without exception despite a serious sleep deficit, though when the more conventionally fantastic beasts disappear in favor of a smoggy wispy thing, the flick flags a bit before finding its legs (and heads, and wings) again near the end. Timely political text too, with fear and mistrust of the "other" encouraging calls to violence.

Eddie Redmayne, who needs a haircut almost as badly as I, is unfailingly charming, duh, and I was convinced from eyes and expressions and bursts of sad laughter that Katherine Waterston must be Laura Linney's daughter, and I think you know what high praise that is from me. According to the IMDb bio, she's Sam Waterston's daughter, but I'm not convinced.

Trailers

• King Arthur: Legend of the Sword--Maybe. Directed by Guy Ritchie.
• Valerian--Maybe. Graphic novel adaptation, directed by Luc Besson.
• Power Rangers--Almost certainly not, but education gained at my grandchildren's and geeky son-in-law's home allowed me to recognize what this was before the reveal.
• Beauty and the Beast--Disney already skillfully ripped off Jean Cocteau's perfect 1951 La Belle et la bête for its 1991 animated version, so I'm at a loss why the studio thought necessary a live-action version with the same conceit that everything in the Beast's house is sentient. But open mind. Emma Watson plays one of the title roles.

Lost for words

Arrival

Crit

But wait: I wanted to hear that opening lecture in which Dr. Banks (Amy Adams) is about to explain why Portuguese sounds so different from the other Romance languages. Something to do with its rising in Galicia, where language is not communication but art. Tell me more!

Stop me if you've heard this one: a dozen eggs walk into a bar. Or float into our atmosphere and park over 12 places where Sheena Easton had a number one hit. And they're full of squiddly things. And nonetheless, this may be the smartest contact film to date. And one of the elements you groan at the studio-interference obviousness of turns out in fact to be a critical plot element.

Linguistics programs are about to become a bull market.

Trailers

• Allied--Don't you hate when it turns out your wife may be a Nazi spy and you'll have to execute her?

Free floating

Moonlight

Crit

I had heard good things about the "gay black coming-of-age story," but at the end of a week that seemed at times to be all about the differences between us, I saw a film about commonalities, about the human imperatives of love and protection, of belonging and defining your own space, of being yourself even if that involves radical reinvention. This is the most moving film I've seen in a long time, and one of the most beautiful I've ever seen.

And talk of its beauty has to include the remarkable actors who populate the film. The trio of actors who portray Chiron (yeah, like the Styx ferryman, but pronounced shy-RON), aka Little and Black, mesh into a thoroughly credible visual and emotional single soul, evolving but integral. Alex Hibbert is the 9-year-old bullied for his perceived effeminacy and weakness, and Ashton Sanders the high schooler still bullied but experiencing a delicious moment of requital of his love (followed by bitter betrayal) for Kevin (also tripled, nearly as effectively, by Jaden Piner, Jharrel Jerome, and André Holland).

When we meet the grown-up Black (Trevante Rhodes), the resemblance to his younger selves is evident, but it's overwhelmed by his adoption of the character of Juan, the prosperous drug dealer who had become his protector and father figure at 9. Juan is played by Mahershala Ali, and if you're a fan of House of Cards, you've seen enough of Remy Danton's half-clad frame to guess the physicality (and the insouciance) he brings to this role--and that Black brings to his own role of drug slinger at the same level of success.

Chiron's mother, Paula, veers the nearest to cliché of any character--the middle-class single mother dragged down by drug addiction--but Naomie Harris invests the part with the humanity required to get us to love her with just the undercurrent of hate that her son carries. And the pleasantest surprise is the screen debut of R&B's magnificent Electric Lady Janelle Monáe as Teresa, Juan's partner, who continues to provide a social safety net for Chiron after Juan's death.

A nearly perfect film.

Gimme Danger

Crit

Everything you wanted to know about the Stooges and then some, but as we knew from Danny Says (which, crap, I just realized I never got around to posting the blog entry on which LB collaborated, though if there's a live link there now, that means I finally have done) and from a featurette on the Criterion Repo Man disc, time spent with Iggy Pop is never time wasted, at least in the conventional sense of the phrase.

Trailers

• Free Fire--Wacky lawbreaking, great cast.

Conscientious

Hacksaw Ridge

Crit

Oh, come on: how does this have an 87% rating on Rotten Tomatoes? It's just a gimmick (soldier who won't carry a gun) thrust among war movie clichés old (one member of every white American ethnicity, plus a brain, a bigot, etc.) and more recent (what I'd call the poetry of carnage: slo-mo, detailed viscera shots, bullets coming out of nowhere through helmet and skull).

And because it's Mel, the uncompromising man of peace is valorized by staying peaceful amid grotesque violence toward him and everyone else.

Meh. I don't really need any more of these.

Trailers

• Logan--Wolverine with a daughter equivalent.

You've got time

Doctor Strange

Crit

I was a straight-ticket Marvel voter as an adolescent (even subscribed, at a time that 12 issues x 12₵ = a $1.75 subscrip), but I can't really can't say I awaited the new issue of Strange Tales (which the Doc shared with . . . the Hulk, maybe?) with the same eagerness as I did Spidey or the Fantastic Four, or the X-Men or even Daredevil. Perhaps I wasn't sufficiently attuned to psychedelia.

This, though, may be one of my favorite Marvel flicks, as discombobulated as the narrative is. It's without doubt the trippiest, and--this is taller cotton--the most lovingly imaged Manhattan has ever been in a Marvel movie, and maybe one of the top 20 in that category for all films. Even with that stupid Avengers skyscraper (I guess) pasted in at Midtown, near GTC & the Chrysler.

Trailers

• Guardians of the Galaxy--A sequel to a riotously funny film, so yeah, probably.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales--Another one? Seriously?
• Life--In space, no one can hear you say "huh?"
• Wonder Woman--Outrageous: a DC trailer before a Marvel movie!

Mass circulation

American Honey

Crit

I'm not the first to notice, but this family road picture is a modern Oliver Twist, with Krystal (Riley Keough) as Fagin, Jake (Shia LaBeouf) her Artful Dodger, and Star (newcomer Sasha Lane) our Oliver. The game is selling magazine subscriptions door to door (or rig to rig at truck stops, or van to hand at oil fields), and the pastimes are weed, alcohol, music, and nonjudgmental sex. Which is somehow mostly less depressing than you expect.

Given its episodic nature, not sure it profits from piling up 163 minutes worth of episodes, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't profit from the head-hammeringly obvious symbolism of the final scene, but it's a surprisingly friendly film.

Trailers

• Moonlight--All the buzz on this has been excellent.
• 20th Century Women--Gonna say something silly here, based on one look at the trailer: this could be Annette Bening's best work ever.
• Elle--Isabelle Huppert out for revenge, and my money's on her.
• Manchester by the Sea--Kenneth Lonergan: yes.
• Miss Sloane--Jessica Chastain as a lobbyist who steps on some powerful toes.

Locomotive

En man som heter Ove (A man called Ove)

Crit

It's another mystery, this one concerning why the titular character is such a curmudgeon, with such a poorly disguised heart of gold. By the end he has ticked off good-guy boxes including xenophilia, homophilia, ecophilia, and--what's the word for love of the physically challenged? Oh, and he secretly loves children and animals too. You might think I've spoiled the whole movie for you now, but no, there's still that mystery.

Hard to dislike, difficult to respect much.

"Something? Anything?" "Nothing"

Chronic

Crit

In this mystery, we know from the first two scenes that David (Tim Roth) is broken, and we think we know why; our guess is accurate, but fathoms incomplete. That incompleteness begins to impress itself on us as we see how David's brokenness manifests itself: in loving, consuming care to one terminally ill person after another.

When I left the theater Friday, I wouldn't have thought I could feel kicked harder in the gut by another movie on the weekend, but I was mistaken. A hard-edged gem by writer-director Michael Franco, and a searing performance by Roth.

A new song

The Birth of a Nation

Crit

Wow, that sure puts losing the wild-card game in perspective.

This is a film more powerful than good, but it could be an awful lot better than it is and still fit that description. I could complain that only one white person (played by Penelope Ann Miller) displays even a modicum of decency, and that the dissolute plantation owner (Armie Hammer) is the next-best cracker only by the marginal virtue of being more morally weak than actively evil, but what do I expect: that the murderous rapist slave catcher (Jackie Earle Haley) is going to repent his sins at the moment of his comeuppance? Let's face it: white people suck, we always have, and the best anybody can hope for is that some day we'll stop, or at least get better.

There is a moment of moral revelation, but it's by preacher-for-hire-out-by-his-owner Nat Turner (Nate Parker, who also wrote, directed, produced, and presumably helped out with craft services as well), who comes to recognize that the word of the god in whom he has always believed and trusted can be warped to the most ungodly purposes. He enlists an ragtag army of barely armed slaves and leads them to Jerusalem, the conveniently named location of the county's arsenal. Three guesses how that turns out.

Fortunately, since then everything has gotten better.

Trailers

• Jackie--Natalie Portman in the title role.
• Get Out--Twenty-first-century middle-class white people even more dangerous than the ones I saw today.
• Live by Night--Ben Affleck (who also wrote and directed [read in jack-of-all-trades joke from above], as a Boston gangster.

Can't go surfin'

Danny Says

Crit

A documentary about a guy who basically discovered the entire third generation of rock & roll deserves a better blog post than this, but mistakes were made:

Cheeseblab (to Laura B, who saw the flick with me): Hey, wanna be my guest blogger?
LB: For Danny? Have you ever co-written one? What about interviewing each other? Danny deserves both our attention, he had given us so much.
CB: Yeah, for Danny. Yeah, mutual interviewbation sounds good. I'll start: had you ever heard of this guy before?
LB: Never. But man was he EVERYWHERE. I probably read the trashy dime tabloids he wrote, not to mention the hours of music I consumed. How about you? Were there any artists that he promoted that you thought just didn't deserve our attention?
CB: Quite the contrary: during the MC5 segment, I was thinking, "Really? Should I have paid attention to those guys?" Incidentally, I want to go on record (rim shot) as saying I had a Johnny Winter album.
LB: I had the opposite thought. MC5 seemed to be an early punk band and a precursor to metal. They had the potential to be a lot bigger, I thought. I was only marginally aware of them as somehow related to Iggy Pop but I had forgotten their ties.
CB: Right, that’s what I’m saying: was marginally aware, ignored them—maybe it’s MY FAULT they never got bigger!
LB: You can't blame yourself. They were ahead of their time. I'd be curious to know more bands and artists he promoted that weren't mentioned in the film. I got the feeling there could have been hours and hours of footage just as exciting as the stuff we saw.
CB: Or maybe just sex tapes we’re just as well off having missed. So hey, my YUP buddy and WNHH radio star Tom Breen informs me that the filmmaker is a New Haven guy, Brendan Toller, and that he was there for a postscreening Q&A at some of the screenings that we weren’t at. Usually I find those Q&As more annoying than informative—most Q-ers are more interested in self-promotion (all the other movies they’ve seen that shed light on the one we’re supposed to be talking about, and just generally all they know that makes them far more fabulous than anyone else asking a Q)—but I sorta wish we’d heard him. Oh well.
LB: Way freakin' cool!

After which the conversation just kinda fizzled out. But see the movie.

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.

The butcher's boy

Indignation

Crit

This was the last novel I loved in my Year of Reading Roth, and the film made from of it is altogether worthy. But whereas in the book I was most engaged by the relationship between the brilliant but naïve Marcus Messner and troubled shiksa queen Olivia Hutton (portrayed beautifully in the film by Logan Lerman and Sarah Gadon), what's riveting here is the clashes between Marcus and Winesburg College's Dean Caudwell (Tracy Letts).

I've had some experience with rhetorical bullies--a Dominican sister in grade school, a supermarket boss when I was in college, even a newspaper executive when I was an ostensible grown-up--but they were all, you should forgive the boxing metaphor, Sonny Liston types, boring in relentlessly and unsubtly on the weaker, scareder, totally overmatched opponent.

Caudwell floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee, or maybe a hornet, rhetorically rope-a-doping the smart and studied but callow Marcus, teasing him into launching what he thinks is an unstoppable haymaker, only to slip it and deliver a deadly counterpunch. Caudwell is--appropriate to Roth--a master baiter.

Trailer

• The Light between Oceans--Great cast, but frankly, it looks kinda Wally Lambish.

Fight the power that bee

Star Trek Beyond

Crit

So Stringer Bell decides to waste civilization . . .

But wait, didn't I say the last time around that the film was fun but overstayed its welcome by about 20 minutes? No, I guess I didn't, though I'm pretty sure I thought something like that. Sure was the case with this one.

Trippiest newbie by light years is stripey-faced Jaylah (Sofia Boutella, who is Algerian!). I look forward to her kicking further ass next time around. Which will, I hope, be just the right length.

Trailers

• xXx: The Return of Xander Cage--Thank god Vin Diesel is getting work.
• Jack Reacher: Never Go Back--Ditto Tom Cruise.

Mistake by the Lake

The Land

Crit

As in Cleve-.

Man, I was not far from opting for Jason Bourne instead of this; I loves me some Jason, but I'm glad I made the choice I made. A little more than a year ago, Dope made great comedy from the kids-in-over-their-heads-selling-Molly plot. This one, though it is not humorless, has little space for the back half of tragicomedy. Instead, the net we see being spun gets drawn in successively tighter, with predictably bleak results. It reminded me a lot of season 4 of The Wire, and that is high (no pun intended) praise indeed.

Tell me about your rotten day

Don't Think Twice

Crit

First, a warning: this probably isn't as funny as you think. Yes, it's about an improv troupe, and yes, there are moments of improv brilliance (and yes, you pray that those scenes were genuine improv, and if they were scripted, you don't want to know), but it's less about what happens on stage than it is about the 24/7 dynamics of the group, and specifically about the effort, mostly unsuccessful, to be happy for the one of them who is asked to join the cast of "Weekend Live," a completely fictitious long-running Manhattan-based comedy sketch show whose martinet producer, I'm confident, bears no resemblance whatever to Lorne Michaels.

So if you're OK wincing more than laughing, and if you go in with that expectation, you will admire, if not quite love, Mike Birbiglia's tough writing and directing follow-up to Sleepwalk with Me.

Trailers

• Office Christmas Party--Sucking seems likely, but the cast is great, and maybe it'll be a guilty pleasure.
• The Hollars--I'm more confident in this one, though it has the potential to slide into sentimentality.
• The Edge of Seventeen--Yes, we've seen this many times, but not often enough with a girl, and Hailee Steinfeld can carry it.
• Bad Santa 2--What do you need to know?

Stealing home

Captain Fantastic

Crit

Often I go to a film expecting to like it but to encounter obstacles to love--plot conveniences, character slips, logical implausibilities. Once or twice in a good year I see something and am lucky enough to be able to dismiss the flaws (one child of six who has gentle doubts about his father's worldview, another who openly rebels against it, and four who would rather die than have to live in fascist, consumerist, shallow American culture? how convenient!) and fall in love.

What makes this story of practical counterculturism work? Acting, mostly: it goes without saying that Viggo Mortensen would commit fully to his role of a widowed paterfamilias who tells all the truth, slantlessly, and leads his tribe in celebrating Noam Chomsky's Birthday (giving each a lethal weapon), or that Frank Langella would bring both nastiness and sympathy to his small role as Ben's nemesis, his wealthy and conventional father-in-law.

But the kids, oh, the kids; write down these names: George MacKay, Samantha Isler, Annalise Basso, Nicholas Hamilton, Shree Crooks, and Charlie Shotwell. Oh, and Elijah Stevenson and Teddy Van Ee, seen briefly as Ben's video gamer nephews, whose parents are played by the always welcome (and rhyming!) Kathryn Hahn and Steve Zahn.

It is, in short (too late for that), an actors' film--and a film for the eyes, with sumptuous location shooting in Washington, Oregon, and New Mexico. But I seem to have buried the lead: it's a film about people with whom I side with in theory but would lampoon in life, yet the film killed the lampooning impulse and left only the love.

Trailers

• Denial--As in Holocaust, with Rachel Weisz going after her second Oscar, as historian Deborah Lipstadt, sued for libel by denier David Irving (Timothy Spall).
• Don't Think Twice--A comedy about comics, starring some of my favorites: Keegan-Michael Key, Gillian Jacobs, and Mike Birbiglia (who wrote and directed), along with one, Kate Micucci, who the trailer suggests might be one of my favorites once I've seen the film.

All the gin joints

Café Society

Crit

The heart wants, Woody has always told us, but it has been a long time since he has told us so beautifully. Way back in Annie Hall, whose themes this one plays with, in some cases more effectively--dare I say more maturely?--we had one of the greatest pair of scenes, wherein what has changed is only (!) the girl. Here we have similarly paired scenes, and again the girl has changed, but it's the same girl (Kristen Stewart, who is about ready for the Academy to start paying attention to, don't you think?). The boy (Jesse Eisenberg, ditto, don't you think?) has changed too, and so have their respective and shared worlds, but the uncoupled couple somehow hasn't.

The bittersweet of the earlier film is bitterer here, and as much as I love Annie Hall, that's not a complaint.

Trailers

• La La Land--Looks like a spiritual remake of Pennies from Heaven.
• American Pastoral--With one Philip Roth adaptation getting good reviews currently, here comes his best novel to the screen.
• Sully--Tom Hanks as another real-life heroic, death-defying captain.

Memorable

Finding Dory

Savoy 16

Thank you to my special guest blogger: Veronica Bechtel:

I think it was a very good movie. I especially liked the relationship between Dory and Destiny. Destiny is supposed to eat a fish like Dory, but instead they are "pipe pals." I don't think they could have made a cuter Dory as a little kid. Her eyes take up almost half of her face, and she is so small! The journey to Dory's parents is a real nail biter. You think everything is saved, but then something else happens, and it's a whole new story! All in all, I think you should see Finding Dory.

I agree!

Trailer

• Nine Lives--Frank Underwood as a house cat.

Field of dreams

The BFG

Crit

Note to Arsenal backers: this is not Steven Spielberg's biopic of Per Mertesacker.

I'm not sure what it is, actually. A plea for vegetarianism, even when the vegetables taste awful? A celebration of explosive flatulence? A call for multilateral military strikes against evildoers? (It's set in the era of Reagan and Yeltsin, when such a notion may have been a bit more plausible.) Rebecca Hall's least significant role ever?

I don't know, but it didn't do much for me. Mark Rylance is fine in the CGI-enhanced title role, because, after all, he's Mark Rylance, and young Sophie, as portrayed by Ruby Barnhill, is a model of cinematic-kid spunk-beats-cute, but I never felt invested in the story. Rarely has Spielberg bored me, but . . .

Wiener-Dog

Crit

I thought I was going to love this Todd Solondz omnibus film, the stories linked via the titular canine, but after the first two segments--cancer-surviving kid cursed with parents from hell, especially his mother (Julie Delpy); the return of the original Wiener Dog from Solondz's debut, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Dawn Wiener (Greta Gerwig this time) and one of her high school tormentors (Kieran Culkin)--the stories flag, so I'll have to settle for "liked a lot."

Trailers

Can I boast a moment? Forgot my notebook, so had to remember the following 6 titles with nothing but my brain. It helped that they mostly crowded the middle of the alphabet and were mostly a single short word: remembering KMMMPS took me a long way. Unfortunately, with the possible exception of the last, none of the films looks likely to be as memorable.

• Kubo and the Two Strings--Most notable for the use (or ripoff) of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"
• Monster Trucks--See, it's a truck powered by a big friendly monster.
• Moana--Fat, tattooed Polynesian stereotype--er, demigod.
• Pete's Dragon--A dragon lives forever, you know.
• Sing--Animated animal talent show.
• Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life--I guess Veronica's a little young for the graphic-novel source.

Occupy

Free State of Jones

Crit

I edited an excellent book a while back called Why Acting Matters, and you should read it, but you could also derive the answer from this film, which traffics in no complexity, no ambiguity, no surprise, and is barely worth its 2½ hours about 10% because of its good intentions and 90% because of the inconceivable commitment of Matthew McConaughey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw (you know her from a slightly better right-thinking film, Belle), and Mahershala Ali (you know him as Remy Danton in House of Cards).

Trailers

• Bad Moms--Is it just me, or are all the jokes in the trailer (1) unfunny and (B) stolen from other Kristen Bell movies?
• Gleason--Documentary of a good dad, despite ALS.

The great Gorky

Our Kind of Traitor

Crit

Not sure what's more implausible: that MI6 would involve a callow amateur in its espionage or that the amateur would be so callow as to do the right thing simply because it's the right thing.

Still: always good to see Naomie Harris.

Trailers

• Anthropoid--It would have been a different century if people in real life had tried as often to kill Hitler as they do in the movies.
• Equity--Anna Gunn as badass banker.
• Loving--Jeff Nichols, my favorite young writer-director I'm not related to, brings the landmark Virginia miscegenation case to the screen.
• Southside with You--Barry and Michelle's first date. I wish I could report that the trailer is promising.