Of our own device

Clemency

Crit

Huh! Had no idea that this is a film about retirement. Not quite my situation, though: I didn't leave work every day feeling as if my soul had received a lethal injection. That's pretty much the situation for Warden Bernadine Williams (Alfre Woodard), and her husband, Jonathan (Wendell Pierce), is another victim, and the one who suggests that maybe it's time to move on.

But no, the point is not boo-hoo, how sad for those nice people who have to put criminals to death. Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge) has maybe fifty words of dialogue in nearly as many minutes onscreen and commands our sympathy, respect, and yes, as the prison chaplain assures him, love.

So the point is more subversive: does anyone get any good out of this? Even the victim's kin? The answer is unsurprising but not ineffective.

On the row

Just Mercy

Crit

The insistent early appearance of Basil Exposition is the first clue that this is going to be narrative challenged, and indeed, we have unambiguous heroes and easy villains and a plot that goes exactly where it needs to for maximum effect (and affect). But then, maybe the story of Equal Justice Initiative founder and sustainer Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) and his railroaded client Walter "Johnnie D" McMillan (Jamie Foxx) has fewer gray areas than most.

In any case, this is an actors' movie--not just the above-the-title ones like Jordan and Foxx and Brie Larson but also Johnnie's death row mates, played by O'Shea Jackson Jr. and Rob Morgan. Morgan, in fact, as Herbert Richardson, who set off a bomb under a house after returning from Vietnam with PTSD, steals the role as emotional center of the film from some pretty potent candidates.

Not a great film, but one whose heart is so firmly in the right place that its flaws are forgivable.

• New trailers: The Lovebirds, which looks like a mashup of Queen & Slim and Stuber (I'll leave it to you whether that's a good idea); and Tenet, which looks like a Christopher Nolan film, and is.

The meaning of life, part III: Fighting each other

1917

Crit

Not sure I align with my Famous Movie Critic Friend Whose Opinion I Trust More Than Manohla Dargis's (henceforth, let's just call him FMC) in judging this the best film of 2019, but I'm certainly closer to him than to Dargis and her N.Y. Times colleague A. O. Scott, whose noses must have been strained by the force with which they were upturned.

Where I think this film is great--is, in fact, the best war movie I've ever seen--is in its depiction of the war between the fighting, especially in its concentration on how nature, in the form of rats, flies, and water among the less visible forces, works as quickly as possible to reclaim the victims. The widely praised simulation of a single 110-minute shot is impressive but unavoidably gimmicky, demanding that you devote some of your attention to finding the seams (which are eminently findable), and the bookend Big Movie Star cameos are pretty close to insulting.

But George MacKay, as Lance Corporal Schofield, who is onscreen for what seems like about 107 of those minutes, imbues the film with the humanity that the gimmicks don't serve: stripped successively of (spoiler alert!) comrade, of bayonet, of helmet, finally of the one thing a soldier cannot be stripped of and still be a soldier, his rifle, he contracts into an indomitable man with a mission. MacKay, whose familiar face I just this moment identified as that of eldest son and emotional linchpin Bodevan in Captain Fantastic, has a chance to be a big enough star someday to be given a cheesy cameo in a film maybe as good as this one.

• Why all the horror trailers? In addition to a nasty-looking The Invisible Man with Elisabeth Moss and an unnecessary (but forgivable for giving Millicent Simmonds another gig en route to being recognized as an actor, not just that young deaf actress) A Quiet Place Part II, one that I'd already seen: The Turning, a reboot of Henry James's "A Turn of the Screw." And the rest, which I'd seen, were yet more literary adaptations: Emma (psyched; do any of you YUPpers think Anya Taylor-Joy could play Hannah Kolb in a movie?), and The Call of the Wild (ugh--animatronic animals, including the dog, really?). 

Better to suffer evil

As I was saying 18 months ago, when I so rudely interrupted myself, . . .

Today I yam a man, a retired man, and I've been thinking for some time that when that happened would be a good time to start writing brief, shallow comments on films I see. So let's crank this Model T and see whether we can't get it restarted.

A Hidden Life

Crit

Honestly, a 3-hour Terrence Malick film on moral courage in the face of a wicked state is more a "I guess I gotta" than an "oh boy!" for me, but man, is there any filmmaker as unafraid of the biggest of the big questions? Why all the wickedness, why all the suffering, why all the injustice, and what the heck are we here for anyway? No answers, of course, but plenty of big questions.

Also big is the gorgeous setting: if you were a person who believes in God, and who believes that the voice of God can, under the right conditions, be heard, the mountains and valleys--partly wooded, partly cleared for farming--of Austria would be conditions that would make sense. Of course, as just about any biblical prophet could tell you, there's zero worldly, practical value to hearing God's voice, unless you happen to have a death wish. Then again, those who hear God's voice tend not to be much about practicalities.

OK, this is my first time doing this in a while, and I realize that I sound awfully flip, as if I didn't admire this film, as if I didn't find it moving, even awe-inspiring, and, at bottom, as if I didn't like it a ton; not so, i.e., negative all those negatives. And see it.

• Let's do trailers that excited me in brief, like so: Downhill, clearly a comic remake of Force majeure, with Julia-Louis Dreyfus and Will Ferrell and a script credited in part to Alexander Payne's writing partners for The Descendants; Kelly Reichardt's next, First Cow; and a wild-looking spin on Peter Pan, Wendy, by Benh Zeitlin (remember Beasts of the Southern Wild?).