Life is what happens

Boyhood

Crit

Spoiler alert: no meteor or sharkstorm falls from the skies, neither gods nor demons, vampires or zombies wage war over the fate of humankind, no one is revealed as a superhero or supervillain, and no one is injected with a mysterious superdrug. In fact, there's not so much as an unexpected death or an ambulance call to rush someone to the hospital. The most immediate physical threat comes from alcoholic stepfathers.

All that happens is that a boy and a girl, over a span of 2¾ hours (which will, of course, seem like real time to all parents), grow to young adulthood while their parents try consistently and succeed intermittently to give them useful guidance on that journey. This utterly uneventful film, in which nothing happens but life, may be the most truthful "fiction" film I've ever seen; it's certainly one of the best I'll see this year.

Trailer

• The Trip to Italy--Seriously? If Michael Winterbottom makes The Trip to West Central Iowa with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, I'm in.

I am he and you are he and you are we

Synecdoche, New York

(2008)

Gee, seeing that it has been nearly 6 years since this came out makes me empathize even more with Caden. Where did those years go?

This is about the grandest, most hilarious Whitmanesque shaggy-dog tragedy imaginable.

Speaking of nearly 6 years, Charlie Kaufman supposedly has a TV movie called How and Why coming this year (maybe on Fx?), and a feature in the works called Anomalisa. So, OK.

Pawns in the game

A Most Wanted Man

Crit

Ah, Phil, Phil, Phil. There were times when just looking at him up there and knowing I'd never again see him do something I've never seen him or anyone else do quite that way before bought me pretty damn close to tears. The picture itself is an OK spyworld vehicle, but I don't think it's just sentimentality that makes me say Hoffman elevates every scene he's in, which is about 95% of the scenes in the film.

And best of all are his half-dozen or so scenes with Robin Wright, as a CIA operative who is essentially Claire Underwood, which is to say she's essentially Lady Macbeth. Hoffman and Wright go at each other like baseline sluggers in tennis, like longtime lovers who know each other's every move and know how to feign surprise--like, in short, great actors, and great spies. I used to think Wright was in over her head in everything of substance I saw her in, much like I now feel about Rachel McAdams. Can McAdams grow up to be as good as Wright?

Dead man running

D.O.A.

(1950)

One of those classic high-concept films that is far more clever than actually good, and the way it is most not good is in the unbearably clichéd and mechanically simplistic love story. That element is unnecessary to the story of man poisoned by a person unknown for a reason unknown--but fortunately with a "luminous toxin" that will take "a day, two days, a week at most" to kill him, giving him time to solve his own murder. The only conceivable reason for the romance is that the film runs only 83 minutes as is, and without the kissing and the reluctance to commit, it would have fallen dangerously close to an hour.

Be all you can be

Lucy

Crit

Huh! Who knew that watching 2001: A Space Odyssey a week ago was prep for the climactic sequence of this? Is this as ambitious or as smart as Kubrick's take on human possibility and the lifespan of the universe? Well, that's not a fair question; it would be just as fair to ask whether Kubrick was capable of the sort of delightful loony, blissfully faux-intellectual head trip that Luc Besson delivers at his best.

Anyway, it's not just 2001. The obvious jumping-off place for the narrative is D.O.A., with the critical difference that the substance introduced into Lucy's system against her will, contra Nietzsche, will both kill her and make her stronger. Finally, after the cosmic-biography-and-light-show tribute to Kubrick, the film ends with an obvious but nonetheless satisfactory nod to The Grapes of Wrath.

This is not Scarlett Johansson's best role of the past 12 months, or even her 2nd-best, but hey, she's had a pretty terrific 12 (or even 7) months. Here Besson has clearly demanded that, once her character gets the drug, she be as affectless as possible. An interesting choice, and I get it, but it would have been nice had she been allowed to chew a little scenery in a role where ravenous scenery consumption would have made perfect sense. Still, if Luc did not exist . . .

Trailer

• Dracula Untold--It would be hard to overstate my appetite for fresh takes on the Drac story, but this just looks like a dumb, plodding, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink waste of time. Hope I'm wrong.

Supple and imaginative

Those Glory Glory Days

(1983)

We've seen sports-obsessive boys agonizing over tickets to the big game many times, and the main thing that's different about this girls' take on the theme is that it foregrounds the innocent, oblivious sexuality at play, which makes me wonder whether we'd find the same tingle in the boy-crushes in those stories if only we thought to look for them.

Gaze

La Vénus à la fourrure (Venus in fur)

Crit

I rarely flog Yale books, but you won't be able to buy this for months anyway, so what's the harm? I just edited a terrific little manuscript by the heavyweight film writer David Thomson--Why Acting Matters, in our Why X Matters series--and the timing for seeing this film could not have been more perfect, because it's all about . . . Acting!

Set in a theater, involving only two people (the always engaging Mathieu Almaric and Emmanuelle Seigner, who got the role on merit, not just because she happens to be married to the director, one Roman Polanski), the film is based on an acclaimed play by David Ives (who cowrote the screenplay with Polanski, and also contributed to the English subtitles of the French film), which is in turn based on the 19th-century Austrian novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, whose name is the source of a particular variety of sexual pleasure. Got all that?

Thomas has written a play based on Sacher-Masoch's novel, not, he insists, on anything to do with his life--but he's Acting! Vanda shows up hours late, she says (but she's Acting!), for her 2:30 audition for the part of, yes, Vanda, the play's dominatrix (who's Acting!). She's ignorant and empty-headed (Acting!), but when she finally persuades David to hear her read--and, critically, to read with her--he discovers that she is a brilliant natural (Acting!) actor, perfect for the part, and perhaps for more than that. He's engaged (Acting!) and not interested in Vanda's extrathespian appeal (Acting Acting Acting!), and though he allows her to direct him to a truer reading of Severin, he emphatically doesn't share that character's need for sexual humiliation (you know).

The rare film for which "stagy" is a compliment; an orgy of sexual frustration whose ultimate central theme is introduced early but seems like a misdirection, such that its misdirection-seeming is itself a misdirection.