Hammer and nail

Wild

Crit

A beautifully made and brilliantly edited film, and another great performance by Reese Witherspoon, who at 38 can still channel her inner Tracy Flick for flashback scenes. But I hope you're not asking me to like or admire Cheryl Strayed, author of the source memoir; I'll go as far as respect, but that's it.

Trailer

• Far from the Madding Crowd--Carey Mulligan follows 48 years in Julie Christie's footsteps.

There and back again

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Crit

Yeah, OK: insomnia last night, wine at the company holiday party today, so drowsiness was preordained. Still, I just felt (while awake) that I'd seen all this before. I'm ready to leave Middle Earth now, and I hope Peter Jackson is too.

Trailer

• Focus--Will Smith crime comedy. This may be the first trailer I've seen for an actual 2015 release. What will open downtown on Christmas Day??!!? Inherent Vice, I hope! Though I'll settle for Mr. Turner.

Grit

The Homesman

Crit

It's impossible not to associate this riveting story of a frontier female defiant of the limitations on her sex, embarked on a sacred mission with the coerced assistance of a rough-about-the-edges, rough-through-and-through coot, with another story that fits the same description--would be impossible even if the recent incarnation of Mattie Ross, Hailee Steinfeld, didn't show up in a small role near the end.

The film is unembarrassed by its debt to True Grit, employing key visual and thematic tropes, and its refusal to apologize makes the reliance easier to accept. Harder to accept are the independent assessments by two male gazes of a character played by Hilary Swank as "too plumb damn plain" and "plain as an old tin bucket," but even that works, because Swank's Mary Bee Cuddy, for all her protofeminist independence, knows she's plain, knows the rules, and, age thirty-one, pursues matrimony like the last berth on Noah's ark.

And in the end, it's not True Grit at all, but it is another dark, unpredictable tale on its own quest. This is the second big-screen feature Tommy Lee Jones has directed, each with a quest at the center, and I have no idea where he'll ask us to follow him next, but I'm there.

The book of right-off

The Babadook

Crit

This is addressed to my friend Lisa, who has an impressive collection of pop-up books: sorry, but you weren't around, and I couldn't wait to see it. Moreover, I don't know how high your tolerance for scary movies is, but I should tell you that this is the scariest film I've seen as an adult, a brilliant fogging of psychology and supernatural. The setup is this: Samuel (a perfectly cute/creepy Noah Wiseman) is a deeply disturbed not-quite-7-year-old, the disturbance arising from the fact that his father died in a car accident while taking his mother (Essie Davis) to the hospital to give birth. Without giving too much away, it also develops that Amelia is not quite the unconditionally loving mother she first seems. Into this standard haunting environment (locked basement door, dog occasionally barking at mysterious noises, cockroaches bursting from a hole behind the fridge) comes the worst children's pop-up book ever, or at least the one best calculated to keep anyone in the house from enjoying a night's sleep. And so it gets worse from there.

An absolutely terrific (in every sense) film, written and directed by Jennifer Kent, her first feature after a long and uneventful acting career. It is so good that I recommend that you skip it.

Ahead of the curve

Frank

(2014)

OK, let's compare that perfectly adequate biopic with this ambitious, weird, ambitiously weird, weirdly ambitious not-really-a-biopic-but-not-altogether-not-not-either, about a different sort of afflicted genius with an extra load above the neck.

Frank, too, seems in search of a theory of everything, but in the music of the spheres rather than in the spheres themselves. The oddness takes an unfortunately conventional turn late in the game, but until then this is as uncomfortable as anyone could wish.

My degeneration

The Theory of Everything

Crit

The convenient thing in making a film about history's second-most-famous ALS sufferer is that your narrative arc draws itself: promise, then tragedy, then tragic heroism, then triumph. The only surprise here is that a biography of someone so cosmically ambitious could itself be so atomically unambitious, not counting the ambition to rack up a few Oscar nominations via the time-tested route of the afflicted-guy movie.

Wait, I take that back: I had a huge surprise even before the film started: my MoviePass worked!

Anarchy in the KS

Vi är bäst! (We are the best!)

(2013)

This puts me in mind of Those Glory Glory Days, another film about teenage girls devoted to a "boys' pastime." There it was football (aka soccer), here it's punk, in the early '80s, when it was rumored to be dead, but 13-year-olds in Stockholm and 29-year-olds in Grafton, W.Va., were struggling to disprove that canard.

Bobo and Klara, with no skill but plenty of angst (i.e., the perfect punk DNA), recruit the Christian classical guitarist Hedvig--who has in common with them only the sine qua non: unpopularity--to join their nascent band. They survive parental repression and a Yoko Ono moment in an exhilaratingly empowering narrative. Loved loved loved it.