Portrait of the jurist as a young man

Marshall

Crit

For a film about racism and false rape accusation in the tony corner of 1941 Connecticut, this veers awfully close to comedy at times, and it's certainly a buddy picture from the get-go. The buddies are a young NAACP attorney named Thurgood Marshall (Chadwick Boseman, completing a hat trick after previous cinematic portrayals of Jackie Robinson and James Brown) and Sam Friedman (Josh Gad), a Jewish Bridgeport lawyer whose specialty is finding technicalities to absolve insurance companies of their fiduciary responsibilities, who is enlisted to get Marshall, a member of the New York bar, certified to sit at (but not speak from) the defense table. They meet cute, they resist each other, and their mutual surrender is as inevitable as a black man someday sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Not a great film, but both an entertaining and a moving one, which makes it more rewarding than some stodgily great ones.

Trailers

• Wonder Wheel--The latest from Woody.
• Roman J. Israel, Esq.--Denzel as a pain-in-the-ass (uppity, say?) lawyer; if nothing else, a good trailer to precede the feature.

You oughta be in pictures

Visages Villages (Faces places)

Crit

A buddy movie and a road picture, filmmaker Agnès Varda aiding, abetting, and documenting the artist JR's ongoing project of taking photographic portraits, printing them huge, and affixing them to walls. There are subtexts political, architectural, and geographical, and even a sort of cameo by that prick Jean-Luc Godard, but mostly this is about two charming and brilliant people charming us and illuminating the world.

Under the boardwalk

Beach Rats

Crit

Frankie (Harris Dickinson) doesn't "consider [him]self gay," but he surfs a gay Brooklyn chat site looking for men to hook up with, while his beautiful ostensible girlfriend, Simone (Madeline Weinstein), somehow can't inspire much ardor in him. What's wrong with this picture? And how is Frankie's deepening commitment to the oxy prescribed his dying father connected to his sexual self-deception? A sad bastard film about a very confused sad bastard.

Meth and Modernism

Columbus

Crit

My favorite moment: Jin (John Cho, making us think: hey, he's a grown-up [just checked: he's FORTY-FIVE]) finds his dying father's floppy hat in a closet and just holds it, staring at it as if it's Yorick's skull. My favorite repeated visual motif: hallways, alleyways, byways, bridgeways; standing still is going somewhere, but somewhere predetermined and enclosed.

This is everything we used to love about independent film, back when that phrase meant something: quiet, unhurried, painfully human, rewardingly inconclusive. And educational: I won't ask whether you knew Columbus, Indiana, is an architectural mecca; did you even know there is a Columbus, Indiana?

Feature debut by writer/director Kogonada, known (if at all) for his quirky shorts. More, please.

Piece of my heart

mother!

Crit

OK, you start with an open marriage between Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead, encourage liberal liaisons with The Shining, Alien, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Life of Brian, Saving Private Ryan, Do the Right Thing, Carrie, the Manson murders, and the riots outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, filtered through the sensibilities of David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky, and against all odds you end up with something so bizarrely original that it takes my breath, as well as the majority of my cortical function, away. I'm pretty sure I liked it, dead certain that I admire writer/director Darren Aronofsky's chutzpah and Jennifer Lawrence's fearlessness, and pleasantly surprised to discover that I know the musician covering Skeeter Davis's "The End of the World" over the end credits (having, oddly, recently heard the original serving the same function in the JFK-assassination episode of Mad Men).

Trailers

• Downsizing--Woot! Trailers from two of my can't miss directors; first, an absurdist turn on life in the 21st century from Alexander Payne, and then . . .
• The Shape of Water--an apparent E.T. riff starring Sally Hawkins from Guillermo del Toro.

Justice deferred

Crown Heights

Crit

Another angrymaking documentary-ish account of an innocent black man ground up for decades in the wheels of what in often called with a straight face the American justice system. Or, looked at another way, another paean to persistence and enduring friendship and love. But if this is what it takes to elicit those qualities, . . .

Very bad wizard

Patti Cake$

Crit

A narrative trajectory older than rap, older than showbiz, even, older than the original Jersey, say nothing about the New one--as old, in fact, as aspiration--but made irresistible by J, Jheri (Siddharth Dhananjay); B, Basterd (Mamoudou Athie); and especially P, Patti (Danielle Macdonald). And by their beats--before I wrote this, I bought the soundtrack.

Trailer

• Stronger--The second film to come from the Patriots Day bombings stars Tatiana Maslany in what appears to be a single role and Jake Gyllenhaal as her boyfriend, who lost his legs and blames her. Directed by David Gordon Green.