This immigration story drowns in problems

 

    Topical subject matter isn't always enough to carry a movie.

    That's the case with Blue Bayou, an overloaded immigration drama from director Justin Chon, who also wrote and stars in the movie.

   Chon plays Antonio LeBlanc, a Louisiana-bred man who arrived in the US at the age of three. Born in Korea, Antonio speaks with a southern accent and has never thought of himself as anything but  American. He has only dim memories of the Korean mother who gave him up for adoption.

   Antonio lives with Kathy (Alicia Vikander), a woman with a daughter (Sydney Kowalske) Antonio loves and who loves him back. The couple is expecting another child. 

   Sometimes, it seems as if Chon never met a problem he could resist; his screenplay staggers under the weight of too many difficulties.

   A tattoo artist by trade, Antonio wants to earn more money to support his growing family. An early brush with the law resulted in a criminal record, which means he has trouble landing jobs. 

   Many of the scenes (an early job interview, for example) have power, but Antonio's personal life proves overly complicated and fraught. 

   Vikander's Kathy was once married to a New Orleans cop (Mark O'Brien), a man who fears Antonio and Kathy will move to Korea and take his daughter with them. The former husband's policeman partner, an unabashed racist played by Emory Cohen, has it in for Antonio.

    Pushed into trouble with the law, Antonio comes to the attention of ICE. Turns out that his adoptive parents never filled out the proper forms, which means Antonio is classified as an illegal immigrant. 

  An immigration attorney (Vondie Curtis-Hall) knows Antonio faces an uphill struggle but tries to keep Antonio from being deported.

  To further complicate the story, Antonio must persuade his adoptive mother to testify on his behalf -- not an easy task as it turns out. He hasn't spoken to her for more than a decade.  The reasons for this  eventually are revealed.

   Antonio also makes the acquaintance of a Vietnamese woman (Lin-Dan Pham). Although she's dying of cancer, she shares her experience as a Vietnamese American, inviting Antonio and his family to a festive family lunch.

   Chon proves convincing as a desperate man but the screenplay piles obstacles so high they begin to lose credibility. In reality, such a story might be possible. On screen, a bit of honing would have helped.

He's on the run but doesn't know why

 Italian director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino directs John David Washington in a thriller that has its moments but ultimately fails to find a galvanizing gear. Washington plays the title character, a young man who's vacationing in Greece with his girlfriend April (Alicia Vikander). The couple leaves Athens because their hotel happens to be situated on the spot where an upcoming political protest has been scheduled. When two people seem as happy as Beckett and April, it hardly comes as a surprise when tragedy strikes. On a country road at night, Beckett falls asleep at the wheel. His car topples down a hill and crashes into a house. April doesn't survive the accident. Not only must Beckett deal with grief and guilt, but he also  finds himself running from a policeman (Panos Koronis) and the cop's female associate (Lena Kitsopoulou). Beckett, who speaks no Greek, has no idea why he's being pursued. The details are mostly irrelevant, but Beckett unwittingly finds himself in the middle of a plot against a leftist candidate that also involves a kidnapping. Beckett tries to outrun his pursuers as he makes his way to Athens and the American embassy. Along the way, Beckett meets two activists (Vicky Krieps and Maria Votti) who give him a ride. Boyd Holbrook, part of a cast of undercooked supporting characters, shows up as an American embassy official whose offers of help may conceal other motives. Beckett's final flight pushes him into violent action. This last-act eruption may have been intended to reflect the frustration Beckett has been building for the entire movie, but it can seem more like a last-minute attempt to up the action ante.  Beckett gets what it can from its Greek settings, but can't distinguish itself as either a straight-ahead thriller or a political drama. 

'The Green Knight' casts an eerie spell

   

   Alluring and visually arresting, The Green Knight takes place during the time of Arthurian legend but hosts no knights in shining armor. The armor is tarnished, as are the lives of most of the movie’s characters.

   Although it boasts a fair measure of squalor, mud, and brutality, Green Knight hardly qualifies as realistic. Based on the 14th Century poem, Gawain and the Green Knight, the story lives entirely in the realm of legend.

  The Green Knight of the title appears early in the movie so there’s no spoiler in telling you that he’s a creature with a tree-like body and a head made of bark. He creaks when he moves. Know this, though. As writer/director David Lowry treats The Green Knight, he's no joke -- and neither is a movie that haunts, unsettles, and holds us in its visionary grasp.

   The story follows a simple enough outline.

   On a Christmas morn, The Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) shows up at King Arthur’s court. He addresses the Round Table, asking whether anyone will accept the challenge he’s about to throw down. Perhaps motivated by ambitions to become a knight, only Gawain (Dev Patel) responds.

   Here’s the bargain: Whatever Gawain does to The Green Knight, he’ll have to submit to the same fate a year later. Gawain beheads the Green Knight, who picks up his detached cranium and departs, laughing as rides his horse into the mist.

   If the general arc of the story is straightforward, the details sometimes blur the border between mystery and confusion. Scene-to-scene, Green Knight becomes increasingly strange as Gawain — once a carousing youth who liked to drink and womanize — tries to demonstrate his honor.

  After a year of being treated royally, he heads (you’ll pardon the pun) for his promised rendezvous with The Green Knight.

   It’s not exactly a pleasurable trip. Gawain encounters vandals on the road who leave him for dead. Barry Keoghan has a compelling turn as The Scavenger, one of the thieves who attack Gawain. 

    Gawain also meets a woman who says that she’s St. Winfred (Erin Kellyman). She wants him to retrieve her skull from a pond. He says she already has a head. It looks like I have a head, but — trust me — I don’t, she tells Gawain. 

   When he meets a nobleman (Joel Edgerton) and his wife (Alicia  Vikander),  sexual currents begin to flow.

   Sarita Choudhury appears as Mother/Morgan Le Fay, a witch, a seer and Gawain's mom, dual faces of the same character. 

   Sean Harris's King Arthur can seem riven by doubt. For the record, the movie refers to him only as King. He's also Gawain's uncle.

   I haven’t even mentioned the talking fox that becomes Gawain’s companion.

   That may sound Disneyesque, but again take heed: Nothing about Green Knight has a family oriented feel. Lowry not only wants to tell a mythical story, he wants to create a mythical reality — and he comes very close to succeeding at a task that could have gone terribly wrong.

     Lowry nicely fits the characters into the environment. 

    As Gawain, a bearded Patel winds up with a tortured face you might see on a religious icon. 

   The Green Knight may be an angel of death — or at least that’s how I saw it.

    There were times when I wished Lowry had restrained the impulse toward mystery — at least a bit. The dialogue often seems whispered as if the characters are living in a secret world that we can’t totally penetrate. 

      You need to be comfortable with that feeling to go along with Green Knight. For the most part, I was and I did.

    Reservations? Some. Dimly lit images make you long for the presence of a bit of clarifying light — even though electricity had yet to be invented. I understand the impulse to place a mythical tale in a naturalistic environment, but enough is enough.

    Various sections are titled but the headings sometimes flash by too quickly for easy reading.

    Viewers may be puzzled by the movie’s ending, which is subject to interpretation, but the overall message speaks with power. The world may be forbidding, but Gawain can’t escape the most essential condition of the human contract: He must die.

   What is the honor that Gawain sought to achieve on his journey? Perhaps nothing more than being ready when the time of departure arrives. In the end, debts must be acknowledged: Payment is due.

   

A hit-and-miss portrait of Gloria Steinem

      Few would argue that Gloria Steinem -- one of the founders of Ms. magazine and a leading voice in the latter-day feminist movement -- helped transform American life. Fair to say, then, that Steinem deserves a biopic. 

    I'm not sure that The Glorias, which was directed by Julie Taymor, qualifies as that movie. The Glorias proves sweeping and general, often outlining the social and personal parameters that defined Steinem's life.

    Perhaps Taymor was trying for a biopic-plus, a movie about a woman and also about a movement from which her life proves inseparable. 

    But at two hours and 17 minutes, the resultant film often outsmarts itself by juggling time and by including embellishments such as scenes of Steinem in dialogue with herself: the older Steinem talking to the younger Steinem, for example.

     Four actresses play Steinem at different ages. Ryan Kiera Armstrong plays Gloria as a child. Lulu Wilson handles the teen-age years. Alicia Vikander and Julianne Moore take over adulthood.

     The most developed relationship in the film involves Gloria and her father (Timothy Hutton). Hutton's Leo Steinem moved the family around as he drifted from one scheme to another. His instability and hucksterism may have helped drive Steinem's mother (Enid Graham) into extended bouts of depression and anxiety.

    At the same time, Steinem shows affection for her often-absentee father whose unbridled -- if unjustified -- optimism is not without charm. He's one of those men who insist on improvising their way through life.

     A post-college trip to India seems illustrative of what keeps The Glorias from soaring. Traveling alone in India, the adventurous Steinem mingles with the poor, honing her social conscience. 

      But the trip to India, like other of the movie's segments,  feels as if it were designed to display one of Steinem's many admirable traits, in this case, her concern for lower-caste women.

    Put another way, too much of what happens in The Glorias feels pre-programmed rather than discovered. We're making stops at key biographical points rather than leaping into an unfolding world of possibility.

    Maybe because the journalism in the late '50s and '60s was such a far cry from the journalism of the 21st century, I was most interested in Steinem's life as a young woman newly arrived in New York. 

     An aspiring writer and recent Smith graduate, Steinem -- played by Vikander at this point -- lands a series of jobs with various organizations, The New York Times among them. Editors persistently try to push her into the world of soft features. She wants her work to hit harder.

    One of her articles, a 1963 expose of what it's like to work as a bunny at a Playboy Club, attracts significant attention but threatens to typecast her. Her male editors want more of the same.

    By the time, Moore becomes Steinem in the movie's final going, The Glorias seems less a biopic than a look at a burgeoning movement with strong contributions from Bette Midler as Bella Abzug, Janelle Monae as Dorothy Pitman Luge, and Lorraine Toussaint as activist Flo Kennedy. 

    Taymor the keeps touching movement signposts,  perhaps because Steinem is wary about not turning herself into an icon. She wants the movement to get top billing.

    Steinem's transition from journalist to activist hardly coms as a surprise. Throughout Taymor's collage of a biography, Steinem remains a woman of courage and conviction.  She seems to have been born "woke." 

    Taymor has directed films (Titus, Frida, A Midsummer Night's Dream) and also is known for adventurous theater,  most prominently, The Lion King.  Here, she adds theatrical flourishes, self-conscious flights into surrealism that break the biopic mold but disrupt as much as they illuminate. 

     She also uses real news footage and shows the real Steinem at the 2017 Women's March in Washington, DC.  

    Steinem, who's now 86, has lived through many stages  of the women's movement. That means the movie serves as an important reminder of what life was like prior to the 1970s, prior to Roe v. Wade and prior to the arrival of women in important roles in business and public life.

    Many rightly will view The Glorias as call to take heed at a time when such gains are being threatened. Sexism and misogyny are still with us, of course, but that doesn't mean The Glorias couldn't have been better.

     The Glorias isn't a bad movie, but it teases us into wondering what might have been. 

Fun sours in formulaic 'Tomb Raider'

Alicia Vikander takes over the role of Lara Croft in a movie that can't resist formula.

“Shoot him, Lara. We can’t let him get to Himiko.”
If this line of dialogue from Tomb Raider doesn’t arouse ripples of excitement for you, you may not be a candidate for the latest attempt to turn a video game into something more than an over-amped funhouse of formulaic plotting and so-so effects.

When the line was uttered by one of the movie's characters, I couldn’t help wishing that the Bill Murray of the Ghostbusters era were around to add a wry and preposterous comment. Murray would have known what to say about Himiko, a departed Japanese queen also known as the Mother of Death. Open her tomb and the entire world will be doomed.

The main suspense about this edition: Can Alicia Vikander replace Angela Jolie as Lara Croft, the intrepid tomb raider? Small in stature but buffed to the max, Vikander put me in mind of a gym-obsessed Tinkerbell who's motivated by a mixture of iron-willed determination, preternatural leaping ability and a growing commitment to combat evil.

Early on, I thought Tomb Raider — which has been directed by Roar Uthaug, the Norwegian filmmaker who brought us The Wave -- might be fun. And it is -- until the movie reaches the island where the notorious, 2000-year-old Himiko has been entombed.

The movie opens in the UK where Uthaug stages a nifty bike chase through the streets of East London. An independent spirit, Lara refuses to inherit the Croft fortune. She'd rather work as a bicycle courier.

Too bad Lara is stuck with the Croft heritage. Lara's father Richard Croft (Dominic West) left home to find the mythic tomb in the Pacific. Lara grew up with a mentor (Kristen Scott Thomas). Scott Thomas doesn't have much to do in this edition but she looks as if someone dipped her in white powder, denying her even rudimentary hints of a complexion.

It has been seven years since Richard launched his island adventure. He is presumed dead.

After a few plot manipulations, Lara -- not one to accept conventional wisdom -- decides to retrace her father's steps in hopes of finding dear old Dad alive on the island.

To achieve her goal, Lara travels to Hong Kong where she hooks up with Lu Ren (Daniel Wu), the son of the captain who guided Richard to the island where some terrible -- but as yet unknown -- evil might be unearthed.

After raging seas wreck Lu's small boat, Lara and Lu are stranded on the island where they're taken prisoner by Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins), a slave-driver who claims to have killed Lara’s dad. Vogel has been searching for the tomb of Queen Himiko ever since. It's roughly at this point that the movie's fun begins to sour.

I’m not sure whether Tomb Raider can match the popularity of the 2001 edition of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider although it’s probably better than the 2003 sequel, Lara Croft, The Cradle of Life.

Tomb Raider leaves little doubt that it's meant to function as an origins story, setting up what the filmmakers clearly hope will be a healthy franchise life.

We’ll see about that: In the meantime, know that Tomb Raider pits Lara against fiendish foes, a storm-tossed sea, a towering waterfall and other dangers which confront her as the script by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons goes through genre motions that ultimately can’t totally mask the story’s hollow origins.

In short: Uthaug and Vikander can’t make good on the promise of vibrant early scenes. By the end, enjoyment has been overrun by formula -- at least it was by me.

A romance burdened by melodrama

Light Between the Oceans seems trapped by its austerity.

In The Light Between the Oceans, his most conventional and commercially oriented movie to date, director Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines) casts Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander as a husband and wife living on a remote slab of rock off the Australian coast.

The story begins when Fassbender's Tom Sherborne, an emotionally scarred veteran, arrives in a small Australian coastal town toward the end of World War I. Riven with guilt about having survived the carnage so many of his fellow combatants did not, Tom takes an isolating job as a lighthouse keeper.

Even with some heavily applied atmospherics, watching a man tend to a lighthouse doesn't make for much of a drama, so a story kicks in.

Cianfrance, who wrote the screenplay based on a 2012 novel by M.L. Stedman, quickly brings Tom together with Isabel (Vikander), the daughter of the man who oversees activities at the lighthouse.

Attractive and glowing with vivacity, Vikander's Isabel breaks through Tom's emotional armor. She wins Tom's heart, and soon becomes the lighthouse keeper's wife.

Isabel desperately wants to become pregnant, but she suffers through a couple of miscarriages that demoralize her and tarnish the glow of romance.

Then, the improbable happens. A lifeboat boat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a still-living infant. Isabel implores Tom to keep the child.

Tom knows Isabel's request will open the door to moral and legal difficulties, but love compels him to bury the dead man and allow Isabel to raise the child.

Young Lucy becomes the object of Tom and Isabel's mutual affection, and for a time, they live as a happy family -- until, of course, they don't.

For those who don't know the story, I'll say no more except that Rachel Weisz shows up about midway through in a role that helps give a sagging story some real humanity.

Heavily reliant on close-ups that allow the camera to study the actors' faces, Cianfrance's approach doesn't quite mesh with increasingly melodramatic material that revolves around Tom's attempts to unburden himself of the guilt he's been carrying.

Fassbender captures the stoic control with which Tom approaches his post-war suffering, and Vikander conveys Isabel's misguided willfulness, but, as I suggested, they're both outdone by Weisz, as a grieving, tormented woman.

The rest of the story concern's Tom's attempt to make things right, before the movie finds an ending (a postscript, really) that's more sentimental than one might expect from Cianfrance.

Despite Cianfrance's attempts at infusing every moment with an aura of importance and depth, The Light Between Oceans can't disguise the fact it's a certifiable weepy -- only one that's a too austere and self-absorbed to give the tear ducts a proper workout.

Putting Jason Bourne back into action

Matt Damon returns as an assassin without memory as director Paul Greengrass extends his action set pieces to preposterous extremes.

If you want to spend a couple of hours watching Matt Damon play a character who's running for his life, Jason Bourne -- the latest in the series about an amnesiac spy -- might be the movie for you.

If you're looking for something more, you'll probably have to look elsewhere. We all know that the world seems to be gripped by chaos, but reproducing that chaos on screen doesn't always result in a satisfying movie experience.

With director Paul Greengrass returning to the helm and Damon jumping back into the Bourne saddle, the movie turns into a dizzying attempt to build a story around a reveal in which Bourne learns more background about himself that has been hidden from him by the CIA.

Bourne, you'll recall, has been programmed to kill by the CIA. Aside from quick flashbacks from his past, Bourne has no memory of his pre-espionage life. He often finds himself being chased by the very agency that turned him into a lethal weapon.

When Bourne resurfaces in Greece, a CIA chief (Tommy Lee Jones) tries to "put him down," i.e., Jones' Bob Dewey wants to assassinate Bourne with the help of a ruthless killing machine called "the asset" (Vincent Cassel.)

Dewey receives additional assistance from Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), an ambitious CIA tech genius who seems to be able to locate Bourne whether he's in Greece, Iceland, London, and ... well ... I think stopped caring after Berlin.

The action set pieces tend to be so interminable, I wondered whether Greengrass was trying to set records. And, of course, Greengrass' approach expectedly races over-the-top.

That means logic doesn't always prevail. If Bourne makes a five-story flop onto concrete, don't fret. He'll be on his feet before you can say, "Splat." Like a politician who won't take "no" for an answer, he keeps on running.

The movie opens with Bourne earning his keep as a bare-knuckle fighter in Greece. It doesn't take long for him to wind up on the CIA's radar.

As the story develops, we also meet a tech whiz (Riz Ahmed), a hotshot whose company has been compromised by the CIA. Ahmed's character allows the movie to raise issues about privacy in a time of pervasive on-line activity, but we don't sense that we're supposed to take any of this seriously.

Much of the action takes place in front of CIA surveillance cameras, giving the movie a kind of fractured vision. CGI-enhanced car carnage comes into play, particularly in a ridiculous Las Vegas-based chase involving Bourne and a formidable SWAT vehicle.

In a movie that moves this quickly, acting tends to be more suggestive than deep. A bulked up but deadly serious Damon makes the movie feel like an aerobics workout. Looking as serpentine as ever, Jones tosses off a few off-kilter line readings, and Vikander opts for lots of furrowed-brow concern.

Julia Stiles makes an early picture appearance as Nicky Parsons, a former CIA agent with an agenda of her own.

Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, United 93 and a couple of previous Bourne movies) disorienting approach to action has its fans, and I've been one of them. He can edit a sequence into smithereens and still have it make some sort of sense, but -- in truth -- I got sick of it in this outing.

No matter how much urgency the actors try to bring to their work, the movie's kinetic charge takes precedence as the story works its way toward an expected and slightly depressing possibility: another sequel.

It would have been nice, though, if the filmmakers had been able to make this Bourne revival better than the movies that spawned it.

Lame drama, but food looks great

Burnt features Bradley Cooper as a narcissistic chef.

Someone needs to explain to me why I should want to spend time with an obnoxiously narcissistic chef who's trying to make a comeback in London after having undermined a skyrocketing career in Paris.

But wait, maybe the answer has something to do with the fact that said chef is the main character in a movie called Burnt, and he's played by a fashionably bestubbled Bradley Cooper.

Burnt, the plot of which I've just described, can't rise above its many problems even with Cooper portraying a culinary hotshot who thinks he's better than everyone else -- and probably would be if it weren't for the drug and alcohol problems that derailed his rise.

Turns out the best thing about this John Wells directed movie, set in the upper echelons of London's foodie culture, is the food, photographed with glossy slickness by cinematographer Adrinao Goldman.

When the camera focuses on the meals that Cooper's Adam Jones prepares, the movie has the allure of a beautifully photographed gourmet magazine, and it affords us a glimpse into the kitchens of the kind of gastronomically praised establishments that serve up minuscule portions for astronomical prices.

Is there an unwritten rule that all highly praised food must never touch the edge of any plate?

Wells supplies the kitchen scenes with the heat and bustle you'd expect, and I'd have been content if food preparation -- complete with tension, yelling and the occasional dress-down -- had completely wiped out the plot.

The screenplay by Steven Knight (Locke, Redemption) doesn't have much to offer once it convinces us that Jones' character is a jerk.

Because he's a talented jerk, others -- Sienna Miller as a saucier with a big future and Daniel Bruhl as a gay Maitre-D -- tolerate Jones and try to help him, even when they're frustrated by him.

Additional support comes from Omar Sy (The Untouchables), as a sous chef whose business in Paris was ruined by the then drunken Jones, and Matthew Rhys , as a rival restaurateur who also dislikes Jones intensely.

Subplots involving Jones' indebtedness to drug dealers and the late-picture introduction of one of his former lovers (Alicia Vikander) add little to an undernourished script.

Functioning as a kind of garnish, Emma Thompson appears as a doctor hired by Jones' employer to monitor his blood-alcohol level, and, occasionally, to offer sage advice.

Celebrity chefs Marcus Wareing and Mario Batali are credited with having served as consultants on the movie, so the kitchen environment presumably has some authenticity.

Truth be told, I'd rather watch the two of them work than be force fed another helping of Burnt.

If you're hungry for a more appetizing food movie, and haven't seen Chef, well ... there's always Netflix.

An acceptable 'Man from U.N.C.L.E.'

Director Guy Ritchie never quite finds the right buoyancy, but his revival of a'60s TV hit proves entertaining enough.

What's at stake in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., director Guy Ritchie's belated attempt to bring a '60s TV series to the big screen?

The end of the word; that kind of thing.

That's the nonchalantly delivered answer given by one the characters in a story about two reluctant partners -- an American CIA agent and a Soviet spy -- who must recover a nuclear bomb from fiends who want to control the world.

The year: 1963. The attitude? Shall we say, relaxed?

Ritchie -- of Sherlock Holmes fame -- takes an unusually low-key approach to spy material that, wisely, I think, has been kept in its original period rather than straining for a contemporary update.

Ritchie doles out the action sparingly in a movie in which '60s styles provide a substantial part of the pleasure. Credit on-the-nose work from the movie's set decorators and from costume and art directors who create a witty, nostalgia-laced environment.

Entertaining without finding quite the right buoyancy, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. casts Henry Cavill (Man of Steel) as Napoleon Solo, a smooth-talking thief who's forced into the service of the CIA.

A blandly handsome Cavill would have done well to add a bit of twinkle to at least one of Solo's eyes.

Armie Hammer does better as Illya Kuryakin, the Russian KBG agent who's teamed with Solo in what amounts to an origins story about how the spy organization U.N.C.L.E. gets its start.

Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina) plays an East German auto mechanic who's thrown into the mix. She proves more interesting than either of the male leads.

A subdued Hugh Grant has a small role as the head of U.N.C.L.E., a role played by Leo G. Carroll in the TV series, which ran from 1964-1968 and attained broadcast blockbuster status.

For the record Robert Vaughn portrayed Solo in the original; David McCallum played Illya.

A routine plot falls short of espionage greatness. Solo and Illya are assigned to find Dr. Udo Teller (Christian Berkel), a German scientist who who has been captured by the movie's villains and forced to build a nuclear bomb.

Solo and Illya hope Vikander's Gaby, who happens to be Teller's daughter, will lead them to her father. The journey takes everyone to Rome.

Added to all this are a wealthy, stylish villainess (Elizabeth Debicki) and a former Nazi (Sylvester Groth), another obvious bad guy.

Groth anchors Ritchie's slyly comic treatment of an obviously serious torture situation, one of the movie's droller moments.

Should there be a sequel -- and the movie is set up for one -- Ritchie and company may work out some of the kinks, which include lighting a fire under Cavill.

Meanwhile, what arrives on screen qualifies as reasonable, mid-August entertainment that goes down easily, despite its problems.

Lavish and colorful, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. also is a little less crazed than Ritchie's work in the frenetic Sherlock Holmes series. For me, that's a plus.

A dark tale mired in familiarity

Wizards, witches and dragons. So what else is new?

Maybe it's time I added a few more books to my already crowded nightstand. Perhaps I should be familiar with author Thomas Siegel's YA novel, The Spook's Apprentice, part of a 14-book series known as the Wardstone Chronicles.

Had I been, I might have been more entertained by Seventh Son, director Sergey Bodrov's lavish but overly familiar adaptation of one of Siegel's novels.

Maybe I would have been more appreciative of the concept of an alternate universe where wizards battle witches, and the fate of humanity hinges on the outcome of these supposedly epic clashes.

Maybe, but I doubt it.

A movie must stand on its own, and Seventh Son must (at least with me) work against a deck stacked with diminishing appetite for swords, sorcery and medieval-style mayhem. I'm more than a little tired of movies in which anyone must fight a force called "The Dark," even when Jeff Bridges -- an actor I much admire -- plays the movie's battler-in-chief.

In Seventh Son, Bridges portrays Master Gregory, a gruff fellow of superior skills. Master Gregory has been battling evil (with help from a series of doomed apprentices) for a very long time. He wears a cowl, carries a staff and is quick to dispense judgment.

Bridges strains to lower his voice by a couple of octaves, either that or he's doing an impression of the late John Huston. Whatever the case, I hope Bridges plans a speedy return to the 21st century.

I would have skipped Seventh Son entirely, but for Bridge's presence, which is augmented by the participation of Julianne Moore, who plays Mother Malkin. Mother Malkin is an evil witch who's capable of turning herself into a ferocious dragon or maybe it's the other way around. She might be a dragon who can appear as a witch.

Bridges already has won an Academy Award (for his work in Crazy Heart) and Moore probably is on the verge of winning one for playing an Alzheimer's afflicted professor in Still Alice. Safe to say, neither will be feted for their work in Seventh Son.

To her credit, Moore never attempts to distance herself from this medieval mash-up, giving it her sinister all while tempering Mother Malkin's fury with a bit of lascivious wit.

Performances aside, the movie feels like second-hand goods, a fantasy that doesn't appear to be breaking much by way of new ground.

The story finds Master Gregory locating his latest (and last) apprentice (Ben Barnes). He trains Barnes's Tom Ward to fight the witch and her associates. These include a warrior played by Djimon Hounsou, an actor who has mastered the art of the brooding scowl.

Along the way, a somewhat bland Tom is smitten a young witch played by Alicia Vikander, made to look attractive in a fairy tale sort of way. We're meant to wonder whether Vikander's Alice is a good or bad witch, but this purported puzzlement hardly qualifies as an adequate source of mystery.

Seventh Son includes its share of big battles, but fails to establish itself as a worthy addition to a genre that seems to be undergoing entropic expansion.

Oh, how I wish the darkness would lift, and we could move on from a moment when movies we haven't seen before feel pretty much like those we have.

Sex, nobility and Enlightened values

The Danish drama, A Royal Affair, mixes lofty ideals and basic human desire.

Dramas involving royal families can produce a mixture of titillating detail and -- if we're lucky -- a sense of higher purpose. The Danish drama, A Royal Affair, provides mild satisfaction on both counts by focusing on an affair between the Queen of Denmark (Alicia Vikander) and the physician (Mads Mikkelsen) who became her husband's most trusted adviser.

The story begins when Vikander's Caroline Mathilde, a member of the British nobility, is shipped to Denmark to marry King Christian VII (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard). Willing but sensitive, Caroline Mathilde quickly discovers that her husband is half fop and half lout, a mentally unstable monarch whose interest in whoring exceeds his interest in just about everything else.

Director Nikolaj Arcel eventually softens his portrayal of King Christian, who turns out to be more malleable than expected. He's also lonely, which is where Mikkelsen's Johann Friedrich Sturensee fits in. A German-born rationalist and committed proponent of Enlightenment values, Sturensee becomes the king's physician. His closeness with the king quickly puts him in an advisory capacity, and Sturensee uses his position to push the king toward all manner of reforms -- forbidding torture, ending privilege for nobles and allowing some freedom of the press, to name several.

These reforms don't come without opposition. Accustomed to running the country, ministers of the Danish cabinet have come to regard the king as little more than a royal rubber stamp. Members of the cabinet, as well as representatives of the church, aren't happy about ceding any of their authority to an intermittently deranged king and his German confidant.

So much for the movie's higher ambitions.

Now for the bed-hopping. The queen and Sturensee wind up as lovers. Their affair proves costly to them, but useful to the aggrieved nobles and their allies in the church, two groups that want to put both the king and the peasantry back in their places.

Mikkelsen, who played a Bond villain in Casino Royale, and Vikander, currently on view in Anna Karenina, generate the right amount of swooning chemistry, and, as the king, Folsgaard inspires real pathos. His King Christian can seem as lost as he is out of control.

All of this plays out with the right amount of period-piece authenticity, and A Royal Affair -- Denmark's submission in this year's foreign-language-film Oscar category -- proves that the path toward reform can be paved with both the highest ideals and the most common of desires.