Naomi Ackie dazzles as Whitney Houston

 As a biopic, director Kasi Lemmons’ Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody breaks little new ground. If you're familiar with Houston's story, you may not find many surprises. 

 Moreover, two  documentaries -- Nick Broomfield's Whitney: Can I Be Me and Kevin Macdonald's Whitney -- already have covered some of the same ground. 

  Happily, though, that's not the whole story. 

  Lemmons approaches the movie with an obvious love for Houston's work -- and a willingness to put plenty of it on display.

   I Wanna Dance With Somebody may not be a great movie but it boasts a terrific, star-making performance from British actress Naomi Ackie. 

   Ackie doesn't look like Houston but she projects the singer's undeniable power -- as an up-and-coming New Jersey kid, as an established star, and as a drug-addicted woman caught in a destructive celebrity spiral.

 Houston's voice was dubbed into the movie. Ackie may not be singing but she nails the songs as bravura performances. By the end of the movie, Ackie has so fully absorbed Houston's style that her work ranks as a memorable achievement.

   Of the supporting cast, Tamara Tunie has an impressive turn was Whitney's stage-mom mother; a stern Clarke Peters plays her controlling dad, and Stanley Tucci turns down the volume to portray Clive Davis, the record mogul who discovered Houston. 

   Written by Anthony McCarten, who also wrote Bohemian Rhapsody, which told the story of Freddie Mercury, the film samples Houston's off-camera life, including the developing conflict between Houston's husband Bobby Brown (Ashton Sanders) and her best friend and one-time lover Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Wiliams).

   Thankfully, Lemmons spares us the sight of an overdosed Houston who was found dead in a bathtub at a Beverly Hills hotel in 2012.  

   Lemmons sets us up for that scene near the movie's end but only implies it. Instead, she flashes back to a recreation of Houston's performance at the 1994 American Music Wards. Houston sings sang three challenging tunes: I Loves You Porgy, And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going, and I Have Nothing.

    The scene becomes a statement about all that was lost with Houston's death. Lemmons allows Houston to write her own musical epitaph, and I Wanna Dance With Somebody brings Ackie to the spellbinding moment she's earned.

Who knew? Peter Pan and Alice were siblings

 

      We may not have reached a post-racial moment in reality, but the movies have found one in Come Away, the screen's latest storybook mashup. 

     Director Brenda Chapman assembles a strong cast as she builds her story around characters from two major tales: J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

     Chapman's multiracial cast centers on two children from the Littleton family: Peter (Jordan A. Nash) and Alice (Keira Chansa).  Chapman's storybook movie includes a fair share of dark moments, beginning with the drowning death of a third Littleton child, the whip-smart David (Reece Yates).

    Initially narrated by the grown Alice (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), we first meet the happy Littleton family with Mom (Angelina Jolie) and Dad (David Oyelowo) presiding over a joyful brood. 

   The arrival of Mom's sister (Anna Chancellor) signals oncoming trouble. Chancellor's Eleanor believes that Jolie’s character has married beneath her status. Rather than pursuing a conventional occupation, Oyelowo’s Jack builds models of sailing ships. 

     As the story progresses, we also learn that a long-standing gambling problem has saddled Dad with debt.

      To further complicate matters, young Peter blames himself for his brother’s death. On the eve of David's departure for an elite boarding school, Peter persuaded his older brother to join him in a game that leads to David's drowning.

     Chapman, who won an Oscar for directing Pixar’s 2012 Brave, does a fine job bringing the movie’s fantasy elements to life. An overturned rowboat becomes a sailing ship when the kids pretend to be pirates. Chapman wants us to see the world through the eyes of the movie's children.

      As is the case with many such fantasies, the theme involves assertions about the primacy of imagination, the suggestion being that the transition to adulthood involves a whole lot of pain.

      Packed with incident and plot, Come Away touches many bases and makes room for appearances from such veteran actors as Michael Caine, Derek Jacoby, and Clarke Peters, all of whom sound wildly different notes in Chapman’s sweeping tale, which turns out to be a prequel to more familiar stories involving both Peter and Alice.

      The screenplay tilts more heavily toward Peter, emphasizing his insistence on remaining a boy, an enchanted state that  enables him to avoid the tribulations of adulthood that afflict his parents.

       I’ve never understood the appeal of perpetual childhood, but Come Away suggests that an unbridled imagination remains the key to freedom. 

      Chapman can’t fuse all the movie’s varied ingredients and Dad’s encounter with the man to whom he owes money (an impressive David Gyasi) probably gives the movie one plot thread too many. 

    Still, at its best, Come Away stands as a nicely realized bit of fantasy filmmaking that, like all the best such movies, isn’t afraid to peer into forbidding corners.

Spike Lee sends four vets back to Vietnam

Da 5 Bloods doesn't entirely gel but it makes its message clear.

Spike Lee, like his movies, operates on many levels. He’s a social commentator, a director and a storyteller. He's one of the few filmmakers who can be credited for creating a one-person genre. When you hear the words “a Spike Lee Joint,” you know that you’re probably entering terrain that’s part drama, part provocation, part corrective of the US historical record and part entertainment.

These ingredients can become seamless when Lee is at his best and can sometimes trip over one another when he’s not hitting his stride.

But it’s important to remember that Lee has created an aesthetic approach that practically constitutes a brand. He can poke an angry finger in your chest or flood a moment with tenderness.

So now comes Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, a movie about Vietnam, black contributions to the US military, black bitterness about the lack of recognition for those contributions and, if that weren't enough, a story about a search for buried treasure — in this case, gold bullion — that sometimes intentionally evokes memories of Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Using news footage to set the tone, Lee opens with a montage that surveys the boiling racial landscape that defined America during the war. Among the clips: protests, Muhammad Ali’s resistance, and Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech at Manhattan's Riverside Church in which he turned his full attention to the war.

All of this is framed by a story with a rather straightforward plot. Four former infantrymen reunite in Ho Chi Minh city. Initially, their reunion is full of bonhomie and joy. Gradually, it becomes clear that the men, known as “The Bloods,” have more in mind than renewing old friendships.

They want to retrieve gold they buried during a harrowing mission and they want to recover the body of a fallen brother known as Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman). The movie paints Norman as a kind of warrior saint who held the soldiers in his squad together and tired to direct them toward higher purposes, perhaps using the gold to help black folks at home.

Of the four Bloods, as the soldiers referred to themselves, two stand out: Clarke Peters’ Otis, a down-to-earth steadying influence who learns that he has a greater connection to Vietnam than the others. A wartime relationship resulted in a daughter, now grown, who Otis meets for the first time.

Delroy Lindo gives the movie’s most vivid, conflict-riddled performance. An anti-immigration guy who wears a MAGA hat, Lindo's Paul easily taps into his anger. He's joined by his son David (Jonathan Majors), a young man who followed his dad to Vietnam because he knows that his father occupies a PTSD-world of trouble.

Norm Lewis’ Eddie and Isiah Whitlock Jr.’s Melvin fill out the foursome of veterans.

Working with three additional writers, Lee isn’t entirely successful at fusing all the issues that crop up and some of the dialogue carries the burden of exposition or of establishing -- or at least making reference to -- political dynamics embedded in the way the US fought the Vietnam War.

Flashback scenes to the war feature Boseman, who's powerful even in a small role. The other soldiers aren’t played by younger actors in these flashbacks but by the older cast. Lee does his best to keep the camera away from their faces, but the juxtaposition of a young Boseman and the older guys can be distracting.

The story also brings in a trio of NGO do-gooders (Melanie Theirry, Paul Walter Hauser, and Jasper Paakkonen) who have taken up residence in Vietnam to defuse bombs and dig up landmines. Jean Reno turns up as a shady figure who’s supposed to help the men smuggle the gold out of the country.

As the men move deeper into the Vietnamese jungle, they begin to squabble about the size of their respective shares. Mistrust develops and before all is done, Lee gives Lindo a wild soliloquy in the jungle as he battles with thick growth, his own demons, a venomous snake, and the historical weight of 400 yeas of American racism. In a way, this single speech does more to embody the damage these men have suffered than anything else in the film. Amazingly, Lindo pulls it off.

Will the men escape with the gold? Will they be double-crossed? Will others try to kill them?

I’ll answer only one of these questions. Others will try to kill them, resulting in gunfights and explosions of violence that reprise the war-time violence the men once experienced.

Those who expect every Lee film to speak its mind won’t be disappointed and those who are put off by the same trait will find much with which to quibble. Lee even manages to work Black Lives Matter into the film’s closing moments, giving the movie an even more topical boost — as if it needed one in this moment of intensely focused discussions of race.

No matter what the subject, Lee’s voice will be heard — and that may be why Da 5 Bloods is least interesting when it’s telling its story and most compelling when Lee does what he does best — shake things up.

Harriet Tubman reaches the screen

Cynthia Erivo gives one of the year's most compelling performances in director Kasi Lemmons' Harriet.

In Harriet, actress Cynthia Erivo comes across as a determined female warrior who battles the evils of slavery, freeing as many enslaved people as she can. With a face full of fury, Erivo creates a portrait of flinty resolve and unshakable faith. Tubman, who escaped slavery at the age of 27, became a "conductor" -- someone who guided the enslaved to freedom -- on the Underground Railroad. She already had won her freedom but wasn't satisfied, not when so many others were left behind to suffer.

As directed by Kasi Lemmons (Eve's Bayou and Talk to Me), Harriet paints a portrait of a woman who came to realize she had only one choice: Be free or die. Once Tubman decided that she'd rather be dead than enslaved, everything else followed.

In Maryland, Tubman was known as Minty. She grew up on a plantation and watched a sister being sold away from the family, an event that permanently scarred her, as did the lashes from the whips of slave masters.

Determined to flee, Tubman made a journey of 100 miles -- from Maryland to Philadelphia. She traveled alone.

Erivo creates a portrait of a woman possessed. Tubman was struck in the head as a child, an event that some say accounted for the religious visions that she claimed to have. Erivo's fierce portrayal leaves little doubt that if Tubman said she talked to God, you'd best believe her. She's like an American Joan of Arc. Employing a different religious reference, frustrated plantation owners dubbed her "Moses."

Part action hero and part American icon, the Harriet that emerges on screen kicks butt and, yes, that's satisfying, given the people whose butt she's kicking. A born leader, she refuses to allow anyone (even the politically cautious abolitionists she meets in Philadelphia) to define her.

The evil white slavers find their fullest representation in a character named Gideon Brodess (Joe Alwyn),
a severe slave master who won't rest until he returns Tubman to his plantation. At one point, he hires black slave hunters to help him in his quest. Gideon's mother (Jennifer Nettles) can be even worse, a hysterical woman who sees her beloved plantation sinking deeper into debt.

The movie's Philadelphia setting produces the movie's strongest supporting characters. Janelle Monae plays a woman who owns a boarding house and Leslie Odom Jr. portrays an abolitionist who introduces Tubman to the Underground Railroad. At various points in the movie, Clarke Peters appears as Tubman's father.

Lemmons sticks pretty much to surface, and, at times, Harriet seems more of an action movie than it needs to be. Put another way, Harriet sometimes feels more attuned to the demands of contemporary moviegoing than to rhythms that would have been more reflective of the period in which Tubman lived.

With Harriet, what you see is what you get and the movie emerges as a kind of primer on Tubman's life that's built around a compelling performance. I agree with those who think it should have been more than that, but Lemmons' big-screen biography sets its own terms and lives within them.

Back to Brooklyn for Spike Lee

Spike Lee returns to Brooklyn for Red Hook Summer, one of the gifted director's least satisfying and most puzzling movies yet. This time, Lee focuses on the relationship between a teen-ager (Jules Brown) and his grandfather (Clarke Peters). The young man, who lives in Atlanta, is taken to New York by his mother (De'Adre Aziza) so that he can spend a summer with the grandfather he has never met. Not surprisingly, Brown's "Flik" isn't happy to be cooped up in a small apartment in Red Hook's projects. To make matters worse, Flik isn't the least bit religious and his grandfather is an old-school preacher. Familiar from both The Wire and Treme, Peters is a fine actor, but he's stranded without much of a script. Long scenes in the Lil' Peace Of Heaven Baptist Church tend to make you wonder whether Lee, co-wrote the script with James McBride, knew where he wanted to take a cast of characters that includes Chazz (Toni Lysaith), a no-nonsense girl who becomes Flik's friend. Lee makes a cameo appearance as Mookie, the character he played in Do the Right Thing. Some 23 years later, the savvy Mookie is still stuck delivering pizzas, which might be the strongest comment Lee has to make in this mostly languid movie. For the longest time, nothing much happens in a movie that shows Flik trying to film everything he sees with his iPad 2. Then, something dramatic does happen. The trouble is that Lee hasn't laid the groundwork for a major reveal that turns the movie into a blur of pain and emotional confusion. I won't disclose the movie's big twist, but it makes Red Hook Summer seem like an entirely different film from the one Lee began. Lee displays demonstrable fondness for this Brooklyn neighborhood and for some of its residents, but Red Hook Summer simply doesn't work.