Muscles, menace in a 'noirish' thriller

   

   It would be a serious mistake to mess with Jackie (Katy O'Brian), an Oklahoma woman who has pointed her life toward winning a Las Vegas body-building competition.

   Jackie's the dynamite that propels director Rose Glass's Love Lies Bleeding, a seamy noir tangle set in New Mexico in 1989.

  A convincing Kristen Stewart — as a woman frantically trying to control the unmanageable — plays the central role of Lou, a chain-smoker who works in the grungy gym where Jackie turns up to pump iron. 

 Lou’s duties include cleaning the toilets, which could be read as both an exercise in degradation and an act of penance for as yet undisclosed sins.

  Sex looms as Lou and Jackie tumble into a heated relationship. But Glass (Saint Maud) has more in mind than an obsessive love story; she's out to pump adrenalin into an exaggerated helping of Neo Noir while injecting it with a healthy shot of cult-classic juice.

   A well-selected supporting cast adds to the grimy atmospherics. Dave Franco portrays JJ, a bully who, early in the movie, has sex with an indifferent Jackie. She hopes he'll help her get by. A first-order sleaze, JJ later beats up his wife (Jena Malone), who happens to be Lou's sister. 

  Revenge looms, and Jackie provides it in a gripping scene made more vicious because by the time it arrives, Jackie has been shooting massive quantities of the steroids Lou provides for her.

  Watching Jackie's muscles bulge brings the Hulk to mind; her strength becomes a near special effect. Her fury can't be controlled; her spring-loaded muscles crack to attention. 

 A bit of comic relief arrives in the form of Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), a ditzy woman with an undisguised crush on Lou and a refusal to take "no" for an answer.

  Roid rage and noir make for a combustible combination as Lou's gun-running father (Ed Harris) lurks in the background, gradually assuming a more important role in the story. 

  With stringy hair drooping over the sides and back of his bald dome, Harris goes satanic, creating a stand-out figure, the menacing calm at the center of every storm. 

  When the finale arrives, the film rockets over the top in ways that either will amuse you or put you off, perhaps an inviting mix of both. 

   Love Lies Bleeding may encourage you to expand your thoughts about female bodies, but it's firmly rooted in Glass's desire to blast her way into an overcrowded genre -- and do it with boldness and audacity. 

   

'Top Gun' sequel hits the right marks

  

    Top Gun: Maverick should once and for all prove how easy it is to make a mega-hit. All you need is Tom Cruise, lots of sleek fighter jets, a gifted camera team, and an attractive supporting cast that knows how to trade macho barbs.

   OK, I'm kidding. 

   If Cruise is the last remaining movie star, as some would have it, it could be because he’s whip smart about managing his career. Besides, a movie as slick as Top Gun: Maverick requires more than a little behind-the-scenes talent.

  Since the release of the original in 1986, few viewers have been clamoring for a sequel. But now we have one, and it deserves credit for finding the right gear: The movie brims with exciting aerial action (not CGI), its own ideas about heroism, and plenty of Cruise charisma.  

    Although Cruise isn’t entirely immune from aging, he retains the pluck and dentist’s dream smile that upped the octane of the original — and many other Cruise hits. 

   Taking over for the late Tony Scott, director Joseph Kosinski infuses the movie with a welcome blast of youth. This time, a new generation of actors (Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Jay Ellis, and Monica Barbaro among them) portray the best pilots in the world.

    The dramatic key to the new movie involves Maverick’s relationship with a younger pilot, Miles Teller's Bradley (Rooster) Bradshaw.

     In what amounts to a disregard for avian identity, Rooster, we learn, is the son of Goose, a Maverick pal who died in the original movie. Goose's death, referred to in a flashback, left Maverick wrestling with guilt.

   Maverick’s inner struggles aside, no one attends a Top Gun movie in search of psychological revelation. Kosinski and his team ably create the visceral excitement of watching jets in dog fights. Though preposterous, the movie’s major mission cranks up lots of tension.

   The supporting cast includes Ed Harris (briefly) as an admiral who tries to ground Maverick’s career. Jon Hamm portrays the commanding officer of the unit to which Maverick is reassigned after another run-in with Naval authority.

    Maverick has a protector in the Navy, Val Kilmer's Ice, his former rival from the first movie. Now an admiral, Ice makes sure that Maverick, an officer with a taste for improvisation, survives in a rule-bound military society.

   In a near-nostalgic moment, Kilmer and Cruise share a scene in which Ice types his part of the conversation onto a computer screen before forcing himself to speak.

   For most of the movie, Maverick trains younger pilots to trust their instincts so that they can perform seemingly impossible tasks without thinking.

    A bit of romance softens the proceedings -- or, at least, tries to do that. Jennifer Connelly plays an admiral’s daughter and potential love interest for Maverick. She owns a bar where the pilots gather. She also has a teenage daughter (Lyliana Wray). 

   The young cast — particularly Powell's  “Hangman” — blends perfectly into a movie that glorifies roguish individuality over the increasingly machine-like nature of combat. 

     Moreover, the tough-love conflict between Maverick and Rooster creates sparks, recalling the original without feeling as if it's repeating it, a feat the movie in general accomplishes.

         Early on, Harris’s character claims combat soon won’t involve human pilots. In a drone-dominated future, there’s no place for guys such as Maverick, men who insist that the pilot makes the crucial difference, not the plane.

       Guess who turns out to be wrong?

      Top Gun Maverick probably will roar at the box office. Why not? It’s so obviously scaled for the big screen that there's no reason to take it too seriously -- at least not as a portrait of military life or of global conflict.

      To put it another way, in the world of movies, Top Gun: Maverick hits the mark, maybe because neither the filmmakers nor the actors are flying on auto-pilot.

A haunting, complex look at motherhood

 

    Count me among those who consider Olivia Colman indispensable.

    Colman has played Queen Elizabeth in The Crown and has taken on a variety of other characters in a growing body of work.

    If you can think of a time when Colman’s performance missed the mark, leave a comment. I can’t.

    Colman stars in The Lost Daughter, a film in which actress Maggie Gyllenhaal makes her directorial debut.

    Adapted from a novel by Elena Ferrante — best known for My Brilliant Friend — Lost Daughter establishes itself as a fearless exploration of motherhood with all its deep affections and charged resentments.

   Colman’s performance skillfully embodies the movie's themes without ever asking for sympathy. She creates a character who can be chilly and difficult, an academic capable of insight and cruelty.

   Slowly and in carefully calibrated fashion, Gyllenhaal moves through the story — although not without leaving disturbing traces of an irresolvable conflict. The Lost Daughter isn’t about resolving conflict; it’s about learning to live with it — or not.

    We soon discover that Leda has taken what appears to be a working vacation. She’s gone to a small Italian beach town, ostensibly to concentrate on her work.

    Inevitably, she meets other tourists, as well as a handyman (Ed Harris) and the local bartender (Paul Mescal). 

    An uneasy relationship develops between Leda and Nina (Dakota Johnson), a wife and mother who has traveled to Italy with a small family group from Queens, New York. Nina begins to fixate on Leda as a possible role model.

    Leda shows the ferocity of her independence when, on the beach, she denies a request by Nina to move her beach chair so that her family can spread out a bit. Leda's refusal intrigues Nina, who’s having her own issues with the demands of motherhood.

     At one point, Nina’s young daughter is lost along with her favorite doll. Leda finds the girl, calming the girl’s frantic mother. Leda also finds the doll, which becomes the centerpiece of a revealing and provocative turn.

     Leda's most important relationship may be one she can’t dodge, the connection to her youthful self. Leda’s younger days are seen in flashbacks in which an impressive Jessie Buckley portrays Leda as a young mother who’s constantly being distracted by two demanding daughters. She can't get any work done at home.

   In these flashbacks, Gyllenhaal presents a small but telling portrait of a marriage under stress. Leda’s husband (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) tends to his own career and disappoints his wife in bed.

   At an academic conference, Leda begins an affair with a colleague (Peter Sarsgaard) who greatly admires her ability to translate poetry.

   Work, independence, and sex provide Leda with much-needed fulfillment— but also leave her grappling with guilt about maternal insufficiencies. She reveals herself when she tells Nina that children can be a “crushing responsibility.” Underline the word “crushing.”

    You can spend productive time unpacking the symbolic importance of dolls in the movie but, in broadest terms, they suggest a side of womanhood that Leda both needs and disdains.

    Presented in a plain, unadorned style in which the flashbacks sometimes feel abruptly inserted, The Lost Daughter stands as a courageously truthful depiction of a struggle many women face but which seldom receives on-screen. 

    The movie doesn't indulge in simple or even complicated solutions; it's a challenging look at what it means for Leda to face the consequences of choices that haunt her. 

     Only an actress of Colman's caliber could make this work.

Great story, but the movie's only so-so

Jesse Eisenberg plays Marcel Marceau in a movie about a mime who became a hero in World War II.

I wish Resistance had been the movie it could have been. Not many of us know that the world’s most famous mime — Marcel Marceau — was a member of the French resistance during World War II and that he risked his life to save many Jewish children from Hitler’s gas chambers.

That’s the core of the story that director Jonathan Jakubowicz tells in Resistance, but the movie only fitfully seems like anything other than a dutiful attempt to add another movie to the Holocaust canon.

Some of the movie's problems have to do with Jesse Eisenberg’s somewhat unexpected appearance in the movie. To me, Eisenberg never seemed like anyone other than Jesse Eisenberg, and it's a bit shocking to read (as I did after seeing the movie) that Marceau was 15 when he joined the resistance and worked to save Jewish children. Eisenberg is 36.

Still, Eisenberg's wired energy always seems to be watchable and he handles the movie's mime duties with ease and elegance.

Too bad Jakubowicz can’t sustain a unifying tone for a movie that wants to celebrate the power of artistry in dark times while not shortchanging how very dark those times really were.

I suppose the movie's greatest virtue lies in its ability to let people know that Marceau was more than an entertainer. Marceau was born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, where his father (Karl Markovics) worked as a Kosher butcher. Dad thought his son was wasting his time performing in the city’s cabarets. Marcel thought of himself as an artist.

The apolitical Marcel finds himself drawn into the fray when his cousin (Geza Rohrig) and brother (Felix Moati) ask him to help a group of Jewish orphans.

Marcel — who has yet to take the name Marceau — entertains the kids, helping to lift these Jewish kids out of their confusion and funk.

The movie’s darkest current emerges when the story shifts to Lyon. At that point, Klaus Barbie (Matthias Schweighofer) enters the story. The sadistic Barbie, a.k.a., The Butcher of Lyon, is portrayed as a man Of irreconcilable polarities, a cultured German who became a murderous anti-Semitic sadist.

Through his journey, Marceau is accompanied by Emma (Clemence Poesy), a young woman who had been involved with the orphans from the beginning.

The story is introduced in a post-war ceremony presided over by none other than General George S. Patton (Ed Harris). Patton tells his assembled troops that he wants to share a story about a person who qualifies as a great hero. Marceau served as a liaison officer with Paton's army, so this may have happened but it doesn't add much to the story.

A sequence in which Marceau, his charges and cohorts try to cross the Alps to Switzerland has moments of high tension, but overall the drama feels wooden, what an after-school special might be like if it also included elements of Nazi sadism -- i.e., cold-blooded murder and torture.

It's one 'Mother!' of a movie

Director Darren Aronofsky's wild-ass horror movie aims big -- maybe too big..

Take the exclamation point in the movie's title seriously. Watching director Darren Aronofsky's Mother! is like reading a book in which every word has been italicized for effect: the silences are oh so ominous, the creak of a shoe on a wooden floor can be jarring and when a furnace fires up, it's like a bomb has exploded. The aural atmosphere of Mother! has been amped up to take what starts as a chamber-piece helping of horror and inflate it to the point of explosion -- maybe beyond that.

In his efforts to harness as much on-screen venom as possible, Aronofsky has enlisted an A-list cast led by Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem. Bardem plays a poet; Lawrence plays his devoted wife. The couple has just moved into an isolated country home.

Irritable to the point of hostility, Bardem's character ignores Lawrence's character. She plasters walls and works on turning the house into a little piece of paradise. You probably have a pretty good idea where all attempts at creating paradise wind up.

Buried in an increasingly chaotic plot, you'll find a mordant comedy about the burden of uninvited guests. The first of these is a man who identifies himself as an orthopedic surgeon (Ed Harris). The surgeon excuses his intrusion by saying he thought he had arrived at a bed and breakfast inn.

Harris' character smokes when asked not to, and claims to be a devoted fan of Bardem's work. He also says he's dying. It doesn't take long for the surgeon's wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) to show up. She's so rude, she makes Harris's character look considerate. She leaves a mess wherever she goes and pushes Lawrence's character into all manner of unwanted conversations.

To augment this bizarre scenario, the couple's two grown sons (Brian Gleeson and Domhnall Gleeson) show up and immediately engage in a Cain-and-Abel style fight over their father's will.

The credits identify Lawrence's character only as Mother; Bardem is referred to as Him. This tells us that we're watching a film that wants to mine a metaphorical motherland. As is often the case, Aronofsky aims big.

Aronofsky toys with every horror trope he can find: eerie basements, spurts of blood and a steady stream of unexplained noises.

All the while, Aronofsky frames Lawrence's face in booming close-ups; Lawrence expresses perpetual consternation over the fact that her husband insists that these uninvited guests stay; his desire amounts to a betrayal.

Generally, Lawrence's character behaves in ways that make little sense, a problem that afflicts much of the rest of the movie, but Aronofsky seems intent on making us ride a wave that swells with bizarre shocks.

With a movie such as Mother!, much hinges on whether Aronofsky can tie things together. Watching Mother! is like listening to a very long (and not entirely interesting joke) hoping that the punchline makes the time we're investing worthwhile.

Now if you want to excavate some meaning from all the stylistic bric-a-brac, try this. Bardem's character is a self-absorbed artist who pays very little attention to his wife. He allows his guests to insult and berate her, every now and again offering his apologies. The fact that Harris's character is a fan suggests that Bardem's character will put up with anything -- so long as it's accompanied by massive adulation.

Aronofsky carries this notion to wild extremes in the movie's final act, which I won't describe here because Aronofsky's images do have a surprising quality that should be discovered in a theater.

Aronofsky (Noah, Black Swan, The Wrestler and The Fountain) certainly knows how to create vivid images but when he finally wraps up his movie, I had the sense that I had just watched a perversely overproduced and willfully malicious episode of The Twilight Zone. It's as if Aronofsky has channeled impulses from filmmakers such as Roman Polanski (Rosemary's Baby) and Michael Haneke (Funny Games) and given them an even more twisted spin.

Mostly I felt sorry for Lawrence, a gifted actress playing a character who takes a psychological and physical beating as the film progresses. Aronofsky may be trying to describe a particularly loathsome form of male behavior, especially among artistic men, but to make his point Lawrence must become the movie's sacrificial lamb.

Whatever the case, it's worth noting that in enlarging the characters played by Bardem and Lawrence to float his allegorical balloons, Aronofsky mostly ignores their humanity. I took the movie's preoccupation with close-ups as significant, a way of locking its characters in the prison of a tormenting vision.

With Mother!, Aronofsky huffs, puffs and damn well tries to blow the house down. But this time out, I found myself wondering whether there was anything more to the movie than the ominous howl of all that huffing and puffing.

'Run All Night:' Another vengeance saga

Liam Neeson and Ed Harris can't salvage this genre exercise.

Liam Neeson and Ed Harris play characters who share a deep history in Run All Night, the latest in what seems the endless series of kick-ass movies that have come to define Neeson's career.

In this current blast of violence and revenge, Neeson and Harris play a couple of Irish guys from Brooklyn who have known each other for a very long time, long enough for Harris's Shawn Maguire to be tolerant about the sorry state into which Neeson's Jimmy Conlon has fallen.

Time and guilt have turned Jimmy, a one-time hitman, into a pathetic neighborhood souse. For his part, Shawn is trying to live in semi-respectable, middle-class fashion.

Watching Neeson and Harris together makes you wonder what sort of movie might have developed if director Jaume Collet-Serra, who also directed Neeson in 2014's Non-Stop, hadn't stepped into a bucket full of genre junk, doubling down on violence, jumbled action and contrived plot twists.

The trouble starts because Shawn's obnoxious son Danny (Boyd Holbrook) gets into trouble for setting up a heroin deal that his father rejects. This leads to a variety of plot contortions that culminate when Jimmy is forced to shoot Shawn's son in an act of self-defense.

Uninterested in how much of a bastard Danny might have been, Shawn vows vengeance. He pledges to kill Jimmy's son (Joel Kinnaman), a family man who works as a limo driver and who long ago broke off contact with his father.

Brad Ingelsby's screenplay establishes a situation in which a wayward father must try to save his son's life, a process that takes place over the course of one cold Christmas Eve.

Kinnaman, an unusual talent who starred in the RoboCop remake and in the TV series The Killing, strikes me as a difficult actor to cast. If you've seen him in The Killing, you know he can be compelling in an offbeat way. But he never quite finds his groove here, which means the movie's father/son dynamic tends to feel perfunctory.

The supporting cast features Vincent D'Onofrio as a Brooklyn cop who has spent the better part of his career trying to put Jimmy behind bars. Last seen as one of Martin Luther King's cohorts in Selma, Common turns his back on non-violence to portray a hitman who does Shawn's bidding.

Of course, Jimmy sobers up long enough to spring back into grueling action, which is really what the movie's about.

I wish I could say that Collet-Serra brought a clever spin to the action set pieces, but he pretty much hits every note straight on as the movie goes through its predictable paces.

Run All Night fails to fulfill the promise of its grittiest scenes. That's all the sadder because Harris makes Shawn's conflicted affection for Jimmy seem real, and because Neeson carries the weight of Jimmy's misdeeds with palpable sadness.

But all this to what avail? Despite flourishes that suggest real dramatic ambition, Run All Night goes nowhere we haven't been before.

'Man on a Ledge' plunges into mediocrity

A convicted cop makes an unusual ... er ... totally improbable stab at proving his innocence.

If a movie puts a man who's threatening to take the big leap on a ledge some 200 feet above a New York City sidewalk, it’s reasonable to expect that some tension will follow.

In the prosaically titled thriller, Man on Ledge, director Asger Leth does create a bit of tension, but the movie that surrounds the title character is too painfully improbable to keep eyes from rolling.

Instead of the tightly focused picture its title suggests, Man on a Ledge turns out to be an unsatisfying mixture of vertiginous teases, heist-movie ploys and bad cop/good cop moralizing.

Sam Worthington, of Avatar fame, plays Nick Cassidy, the man on the ledge, a former New York City cop who was sent to prison for stealing a valuable diamond.

The screenplay by Pablo F. Fenjves quickly shows us how and why Cassidy wound up on the ledge, where he spends most of the picture.

I won’t burden you with a plot summary, except to say that Cassidy, his brother (Jamie Bell) and his brother’s girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) are involved in a preposterous scheme that’s supposed to prove Cassidy’s innocence.

If you’ve seen even a couple of movies, you’ll quickly be able to separate the bad guys from the good guys, but I’ll give you a rapid rundown of the supporting cast, which includes Elizabeth Banks (as the detective called to talk Cassidy off the ledge); Edward Burns (as a skeptical cop who doesn’t think Banks’ character is up to the job); and Anthony Mackie (as Cassidy’s former partner and purported best friend).

Special mention needs to be made of Ed Harris, who plays David Englander, the real-estate tycoon who owns the building where Cassidy stages his ledge stunt. Englander’s greed and insensitivity are so blatant, they stand out like an overly wide and aggressively garish tie. Getting a bad – i.e., caricatured -- performance from an actor as gifted as Harris takes some doing, but Leth manages it.

Other annoyances crop up: Bell and Rodriguez banter in ways that are neither funny nor believable, and the standard crowd gathers to encourage Cassidy to jump, thus ensuring that a major cliche gets its unruly due.

I wasn’t sure what to make of Kyra Sedgwick, who plays a hard-bitten New York TV reporter. Sedgwick’s Suzie Morales roots for the most lurid and gripping possible story. It didn’t take long for me to begin to share Suzie’s point of view.

So if I was at all tense by the end of this one, it was probably because I was waiting for someone to talk me down from the ledge disbelief.

Talk about taking the long way home

Director Peter Weir makes the suffering on this journey feel all too real

In the movie 127 Hours, James Franco plays Aron Ralston, a young Colorado man who freed himself from entrapment in a Utah canyon by cutting off his right arm. In director Danny Boyle’s gripping story of survival, Ralston is outfitted with a variety of equipment: a battery powered light, a video camera and a knife, among other hiking and rock climbing paraphernalia.

It in no way diminishes Ralston’s story – or Boyle’s achievement -- to note that the movie The Way Back tells the story of a survival journey that was unaided by any technology other than a knife. I’m being a little unfair because The Way Back takes place well before a lot of the high-tech gadgetry available to Ralston even existed. But that may be why The Way Back succeeds in showing us – in forcefully primal ways – what it’s like to grapple with the merciless brutalities of nature.

Based on a true story, The Way Back focuses the incredible tale of a group of men who in 1940 hiked 4,000 miles to escape a Siberian gulag. Consider that number for a second: 4,000 miles, a distance I’d view as an ordeal in an airplane, never mind on foot. The men traversed all kinds of forbidding landscapes in their quest for freedom, and director Peter Weir’s movie works as an amazing testament to their desire to survive and be free.

Not all of those who escaped the gulag made it to safety. Ultimately, three of the men crossed the Himalayas into India while another – an American – headed for Lhasa in Tibet in order to find his way back to the U.S.

The story begins when Janusz (Jim Sturgess) is sentenced to 20 years in a Siberia prison camp for being a spy. The Soviets tortured Janusz’s wife in a successful attempt to force her to betray her innocent husband. Once in the prison camp, Janusz quickly realizes that there are at least two dangers: The guards and the vicious criminal prisoners, those who’ve been sent to the gulag for theft and murder as opposed to supposed political activity.

The escape elements of the story couldn’t be simpler. After making sure that we understand the grim horrors of the gulag – freezing temperatures, inhuman work details and scarce food – Weir stages the escape that sets up the rest of the movie. Joining Janusz and cohorts in his trans-continental trek are an American – known only as Mr. Smith (Ed Harris) and a Volka (Colin Farrell) -- a Russian criminal whose torso sports more tattoos than the average American athlete.

Weir probably doesn’t do enough to individualize the characters, but he certainly knows how to make their physical torments seem real. A gaunt looking Harris, for one, looks as if he’d spent years fighting a losing battle with the elements.

With an able assist from cinematographer Russell Boyd, Weir paces his traveler/heroes in some of the most arresting landscapes ever filmed. You feel overwhelmed by the terrain, some of it photographed in long shots that emphasize the isolation of the men, as well as their vulnerability.

About half way through, the travelers are joined by a young woman (Saoirse Ronan) who’s also on the run. At first Mr. Smith, the most emotionally guarded of the men, refuses to take her along, but even he eventually develops respect for a girl of undeniable spirit and physical courage.

The cast handles the variety of accents well, and The Way Back becomes a visually impressive journal of a trip that only the heartiest of souls possibly could have survived. The movie’s ending doesn’t reach the emotional heights for which Weir may have been aiming, but this story of survival makes for a stark reminder of what it’s like to have to claw one’s way toward the next day, maybe even toward the next step.